Welcome to My World

With my friend safely home from her trip to Atlanta, Georgia to participate in the 2008 International Science & Engineering Fair (congratulations to her for winning her seat there, btw! More on that in a subsequent post this weekend ), I am free to rant about the bat-shit insane idiots working for the Transportation Security Administration. Like the “You can’t take pictures here!” crowd demonstrating that sanity has left the security industry behind in public spaces, I am more convinced than ever before that the entire concept of the TSA is fundamentally broken, flawed, and unworkable.

My friend’s luggage, you see, was flagged by the TSA on her flight to Atlanta, and her luggage was detained, screened, and thoroughly searched. She made it to Atlanta. Her luggage didn’t meet her there. It went on to New York (the plane’s next stop) for a thorough examination, then came back to Atlanta where it was eventually delivered to her late that night. So while some unnamed yokels at the TSA in Atlanta and/or New York rummaged through her bags, flipped through her clothes and underwear and all her other possessions that came along on the trip, she spent her first day in Atlanta wearing stuff that didn’t fit her (donated to her by the airline, her friends, and by ISEF sponsors), worrying about whether she’d actually get her bag back (which contained a contact lens case, prescription medication, and other “important” stuff).

What caused them to flag it as “suspicious” you ask? A plastic carrying case designed for, and carrying, eight rechargeable AA batteries. They looked “suspicious” on an X-ray scan, and this was enough for some TSA dickwad to flag the luggage as suspicious, requiring additional screening. How did they accomplish this screening? They put it on the fucking airplane anyway to fly to Atlanta, then put it back in the air again to fly to New York to be examined. Then, having ruled it “safe,” they flew it back to Georgia.

I’m officially sick of people lording artificial power just because they can. I’m tired of people who aren’t causing harm or even inconvenience being harassed for taking pictures of a public place. Lest a language lawyer pounce on me by pointing out “but, but, but Union Station isn’t a public place, it’s privately owned and operated!” I will explain that when I use the term “public place” in this rant, I refer to the concept of a place wherein random persons can freely enter, mill about, and exit unmolested under most circumstances. This includes places like bus stations, train stations, airport lobbies (the bits where you don’t have to go through security to reach), even 24-hour Wal-Marts. I refer to it as any place where you can walk in without paying an admission fee, goof around harmlessly for awhile, then leave.

Heh. I haven’t poked fun at Bill O’Reilly for awhile, so let’s fix that with a quick “point-n-laugh” session at an early recording of his calm, gentle demeanor and complete professionalism as a teleprompter fails during a taping of a host segment for Inside Edition.

I guess he didn’t just turn into an angry old fart — he’s just always been an asshole. Bet he fits right in there at Fox I think I’ve figured out why anybody bothers to go on his show at all, knowing he’s a huge fan of the hit piece, the “cut off their microphone” trick, and the “shut up!” maneuver — a person goes on his show in the hopes of pissing him off enough to get an explosion like this one. I suspect that feels even better than winning the lottery

I’m entirely unwilling to try to hide my giddiness as I recap the current standings in the 2008 Democratic Primaries: Hillary Clinton has lost. At this point, even if the two states that disqualified themselves by holding early primaries had all their votes counted at the Democratic Convention, she still wouldn’t have as many delegates as her opponent, Barack Obama, which means she still loses even if she gets Michigan and Florida counted. It’s done and over.

Clinton supporters can troll and boast all they want, but there’s just no even remotely plausible way for her to win the nomination short of Obama suddenly dropping out of the race. This opinion piece sums it up nicely, though: Hillary Clinton has firmly and defiantly reminded us all that she has “every right” to continue running in this race until a winner is decided. She absolutely does have that right. But she’s still a fucking idiot for doing it at this point.

Maybe to enlist more people? Maybe to scare up support for an expensive war in Iraq that, by many accounts, we’re losing (lives, money, and goals).

A recent advertisement by the US Air Force suggests that all your cell phone, GPS, and television viewing joy can be killed by a single missile. Fortunately for those of us living on Earth, that’s not actually true. Thanks, Wired, for pointing out the many, many flaws with this latest scare-mongering nonsense.

It is 2008. The Salem witch trials are long behind us. But apparently, in Florida (the state that does its best every single day to earn its FARK, a simple magic trick is enough to make a school administrator fire a teacher for practicing “wizardry”. Additional coverage here.

The article even quotes the school district:

The Pasco County School District says there were several other performance issues, but none compared to his “wizardry.”

So, the district actually says the biggest problem with his performance was his “wizardry.”

Ugh. This is stupid beyond words. We’re too stupid to survive as a species. We’re doomed.

Ah, tax day. That most hair-pulling, gut-wrenching day of the year when you’re forcibly reminded just how much of your daily toiling at the grindstone goes to (supposedly) the “greater good” of society.

I’ve only ever had a sizable tax bill like this once before in my entire life, and that was back in 2000 when my ex-wife and I hatched a plan to buy ourselves a house in Colorado — the theory went something like this:

• Claim 6 exemptions instead of 2 on my W-2 form to reduce the total taxes taken out of each paycheck, so that when we actually buy the house, all the interest we pay will be deductible and it’ll all balance out.

While that idea actually does work (remembering though that the reduced withholding increases what you’ll owe at year’s end, and the interest only reduces the taxable income you get taxed on) if you follow through, it sets you up for hilarious failure when you don’t actually buy a house. Whoops.

Two nights ago I had an opportunity to explore the realm of Microsoft’s “Windows Genuine Advantage” bullshit — their soft and friendly name for their *fucking draconian anti-piracy authentication and validation suite*. It seems like almost every month (sometimes even more frequently) the company ships yet another update (in case you’re wondering, Windows only runs on bare metal now on one machine of mine full-time — an older Acer laptop that I used to run Linux on until I loaned it to a friend; it got re-imaged back to XP for her use, and since it came back I haven’t had time to put Linux back on it) to the veritable “prove you haven’t stolen from us, bastard!” toolkit.

Here’s the amusing part. A few weeks ago, some friends handed me an older laptop that was seemingly permanently broken, to see if I could resurrect it. It really *was* permanently broken, with no resurrection possible. Crud. Wasn’t a bad notebook, either I could have thrown it into the World Community Grid pile of machines I have.

It seems we (as in, Americans) are taught this lesson the hard way over and over again, yet we continue to refuse to actually learn it. It turns out, yet again, as it always has, that if all you ever teach your kids about sex is “not to do it,” they’ll end up thinking they can prevent HIV with bleach and avoid pregnancy with Mountain Dew.

Die-hard abstinence proponents absolutely hate hearing shit like this, because this is the strongest evidence you can ever present to them that their preferred sex education curriculum doesn’t work.

It took them a year or so longer than they wanted it to take, but Microsoft have finally gotten their wish — they actually succeeded in rigging the vote to approve Office Open XML as an ISO standard. They’ve also just destroyed what was once a well-respected international standards body, but I doubt they care. This is just another avenue they can now “leverage” to rake in yet more money.

Everything about this process stinks, and I’m pissed that they got away with it. They even tried this exact same crap before, and were shot down (as they should have been). Deliberately named to be remarkably similar to OpenOffice, a competing (and free/open source) office productivity suite, the Office Open XML format is Microsoft’s faux bid to appear transparent and open to the world. Now that it’s an “official” standard ratified by the ISO, they can even waddle into government offices and gun for lucrative government contracts: “see? We’re even an ISO standard now! How much more open can you be?”