My view of the world

According to the AP, Up in Reno, only police officers can bring firearms into court under an order signed by Washoe District Chief Judge Jerry Polaha.
Thursday’s order clamping down on guns in the courthouse was approved after Family Court Judge Chuck Weller was shot in the chest while standing in his third-floor office June 12.
Too many guns in the courtroom is one of the biggest concerns at the courthouse, said Ron Longtin, district court administrator.
The judge was shot from outside, at a range of about 300 meters, through his office window.
While I think limiting guns in the courthouse is a good idea, just how, could not having guns in the courthouse have prevented this?

Even more interesting, is the fuss and bother about a judge getting shot, and how little attention is paid to Weller’s administrative assistant, Annie Allison, who was hit by bullet fragments in her arm and hip, and if you’ve listened to the news, the fact that he stabbed his wife to death seems to be of secondary importance.

I know people who have known the alleged shooter, Darren Mack for years and everyone says that apart from his being a swinger, he seems like a nice, normal guy and all they tell me about his wife, was that she was a vegetarian and measured his food in grams.
I guess the divorce was just too messy and rumor has it, that the judge was going to take away Mack’s parental rights, and give his soon to be ex $10k per month plus child support.

Several sites say that Judge Chuck Weller took the word of the woman as gospel and ignored anything presented by the father, these writings were of course done by angry fathers, but even if they are the absolute truth, it should remain illegal to murder anyone, even a judge.
However, until we have some sort of enforcable ethics rules, I can fully understand Daren Mack’s frustration with a system where judges can do whatever they please, with no oversight.

This case also generated a number of interesting comments.
“This is an interesting case because of the apparent disorganized, highly charged emotion, yet there is what appears to be a strong sense of organization and planning, too,” former FBI profiler Clint Van Zant said.
Van Zandt was one of the profilers that worked on the unibomber case.
It doesn’t look all that complicated to me, I figure the wife was a crime of passion and the judge was planned, but then again, I’m not a highly paid consultant, so what would I know.

As to the bomb making materials that they found, I love the official discription:
The materials, when mixed together and attached to a blasting cap or shot at, will explode, said Washoe County sheriff’s Sgt. Lou Gazes, head of the Consolidated Bomb Squad for Washoe County, Reno and Sparks and who was at Mack’s apartment.
“There were materials that could have made a bomb,” Gazes said Monday.
B.F.D. I can do that from almost any house, between the kitchen, the bathroom and the laundry room, anyone can make an explosive device.
Unless they can show a detonator or some other evidence of actual intent, they’re doing what they always do, they’re playing to the press and trying to make it seem like more than it is.

In the mean time, Mack got tired of running up and down the west coast of Mexico, from resort town to resort town and contacted the Reno authorities, resulting in his turning himself in.
The US ambassador to Mexico said this case proves that you can’t hide in Mexico, excuse me, he contacted the authorities and arranged to surrender, they didn’t catch him.

I found this nice little utility that removes the M$ wga call home function, evidently it still allows the authentic copy check, but at least it stops some of the spying. You should read the whole page when you download it here . M$ obviously feels that as long as we use their software they can do anything they damn well please, and if you wade through the EULA and their privacy statement, you’ll find that they’re even willing to put that sentiment in writing.

The FTC recently lost two computers containing the personal information, including some financial data, on 110 people. These computers were password protected, and if they used Winblows security it will take someone “minutes” to get in. This is the organization that is responsible for protecting us from fraud and identity theft and you know the numbers are going to go up.
The VA lost data on 26.5 million vets, the DOE was hacked for info on 1,500 employees and contractors.
The Dept of Agriculture lost data on about 26,000 employees to hackers.

Makes you feel all safe and warm, and kinda fuzzy inside, doesn’t it.

The news has finally picked up on the fact that recruiters for large corporations and even some admissions offices at major universities are checking online sites like myspace, xanga and facebook. Recruiters say that what is said, or shown on these sites gives them an insite into the type of person they are thinking about hiring.
After reading a bit of the article in the NY Times, I looked over a couple of these services. I just browsed, with nobody in particular in mind, and found everything from the mildly bizarre to the sickenly sweet, with a majority referring to booze, drugs and sex.
Since most recruiters are corporate “suits,” the more interseting of these people would probably freak them out.

While roaming aimlessly, I found a picture of a girl on the toilet (nothing showed), a large number of folks who seemed obsessed with their own butts, about a hundred sets of obviously plastic tits, a bunch of bikinis from the “two bandaids and a cork” school of design and this old poem.

Sticks and stones may break my bones
But whips and chains excite me
So tie me down
To the ground
And show how much you like me

The guys all seemed to be trying to prove that they could guzzle a bottle of 151 and not get a hangover, and they were all “God’s gift to women,” thereby proving, that God has a sense of humor.

I think that most of this is just “bar talk,” but the “suits” will undoubtedly take it seriously.
The moral of the story is:
If you’re looking for work in a large corporation and you have a profile with one of these services, clean it up. The staighter, more group oriented you look, the more likely you are to be interviewed and possibly hired.
I don’t care how much of a freak you are and how proud of it you may be, remember, with big outfits, they’re looking for fairly bright lemmings, so Boring is Better.

The latest bit of crap from M$, Windows Genuine Advantage, calls home every day, I know this because I have a third party firewall and it asks me if I want to allow this. This first time it asked I said yes, the second time I thought about it an said yes, now I say F*** You.
This is supposed to be anti-piracy software. Excuse me, but since when do I reinstall winblows, from a “pirate” copy and keep the WGA intact. If that’s installed, then they’ve already checked my copy. This does tend to make a guy wonder what they’re up to, doesn’t it.

Does anybody else remember when Uncle Bill had one of his stooges announce that Windows 9x didn’t collect personal data when you registered online, then along came the report out of Spain, that showed exactly where they stored this data that they “didn’t collect.”

There is a thing called a GUID, this is sent to any website that requests it, that M$ swears contains no user identifiable data. It gives them the mac address of your machine, the id from your copy of Winblows and once you give M$ or one of their partners your personal data, say, by doing something silly, like registering a piece of software, they’ve then got your specifics in a database, complete with the GUID, neatly bundled and ready to cross-refencee.
It’s kind of like your SSN, this unique number contains no user identifiable information, until it’s cross-refenced in a database.

You need to remember, Corporations like M$ and Walmart and all the other Monolithic monsters out there, are not there for your benefit, they’re there to take as much of your money as is physically possible and then move on to the next sucker.
On the WGA homepage M$ tries to sell Windows Genuine Advantage as if it was there to protect you, it’s not, it’s there to protect their profits and they could care less about you.
They have no honor, only greed.

Using Hurricane Katrina as one of his excuses, President Bush signed an executive order establishing offices of “Faith-Based and Community Initiatives” within a number of federal agencies.
This is from Homeland Security:
(a) The Secretary of Homeland Security shall establish within the Department of Homeland Security a Center for Faith-Based and Community Initiatives.

(b) The Center shall be supervised by a Director appointed by Secretary. The Secretary shall consult with the Director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives prior to making such appointment.

(c) The Department shall provide the Center with appropriate staff, administrative support, and other resources to meet its responsibilities under this order.

Sec. 2. Purpose of Center. The purpose of the Center shall be to coordinate agency efforts to eliminate regulatory, contracting, and other programmatic obstacles to the participation of faith-based and other community organizations in the provision of social and community services.

Our President is an Evangelical, this department was established in 2001 as part of a plan to circumvent the separation of church and state as provided by the Constitution.
This is just the way the current administration thinks.

Anyone who thinks there should be no clearly defined separation should take a good look at the middle east, the nut cases like the ones who flew those planes into the Trade Center, put religion first and are firmly convinced that what they are doing is right, in the name of “God.”

From my perspective, as long as we have religious folks in congress, it is inevitable that we will have a certain amount of that view point creep in and as long as they stick to the 10 commandments everything will be fine…. Oh wait, we’re talking about politicians, scratch the commandments. And the only golden rule they understand is the political golden rule, whoever has the gold makes the rules.

My biggest bitch, is that this creates yet another bureaucracy, where the friends and family plan can keep idiots from actually having to work for a living, while paying them a large salary and providing better benifits than most of us could ever hope for, all at the taxpayers expense.
Also remember, that Bush backed that loser that ran FEMA, you know, that outfit that couldn’t even deliver ice and that still haven’t gotten all the trailers in place.

An online outfit called MonkeyBet.com says it’s going to build a casino on the old Chalet Vegas site over on Paradise. They also say they have a casino in Blackpool England, yeah right, there’s nothing in the Blackpool telephone directory.
Another luser website trying for free publicity.

We now have a Las Vegas Internet Chamber of Commerce. as far as I can tell they are no relation to the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce. The photos on the site look like “stock” photos.
My favorite tab on their website is “make money.”

Rags over at raghand.com is picking on those poor defenseless politicians again.

I’m still going through a bunch of daybooks and family papers to see what I can turn up, on the old days, that might be interesting, but so far, my family’s boring. Back in 1951 someone built a speargun for Mark Swain, but that’s all the entry said, ..boring.