Coming Out Of The Woodwork

Richard Dawkins is a moonbat of the first order. And the editors of the Guardian are insane.

 The Downside of Living Downunder

Team America doesn't open here until December 2. The Incredibles December 26. Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow not until February 3.

Bastards.

 Meltdown Watch

From today's The Age:

Labor has not had the moral imagination to respond to the conservatives' radical agenda.

The conservatives' radical agenda? Well, in this day when the radicals have become reactionary, that's might not be as silly as it sounds.

The article is the usual pathetic whining of the losing left - the author "lectures in sociology at the University of Melbourne", which should tell you all you need to know.

This item from the same paper, titled "Face it: Latham has failed", is rather more in touch with reality.

 The Meltdown Continues

This from the official blog of the Australian Greens:

Morons
Submitted by Virginia. on 11-10-2004 10:42 PM, in the category
Apologies for the fact that idiots exist.

Obviously the re-election of the Liberal Party has given some of our redneck pals the guts to come out of the woodwork. Apologies to people who attempted to read and/or post to the comments section of the blog today, and found themselves redirected to boring (and badly-designed) right-wingery.

As I'm sure you know, a redirect script is a terribly impressive and complicated thing to program, and makes you look really cool.

Anyway, comments are off until I can put aside my election hangover for long enough to deal with the minor problem it presents - I guess this is just practice for life under our newly-minted undemocratic democracy.

Right back atcha, guys!

 The Meltdown Begins

One of the things I've most been looking forward to once the elections are over and Howard and Bush have been returned to office with increased majorities is the complete screaming meltdown of the left.

Still three weeks to go for the American and global meltdown, but here in Australia it is already under way. WhackingDay has the goods.

 Darn Internet

With 8.35% of the primary vote and 4.39% of the two-party preferred vote counted, the Australian Electoral Commission is calling 6 seats for Labor, 14 for Liberal, 5 for National (so 19 for Howard's Coalition) and 2 Independent.

There was a strong early swing against Labor due to the forestry workers in Tasmania, and it looks like the Coalition has picked up one, possibly two seats there.

7:15PM: Click!

9.34% primary, 4.81% preferred counted.

Labor 8
Liberal 18
National 7
Independent 2

7:20 PM: Click!

11.98% primary, 5.96% preferred counted

Labor 12
Liberal 24
National 9
Independent 2

So that's 33 for Howard, 12 for Latham.

Well, early days, early days.

7:25 PM

My DNS server isn't responding. Wah?

7:30 PM

19.10% primary, 9.49% preferred vote counted.

Labor 30
Liberal 40
National 12
Independent 3

They've taken one of the Tassie seats off the Libs and put it back in "doubtful", though.

7:33 PM And remember, it's not just Australia that's voting today. Afghanistan is going to the polls too. Thanks to, well, you know.

7:35 PM

20.37% of the primary and 10.39% of two-party-preffered votes counted.

Labor 32
Liberal 43
National 12
Independent 2

And remember, the Liberals and the Nationals are in coalition, so it's 55 for Howard and 32 for Latham.

7:40 PM

How do they count these things so fast? It's not like they're particularly simple, and they're not computer-based or punched cards.

Anyway:

26.57% of the primary and 14.44% of the preferred vote has been counted.

Labor 40
Liberal 49
National 12
Independent 3

7:45 PM

28.67% of the primary and 15.65% of the preferred vote counted.

Labor 41
Liberal 50
National 12
Independent 3

The Coalition has 62 of the 76 seats it needs for a victory, and there are still 44 seats in question. I think it's a pretty safe call for a fourth term for John Howard.

But I'll be back in five minutes anyway.

7:50 PM

31.83% primary and 18.47% preferred counted.

Labor 40 (yep, they went backwards)
Liberal 54
National 12
Independent 3

Looks like a national swing of around 2% to the Coalition, so they will likely be returned with an increased majority.

7:55 PM

Not only have I lost the CD cases for my original Sims collection - which have the license keys on them - but I've lost the file I created that I put all my license keys in. Poot. Oh, no change on the election in the last five minutes.

8:10 PM

Not much movement now, as the marginal seats won't be called for one side or the other until a lot more votes have been counted. Labor has picked up 1, with 38 remaining undecided.

However, the Coalition need only 9 of those 38 to win, whereas Labor would need 34. I'm seeing the Coalition picking up an extra 5, maybe 7, seats compared to last time. (And they already had an 81-65 majority.)

8:30 PM

While we wait for something to happen (like the votes coming in from Western Australia), the ABC is predicting 85 seats for the Coalition (up 4) and 62 for Labor (down 3).

9:45 PM

Mark Latham has conceded. John Howard is once again Prime Minister of Australia.

 All Over Bar The Drinking

Well, today is voting day here in Oz. Voting doesn't finish for a few hours yet, due to Perth, which is always running late. And so, in a few hours, we will know.

Are we in for a fourth term of John Howard's decent and sensible (if unremarkable) leadership? Or will I spend the next four years apologising for my government?

I plan to go to sleep tonight without checking anything anywhere, and then tomorrow morning I'll take a look at Tim Blair's site. And spend the day re-installing my Linux box, either way.

My Windows box seems to... Work. Yes, I have it booting to a RAID-5 volume. Writing to RAID-5 is rather slow - the benchmark I ran only gave me 12MB/s. But reading from it, I sustained just on 100MB/s, which is all you're going to get from a standard PCI slot. Overall, not unhappy, once I got the BIOS and the drivers sorted out. (Yes, the drivers were also immensely sucky.)

 Helpful Household Hints

At least if you live in a house like mine...

If you are the proud owner of a HighPoint RocketRAID 1640, and your BIOS revision (displayed on the configuration screen when you boot at the top right) is anything less than 2.05s, go to the HighPoint site, download the latest BIOS revision, make yourself a boot floppy, copy the BIOS loader program and the loader onto the floppy, reboot, and update that damn BIOS.

I don't remember what version my card had, but the new BIOS is much much much better, transforming a uniquely sucky card into one that seems, so far, adequate.

More news as it comes to hand. First I have to get through building a 600GB RAID-5 set. That took 7½ hours before; maybe it will be quicker this time...

 Environy

Near my house there are two large plastic signs telling me I should Vote Greens - which someone has thoughtfully nailed to a couple of trees. The trees were not available for comment at time of publication.

Anyway, Bernie Slattery has the inside scoop on what colour the Greens really are. Hint: You might as well call them the Watermelon Party.*

Don't miss their 40-point plan for new and increased taxes. including a 33% surcharge (on top of the current top marginal rate of around 50%) for people-who-earn-more-than-is-good-for-them. And the plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by - wait for it - 100%. Which means that all those cuddly animals will have to go - after all, we can't have them breathing, now can we?

I've touched on Bob Brown's insane policies before. This is what Slatts has to say:

They are political extremists whose policies borrow equally from the textbooks of Hitler and Stalin.

Of course, Australians are too sensible to put up with totalitarianism and should the Greens achieve any measure of power it would be short-lived.

But remember Whitlam. Much damage can be achieved in a short time by ideologues and their useful idiots.

* Okay: Green on the outside and red on the inside.**
** And I won't mention that the leader of the Australian Greens is Bob Brown.

 The Bluebird of Crappiness

So, I finally got around to installing my new SATA RAID controller in my Windows box.

That's why I'm posting this from my Linux box.

Windows box, she no boot no more. Nor can I re-install Windows.

Pfui.

While I'm here: The controller is a HighPoint 1640. The only brand of RAID controller I've had uniformly good experience with is 3Ware, and they're damned expensive. Does anyone have any recommendations for a cheap(ish) SATA RAID controller that does RAID-5 and doesn't utterly suck? Or do I blow my budget into tiny little pieces and get a controller that will at least work?

 Smart Money

Lately I've been growing more comfortable that George Bush will be re-elected and John Kerry banished howling into the outer darkness, and that all will be right and proper in America again. Not that I'm a huge fan of most of Bush's policies, but I strongly agree with his foreign policy, and have nothing but contempt for Kerry. If the Democrats had nominated Lieberman, it would be a very different story, but that didn't happen in this universe.

Here in Australia I haven't been nearly as comfortable, with Mark Latham, a character nearly as contemptible as Kerry, stubbornly refusing to self-destruct. Until this week, when he signed on to the Green's tree-hugging policies to secure their preferences (Australia uses a preferential voting system, where votes for a losing candidate are directed to one of the other candidates, until only two are left).

Unfortunately for Latham, the traditional constituency of his Labor Party is, well, workers. Including forestry workers. And the trade unions are very influential in the Labor Party as well. And Latham just pissed them off royally. Smart money says his greenie-grabbing tactics have scuttled his ship.

Which smart money? This smart money. Click on "Elections" in the left-hand menu.

A dollar bet on the Coalition (John Howard, the good guys) would return just $1.16 for a win (at 10 AM Wednesday October 6, just three days before the election). A dollar on Labor would return $4.50.

By comparison, a dollar on George Bush returns $1.50, against $2.40 for Kerry.

Tim Blair has more.

 The Second Space Age

SpaceShipOne has landed safely after a second successful flight to the edge of space in under a week.

Scaled Composites, led by Burt Rutan, has done it!

Transterrestrial Musings was live-blogging the event.

 Morals Or Money

Instapundit suggests that Paypal are becoming the Web Morality Police:

Beginning Friday, PayPal will begin penalizing users who buy things it doesn't want them to: prescription drugs from unverified pharmacies, material with even a whiff of sex and gambling or lottery services. . . .

Its policy on adult materials is especially stringent, banning not only any material or services suggesting sexual activity but also "non-adult services whose Web site marketing can be reasonably misconstrued as allowing adult material or services to be purchased using PayPal."

I rather suspect that this has nothing at all to do with morality - and everything to do with customer complaints. Unverified pharmacies? Read "scam artists". (And spam artists, judging from the state of my inbox.) There are legitimate (if that's the word) adult services online - Playboy now has an online service - but the area is rife with scammers and spammers as well, because it has a solid track record of actually making money. I don't know whether online gambling is profitable, but it has attracted the spam-and-scam crowd too.

I don't think Paypal give a damn about what you spend your money on; what they do care about is giving refunds. They hate giving refunds.

And note these paragraphs from the article at inernetnews.com:

A year ago, eBay paid $10 million to settle charges by the U.S. District Attorney that it violated the U.S. Patriot Act by transmitting funds earned through online gambling. When it announced the acquisition, eBay said it would stop PayPal's gambling payments.

Merchants using PayPal to sell pharmaceuticals online must be certified by the National Association Boards of Pharmacy's Verified Internet Pharmacy Practices Site program.

It's not about morals, it's about money.

 News From The 21st Century

After two injections of the vaccine, sheep burped 8 per cent less methane in a 13 hour test.

(New Scientist, 25 September 2004)

 Got Sims?

I do.

See you in a week or so!

 Floppies? Bah!

The drivers for my new RAID controller are on floppies.

My computer does not have a floppy drive.

Bah.

(You're supposed to feed it the floppies when you're installing Windows, so just downloading the drivers doesn't actually help very much. How it can then find the drivers when it needs the drivers to access the hard disk which contains the drivers is one of those unanswered questions.)

 Well, Now

So, I bought another gigabyte of memory for Kei, my Windows XP box, mainly so that I can play with virtual machines (which gobble memory like candy).

I thought I'd see if it made any difference to performance when I wasn't running any virtual machines.

It does.

Windows XP is quite noticeably faster with 2GB of memory than it is with 1GB of memory.

For what it's worth.

And no, I'm not going to go out and buy another 2GB of memory to see what that does. It won't fit, for one thing.

 Creative Problem Solving: The Throw Money At It Approach

I have three disk drives playing up at the moment. None of them have actually failed, but they are all causing errors often enough to be annoying.

So I've bought four new disk drives.
And a RAID controller card.
Um, and a gig of memory, because Virtual PC goes through memory like a rabbit through a carrot patch.
And a gigabit switch, because Windows networking is utterly retarded.*
And a bunch of fans, because Summer is just around the corner, and I'd rather all those new disk drives didn't melt.

Alas, my copy of The Sims 2 hasn't arrived yet, so I'm stuck with my old Sims for now.

* It's a long story.

 Birthday Presents And The New Economy

So, as well as the huge party and all the money (thanks guys!), I also got several new computers, a house, a family, and a new job.

Curiously enough, all of them are virtual.

The party was on the MuNu forums (big thanks to Susie and Renata); the money was pengos, the Munuvian currency (slightly pointless since I own and operate the mint, but the thought is appreciated), the new computers come courtesy of Microsoft Virtual PC, the house and family come bundled with The Sims 2, and the new job is...

Well, the new job is interesting. I'm now working for an ISP again, after a break of several years. But I haven't left my old job, it's just that we now have an internet division. Except that we don't really have an internet division; it's all, well, virtual. All we do is run a web server and handle level one tech support* - and billing - and everything else just sort of happens.**

Strange place, this 21st century of ours.

* Is your computer turned on?
** Yeah, right.

 Birthday Song

Happy birthday to me!
Happy birthday to me!
All hard disk drives suck,
As does Windows XP!

Mmm, chocolate...

The nicest present I got today was this:

20-year-old girl at office: (Sings) Happy birthday to you!
You're a hundred and two!
Me: Thanks!
Girl: So how old are you?
Me: Thirty-eight.
Girl: No, how old are you really?

 What The New York Times Meant To Say

Sometimes you have to read between the lines:

After days of expressing unfounded confidence about the obviously bogus documents used in a deeply biased "60 Minutes'' report that might have raised new questions about President Bush's National Guard service were the evidence in question not transparently false, CBS News officials finally have admitted to grave doubts about the authenticity of the material, network officials said last night.

The officials, who asked not to be identified because if this gets out they will lose their jobs, said CBS News would most likely make an announcement as early as today that it had been deceived about the documents' origins which was obvious to any reasonably bright nine-year-old. CBS News has already begun intensive reporting on where they came from although here we are using the word intensive as the direct opposite of the term extensive, and people at the network said it was now finally possible that officials would open an internal inquiry into how it moved forward with the report when anyone with the intelligence given to the average jellyfish would have canned it in the first five minutes. Officials say they are now beginning to believe the report was too flawed to have gone on the air and that Dan Rather may not, in fact, have brought the commandments down from Mount Sinai as he previously claimed.

But they cautioned that CBS News could still pull back from an announcement and resume their absurd attempts at a bluff when they no longer hold any cards. Officials met last night with Dan Rather, the anchor who presented the report, to go over the information it had collected about the documents one last time before making a final decision and see if he was willing to go quietly. Mr. Rather was not available for comment late last night as he had to be restrained following the meeting.

(For the irony impaired, the words in italics are mine. The words not in italics are not mine.)

 Where There's Brickbats

There must be roses. (What the hell is a brickbat, anyway?)

So, a big un-pox to the guys who wrote rsync, which un-sucks about as much as any piece of software could.

Oh, and likewise to the creators of Cygwin which lets me run rsync on Windows.

Hmm. "File has vanished". It's never said that to me before. Probably not a good sign.

Hmm hmm. Maybe I could delete some files? Half a million on this disk alone and still scanning like mad. No! Ack! Urk! What am I saying?! I haven't deleted anything since 1996 and I'm not about to start now!

Hmm once more: 741,241 files. On one disk. One out of... Uh, several. Rsync is now considering these 741,241 files, or so it tells me.

Hmm for the last time. I forgot how pathetically slow rsync is on Windows. Argh. Yuck. Bleah. Foo. This is going to take forever.

 A Pox, I Say!

A pox on all makers of disk drives and designers of file systems!

A pox!

Yes, while I was backing up everything on my Windows box so that I could attempt to convince it that the boot disk was not the G drive and that the system disk was not that spare disk I installed one day with a certain amount of comfort that I would not lose every last one of my files, my trusty* external disk decided that it didn't want to play any more. Well, it decided it was going to make some unhappy noises and refuse to write anything more and Windows decided that that was a good enough excuse to lock up completely.

So I've now pressed my emergency back-up Linux box into play. It's built up out of all the spare parts I have lying around from previous systems, and it has so far stubbornly refused to die. Of course, it's old and clunky and slow, but it actually works.

So now I can copy all my files onto that, reformat everything attached to my Windows box, reinstall Windows for the third time in a week, and then copy everything back again. Joy.

Then I'm going to buy me a UPS.

* It hasn't suffered massive file corruption for, like, months.

 Democrats Suck!

Three-year-old Sophia Parlock cries while seated on the shoulders of her father, Phil Parlock, after having their Bush-Cheney sign torn up by Kerry-Edwards supporters on Thursday, Sept. 16, 2004, at the Tri-State Airport in Huntington, W.Va. Democratic vice presidential candidate John Edwards (news - web sites) made a brief stop at the airport as he concluded his two-day bus tour to locations in West Virginia and Ohio. (AP Photo/Randy Snyder)

(Yahoo! News via comment at Ace of Spades)

Update: LGF has more. Sharp-eyed lizards noted that the guy at the left is holding part of the girl's sign.

Update: Okay, everybody in the world had this story before me. So here's a picture of a kitty.

 In All Fairness

Andrew Sullivan may be a little slow, but he's not completely insane:

When I first read the CBS story, I thought the docs were "devastating." I'm not backing this president for re-election. But all that is completely beside the frigging point. Journalists are supposed to provide accurate evidence for their claims. CBS didn't. And its response to the critics is to stonewall and try and change the subject. The correct response - the one they'd teach you in kindergarten journalism class - is immediately to check the authenticity of the documents as best you can, and if the doubts persist, to apologize immediately and yank the story.

(His italics.)

Compare and contrast with this roundup of your favourite bottom-feeders courtesy of Dr. Rusty.