Concerning the recent developments in the UK:

I really wonder how many people are going to trust the health care system over there anymore. Really.

I mean, there was essentially a cabal of people in the medical field over there that basically took it upon themselves to break the Hippocratic oath for a religious cause. The problem that I see here is "how long until they infect their patients with something really nasty to infect the populous with?".

I was genuinely surprised when I heard the words "doctor", "terrorist", and "explosives" in the same sentence. I believe the people in the medical field have access to things that are so much more insidious, more horrific, and more panic inducing than explosives. Hell, we've seen what we do with suspected Anthrax and Eubola samples. I'm not saying our reactions are not justified. They are, as these two items are huge on the list of destructive potential, but what about stuff that we haven't seen or heard much of? How about a manipulated strain of Necrotizing Fasciitis? I do not believe these things are not out of the reach of modern medicine. I also believe that items needed to facilitate work on stuff like this were probably available to at least a few of these physicians.

Then again, I just might have too much time on my hands for my brain to work.

Mel Martinez, you're fired.

Mel is "dissapointed" about the defeat of the latest amnesty bill to cross the Senate floor. I'm sorry that you felt it necessary to vote for it in the first place, Mel. Deeply sorry.

I must admit that after I heard about the first successful cloture vote concerning S. 1639, I was a bit livid. I was disappointed that our Senate would say "Well, the existing laws weren't enforced properly, but by God, we will make shure that the resources are available to enforce these!" and actually expect us to believe that the enforcement would happen differently than it has in the past. I'm sorry ladies and gentlemen, I'm not buying it.

These are my desires concerning illegal immigration currently:

1. Seal the borders. With a fence and concrete car barriers. Make shure that it's prohibitively difficult to get in. No cameras, no UAVs. FENCE and CONCRETE. This will be passed in an independent bill with simple language that will have no more than a few pages to it. All other legislation concerning immigration will be put on indefinite hiatus until this first provision is resolved. We work hard to keep tabs on those arriving by plane or boat, placing huge checkpoints in those points of entry. Why should the land border be any different?


2. Make it easy for employers to verify identifying papers that people present for employment. I'd be happy with a 10 business day turnaround for verification. This should be plenty of time to search a database for a green card/Social Security number/work visa. This process will need to be streamlined over the next few years to bring the turnaround time to less than 5 business days.


3. Penalize the crap out of employers that give illegals jobs, after number 2 has been enacted. Make it painful to get caught employing illegals. Extremely painful. Something on the order of a significant percentage of the company's gross income.


4. Require existing illegal immigrants to contact the US Embassy in their country of origin IN PERSON to get a work visa. Limit the number of these visas to the number of employers asking for employees from this labor pool. Each of these work visas will have the employee's sponsor's name attached to it. The work visa shall be valid for 1 year, renewable indefinitely annually by the visa's sponsor. If the employer does not employ the number of people requested for a minimum of 1 year, slap a stiff fine on them. If the employee finds work for another employer, it will be the responsibility of the new employer and the employee to have the sponsor name changed on the employee's work visa. These work visas will be cataloged in the database mentioned in number 2. If it is discovered that the employee is gaming the system, or shell corporations are being set up to bring people over, all of those involved will be brought up on racketeering and human transport charges. Immigrants convicted of these charges will be deported immediately, with no hope getting another work visa or hope of returning. Natives will spend a very long time in a Federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison, with all assets seized.


5. One of the primary requirements of attaining a work visa will be a semi-fluent grasp of the English language. We are not going to conform to your society here. You are being welcomed into ours. The phrase "When in Rome..." applies here.


6. One of the primary requirements of attaining a work visa will be a clean criminal record in your country of origin. Those who break their society's mores are not welcome here, as you will probably be breaking ours as well.


7. Those getting work visas shall be held to the same standard that the rest of us are: Obey the law in their area. Anything more than a misdemeanor charge means they lose their work visa and are deported back to their country of origin with no hope of getting another work visa or no hope of returning.


8. Illegal immigrants that refuse to leave in a timely manner after the passage of the legislation above shall be arrested and held in a local Federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison until another group of deportees are being escorted out of the country. This should help with the cost of deporting people by doing it in groups rather than individuals. Deportations will happen by bus if the deportee is going to Mexico or Canada. Deportees to other countries would go by boat. Pending approval of the Pentagon, in the brig of our U.S. Navy ships. Forgoing that, other means would have to be worked out.

I believe these steps will be a great start to meaningful immigration reform: Control the flow of immigrants. Make it difficult for illegal immigrants to get work and many will go home. Those that don't get arrested and held until they get to ride home with several of their closest friends. Regulate the number and quality of those coming back. There are probably loopholes (some may be gaping) in my statements above, and I would hope that people smarter than me would help us find and close them, but I feel that it's a good baseline to start with.

Mel, this bill didn't do any of that in any sort of meaningful way. You can point to provisions that hinted at it, but most of those provisions are on the law books already. This sir, was the last straw. You have lost my vote in 2010. Have fun in the private sector. Hope you liked being a lawyer.

Big damn (motorcycle) hero

The movie "The World's Fastest Indian" is a great psuedo-biography of a motorcycle racing legend: Burt Munro.

Burt was a genius and a madman. Read more here.

Then watch the movie. I highly recommend almost family friendly movie.

QFT

In the context I'm using it, Quoted for truth. Nothing else better applies to the following: KXCD for 2007-05-07. I'll be damned if Randall Munroe didn't just hit it on the head.

An open letter to Bank of America

One of my pet peeves is seemingly poor programming practices, especially when it comes to something that I perceive as easily worked around or corrected.

Well, the Bank of America online banking website just earned my ire in this realm.

I'm trying to reset my password to use an algorithm that I've developled for myself. My algorithm generates very secure passwords that are easy for me to remember, and different for each place I use it, using letters, numbers, and symbols. Well, the online banking site has some specific rules for creating passwords:

- It cannot contain special character $ < > & ^ ! [ ]

Now, these are probably metacharacters for whatever language is running the site on the back end. The problem is that, from what I can assess, they don't FRAKING QUOTE the password that you supply them that would prevent whatever language they're using on the back end from interpreting the symbols as metacharacters. Either that, or they don't trust the front-end (the part that we enter our username and password into) to pass the symbols to the backend properly, which should also be solved by quoting the string.

Now, unless someone from Bank of America calls me on this, I'm going to assume that someone in the web development team is a moron, and didn't do enough homework when he/she got their Computer Engineering degree.

I'm not studied in this field, but I know enough to talk to professionals about this on a reasonably intelligent level, having done web development in PERL. If anyone can give me a reasonable explanation, I will post it here, and issue an apology if needed.

To Senator Harry Reid:

I sincerely hope you choke on your own words.

Traitor. I do not use that word lightly.

To explain: Google search for "Define:Traitor". Second entry.

Merriam-Webster defines "traitor" as one who commits treason.

Senator Reid is giving comfort to our enemies abroad, and endangering our troops who protect us from those who would do evil to us.

In my opinion.

Does anyone want to fire up the "Impeach Reid" website yet?

Victor Wooten shows why he's in the "inner circle" of great bassists... Again

If this doesn't inspire young bassists, I don't know what will.

There's really not much to say except "watch the video". Vic has always been regarded as one of the A list bassists on the planet. This is yet another demonstration as to why.

Oh, if you liked that, check out the band he plays with, Bela Fleck and the Flecktones.

I'll be damned if she didn't hit it on the head:

One of the bloggers that I make it a point to read at least once a week is Kim DuToit. He's a naturalized South African national now living in Texas. I don't see eye to eye with him on everything (firstly, he's a professed atheist), but I do like his ideas behind firearm ownership and the freedoms that are granted to us by the second amendment.
I say that to say this: His wife also takes to the keyboard sometimes, and she completely *NAILED* my feelings on the recent crime that occurred at Virgina Tech, and the idea of "gun control". Her rant on this can be found here.
By the way, my idea of gun control is "use both hands". If you don't like it, you're welcome to take your opinion and file it in /dev/null along with the rest of the garbage.

Because I like to give links and props to things that pull my ass out of the fire, part 2 in an ongoing series.

I had attempted to upgrade my Ubuntu/Dapper server (it had many things on it, including Web, SSH, XWindows, and the beginnings of Mail) from Dapper (5.x) to Feisty (7.x, currently in beta). I do the usual upgrade items for any Debian based distribution, change my sources, update the source list and do a dist-upgrade.

From Dapper to Edgy (6.x). Worked with little fuss. No problems.

From Edgy to Feisty... well... to make it short, I lost contact with my Logical Volume Manager definitions.

When I rebooted the machine at 0300 this morning after finishing the update (with much complaining) I rebooted, figuring the complaining to be nothing more than warnings about localization and such.
Well, the machine started.. but not much else. I couldn't load the root file system after boot, so it just sat there. Bummer.

I dd'ed myself a copy of the hard drive, to ensure that I had a recoverable copy of my data in the event that I hosed anything too much. Then I started digging, thinking that I had formatted the file system in ext2. Well, I did, technically. INSIDE THE LVM PARTITION!!! BAH!!! I'M SUCH A USER!!! It took my brain a few minutes to think about "hey, let's use fdisk and figure out what that partition is exactly!".

Actually, LVM isn't that bad of a thing. It's just a bit of overkill for a 20GB drive that's in no danger of filling up.

Anyway, I consult our benevolent almighty data overlords Google for info recovering LVM partitions, and lo, I find the this. Section 7 to be exact. I'm currently copying the data from the recovered partitions to an external USB drive as I type this. I should be able to format the drive and start over tomorrow, with all of my data. Thanks Richard!

God rest his soul.

Jonny Hart, creator of the comic strip "BC" died Saturday before Easter. His wit and insight will be sorely missed.