Articles & Essays by Orson Scott Card - Afterword to the novel Empire

I believe everyone in the United States should read Articles & Essays by Orson Scott Card - Afterword to the novel Empire, just as a reminder of how insane politics have become nowadays.

The more I read, and the more research I do on the upcoming elections, the more I start to think that no matter who I choose to represent me at whatever level of govenment, I will have made a fatal mistake in judgement.

Sadness

While waiting for coverage of the Soyuz TMA-18 reentry to continue, NASA ran footage of the final roll out of shuttle Discovery. The whole thing was very sad.

There's something amazingly painful about watching the end of the NASA human spaceflight program, and more than likely the end of American astronauts in space.

Hopefully, Russia and China can keep the dreams of a human future in space alive.

Color Survey Results « xkcd

xkcd recently posted a color survey, and today he finally posted the results.

Apparently, I'm thankful I didn't take this, because the results are just insanely hilarious.

Web publications suck

Many of my weekly computing magazines are converting over to a web-based format, published in PDFs, to save on publishing costs and to "go green". I personally don't have a problem with those reasons, but I'm not a fan of the format. It's tedious to read and slow to download.

HOWEVER, I AM a hater of publications who move to this format, but don't upgrade their servers to handle the load. I've got three different magazines on this format, and I can rarely download the damn things at work, because they're so slow, or throw 500 errors, etc. I can usually read them at night at home, because the entire US business world isn't beating them into the ground at 11 pm.

Please people, beef up the servers if you're going to publish this way.

Obama Administration cancels Constellation

The news is out, and the Obama administration has officially requested that NASA cancel the Constellation moon program, and replace it with partnerships with private industry and international partners.

Well, here's my read: NASA is dead. Our leadership in space is dead. We will no longer do anything that may be classified as risky, cannot be fostered off on an international partner, or won't turn a profit.

You think NASA has been risk-averse the last 20 years? Wait until private industry is responsible for the vehicles. You won't see any human doing ANYTHING that might cause a lawsuit. Visits to Hubble or anything similar will never happen again.

My bet is we'll be watching the Chinese take over real exploration, while we hide under our blankets on Earth. Hell, the Russians will be kicking our loser butts in 10 years. Maybe we'll still be present in low earth orbit. Maybe. The Russians will probably pay us off the ISS with their oil money and kick us out of there too.

Oh, I should also probably mention: a TON of smart engineers and high-tech workers are about to lose their jobs. I wonder if they'll let complex 39, the LCC and the VAB rot away like so much of the Cape?

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.