| Friday, May 11 2012 |
Damn.
I really doubt they'll ever make another guy quite like Carroll Shelby.
I had the pleasure of meeting the man some moons ago, and much of my own life has taken more than a few pages from his book of speed.
He leaves us with this. A 662 horsepower showroom stock ponycar. Along with half a century or so of automotive awesomeness.
Now that, is what you call a legacy.
posted by Mr. Lion
@
20:29 EST | comments
(0)
| Wednesday, May 9 2012 |
Dear Apple,
Please un-fuck the search functionality of OS X Mail. It is unusable and broken.
posted by Mr. Lion
@
20:18 EST | comments
(0)
| Tuesday, April 17 2012 |
On the other hand...
The last few days required that I install Windows 7 on a relatively current netbook. I had not touched Windows in any significant manner short of using a box at Kinkos on occasion for, oh, six years.
The experience left me scarred, angry and confused. It blows my mind that a company with all the resources in the world has been making a defective product for 20 some years and STILL can't make it usable. Amazing.
Alternatively, one of my little servers that has been churning happily away for.. really quite some time now:
12:09PM up 2030 days, 20:23, 1 user, load averages: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
posted by Mr. Lion
@
14:14 EST | comments
(0)
| Friday, April 13 2012 |
Yawn. Glurb.
Work. More work. Even more work.
This isn't a bad thing. Except for blogging.
posted by Mr. Lion
@
22:49 EST | comments
(0)
| Friday, March 23 2012 |
Operation Wag the Dog. At 299792458 m/s.
One of the annoying things about having talk radio on in the background while hammering on things are the news bumps. To listen to any of the live shows over the airwaves, I'm forced to deal with WABC, and its tired, asinine "news" headlines every quarter hour or thereabouts.
The "news" tirade today is over the Trayvon Martin shooting in Florida. The leftward lilt over what is indeed a tragedy, but ultimately one of thousands that occur the world over every hour would be pathetic, were it not so utterly despicable.
The MSM is treating this fiasco as a literal show trial. Why? Well, not to put too fine a point on it, a not black person shot a black person, and the shooter was legally carrying a concealed weapon. So, naturally, it becomes a wonderful hobby horse of idiocy for everyone from Sharpton to random talking head network news imbeciles using the death of this kid to attack Presidential candidates.
Even the President got his shot in, displaying his usual degree of class. See, we have to do a lot of "soul searching" over this, and think about the laws and societal elements leading up to this tragedy.
Or, to translate: Guns are bad so we have to ban them, so are castle doctrine laws so we have to get rid of those. Oh, and everyone's racist.
However, back here on Planet Reality, we don't have the first idea of what actually happened in Florida, short of a few 911 call recordings and sketchy third party reports.
On the face of it, this is somewhere between a justifiable shooting and manslaughter due to a series of poor judgement calls. The event in question also happened over a month ago. Two facts you'd never know were you to listen to any given media outlet for half an hour. See, this poor, innocent boy was shot because of his clothing choice, if you listen to one retard. Or because he was black, if you listen to another. Or because the shooter was just aching to pop someone.
The man in question has not been arrested nor accused of a crime. No evidence has been brought forth. No judgement of guilt or innocense has been made. Though, you'd never know it to listen to every single effing report on the subject, some of which amounts to future jury tampering.
Nothing significant about what the family of this kid must be going through, at least nothing without the heavy coloring of race thrown in. Nothing about the thousands of other kids who are killed, often by other kids, every year. Nope. We'll just use the death of what appears to be an innocent teenager to shovel our usual agenda down as many throats as we possibly can.
This shit has got to stop.
UPDATE: What a shock, there's more to this than is being reported.
No apparent evidence? Zimmerman had a cut on the back of his head, a bloody nose, and grass stains on his back. Some (presumably disputed) witness accounts say that Trayvon Martin was on top and beating him.
There may not be conclusive evidence, since we don't know what precipitated the scuffle, and there may not be evidence that Trayvon Martin was doing something wrong when Zimmerman first called 911 to report suspicious behavior but to say there is "no apparent evidence" that Zimmerman fired in self-defense is the quality of reporting we have come to expect from the Duke Lacrosse cheerleaders. All The News That Advances The Narrative.
Yup. Shameless.
posted by Mr. Lion
@
19:08 EST | comments
(0)
| Tuesday, March 20 2012 |
Pretentious whining for science.
Oh no! We're running out of Helium! And that's made a few pretentious eggheads very cross indeed.
Professor Robert Richardson, of Cornell University, New York, who won the Nobel physics prize in 1996 for his research on helium, argues that a helium party balloon should cost £75, to reflect the true value of the gas used. Yet you can buy enough helium to float 200 balloons for that price. "We are squandering an irreplaceable resource," he says.
Right. Much as how gold and platinum are of extreme use in semiconductor construction, and yet we
squander it on silly things like engagement rings and watches.
Hey, Einstein: Helium costs something like $2 per cubic foot for a reason, and it's a very good reason: That's what the market says it should cost, given the realities of supply (relatively abundant) and demand (relatively small). Doesn't matter if someone wants to cool magnets with it, weld aluminum with it, or fill party balloons-- it's a commodity, and like any other, can be used by anyone to do anything
they damn please. And if we run out, which is a pretty big if as with most The Sky Is Falling projections,
everyone will need to find a different inert gas to do what they need to do.
It is not for bleating scientists to decide who is blessed enough to use Helium. It is for the people who extract and sell the stuff, and right now, they say it should be cheap enough for Little Johnnie to tote around a party balloon full of it.
Some people, those with a degree of rational sense, might also point out that the Large Hadron Collider sucked up something like
5,000 tons of liquid Helium-- the amount produced by the world in a year. Several tons of which they vented to the atmosphere when various parts of it
went boom.
That's something like ~800,000-1.2M cubic feet of gas, or, enough to fill several million balloons, if you were wondering.
Now, who exactly is being irresponsible with Helium again?
If you want more Helium for science, I suggest you
buy it like everyone else, instead of hand-wringing over effing party balloons.
posted by Mr. Lion
@
17:37 EST | comments
(0)
| Saturday, February 25 2012 |
It's a consensus!
By a wide margin, the usual gaggle of morons have widely panned Act of Valor, which is far from surprising. Hollywood these days, barring the occasional decent film that slips through, has its collective head so far up its butt it wouldn't know a decent film if one hit it in the face.
That's pretty much what Valor does. In short, it's a film about the good guys kicking butt and taking names. It has a sense of reality and immersion that I've never experienced before in cinema. It is, by far, one of the best films I've ever seen.
The critics hate it, of course. But that's okay. We hate them, too.
UPDATE: Suck it, Hollywood.
posted by Mr. Lion
@
10:44 EST | comments
(0)
| Thursday, February 23 2012 |
Solution in desperate search for problem, has problem.
The fun just keeps on coming in the EV Follies. Evidently if you completely discharge a Tesla-- something that would be fairly easy if, say, you returned home from a massive 50 mile journey and were met with a several-day power outage due to a major storm, grid calamity, or lack of supply (California, call your office)-- the car transforms from a $100,000 brick into a $140,000 brick.
By which I mean you have to replace the batteries. All of them. And you get to pay $40,000 for that privilege, because it isn't covered under warranty. Nor via insurance coverage.
Yeah. Slow, ugly, heavy, expensive cars with ridiculous range that require permanent life support. Sign me up!
Oh, wait. The government did already. Against my will. Zang.
posted by Mr. Lion
@
00:04 EST | comments
(0)
CopyRight © 2001-2011 CapitalistLion.com All Rights
Reserved
Syndicated news: RSS 2.0 - RSS 1.0
