Barnson.org

No.. its not a typo..

This is the top story on yahoo News right now.. and once again, Fox has screwed Whedon fans…

CLICK HERE FOR THE STORY

Basically, there was a live event that would play the episode “Once more With Feeling” from buffy, with live actors a la “Rocky Horror” and Fox has shut it down.. (The people involved made a good faith agreement with a group called Criterion which evidently has some say in these things)

Fox has shut it down saying that they have no right to do this..

The big question is.. why not broker a deal. there’s no money in this for Fox. Why do this, except that they want to “protect their rights”..

Well.. look over at aintitcool or whedonesque.. Buffy fans and Browncoats know that Fox has screwed the fans for a long, long time (see: Firefly episode airing and cancellation) – and now this is mor ebad blood. Foolish, I say.. what about you?

Time to revisit an old topic, but one that gets brought up year after year when talking with family and friends:

There has never been a random Halloween candy poisoning in the US.

There have been cases of parents murdering their own children by poisoning candy, a homeowner accidentally handing out marijuana in Snickers wrappers because he decided to use candy that showed up where he worked at the dead letter office, a child putting ant poison on his own Snickers bar to freak out his parents, children finding stashes of drugs and dying from an overdose with relatives sprinkling the drugs on Halloween candy to try to protect the abuser, and other incidents. No random poisonings, ever. But, this Halloween, your kids are not going to get poisoned by some random person in your neighborhood handing out poisoned candy.

Next up: foreign objects inserted into candy. There is a small chance — less than the risk of your child dying from choking on a piece of broccoli — that there may be a needle, razor, or other foreign object inserted into candy. Your kid might get a poke or a cut. There have only been 80 incidences of foreign objects found in Halloween treats in the USA since 1959; 70 of them were hoaxes perpetuated by the “victim” or immediate family.

My question with all of this is: why the obsession? My parents made a huge deal out of this when I was a kid, counseling me to cut up apples and discard suspicious-looking candy (no matter how good that smooshed-up Snickers looked in the bottom of the bag). Could it be that, even though most of us know this is a hoax, we instinctively feel some need to instill in our children a distrust of free gifts from neighbors?

Today I decided to read the comments on an article in the Salt Lake Tribune regarding this weekend’s upcoming Exmormon Foundation conference. One comment stuck out to me. I reproduce it below, posted by an individual with the alias of “Blessingstoyou”:

sistermissionary wrote: “Same old thing. Those who leave the Church cannot leave it alone.” It saddens me that you would write such a thing. From growing up in the church I heard this rhetoric many times before, and unfortunately, I still hear it today. Why is your heart so hardened that you feel the need to diminish the feelings of others because they think or believe differently than yourself? Let me give you an example. Let’s say that you purchased a car without doing any research on the make or model or read any consumer reports on the vehicle and never had it inspected by a third party mechanic before you bought it. You simply believed everything about the car the salesman told you. You bought it because it ‘fit you’ in that time of your life and made you look good and feel good while driving it. The price was right, the color was your favorite, mileage was good and everything on the outside seemed to meet your needs. It was what you thought at the time … the perfect car for you. You bought it and drove it off the lot, happy as can be. It served you good and got you from point ‘A’ to point ‘B’ except for what you thought were a few minor problems that kept coming up, but you were able to give them temporary fixes to keep it running without taking it in to a mechanic. Sooner or later, the problems with the car continued to multiply to the point where you could no longer ignore them. You had no choice but to take the car into a mechanic. Once at the mechanics, after lifting up the hood, you got the bad news that the car you bought had several recalls, and that the engine, steering and gas tank were faulty and it was a miracle you had driven the car as long as you had without any serious accidents. You stand there shocked and appalled. You had no idea it was as bad as it was. The mechanic tells you that no amount of money you can throw at it will make it any better. There is nothing he can do to fix it. It is a lost cause. You go home and start doing your research. You find out all the problems with the car, read about all the recalls, and are sick that you believed everything the salesman told you. You feel you should have known better. You think back to that day when you were so happy to buy that car. How it made you feel. You even remember the first song you played on the radio. You remember how it smelled. All the good feelings you experienced when you bought it come rushing back to you. On the other hand, you also feel angry at being taken … believing foolishly in the salesman who sold it to you. You want to call all your friends and family and warn them. You don’t want them making the same mistake you made. When you make your calls to warn others and tell them about your experiences and what you found out about your car and what the mechanic told you, all you hear is that there is nothing really wrong with your car at all. They tell you to ignore the recalls, and that the mechanic is blowing smoke up your skirt. It’s really all your fault, for taking it in to a mechanic in the first place. This logic from others escapes you because you know the car had problems after you purchased it. You know it did, because you experienced them first hand. After all, that is why you finally had to take it in to a mechanic. The problems wouldn’t go away and you finally had to do something about them, only to get the bad news that the car couldn’t be fixed. Everything you have read about the car confirms what the mechanic told you. You even research others who bought the same car and find out that they too experienced the same problems you did. So what do you do? Do you believe your friends and family who tell you there is really nothing wrong with your car? Do you continue to drive it knowing that it is faulty and may cause an accident and cause harm to your self and others? Do you believe the mechanic and the recall reports and the consumer reports? Who do you believe? Answer that question to yourself. What would you do? This is similar, to how many feel about their religion that they were born into or may have converted to when they have the whole picture to look at instead of just part of it. If you found out from a friend that they were going to buy the same car as you did, would you sit quietly by and let them do it without at least giving them warning of your personal experiences? Or would you encourage them to read everything they could find on the car and have all the facts in front of them before making such a financial investment. Religion should not be treated any differently than any other part of our life decision making process. Why is that we just accept what we are being told because it makes us ‘feel good’ even though we get that nagging feelings that something may be off? Is it the feeling we want to keep having? Does it make us feel all is well with the world? Is our way of not coping with what is … but our wanting to cope with what we want it to be – whatever that is?

I have a random signature generator which I use with all my work emails. Today, it found a quote which I thought was surprisingly appropriate given another topic I wrote about last week:

I live the way I type; fast, with a lot of mistakes.

I only had a friend clue me in to this phenomenon, and all I have to say is OMGWTFBBQAWESOME. I laughed so hard I cried.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qc6w4SzIUN0

(Note: Safe for work, but your co-workers may wonder what you are watching which involves so much bleeping…)

Within UltraMegaCorp, there is a strong push to move jobs offshore. This is done in the name of improving the bottom line of the company, because they can get equally-competent people overseas for a fraction of the cost of USA domestic employees. Now, I agree with this in part. We have some employees on our team among the thousands employed by UltraMegaCorp in India. Some of these employees are competent, motivated, and have come to know the job well in the year or so they have been working on it.

Unfortunately, those two people are really, really busy.

Exhibit A: Service request from QA tester. Background: A “V440” is a Sun Solaris machine. In the case of this particular machine, it is running Solaris 10, a UNIX variant. Solaris, for those who don’t know, is nothing at all like Windows except that it runs on a computer. With memory. And hard drives. And, you know, configurations. And stuff.

Now, you would think that a highly-qualified, highly-trained Quality Assurance Engineer would understand what operating system he is working on. In fact, it probably is part of the spec against which he is testing. See if you can spot the error.

—————————————– Service Request Details —————————————–

SR #: 38-3471727291 Date Opened: 10/3/2007 04:49:30 AM Requestor: Mgobudana Raghiva (MGORAG) Job Title: CONTRACTOR: Engineer – Performance Engineering (Superlative) Contact Phone #: Office Phone #: (555) 555-1212 Location: Bangalore Time Zone: Manager: MGROBERT

SR Title: Increase buffer size in SMGV440S999 machine

Description:

When we executed the test, observed the following errors.

Action.c(63): Continuing after Error -27790: Failed to read data from server “smgv440s999”: [10055] No buffer space available

Try changing the registry value HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\ tcpip\Parameters\TcpTimedWaitDelay to 30 and HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\ tcpip\Parameters\MaxUserPort to 65534

Try also increasing the size of the NonPagedPool Memory as follows:

1. Open the Windows Registry. 2. Select Find>Data and search for the term ‘SharedSection’. 3. This search should return a path similar to this: My Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\ Control\Session Manager\Sub Systems\Windows 4. Modify the second value to 4096. 5. Reboot the machine.

Details:

UID: performanceguy PWD: superstar26

Thanks Mgobu.

This is a bit like dropping off your clothes dryer at the local Toyota dealership and asking them to fix the noisy fan in your furnace…

I read a very thought-provoking article today by Pervez Hoodbhoy, chair and professor in the department of physics at Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad, Pakistan, where he has taught for 34 years.

http://ptonline.aip.org/journals/doc/PHTOAD-ft/vol_60/iss_8/49_1.shtml

It was interesting to read and realize that things I accept as commonplace are unusual in many Islamic nations. What I came away with is the general impression that, while Islam is compatible with science, there are numerous factors in current Islamic leadership and society which retard growth. The main points I drew were:

• Suppression of women — particularly requiring the veil — leads to an environment in which fewer people are willing to speak up, with fewer contributions by women and men.
• Science and religion are still at odds in some ideological areas, and when the nation is Islamic, science loses.
• Most Muslim countries are still poor, despite the exception of a few oil-rich states.
• Native languages do not cope well with science.
• Few scientific works are translated into native languages.
• The scientific method is alien in a “society in which absolute authority comes from above, questions are asked only with difficulty, the penalties for disbelief are severe, the intellect is denigrated, and a certainty exists that all answers are already known and must only be discovered.”
• Religious experience is believed to have scientific credence, with the resulting lack of testable hypotheses. “Science finds every soil barren in which miracles are taken literally and seriously and revelation is considered to provide authentic knowledge of the physical world.”
• The West financially and ideologically supported fundamentalist Islam for many years because it suited its colonial and resource needs. A rise in fundamentalism comes at the expense of Enlightenment thinking, and corresponds to a fall in scientific innovation.

All is not lost, however, and Hoodbhoy sees a future in which the Islamic communities which brought us Algebra and astronomy are again full participants in advancing science. He believes, however, that it will require a fairly radical shift in Muslim thinking which “shrugs off the dead hand of tradition, rejects fatalism and absolute belief in authority, accepts the legitimacy of temporal laws, values intellectual rigor and scientific honesty, and respects cultural and personal freedoms.” Most importantly, though, he does not think that real scientific progress can occur while these endless clashes with the West continue.

“On an ever-shrinking globe, there can be no winners in that conflict: It is time to calm the waters. We must learn to drop the pursuit of narrow nationalist and religious agendas, both in the West and among Muslims. In the long run, political boundaries should and can be treated as artificial and temporary, as shown by the successful creation of the European Union. Just as important, the practice of religion must be a matter of choice for the individual, not enforced by the state. This leaves secular humanism, based on common sense and the principles of logic and reason, as our only reasonable choice for governance and progress. Being scientists, we understand this easily. The task is to persuade those who do not.”

The SWEENEY TODD trailer with JOHNNY DEPP is now available!! WooT!!

CLICK HERE TO GET SLICED AND DICED!!

BTW: Matt, if you feel like imbedding this, please do!

If I was running for President in 2008, I would campaign that every U.S. citizen gets health insurance coverage through either their employer or through the government. Every single person has access to health coverage.

Unless you smoke. Then you don’t get health insurance. If you use illegal drugs, you don’t get health insurance. If you drink and drive, you don’t get health insurance. If you smoke, do drugs, etc. and have dependents, no one in the household gets insurance.

I know people who haven’t been to a doctor in 10 years because they take care of themselves. Meanwhile, folks abusing their bodies with terrible substance habits drive up the cost of care and the tax burden for everyone else. No problem. You want to abuse your body with that crap, go right ahead. You don’t get health coverage.

That’s the basic premise. The more I think about it, the more I like it.

Okay.. here’s a fun one (Ben, are you listening?)

So, we all know that there was movie called “Snakes on a Plane”. Let us assume that Joe Schmoe also had a screenplay called “Snakes on a Plane”, and while it had snakes and a plane, it was otherwise, a totally different story.

Let us assume that the screenplay for the unmade film was copyrighted first, but that the writer of the other (hit film) “Snakes on a Plane” had no idea there was ever an unmade screenplay with the same name.

SO.. now there is a guy with a screenplay that the filmmakers never knew about, but he knows his copyrighted screenplay predates the film. Does he have a case?