Celebrity Press

After the whole Brittany Murphy death thing, it's amazing how many times I've heard these stupid celebrity press assholes gossiping about how she must have died from something since you never die at that age unless it's drugs. Talking about how she was fired from x or y. And then, at the end of the story, there's "Our thoughts are with her family at this tragic time".

Okay, why even do that? Why waste your breath? If her family watched that, would the feel comforted that your thinking of them? Please. You're looking for more ratings based on better dirt.

Just stop with the fake sympathy. We all know you don't give two shits unless it boosts your ratings.

Yes, you NEED Antivirus

I just spent the last 4 days wrestling with some of the most awful malware imaginable. The PC in question was regularly updated with Windows patches, and had anti-malware software on it as well. The only failure I found was out-of-date anti-virus software.

With the viciousness of the malware coming out, you've got a couple options to avoid getting some nasty on YOUR PC someday:

• You MUST run a firewall. A hardware-based one on a router/switch is best.
• Switch to 64-bit Windows (not perfect, but it makes it HARDER for them)
• Switch to Linux or Mac OS. Neither of these will last forever, but it's better than the alternative. While I haven't switched yet, I'm avidly watching Linux as my desktop of choice for the future.
• Keep your anti-virus UP TO DATE.
  

I really wish the people who wrote this stuff would write some code that was useful to humanity. It would be incredible stuff.

I Hate Sitcoms

For years, I have never been able to watch sitcoms. I have always said that if I can see it coming, I can't stand watching it. Today, I figured out why I hate sitcoms. It's not really because I can see what's coming next. It's that usually, the funny is coming from someone getting hurt. And I can't stand watching that.

Odd that it's taken me ten years to figure that out.

Pale Blue Dot

Was reading a post on Schlock Mercenary this morning, which led me to the Wikipedia article on "The Pale Blue Dot". This was a title Carl Sagan gave to a picture taken by Voyager 1 of the Earth from far out in the Solar System. In 1995, Carl gave a commencement speech where he spoke about this image, and the words struck me as some of the most wonderful I have read in a long time:

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

Carl was quite a philosopher.