Beastie Boys Sabotage

Woman: Is there a problem, Officer?
Officer: Ma’am, you were speeding.
Woman: Oh, I see.
Officer: Can I see your license please?
Woman: I’d give it to you but I don’t have one.
Officer: Don’t have one?
Woman: Lost it 4 times for drunk driving.
Officer: I see…Can I see your vehicle registration papers please.
Woman: I can’t do that.
Officer: Why not?
Woman: I stole this car.
Officer: Stole it?
Woman: Yes, and I killed and hacked up the owner.
Officer: You what?
Woman: His body parts are in plastic bags in the trunk if you want to see.
The Officer looks at the woman, slowly backs away to his car, and calls for back up. Within minutes 5 police cars circle the car. A senior officer slowly approaches the car, clasping his half drawn gun.
Officer 2: Ma’am, could you step out of your vehicle
please!
The woman steps out of her vehicle.
Woman: Is there a problem sir?
Officer 2: One of my officers told me that you have stolen this car and murdered the owner.
Woman: Murdered the owner?
Officer 2: Yes, could you please open the trunk of your car, please.
The woman opens the trunk, revealing nothing but an empty trunk.
Officer 2: Is this your car, ma’am?
Woman: Yes, here are the registration papers.
The first officer is stunned.
Officer 2: One of my officers claims that you do not have a driving license.
The woman digs into her handbag and pulls out a clutch purse and hands it to the officer. The officer snaps open the clutch purse and examines the license. He looks quite puzzled.
Officer 2: Thank you ma’am, one of my officers told me you didn’t have a license, that you stole this car, and that you murdered and hacked up the owner.
Woman: I’ll Bet you the liar told you I was speeding too.

When Michigan’s housing market started its downward slide in 2003, I started to wonder if home ownership really is the pathway to security that it had been for many families in the past.

Perhaps for those who buy and hold their homes for several decades, the promise of home ownership remains. But for those who have recently purchased homes or those who have upgraded homes a few times, I have a suspicion that there are at least three factors that make home ownership less of the “no-duh” purchase it used to be:

1. the market is riskier and has yet to stabilize
2. repeatedly moving from house to house means owners spend more years in the front end of the amortization table where most of their payments are loaded with interest
3. owners can no longer count on gaining equity through appreciation to offset the dominance of interest in the first seven years of the mortgage

In an expensive and unstable market like the San Francisco bay area, I like the safety of renting a home. Fortunately, I was fired from a job the day before we were going to buy a house in Santa Clara. Had we purchased it, we would have lost about $200,000 in market value. That experience sensitized me to the shocking risk of home ownership in coastal California.

People who bought homes in the past three years had in mind the previously-reliable maxim that buying in a down market was a good idea. The problem was that the bottom didn’t quite arrive -it kept dropping. This also sensitized me to the risk of ownership.

I once read that one should buy appreciating assets, i.e. homes, and rent depreciating assets, i.e. cars. We’ve owned two homes and leased eight BMWs with that philosophy. But now I have inverted those two: lease a home and buy the car. Why?

Because risk has become more important to me that appreciation or depreciation. I want to have the financial flexibility to adjust to a market by moving if necessary and to leave it easily without penalty or to buy a car and own it long term. If I own my car, I free up money that would be committed to a payment and that allows a bit more financial agility to adapt to riskier situations.

This Wall Street Journal article discusses the emerging trend of renting homes rather than buying them.

For an increasing number of Americans, though, it simply makes more sense to rent these days. According to Moody’s, by late 2011 it was cheaper to rent than to own in 72% of American metropolitan areas, up from 54% a decade ago. And the more people who do it, the more socially acceptable and desirable it becomes. The decline in the ownership rate means that about three million more households rent today than did at the height of the bubble.

It’s tempting to view the rise of rentership as an economic step backward. Renters can’t build up equity, and they have less control over their living standards than owners. Renting is generally seen as something you do when you’ve failed as a homeowner or are not yet ready to be one. But I’d argue the rise of rentership is a sign of a system adapting—albeit too slowly—to new realities.

via Renting Prosperity – WSJ.com.

Referenced Article: Letters of Note: Iorz feixfuli, M. J. Yilz.

I’ve been thinking lately about how texting and ghetto slang has changed the spelling of words. Spelling Nazi’s come in and correct you’re spelling and tell you your an idiot for not spelling properly and that their should be more emphasis payd to the proper spelling of wordz.

If we are honest, we will consider the possibility that the notion of “correct spelling” is fairly ridiculous. There are many rules and a great number of exceptions. Homonyms, contractions, vowels, consonants, synonyms. All cause problems. Words aren’t spelled the way they sound or don’t even look look like they are pronounced.

For example: conceit. forfeit.

Does spelling really matter? If we allowed some flexibility in spelling variations, would it be such a big deal? Could we not determine meaning from the context of the word? I wonder if “contextual spelling” would make it easier to learn English, especially for someone for whom English is a second language.

Grammar probably does matter but right now, I’m not sure that spelling necessarily does.

This 1971 letter to the editor of The Economist makes an interesting point in a delightful way.
What do you think of proper spelling?

panegyric – eulogic, encomiast
A formal, high-minded speech can be described with a formal, high-minded word — the word panegyric, which is a very elaborate tribute to someone. You could consider most eulogies as panegyrics.
It stands to reason that the original use of the word panegyris, from which panegyric derives, was to describe a public gathering in honor of a Greek god. The Latin, L. panegyricus, altered slightly to mean “public eulogy,” which around the 16th Century shifted to the French panégyrique, which meant “laudation.” In any case, the word today stands for high praise given in a speech or tribute as highfalutin as the word itself sounds.

A stilted silence seized the conversation. Milton, a man with a shiny pate pitifully ornate with greasy strands of hair, had realized five beats too late that he has mentioned the wrong name. Unlike others who might look awkwardly down at their plates, this group looked at each other directly, with foresight and intent, each attempting to read the others’ reaction to Milton’s faux pas. Infrequent light, eradicable flickering lights, tenuous amber vibrations unfolded on white plates, red meats and green and red salads. No one’s eyes averted and Milton did not feel shame in the silence. He had not been shameful but clumsy.
“I’m surprised…” and a shallow bright voice trailed off to a short silence. Still enough to punctuate the moment like punching a man in the stomach with a pillow between fist and abs.
Glances flashed across the table in a rapid network of emotionneurons, looking for revulsion, acceptance, doubt, forgiveness, whatever the current status may be. Without a clear lead, they looked ton one another to follow.
Milton’s shiny forehead was bowed slightly as he seached his cache to wonder how he could have let this happen. What led up to it? That memory that reminded him [of Calvin]. Once the memory is recalled, the name, the face, the recollections of times before banishment, it is difficult not to think of him. One cannot not think of something once they have thought of it. Milton remembered trying spastically to twist himself away from the vibrating sheath through which the memory of Cavin [yes cavin] managed to permeate itself while being pushed away until Milton, casually let him through the sheath of memory into the front of his mind then wetly on his tongue.
“… That we would mentiion him?”
The eyes of the bright-voiced woman closed, opened, closed and opened in an acquiescent code of acknowledgement.
Someone reached to take a drink of wine and in quick conformity, everyone else brought their wines, scotches, vodkas to their lips, a mass gesture of fidgets.
“Tom would know what to say…”
Gregory Townsend brought his glass down to the table with emphatic force, the heel of his hand both cupping his scotch and softening the thudded percussion.
“Tom was a goddamned encomiast. Tom would laud the nature of Lucifer, tumbling and twisting stories and facts so that he be not a tempter but an opportunist. We don’t need perceptions for this.”

It was too much. His palms opened flat and angled toward he breadth of the table to assure them and apologize for using more force than was necessary.
“Milton, you clearly were thinking of him.” Veronica Wells twirling a thick section of hair between her thumb and three fingers. Her eyes seeing his then leading his eyes across the table,  as if to remind him that this was his moment.
Thick Milton fingers rubbed over his bald skull as he leaned toward the table, head tipped down, eyes raised to Veronica. She had a memory of rehearsal, something plotted, planned. Milton stepped to the center where the dominante would be. He had no memory. Though it was him who culled Cavin to memory as they all sat at the table and had thought weeks before their dinner that it had been too long since they had mentioned it. Milton had not rehearsed it but he had planned it. As he drove, Cavin pressed into his mind. The dominance, the potency of the man, pushed against the vinyl membrane of memory, made it porous and now this moment bound them in strands of memory and resentment. Adrenalin surged, dread. The gawking wonder of awkward spectacle, stopping the traffic of conversation, words, rehearsed by each for days to assert personna.
Knives and forks, cups, glasses cascade in tinny, food-eating animosity. Cryptic dashes and dots of forks and knives tapping out staccato beats of rhythms of eating, chewing, drinking. Milton now hearing it all and falling into this unquenched desire for closure, for something that was true, credible, forgivable. Tom’s mighty chest, whose vested suit was the corpulent bodice of his power, thrust out at the table in the memories of them all. It was only their third dinner since.
Milton, covertly confident, crippled by ungainly appearance but welcomed by the thoughtful and attractive, stalled. Not from hesitation but from drama, to separate himself from Gregory’s … [whatever]. Milton chose.
“I was. Thinking. I took — I had a long drive in. Cavin… in my mind.”
A few others thought that if Milton’s attempt failed, they would try to gain Tom’s spot. Spinning, querying.
“Our grief is from two men. One who chose, one who died. This could be the last time we meet. We have to say the words we all know, we hide, we push deep down with our hands pressed flat, pushing from our throats to our stomachs. We stuff it and if we keep pushing with our hands, we will end. We are all too honest, if we prefer, than to pretend that this was the unforgivable. We are all too many liars too and if we let us, we will lie and never meet again.”
Some eyes turned to laps, some looked in the direction of the feigned laughter of an indifferent woman being entertained by the endless stories of her date’s perfection. Those who too had thought of Cavin during the day, who had been unwilling to press their hands down any longer, looked at Milton and invited him with earnest faces to say more.

Link to the article: Kaspersky: Mac security is ’10 years behind Microsoft’ | Apple – CNET News.

I expect to be corrected by Kevin, Tom, and Joel on this but I’m going to say this anyway.

I’ve heard OS X enthusiasts say for years that the OS is architecturally superior to Windows and that Microsoft’s long battle against malware proves the inherent superiority of Max OS.

I have argued on bimmergeek.com for years that Macs have been protected by security by obscurity until relatively recently. I have further argued that a legitimate case can be made that Windows actually has substantively better security specifically because it has been attacked relentlessly and updated by Microsoft for years.

Windows has been tested and proven in the wild. OS X has not. All OS X has are claims it is inherently superior.

Recently, there was an outbreak of Mac malware that is estimated to have infected 600,000 Macs and may still be active on 185,000 machines. I have been surprised that Mac adherents say that it wasn’t really OS X that was compromised but rather Java. The distinction is only meaningful to people interested in technology because the end result is that 600,000 Macs were exploited by malware and that’s really what matters to end users.

The article I cite for this post reviews some of the efforts that Apple will use to help protect users and those efforts are primarily functions of Apple’s “walled garden,” which I generally consider to be an effective means of protecting devices. It works well for iOS  devices but it’s a bit more flawed as a security approach for Macs.

With iOS, the only way to install applications is through iTunes or the App Store (assuming the device hasn’t been jail-broken). Not so with OS X. .dmg files and installation packages can be downloaded from any site that offers them. It’s a good move to require apps sold on the App Store to comply with sandbox rules but since the App Store isn’t the only source for apps, it’s not a complete solution.

The problem is that these technical solutions do not protect users from themselves. Most malware depends on “social engineering,” a term that refers to inciting users to bypass security measures on behalf of the malware. Users do this because they are unaware of what they are actually doing when they download an attachment and open it. Malware won’t conform to sandbox rules and if a user is persuaded to open it, there’s not a lot the OS can do until a threat surfaces and patches are issued.

I have been eagerly anticipating this time. We are about to see if OS X is truly inherently secure or if its market obscurity has enabled it to coast on false claims.

I greatly enjoy the use of Durex boxes to build a cathedral.

Link to Article: HTC, Facebook jointly developing smartphone, say sources.

This article discusses yet another round of rumors that Facebook seeks to develop its own platform phone.

Why don’t they just make a Facebook application that isn’t a steaming pile of poo?

I hate this trite saying. A lot.

I hate it because it’s a bullshit value of goodness. It’s supposed to inspire people to be kind and, if the bumper is long enough to contain the full maxim, inspire people to practice senseless acts of beauty.

It sounds so good but it’s fluffy, bullshit philosophy.

Goodness, kindness and beauty are not random or senseless. This tenet of bumper sticker philosophy leaves goodness, kindness and beauty up to whim or chance.

Instead, the message could be: Be consistently and thoughtfully kind to others and show them beauty through your life. 

Link to PetaPixel Article: 3D Glass Plate Photos From the 1930s.