Wednesday News

Good Morning Conflucians!!

Let’s dive in with a hodgepodge of unrelated news items. First up, Adam Savage from Mythbusters had a funny experience with TSA where they saw his junk but missed the razor blades:

Savage was put through the full-body scanner, and while he joked that it made his penis feel small, no one seemed to notice the items he was carrying on his person.

[…]

If the TSA thinks you can hijack a plane with saline solution and nail clippers, Savage’s 12″ razor blades are the equivalent of a nuclear bomb. Since the blades weren’t anywhere near Savage’s privates, they likely would have been missed by the pat-down as well.

Follow the link for a video of Adam discussing it. So the gate rape is not only demeaning and horrifying and a direct assault to our constitution, but it’s a complete waste of time. Oh, by the way, gate rape is now in the Urban Dictionary.

Not much of a surprise, but we’re headed to S. Korea for war games:

A US aircraft carrier is heading for the Korean peninsula a day after North and South Korea exchanged artillery fire on a border island that left two South Korean soldiers dead.

The USS George Washington, which carries 75 warplanes and has a crew of over 6,000, left a naval base south of Tokyo on Wednesday morning and would join exercises with South Korea from Sunday, US officials in Seoul said.

“This exercise is defensive in nature,” US Forces Korea said in a statement. “While planned well before yesterday’s unprovoked artillery attack, it demonstrates the strength of the ROK (South Korea)-US alliance and our commitment to regional stability through deterrence.”

The US has 28,000 troops based in South Korea.

Let’s hope nothing stupid happens. Well, N. Korea has already done that. Let’s hope nothing else stupid happens.

In case you haven’t heard, the world as we know it almost came to an end last night. But saints be praised, Bristol didn’t win:

Sarah Palin’s eldest daughter Bristol has been defeated in the final of the Dancing with the Stars competition, after claims that fans of her mother had helped her advance at the expense of more talented dancers.

[…]

Palin’s improbable run for the finals had been championed by some conservative bloggers, who led get-out-the-vote campaigns on behalf of the 20-year-old single mother. Palin’s fan support was evident when she was voted in last week over singer Brandy — who had received a perfect score for her one dance — on last week’s show, prompting some viewers to question the veracity of the “Dancing” voting system.

I picked the Telegraph just to be different. But it’s about the same story as everywhere. Notice the title of that article: “Bristol Palin loses out in Dancing with the Stars final”. A few months down the road, will anyone remember who won? But the biggest point of course is, it’s a really stupid reality TV show, why is it being covered?

In some local news, my two senators, Jim Webb and Mark Warner, are fighting to get the Navy to spend money on current shipyards (two of the four are in Virginia) before moving an aircraft carrier to a new location:

Sens. Jim Webb and Mark Warner renewed the fight over the Navy’s East Coast aircraft carrier fleet after a yearlong Government Accountability Office (GAO) study found the Navy has a $3 billion backlog in restoration and modernization projects at its four shipyards.

[…]

Webb and Warner are using the GAO study to fuel their argument that the Navy should not spend limited defense funds to prepare Mayport, Fla., to house a nuclear aircraft carrier, but should address the multibillion-dollar backlog at the shipyards instead.

“This study documents why the Navy should invest more resources in our four naval shipyards before building redundant nuclear-support infrastructure to homeport a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier in Mayport, Fla.,” Webb said in a statement on Friday.  “The yards play a key national security role through their performance of critical ship repair, maintenance and modernization work.”

I think the Senators and the GAO are right in this case. The deterioration can turn into a critical issue. Of course I’m a bit biased perhaps.

Obama is out campaigning that he saved the US auto industry:

President Barack Obama trekked to economically ravaged Kokomo, Ind., Tuesday to defend the government’s rescue of Chrysler Group LLC and General Motors Co. The two automakers plan to invest another $1 billion in four Midwestern plants.

[…]

In Indiana, Obama and Biden underscored the importance of the $814 billion economic stimulus plan, choosing a city that has been devastated by the loss of automotive jobs in recent years. Both GM and Chrysler filed for bankruptcy last year and relied on government aid to restructure. Their financial fortunes have improved, as both work to repay their government loans.

“We’re coming back. We’re on the move. All three American companies are profitable, and they are growing,” Obama told Kokomo factory workers.

“Today, each of the Big Three automakers has increased their market share,” he said, adding that “for the first time in over a decade, Americans are buying a larger share of Chryslers, Fords and GM cars, and a smaller share of their foreign counterparts.”

As reported previously, the Pope has said condom’s might be fine in some cases. Initially he dwelled on male prostitutes. Since then theologians have been trying to divine what he meant:

Speaking at a Vatican news conference Tuesday, the Rev. Federico Lombardi told reporters that he had asked the pope whether he intended in the book to refer only to male prostitutes – a question that came up because of different translations of the book and apparently confused pronouns. Benedict replied that gender really doesn’t matter and that the important thing was that the person in question takes into consideration the life of the other, Lombardi said.

“I personally asked the pope if there was a serious, important problem in the choice of the masculine over the feminine,” Lombardi said. “He told me ‘no.’ . . . It’s the first step of taking responsibility, of taking into consideration the risk of the life of another with whom you have a relationship.

“This is if you’re a man, a woman or a transsexual. We’re at the same point. The point is it’s a first step of taking responsibility, of avoiding passing a grave risk onto another,” Lombardi said.

Progress. And we’ll take it where ever we can get it. I hope this helps loosen the grip on condom usage. Oh yea, I did that on purpose.

In a sort of related story, a new AIDS drug has been showing promise of lowering the risk of HIV:

When gay men at high risk of becoming infected with HIV through sex take a daily dose of antiretroviral drugs, their chance of catching the virus drops by at least 40 percent, according to a new study.

The protective benefit could be as high as 95 percent if a person is extremely attentive about not missing a dose, the research on nearly 2,500 men on four continents found.

The study provides further proof that the drugs that have transformed AIDS treatment over the past 15 years might be powerful tools in preventing infection, as well. Earlier evidence of that appeared last summer, when a study testing a vaginal gel containing an AIDS drug lowered African women’s risk of acquiring HIV by 40 percent.

[…]

This latest approach adds to a growing menu of strategies for preventing infection in ways other than by urging people to change their behavior. While globally the AIDS epidemic is starting to ebb, gay men remain a risk group in which rates of infection are growing in both rich countries and the developing world. This study offers a new tool to address that problem.

“This is an extremely important advance in our efforts to address HIV in both the United States and globally,” said Chris Collins, policy director of the New York-based organization amfAR, the Foundation for AIDS Research.

Even more progress. One more step towards conquering this horrible disease.

And now for something completely different, Kuwait is banning DSLR cameras:

According to Kuwait Times The Ministry of Information, Ministry of Social Affairs and Ministry of Finance have put the ban in place. Start burying your DSLRs in the backyard once the Ministry of Interior join the club.

If you’re not familiar with the term, DSLR cameras are Digital single-lens reflex cameras. For the layman like myself that translates to big -mostly black- cameras with cool looking lens’. You know like the one’s paparazzi use in the US & UK.

[…]

To tell you the truth, I wasn’t that surprised when I heard the news a couple of days back. But being the Arab optimist I am, I thought to myself maybe the public outcry will make the three ministries that implemented the ban retract.

The problem is, there is no outcry.

To those of you who don’t know this, the Kuwaiti society is generally a conservative one, at least while their in Kuwait for that matter. What I sadly discovered is that most of the Kuwaiti public actually welcome the ban.

The Kuwaitis welcoming the ban remind me of the sheeple Americans that are fine with the gate rape activities. Wake up people.

And in even more different news, if you add work, MS enterprise related, email abilities to your smartphone (iPhone, Android, Palm, Blackberry, etc.), your entire phone can be wiped out from your work’s IT department:

A few weeks ago, Amanda Stanton’s iPhone suddenly went black.

She had been talking on it and navigating with a GPS app during a work trip to Los Angeles. Then, without any warning or error message, the phone quit.

Everything was gone — all her contacts, photos and even the phone’s ability to make calls.

It was only after she got home to Silicon Valley that she found out that her phone had been killed by her employer, a publishing company.

Someone in the IT department had sent out what’s called a “remote wipe,” a kind of auto-destruct command that’s delivered by e-mail. The wipe was done by mistake, and Stanton wouldn’t have been surprised to see this kind of remote control on a company phone.

But this iPhone was hers.

“It was my account, in my name [and] I’d paid all the bills,” Stanton says. “It didn’t make any sense to me that somehow work could get through AT&T, who I thought controlled my phone, and could completely disable the phone and the account.”

It’s no surprise to people who know IT. Since 2003, a growing list of smart phones have come loaded with software from Microsoft that makes remote wipes — and many other remote-control commands — possible.

The phone doesn’t need to download any new software. All that’s necessary is for the phone’s user to configure it to receive e-mail from a Microsoft Exchange Server — the kind most big companies use.

You’ve been warned. If you are required to have work email on your smartphone, get a work phone for it. If you can’t and you have to have the email, backup often. Still, there’s actual personal risk if your phone is wiped at the wrong time. Of course what’s really bad is that Microsoft Exchange Server installs those hooks into your smartphone and doesn’t let you opt out, even if it’s your phone. I’d say companies are liable and should insist MS fix that issue.

There you have it, a small collection of some things going on. Chime in with what you’re finding.