ok, so like most of my friends who have been following the whole Mark Foley story I've been feeling the schadenfreude, but it does bug me that it takes a sex scandal to get people upset...

ok, I admit, sexual advances on children is one hell of a sex scandal, and there is no doubt in my mind that he's getting what he deserves (maybe not enough even)...I'm also always happy to see the party of "family values" aka the "god hates fags" party get caught up in not only a sex scandal, but a gay sex scandal; but with all the civil liberties scandals around why is this the one that gets people's attention...I mean congress can suspend habeus corpus (sp?) and it barely makes the papers at all, but a congress man likes little boys, hold the fucking presses...

I mean, I guess what with it's not just a sex scandal, but an illegal one, it should be news, but I just wish Americans cared as much about the other things going on in congress...

Why is it always about sex?

So someone (I can't remember who, but I have a sneaking suspision it was amazon) recommended I see a movie called Code 46...two thumbs up from me...

its a near future distopian society, lots of cool biotech references but not so futuristic that you don't buy it (although I'm quite sure a biochemist would get a good laugh out of lots of it)...

Code 46

so I've been trying to take the train to work lately...this morning the ticket machine argued with me about whether or not my check card had a magstripe on it...eventually, just as the train left it spit my ticket out...so I got to pay for it and I missed the train...curse!...seriously, why don't all these companies just pay Billy to make their shit, his hacker tools kick all the commercial version's asses...

so all busted ass point of sale technology aside, why does it cost me nearly twice as much money to ride the train to work than it does to drive?!? the cost of a 3 zone ticket (san francisco to mountain view) is $10.50 round trip per day!...so lets break that down and compare that to gas prices...

so according to the us government my car gets about 31 miles per gallon highway and 24 mpg city (this seems to hold true to my own experience)...google maps tells me my drive is about 40 miles from home to work (that commute is killing me)...

so with gas costing me about $2.70/gallon lets compare the price of public transit to the price of driving my car...

at highway mileage rates (which is accurate for almost my entire trip) I'm spending about $6.97 a day on gas to drive to work and back...even if I were to drive the entire trip at city mileage rates I'm still paying only about $8.66 for a round trip in my car....

caltrain does offer some slight discounts if you buy either a 10 ride pass, or a monthly pass...the 10 ride pass will get me to work and back for a full work weak for $44.75...compare this with the average estimated cost of driving over that same week at just $34.85...

the monthly pass will cover me for a full month for $139.25...this is roughly the same price as driving at about $139.40 for a months worth of gas...

so if I buy a month in advance I can save myself a wopping 14 cents!!!..there are a few problems here...

first, like a lot of tech proffessionals in the bay area I am able to telecommute several days a month, even a couple days a month not driving will dramatically shift the cost-benefit analysis in favor of driving...

second, the train takes much longer to get there (between 45 minutes to an hour extra each way), and I have to connect to VTA to make the final leg of my trip to the office, I get this part for free as a Juniper employee, but most people will have to throw down about %50 the cost of the caltrain ticket for a roundtrip on this connecting light rail every day...

third, with gas prices so high we can probably expect one of two things to happen, either gas prices will go back down (although not as low as they were before of course), or they will remain and the resulting inflation will raise the cost of other goods and services...including the caltrain...at best caltrain is breaking even with my car at the monthly rate, and thats not including the cost of connecting transportation...any slight change and they've got nothing left to offer...

so why does caltrain cost so much money? especially in a part of the world that smugly prides itself on being environmentally concious to the point of being rediculous...you would think that they would try to put some of that communism style of politics that they love in these parts into action by subsidising public transportation like caltrain...I'd love to ride the train to work, and I'm sure a lot of other people would too if it were economical...hell, I'm sure lots of people without cars that live in san francisco wouldn't mind living some where in the bay that was cheaper and commuting into the city...what good is public transportation if you price it so high that no-one uses it...

so I'm going to end this rant here for a while, but the next time I'm avoiding doing work I'll do some digging to see where they get their money, and what the hell they're doing to make it cost so damn much...

I love these guys, they always make such great interfaces...

Remember last scene in the movie "WarGames" where the WOPR learns about the futility of war whilst the warroom massive screens play out crazy nuclear nightmares...

DEFCON is a game that looks just like that but badass!

This game is a product of Introversion Software the makers of UPLINK... which is great because I'm already adicted to their products.

--timball

DEFCON - Introversion software

this thing is really cool, it makes you wonder about making a homebrew UAV spy planes, etc...

from the post:

Here's a remarkable video shot from the cockpit of a radio-controlled airplane. The camera's video is transmitted to the flyer on the ground below, who's wearing VR goggles. When he moves his head, the remote camera's pans and tilts correspond exactly to his movements. The result is a extraordinary feeling of actually being in the plane. Shouldn't all R/C airplanes be made this way?

Remote Flying with VR Goggles and a Camera

So I just got out of this meeting where these two programmers are trying to fix this old bad idea with a new bad idea...this is nothing new, but today they must have eaten their wheaties cause they were going for extra points...

so I point out that the new idea to fix the old bad idea is also bad...they argue for a moment until they are forced to give in and accept that the new idea is just as bad, so they form a huddle and deside, rather than replacing the bad idea with an ok idea, or dare i say even a good one, they will insert a new glue layer to bridge the old bad idea with the new bad idea...of course this new glue layer is filled with bad ideas, and on the hole it too is a bad idea...

so now we're left with the old bad idea, the glue layer filled with bad idea, and the new bad idea...they combine to form one large bad idea that is greater than the sum of its collective bad ideas...like Vultron...exception instead of lions, this one is made up of retarded programming ideas...oh and there is no sword...

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The nationwide health scare over bacteria-ridden spinach widened Monday, as the number of states reporting sickness linked to the outbreak increased to 21.

See, spinach is evil.

CNN.com - E. coli spinach scare increases to 21 states - Sep 18, 2006

This is the best video blog I've found so far...this guy is hilarious and smart, every day he's got something worth watching...

the show with zefrank

Abstract This paper presents a fully independent security study of a Diebold AccuVote-TS voting machine, including its hardware and software. We obtained the machine from a private party. Analysis of the machine, in light of real election procedures, shows that it is vulnerable to extremely serious attacks. For example, an attacker who gets physical access to a machine or its removable memory card for as little as one minute could install malicious code; malicious code on a machine could steal votes undetectably, modifying all records, logs, and counters to be consistent with the fraudulent vote count it creates. An attacker could also create malicious code that spreads automatically and silently from machine to machine during normal election activities — a voting-machine virus. We have constructed working demonstrations of these attacks in our lab. Mitigating these threats will require changes to the voting machine's hardware and software and the adoption of more rigorous election procedures.

Felten and friends pown e-voting...again

game theory is the shit....that is all...