Just when you think

... you can depend on a long-term 'oil is too expensive' trend to make Solar Power Satellites look attractive along come market forces ...

The tripling of oil prices since the summer of 2003 has unleashed forces that within the next two or three years will bring oil prices tumbling back down to below $50 a barrel. Looking even further ahead, prices could easily fall to $30 a barrel or even lower.

Darn capitalists.

Complacency kills

Fallujah is not exactly safe but it's not the horror-show it was a year ago.

Several Marines were shocked that I was willing to walk around the streets of Fallujah without a gun, but I didn’t feel the slightest bit nervous. Complacency kills, and I get that. But I had Marines as bodyguards and I wasn’t allowed to defend myself anyway. So I figured I might as well relax.

Cross Posted to The Daily Brief.

Happy New Year

Happy New Year.




... and here is wishing high hopes and a prosperous future to you and yours. Ad astra, y'all.

The last word in Lolcats . .

Indoor plumbing rocks

and the good old days .. weren't.

I waked in the morning about 6 o’clock and my wife not come to bed; I lacked a pot, but there was none, and bitter cold, so was forced to rise and piss in the chimney, and to bed again.

Italics mine. Note that Pepys wasn't a prole - he was - in 1664 - a reasonably well-to-do fellow living in a cosmopolitan city in the most advanced region in the world. Who woke up cold and pissed in his own chimney.

The tools who want us all to live like peasants and get the willies about economic over-consumption can kiss my warm and toasty ass.

The Gold Standard - Killer App for Space?

Mr. Poretto is going on about the gold standard - he is in favor of it - which is interesting but a bit much for my poor button-brain.

Travis replied ...

The world supply of above-ground gold increases by about 2% per year. The supply cannot be accelerated faster than that; the laws of physics prevent

I disagree. Gold mining, like everything else, responds to increasing demand. If the price of gold doubled, could we not drastically increase gold mining with a decade or so?

Look up? 99% of the resources in the solar system are not terrestrial. We think that Eros has

20,000 million tonnes of aluminium along with similar amounts of gold, platinum and other rarer metals.

In the 2,900 cubic kms of Eros, there is more aluminium, gold, silver, zinc and other base and precious metals than have ever been excavated in history or indeed, could ever be excavated from the upper layers of the Earth's crust.

That is just in one asteroid and not a very large one at that. There are thousands of asteroids out there.

People will talk about a 'killer app' that drives development in space - the one thing that will be the thing that we can't live without.

SPS could be that but putting all our hopes in such a frail basket seems unwise.

I wonder if putting the world's largest and most productive economy on the gold standard would be the killer app that drives development in space.

You may not be able to depend on energy policy or expensive oil .. but you can always count on people's hunger to acquire wealth.

It's not the inner system - it's a treasure map.

... and Armageddon sick of it

Dog toys exist to be destroyed

I guess most dogs enjoy death and destruction of toys

Half-right, for our house.

The (toy fox) terrier will take any toy and demolish it as quickly as she can.

The German Shepherd .. while enjoying a good chomping and chewing fest .. seems to take care not to destroy them. Her volley ball has a few hundred fang marks but she's never punctured the vinyl.

She still has a soccer ball that she tore the snot out of when she was a puppy - it's such a mess that you can't tell what it is aside from a floppy mass of vinyl and drool - but it's held up pretty well since she grew up.

Via.

The sub-prime mortage mess, explained

"Peter, did you read the fine print on this loan contract?"
"Um, if by "read" you mean imagined a naked lady, then, yes."

- Brian and Peter in A Fish Out of Water

Go, Fred Go

I lack the funds and I completely lack the time to fiddle with blog widgets but ... support Fred in Iowa.

Why?

• He's married to a complete hotty.
• He's not Mike Huckabee.
• He's from the South - having a fellow with a southern accent in the White House would make some people completely flip their lids. And that would be cool.
• He's more of a Federalist than anyone else running.

Gumption Trap

I've been fighting with my Windows XP desktops (one virtual, one hardware) for the last ninety minutes - I've gotten them to crash, reboot, restart, dump memory and do everything except what I wanted them to do - which was to a) run Outlook and b) run Hummingbird Exceed.

90% of the people in this country run some version of Windows at the office. How in the hell do y'all get anything done?

Save the world, one bit at a time

You can't save the entire world. Mostly you have to do what you can, where you can and trust that everyone else is as well.

Ala'a lived in Iraq. He was nine, suffered from cerebral palsy, and an orphan. Ala'a orphanage was adopted by a unit of MPs.

To [Captain Scott] Southworth, Ala'a was like a little brother. But Ala'a — who had longed for a soldier to rescue him — secretly began referring to Southworth as "Baba," Arabic for "Daddy."

Then, around Christmas, a sister told Southworth that Ala'a was getting too big. He would have to move to a government-run facility within a year.

"Best case scenario was that he would stare at a blank wall for the rest of his life," Southworth said.

To this day, he recalls the moment when he resolved that that would not happen.

"I'll adopt him," he said.

And he did. It took a while and a mountain of paperwork and a lot of family support but . . . he did.

They made it to Wisconsin late Jan. 20, 2005. The next morning, Ala'a awoke to his first sight of snow.

He closed his eyes and grimaced.

"Baba! Baba! The water is getting all over me!"

"It's not water, it's snooooow," Southworth told him.

I can sympathize about the snow.

Hooray for Wendy

Hooray for Wendy.

Wendy, the little girl who cried every single day when she went to school, who was told and thought she was stupid, and who became our first guinea pig in the home-school realm…

Has made the Dean’s List.

I won't say 'hooray for homeschooling' - as tempting as it might be - because it's not about how you get it done, it's about the kid.

Edward 'NIMBY' Kennedy

Sam Dinkin has a take-down of Scientific American's grand plan for solar power - worth a read.

The real gem is in the comments ..

[solar power is] viable, as long as you can't see the vast cell farms from Sen. Kennedy's house.

Haw.

Culture

Culture matters.

Each class at the Idaho Police Officer Standards and Training Academy is allowed to choose a slogan that is printed on its graduation programs, and the class of 43 graduates came up with "Don't suffer from PTSD, go out and cause it."

Ada County Sheriff Gary Raney, who attended the Dec. 14 graduation, pointed out the slogan to the academy's director, Jeff Black, minutes before the ceremony began, Raney said. A photograph of the program was e-mailed anonymously to news outlets throughout the state.

"That's not something we encourage or condone," Black said. "It shouldn't have been there. It was inappropriate."

Mr. Black is being disingenuous ... or he's a victim of the Peter Principle.

I am reasonably sure the academy does not have a course of instruction detailing 'how to be an ass' .. but the students did not come up with that on their own. That kind of stuff gets stuffed into a person's brain housing group by culture and the attitude of the instructors.

Via.

I dare you to click this

You can't not click this ..

"A Hard Day's Night" recited by Peter Sellers in the style of Laurence Olivier doing Shakespeare's Richard III.

Via.

Vendor Follies

Hi, I'm reinstalling an application server. The license key doesn't work. This is the key: REDACTED

Vendor: That's a version 9213 key, you need a 9214 key.

I don't have one of those. But we did upgrade from 9213 to 9214 six months ago ..

Vendor: Right, you need a 9214 key. Copy the key from your 9214 environment and use that.

The version 9213 key is the only one I have. So I can run an existing server with an obsolete key, but I can't install a new one. I sure am glad I'm having this problem now and not on a weekend with flaming chunks of server falling around my ears and crazed users pounding on my door wanting their critical application restored right now! Because if I were having this conversation then I'd be really pissed irate instead of bemused.

Three cheers for licensing schemes that work sorta kinda sometimes.

This isn't really appropriate for this, but it is funny.

The More Things Change

Electronic equipment from 1939.




The rack and cable management could be moved into a 21st century server room without attracting any attention.

I suspect that server rooms in the 23rd century will still be using a 22 inch rack. Some of them may even have antique Sun hardware running in them to enable backwards compatibility that some biz guy just can't live without. And they'll talk to the equipment using VT100.

His and Hers

I can't quite explain but this works out quite nicely. The psycho-babble not so much but there it is.

his

Find your own pose!

hers

Find your own pose!

Tis Two Nights Before Christmas - A Poem

She's a poet - and she knows it.

'Tis Two Nights Before Christmas...

Tis two nights before Christmas and all through the house
Not a sign of one ornament, I must be a louse.
The presents are unwrapped all lying on the bed,
and thoughts very un-Christmassy still run through my head.
The tree still undecorated, only lights lit.
I guess i should get up and try to fix it.
But if only I could forget the presents I must wrap
and put them in Wal-Mart bags, be done with this crap.
The children are waiting to see what Santa brings,
but I have been ready to be done with these things.
But the children keep me going and I know I must try
to keep up tradition, so I'll start now with a sigh.
I'll decorate the tree, make cookies, and smile.
I'll try to remember celebrations aren't a trial.
And when Santa shows up with his red sack filled with toys
He'll find our house ready with happy little boys.
And he'll know that in spite of the cold and the snow,
I'll open my heart and mind and go with the flow.

So Merry Christmas my friends that are both far and near.
I may sound hum-buggy, but I wish you good cheer.
May you find every wish that you have in your heart,
and I hope that your New Year has a wonderful start.

Blessings,
Pasty

Merry Christmas!

Beauty

Ain't she gorgeous?



I'm a lucky guy.