Decius wrote:
Lamar Alexander:

I think video games is a bigger problem than guns, because video games affect people.

Like current senators aren't one of the biggest problems of all...

RE: Yes, a US Senator just said games are a bigger problem than guns | Ars Technica

I would so love to see this search warrant.
Kid says he went into a chatroom for anonymous. That link came up everywhere on twitter when attacks were going on.

"About 7 a.m. yesterday the FBI came in the door with about 10 people, I believe with flashlights, yelling 'Open the door'," said Zhiwei 'Jack' Chen, an 18-year-old computer engineering student who has become a person of interest to the FBI.

"He opened the door and they pulled him out into the hall, and they came in with flashlights and they told us to get out," his roommate Kurt Heinrich said.

"I got off my bed and they pulled all of us arm by arm out the door," Chen said.

They say drawers were spilled out, closets opened, and everything was searched.

"They confiscated everything..."

Georgia Tech Dorm Room Raided in Connection with WikiLeaks Sympathizer Investigation

Decius: I hope this post looks silly in 24 hours.

The good news is that your post doesn't look silly.

Three attempts to pump mud and 16 tries to stuff solid material into a breached Gulf of Mexico oil well failed to stop the flow, top BP executives said Saturday, and engineers and executives with the oil giant have decided to "move on to the next option."

That's the bad news.

The next option is to inject lawyers and lobbyists into the breached blowout preventer until a compromise is reached with the oil well.

Top Kill, fail.

I have had a lot of luck with Aryuvadic herbs, actually better luck than with Western medicine, so I've been trying to learn more about it.

Well, the other day, I stumbled upon this idea of pinhole glasess. Most of the sites I saw looked pretty questionable, and some even touted conspiracy theories of how the FDA tried to keep them out of the hands of consumers.

As I was looking for info, and saw they were a dollar on ebay, so I bought a pair. They came a couple of days ago, from Nepal.

I've had a problem for years with my eyes not focusing well to different distances. Like, for example, if I am outside, and I come in to the PC, there's a good 10 minutes I can't see the PC all that well. I take my glasses off and squint to see.

Well I opened my mail from Nepal at my pc, and put these glasses on. I noticed instantly I could read the pc very well, AND I could look across my house into the kitchen and STILL see well.

I took them outside - oh they are great in the pool. I can see everything and at 1.00 a pair and plastic, they block out the sun and I'm not worried about losing them or breaking them in the pool. I could see everything - better than with my glasses on.

Now, there's a weirdness to them. I wouldn't drive with them, that's for sure, because there is peripheal vision loss. There's also the black dots that you have to get used to. (Didn't take me long at all to not notice them, but my husband never could adjust.)

I kept thinking of poor ol' Piggy, in Lord of the Flies, and how if he just knew about these, he couldn't made him some from palm leaves.

My name should have been Velma, but my dog won't help me look even for Scooby snacks.

A cheap whim....My experience with pinhole glasses

The came with guns drawn to arrest him, for an alleged bomb threat.

His mom says he has an alibi, but since he is being held under the Patriot act, she can't even defend or see him.

US teen, 16, held under patriot act

I've yet to see any REALLY decent coverage of this debacle.
Symantec releases a 'patch' and doesn't SIGN it? (and that gets through QA how?)....
====================

"Symantec said Tuesday that an unsigned patch released by the company had been used as an excuse for spammers to launch a disinformation campaign about the company.

On March 9, Symantec released a patch labeled "PIFTS.exe" between 4:30 PM and 7:30 PM Pacific time, that was a legitimate upgrade for both Norton Internet Security as well as Norton Antivirus 2006 and 2007. By mistake, Symantec said, the patch was not digitally signed, leading Symantec's own products to flag the patch as possible malware. ...
Symantec apparently exacerbated the situation by removing what it called spam posts, leaving others to wonder whether Syamtec was censoring an issue that would have hurt the company's reputation."
=======================

Then when firewalls go off, users post about it, and Symantec deletes their posts. They later claim hackers from the likes of 4chan (which was ablaze with speculation about it) spammed their boards like crazy with it, so they had to scrub the boards.

BAD GUYS get hold of it, and quickly the top search results on pifts.exe give folks viruses.

Rumors fly it is it accessing a server in Africa. Not exactly true, more like one in Arlington?

Symantec says everything is fine, it is harmless.
But people had already started analyzing it. It looks a wee bit like spyware.
But all is fine, because Symantec says it is. It is all just a disinformation campaign against them. Please go back to what you were doing.

But..that's ignoring the fact that it is just all...so...bizarre...

Pifts.exe is a good name for a weird thing, pfffffffffft

What struck me as really strange is how a lot of this article talks about Britain's KNIFE PROBLEM ?? (Could it be people killing people and not guns?)

"A habitually violent young man was convicted Wednesday of the murder of teenage actor Rob Knox, who had starred in the latest "Harry Potter" film....

.... Knife crime in Britain is a political hot topic due to a spate of recent killings of mainly young people in major cities. UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown has urged tougher sentences for those caught carrying knives. He told the Daily Telegraph last month: "By carrying a knife you are not only endangering the lives of others, but you are more likely to be killed, or end up in jail.

"We need to change the way young people think about knives, we need families and communities working together ... to get this message across and help stamp out knife crime and get weapons off our streets."

Britain wanting to outlaw KNIVES? Man Guilty of Killing Harry Potter Actor

Just wait til Smart Grid hit us.
It's already began.

As Data Collecting Grows, Privacy Erodes

A lot of other people have Kathryn Johnston’s blood on their hands too, people with names like Bennett, Gates, Walters, Souder, Tandy, and Meese. They’ve been ratcheting up the war rhetoric of drug prohibition for 30 years.

I would have added Biden to that list.

Most of America is now accustomed to the notion that state agents dressed in battle garb can and will tear down the doors of private homes in the middle of the night for nothing more than mere possession of psychoactive substances. And most of the time, they do it under the full color of law.

If a violent, terrifying, paramilitary-style raid in the middle of the night on someone suspected of a nonviolent, consensual crime isn’t “unreasonable,” I don’t know what would be.

Kathryn Johnston’s death is tragic. But the real tragedy here is that had the cops found a stash of marijuana in her basement that actually did belong to her–say for pain treatment or nausea–her death would have faded quickly from the national news, these tactics would have been deemed by most to be wholly legitimate, and we probably wouldn’t still be talking about her today.

No knock warrants....how are they constitutional?

The Agitator » Blog Archive » Tearful Atlanta Cops Express Remorse for Shooting 92-Year-Old Kathryn Johnston, Leaving Her To Bleed to Death in Her Own Home While They Planted Drugs in Her Basement, Then Threatening an Informant So He Would Lie To Cover It All Up

I was looking at this manuscript the other night - the world's most mysterious...they say.

SOme say because it is uncracked that it is all gibberish. It may be, but I have studied the occult for 27 years or more, and learned to read Latin so I could read the older texts, and the pictures make SENSE to me. I am very familiar with the works of Dr. Dee as I have owned several reproductions of his magickal diaries and writings. (I collect rare occult books and have about a 800 volume library.)

Would it not be possible for someone with interests like MINE to try to use what I can decipher about the PICTURES so that a cryptographic key could perhaps be uncovered?

It looks to me, at first glance, that this work is a work written to escape the condemnations of 1277, as I think it deals with deterministic astrology - and seems to be relating the nature of plant structure - plants have astrological 'rulers' to the nature of the signs, perhaps, could be, the nature of the offspring of women.

This is just my first glance. I think the females may be denoting the Sybils.

In any event, the pictures themselves speak volumes to me.

Elonka, you out there? Interested? If so email me. IF not I think I will work on what I see and if I come up with anything solid, I will dump it online.

The Voynich Manuscript - The Most Mysterious Book in the World