Here’s something on washington’s smoking ban (Link Dead) and how it’s seriously inconveniencing people where the old well ventilated indoor rooms worked far better.

This blurb about a guy in austria (Link Dead) is rather disturbing to me in multiple ways… The holocaust was a horrific event and one that should be remembered so it is never repeated, but my first issue with this is that it appears to be a law that criminalizes thought and speech. Isn’t speech one of the very things that some european countries are claiming that they are protecting by publishing those cartoons?

Google apparently doesn’t have a online content providers license in china. (Link Dead) This leads me to wonder what kind of sick twisted country would require online content providers to have licenses? I mean, to put stuff up on the net all you have to do is put up an httpd and write something. That’s the whole point of the net to begin with. Everyone is a publisher. I guess when you’re a tyranny, you have to eliminate any uncontrolled printing presses you can and restrict them to just a handful of loyal slaves of the government.

Glorifying Hitler is a sure way to get positive public relations, no? I think it’s rather brave of the mobs to put all their cards face up on the table like that. Too bad the media didn’t really take notice of it. Maybe if we got Cheney to shoot someone holding that sign it would make the front page of the news.

The Lynch Mob (No longer available) takes a stab at FUD. They’re predicting some rather pricy components will go into the PS3, but they’re completely forgetting their own previous estimates along with many recent news items that show some of their claims to be completely false. First of all, Take a calculator, go to where they list the costs, and add them up. It adds up to $800 not $900. Do you really want to trust your money to someone who makes that mistake?

Pop Mechanics’ post-action report on katrina (No longer available) debunking random myths. I’m tossing this here so I can refer to it later when someone starts spouting off on it. Like Jerry Doyle. I can’t believe how he seems to have fallen for the whole thing hook line and sinker.

Picked one up 2 weeks ago. They were definitely right about it having an adjustment period. I was sore and didn’t sleep well for about a week there. Today though was an interesting experience. Normally I can’t completely wake up in the morning without resetting my alarm for a future time and plopping back into bed. This time I snapped awake right when the alarm went off (6 hours after going to sleep) went in and turned it off, then stayed up.

This article from UCLA (No longer available) has an amusing bit of logic to it. But he was unrepentant, and blamed the west’s view of Islam as the primary cause of the violence.“This protest is not about the cartoons, offensive as they are,” he said. “There has been intense psychological pressure on Muslims. We have heard western politicians relate our faith to terrorism, over and over again, and it is too much.

I did finally get that AMD Sempron64 2800+ processor put into my secondary desktop. It’s a swift little computer too. The only problems I’ve had so far with AMD64 Linux is the deinterlacers on TVTime and the fact that you need the closed source nvidia driver for the video card. I finally have it working, but it’s basically in 640x240 mode on the tv until I can get them going again.

I’m trying to come up with good ways of phrasing some energy related ideas. I’ve been listening to some talk radio, reading some news articles on the web, and I’ve come to the conclusion that nobody has a bloody clue when it comes to our energy problems. For one, it seems like they don’t recognize that we actually have two separate problems. One is Stationary energy generation/collection, the other is Portable energy storage.