A Few Quick Ones

Stolen from QDB (These are Chatroom transcripts):

<Jesus> The guy does not understand the concept of the "Shift" key
<Noser> the what key/

~~~~~~~

TheMan: Can one person type !add 2+2?
Node: !add 2+2
Aranjedeath: it dont work
Aranjedeath: yeah
Zabikten: $calc(2+2)
Zabikten: hm
Node: !add 2+2
Zabikten: dude
Zabikten: it's fucking 4
Zabikten: why do you need a calculator?

~~~~~~~~

<fichen973> Your porn is so old that the women in the pictures have offspring with their own porn sites.

~~~~~~~~

<Mandi> why can't I find the picture I want
<Borgs> that's because the governement closes those sites and procecute people who download those sorts of pictures

~~~~~~~~

<shyster> the other day
<shyster> my girlfriend asked me about my wildest fantasies
<shyster> I probably shouldn't have told her they all involved other women

Ricky Gervais - Microsoft's Office Values, Part 1 & 2

Part 1

 

Part 2

The Office - Where it all started. You want the BBC Version season 1 and season 2, as well as the Office Special which ties it all together.

One More Reason To Eat More Organic Foods

If you want to get rid of a pest, why not use a littler pest to plague it? That's the tack OKd last week by the Food and Drug Administration, which has for the first time approved the use of bacteria-eating viruses as an additive to foods.

From now on, these viruses - known as bacteriophage or phage - can be sprayed on ready-to-eat cold cuts and luncheon meats by manufacturers to prevent listeriosis, the most deadly of all food-borne illnesses in this country.

But harnessing these tiny viruses to fight food poisoning takes more than just spraying cold cuts with random collections of phage. Invading phage and enemy bacteria must be perfectly matched for the process to work. Each strain of phage is highly specific and kills only certain bacteria.

Also, bacteria become resistant to certain strains of bacteriophage very rapidly. That is why, in this new spray-on application for ready-to-eat meats, Intralytix scientists are using six different phage. To come up with their cocktail, the scientists collected more than 300 different strains of listeria and tested listeria-invading phage on all of them. There was no single phage that killed all strains, so the scientists designed the product so that every kind of listeria would be attacked by more than one phage.

Full Story

The Collection Plate

A man went to church one day and afterward he stopped to shake the
preacher's hand. He said "Preacher, I'll tell you, that was a damned
fine sermon. Damned good!"

The preacher said, "Thank you sir, but I'd rather you didn't use
profanity."

The man said, "I was so damned impressed with that sermon I put five
thousand dollars in the offering plate!"

The preacher said, "No shit!"

Meet A Black Person

Improv Everywhere's Agent Dunn offers a service to the very white population of Aspen, CO.

 "Mom! C'Mere! There's A Black Guy Down Here!" God Bless America.

I am currently listening to "La Dolce Vita" Suite by Monks of Doom from the album What's Left for Kicks?

 

 

 

Removing Windows DRM with FairUse4WM

From Engadget: So far as the yet very quiet forums are claiming, a new app called FairUse4WM can be used to strip Windows Media DRM 10 and 11 (i.e. PlaysForSure, but not WM DRM 9). Yes, yes, we know, we've heard this song and dance before. But before we proceed, let's just be totally clear on how the system works: providers like Napster and Yahoo Music Unlimited provide subscription service for unlimited access to Windows Media DRMed files; stop paying the fee, stop getting access to the files -- but you already knew all this. We tried FairUse4WM and we can verify that it quickly and easily stripped the DRM from our Napster To Go tracks, and made them freely available to play on our Mac (which, of course, has Flip4Mac installed).

In other words, it's a simple, apparently lossless, one-step method for making your files playable after you're no longer paying fees on your subscription service. The app didn't work on our Vongo videos, but we can verify with all certainty that yes, Windows Media DRM can now be easily and quickly stripped from PlaysForSure media services. Now watch as Microsoft shuts down the forums and runs damage control in order to prevent an digital media entire platform from collapsing.

P.S. - Here are some links to the app (no, we can't verify their validity, and yes, we take absolutely zero accountability for what you may do with it): here, here, and here.

Jet Blue TRAMPLES Civil Liberties - Buh Bye.

From Jarrars Blog: I went to JFK in the morning to catch my Jet Blue plane to California. I reached Terminal 6 at around 7:15 am, issued a boarding pass, and checked all my bags in, and then walked to the security checkpoint. For the first time in my life, I was taken to a secondary search . My shoes were searched, and I was asked for my boarding pass and ID. After passing the security, I walked to check where gate 16 was, then I went to get something to eat. I got some cheese and grapes with some orange juice and I went back to Gate 16 and sat down in the boarding area enjoying my breakfast and some sunshine.

At around 8:30, two men approached me while I was checking my phone. One of them asked me if I had a minute and he showed me his badge, I said: "sure". We walked some few steps and stood in front of the boarding counter where I found out that they were accompanied by another person, a woman from Jet Blue.

One of the two men who approached me first, Inspector Harris, asked for my id card and boarding pass. I gave him my boarding pass and driver's license. He said "people are feeling offended because of your t-shirt". I looked at my t-shirt: I was wearing my shirt which states in both Arabic and English "we will not be silent". You can take a look at it in this picture taken during our Jordan meetings with Iraqi MPs. I said "I am very sorry if I offended anyone, I didnt know that this t-shirt will be offensive". He asked me if I had any other T-shirts to put on, and I told him that I had checked in all of my bags and I asked him "why do you want me to take off my t-shirt? Isn't it my constitutional right to express myself in this way?" The second man in a greenish suit interfered and said "people here in the US don't understand these things about constitutional rights". So I answered him "I live in the US, and I understand it is my right to wear this t-shirt".

The rest of the story is here.

Gaim Crashing On Startup?

Yesterday, Gaim started crashing for a bunch of people (most notably Windows users) when trying to connect a MSN account.

* Update - August 20th, 2006 - 12:32 CDT *

Gaim 2.0.0beta3.1 has been released which fixes this and other bugs in beta3. You can download it from its SourceForge file release page.

Drug Companies Fear Upcoming Film - Lash Back

Michael Moore's upcoming 2007 documentary "Sicko" - aimed at the $1.5 trillion healthcare and pharmaceutical industry - has mobilized many companies within the medical industry to try to discredit Moore and the film, AdAge.com reports.

Moore, who directed such documentaries as "Roger and Me," "Bowling for Columbine" - which won an Academy Award - and "Fahrenheit 9/11," says on his website that he asked the public to send him letters about their healthcare system experiences, and received more than 19,000 of them.

"To read about the misery people are put through on a daily basis by our profit-based system was both moving and revolting," Moore writes. The filmmaker says he won't discuss the documentary with the public, but says, "Sicko is a comedy about 45 million people with no health care in the richest country on Earth."

AdAge.com claims that the pharmaceutical industry is attempting to discredit Moore's film by trying to spin the filmmaker as biased and one-sided. Ken Johnson, senior vice president for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), says America needs a "thoughtful and well-researched" investigation into America's healthcare problems, and insists Moore's film won't provide that.

But consumer health advocate Mike Adams disagrees. "Big Pharma is the king of spin and propaganda," he says. "And drug companies will paint anything as 'biased' if it doesn't bow down to the lies, distortions and fraud being promoted by the industry. Big Pharma is not merely afraid of Michael Moore, they're afraid of anything resembling honest scrutiny or investigative journalism," he added.

Moore says that every family he talks to about healthcare nightmares suddenly receives free health care when pharmaceutical companies learn they've spoken to Moore. "There has been a 100 percent success rate of the people we're filming of getting whatever they need from HMOs, pharmaceutical companies, whatever," Moore says.

Odds Of Your Dell Laptop Battery Sploding

From our "calm-the-fuck-down-department" comes this article by Christopher Null. Please forward to all your airline employee friends:

Dell has reported 4.1 million laptops at risk, and six known cases of batteries melting or exploding over the last two years. Let's play pessimist and assume the problem is much worse than Dell knows about. Let's assume that over the next three years, ten times as many notebooks will explode if left with at-risk batteries. Doing the math: That's a 1 in 205,000 chance per year of a recalled battery exploding. Over the next two months, should you decide to wait a bit to replace your battery: The odds are 1 in 1,230,000.

Do those odds frighten you? I decided to cobble together some comparable statistics to put you at ease. Here's your risk of facing death or damage due to some more realistic concerns. (Note that all odds below are for the event happening over the course of one year.)

Odds of being struck by lightning (though not necessarily dying) in a given year: 1 in 400,000 (Source: National Weather Service)

Odds of dying in a car accident in a given year: 1 in 18,400 (Source: National Safety Council [NSC])

Odds of getting killed somehow while walking around outside: 1 in 49,000 (NSC)

Odds of drowning: 1 in 88,000 (NSC)

Odds of choking to death: 1 in 97,000 (NSC)

Odds of dying in an air (or space) accident: 1 in 392,000 (NSC)

Odds of freezing to death: 1 in 469,000 (NSC)

Odds of death from falling off the bed or a chair: 1 in 347,000 (NSC)

Odds of choking to death on your own vomit: 1 in 740,000 (NSC)

Odds of getting killed by fireworks: 1 in 26,440,000 (NSC)

Odds of death due to overly hot tap wa