more of my kvetching
Dr. Paul Handel of Houston told participants, “The obesity epidemic is not the fault of Krispy Kreme or McDonald’s. Unless we rekindle some sense of personal responsibility … 20 years from now we will still be struggling to treat” the problem. (read more)
See, stupid-lawsuit-people? Doctors don’t agree with you. Quit eating Big Macs and quit whining about being fat. I take full responsibility for my daily Starbucks scone, I’m not arguing that Starbucks is making me fat. Though the scones seem to get smaller every day… I think the Starbucks bakery gnomes are trying to cheat me.
T-Boz of the female R&B group TLC has filed for divorce from her husband, rapper Mack 10, saying he committed adultery and threatened to kill her. (read more)
…and we’re surprised? Some gems from Mr. 10’s repertoire:
S**t I represent the killas
Them niggas that bang slang
…
I still got them niggas that I wanna
take my pistol and stick it to they f*****’ grill.
…
I know more hoes that specialise in oral (Open up!)
I like that, sleep good on the flight back (uhh), spread the word
So I’m wondering if Ms. -Boz listened to her husband’s songs before marrying him. Or maybe it was one of those magical naive “he’ll change when he marries me” things. Either way, if you’re saddened because your rapper husband has tendencies toward violence and infidelity, tough cookies… look for a classical pianist or something instead.
Beginning Tuesday, all of Yahoo’s free e-mail accounts will be upgraded to 100 megabytes, a move spurred by Google’s plans to offer 1,000 megabytes of free storage through its Gmail service, which has remained in a test phase since early April. (read more)
Talk about a compeititive offer… a highly-sought email address with a gig of space or an address everyone has with 100MB. That’s a comparable product. Maybe I’m just smug because I already have a Gmail account (Thanks Bryan). Though the extra 96MB on my Yahoo! account will be nice so I won’t have to clean out the spam as many times per day. Yahoo! claims to be dealing with a spam problem, but here’s the catch — I’ve never given my Yahoo! email address to an online business but I still *mysteriously* get email addressed to my name (as typed into Yahoo!… which a random mailer wouldn’t be able to guess) which can only mean that Yahoo! sold my address to advertisers. And we wonder why their spam filters are ineffective.
ESPN and other Web sites, eyeing the successes search engines have had with ads based on keywords, are exploring a new form of targeting that’s tied to their visitors’ online habits.
Though some privacy advocates find the practice creepy, Web sites say the technology lets them deliver ads that readers find more relevant. (read more)
Creepy, yes, but better than what we have now. It brings to mind the scene from the movie Minority Report where the guy is walking down the street and he gets these ads that address him by name as he walks by them. I’m still not clicking on targeted ads (and they probably wouldn’t work for those of us that practice self-defensive lying on demographic forms — I’m a 90 year old retired scientist wherever possible) But anyway, it’s worth a shot as long as it can be turned off. Maybe it’ll spread to email and I’ll stop getting ads to enlarge my breasts.
Most college students doubt that voting in presidential elections will make major changes in American society, according to a nationwide survey. (read more)
Yeah, because the electoral college is designed to keep our votes from counting — young citizens that aren’t landowners were all but blocked from being counted in a vote since the inception of our system. Plus the majority of college students are women. Another reason students votes don’t count is because they simply don’t — an appalingly low number of students vote. There are enough students nationwide to seriously influence a vote. But people don’t believe their vote counts. Catch what? Catch-22, that’s what.
Newdow had declared that his daughter would be singled out if she chose not to say the Pledge of Allegiance, and would be coerced to participate.
“Imagine you’re a third-grader in a class of 30 kids. That’s enormous pressure to put on a child,” he said. “Government needs to stay out of the religion business altogether.”
Yeah, and a third-grader in a class of 30 kids wouldn’t be singled out if her father-who-was-in-the-midst-of-a-custody-dispute got rid of the pledge of allegiance altogether. I just skip the little ‘god’ part when I say it… difference of opinion, whatever. I know people that skip all kinds of parts, notably the ‘liberty and justice for all’ part. What I find hilarious is that the same people defending this pseudo-prayer in school (who doesn’t implore some higher power for help before a test, regardless of faith?) are the same people who scoff at nationalism in the Arab world and profess that the United States should rule the globe. But, as Michael Korda says, an ounce of hypocrisy is worth a pound of ambition.
Touchscreen voting machines in 11 counties have a software flaw that could make manual recounts impossible in November’s presidential election, state officials said.
A spokeswoman for the secretary of state called the problems “minor technical hiccups” that can be resolved, but critics allege voting officials wrongly certified a voting system they knew had a bug. (read more)
Yeah, the bug in the software is that it’s a custom platform. How’s about this:
1) Voter walks up to kind old lady at voting place
2) Voter swipes ID, (unix) notebook computer runs name*, creates unwieldy national-security-strength crypto-key** on a little keychain thing
3) Voter takes keychain thing, plugs it into voting machine
4) Voter votes
5) Voter gets little printout of votes, and activity is recorded in a timestamped log with the person’s crypto key
6) If the crypto key matches something in the database, the vote is nullified
* running the name against the database of eligible voters only, and then removing that name from the list (just like the nice old lady crossing you off)
** 4096-bit or something ridiculous, using something useless and non-traceable like the middle three letters of the last name plut the last digit of the ZIP code plus the alphabetic inverse of the hair color as a cryptographic seed
Given a month or so, I could write something that does that in C or Java, and I’m not even a programmer. Well, fine, I could pseudo-code it in BASIC… I’d be better off finding someone thats a real programmer. What is these people’s problem? There are open-source tools available to do everything they need to do. Grumble.
But…yeah.
I like Sumatra better than Breakfast Blend at Starbucks. Just thought I’d share.
