Tempers Flare At Anti-War Rally At Travis AFB:

Why the hell would the anti-war establishment protest AGAINST the use of unmanned aerial vehicles? One would think that UAVs save American lives, wouldn’t the anti-war folks be happier that this kind of technology involves less risk to the people that serve in our military?

Dilbert comic strip for 11/27/2009 from the official Dilbert comic strips archive.

I have seen this unfold in real life. More than once.

karlaakins:

applescrufff:

btwhalloweens:

rockandrollsuicide:

ohmysam:

imsocliche:

iamglencoco:

prostitutionisrevolution:

thisisnotagamethisisyourlife:

rick-ross:

beccassxc:

lipslikescarlett:

sinkthatship:

jacobpaulbby:

ember16:

Mine is Eyes

Eyes + Hair + Smile

Lips/smile+ Eyes

hair, style/clothing

smile

teeth, eyes

eyes, hair, style. yummy.

hair, smile. eye color. all good stuff.

hair, eyes, smile, clothing. pretty much entire physical appearance.

eyes + smile

Hair and the way they dress.Ha

hair.

Teeth, Hair, Skin (:

Eyes and hair.

Character

Yup. The character, totally.

karlaakins:

whatitsliketodie:

lostinliville:

I love silence.  People mistake my sometimes quiet nature for shyness.  Honestly, silence can sometimes speak louder than words.  I can’t wait to find a person that can just sit on a bench with me in perfect harmony without speaking a word.  Silence truly is golden.

Me, too.  I rarely have the TV on and don’t play a lot of music.  Some mistake that for being aloof, but I’m not at all, just listening, observing, and learning.

Ditto.  My favorite sound is silence, which is ironic because I have managed to create a chaotic cacophony of sound with 5 kids, 4 dogs, a husband with adhd and 5 grandchildren…maybe that’s why I relish silence so much.

When I drive, I don’t need the radio.  I love driving with no sound at all except my thoughts.  Lovely.

Silence freaks me out. I like white noise, when I work I keep the TV on with something like a war documentary (or I listen to music), after a few minutes I tune out the narrative and I can get into my work. It is almost impossible for me to fall asleep if I can’t hear a fan. PJ is the same way, we have very reliable power here, so we never have blackouts. The first time we had a real blackout it was hell because PJ didn’t understand why the lights and his fan didn’t work. None of us got to sleep until electricity came back.

LIFE: Areial shot of Lake Anne Village. – Hosted by Google

This is what my “town” looked like in 1965. We live less than a mile away, and yes, it still looks almost the same. The only real difference is that there are more trees.

karlaakins:

karlahack:

The Band

Be-eeeeel-ze-bub has the deeeeeeevil put aside for meeeeee, for meeeeee, for meeeeeeeeeeeee!

karlaakins:

I recognized Bell and his famous violin right away but I’m a musician.  There is no way on earth I wouldn’t have stopped and listened!  Just.  No. Way.

I love this experiment, though.  But it’s a sad commentary on life in the fast lane.

genevieveclare:

(via heymissy:allthingsalishan:mzreport)

Perception

Something to think about….

Washington, DC Metro Station on a cold January morning in 2007. The man with a violin played six Bach pieces for about 45 minutes. During that time approximately. 2 thousand people went through the station, most of them on their way to work. After 3 minutes a middle aged man noticed there was a musician playing. He slowed his pace and stopped for a few seconds and then hurried to meet his schedule.

4 minutes later:

The violinist received his first dollar: a woman threw the money in the hat and, without stopping, continued to walk.

6 minutes:

A young man leaned against the wall to listen to him, then looked at his watch and started to walk again.

10 minutes:

A 3-year old boy stopped but his mother tugged him along hurriedly. The kid stopped to look at the violinist again, but the mother pushed hard and the child continued to walk, turning his head all the time. This action was repeated by several other children. Every parent, without exception, forced their children to move on quickly.

45 minutes:

The musician played continuously.  Only 6 people stopped and listened for a short while. About 20 gave money but continued to walk at their normal pace.  The man collected a total of $32.

1 hour:

He finished playing and silence took over. No one noticed. No one applauded, nor was there any recognition.

No one knew this, but the violinist was Joshua Bell, one of the greatest musicians in the world. He played one of the most intricate pieces ever written, with a violin worth $3.5 million dollars. Two days before Joshua Bell sold out a theater in Boston where the seats averaged $100.

This is a true story. Joshua Bell playing incognito in the metro station was organized by the Washington Post as part of a social experiment about perception, taste and people’s priorities.

The questions raised:

*In a common place environment at an inappropriate hour, do we perceive beauty?

*Do we stop to appreciate it?

*Do we recognize talent in an unexpected context?

One possible conclusion reached from this experiment could be this:

If we do not have a moment to stop and listen to one of the best musicians in the world, playing some of the finest music ever written, with one of the most beautiful instruments ever made.

How many other things are we missing?

As a long time veteran of the DC metro rail network, I think the experiment was flawed. The morning and afternoon rush hours are such a hassle that your one mission in life is to make it out of the station (or to your platform) as fast as it is humanly possible. I am asthmatic and very sedentary, and that didn’t stop me from speed-walking through the West Falls Church and Courthouse stations, and I got pretty good at running up and down the escalators, a crucial skill if you depend on time.

And yes, we had musicians all of the time, but we are so worried about making it through that we simply don’t have to time stop, or to even pay attention to the piece. Add to that the earphones that literally everyone wears to fight off boredom and the noise.

There’s one more factor: the “DC Jaded” phenomenom. I didn’t know about this one because I have been here for over 12 years, but I know people that came here for just a couple of years and they tell me it is very real. This is why most people in the train won’t talk to anyone, and they (yea, myself included) frown on tourists violating the unwritten etiquette rules of riding the train.

I think this would have worked differently if he had decided to play around lunch. It would still be busy enough, but the passengers wouldn’t be in the commute mindset.

karlaakins:

foureleven:

clients:

Setting: a conference call discussing the latest site updates.

Client:

You know the picture of the black man on the site, the one in rotation with the other pictures?

Us:

Yes, we know the one – what’s the matter?

Client:

Well he’s just not quite black enough.

Client:

We want a shiny black man on our website.

This is my new fave tumblr.

For Pedro

This kind of thing is funny until it happens to you for real.

Slashdot Technology Story | Try Out Chrome OS In a Virtual Machine:

Tried it.

The good news is that yes, it worked.

The bad news is that they stated that it was a VMWare image. It isn’t. It is a VMWare disk image. You need the full version of VMWare in order to use this, or you need to use Sun’s free VM, VirtualBox.

It’s not a big deal, and this is slashdot so it is not like they have fact checkers in place.

So what about it? Well, it worked. Barely. It is a weird experience, even in a VM it still booted up in less than 10 seconds, which was impressive as hell. The thing boots up into a login window, and then it is just Chrome with an extra tab with shortcuts to other things. Gmail worked exactly as in Chrome or Firefox. I tried a few other things but it kept complaining about security certificates, and I didn’t feel too adventurous.

It was slow, but that is to be expected since it is a VM, and I am running the disk image from a USB drive so it is not fair to hold that against it. There’s not much else to say, it simply works. It is a PC with nothing but a browser in it. I noticed very few distractions on the screen. There is a menu to turn on and off ethernet and WiFi, and that’s about it. I can’t even figure out how to change the video resolution.

If Google can get away with this, it is going to be great. Who gives a shit about the data in the cloud? If all you need is the ability to deal with email, office documents and light things like these, then this is definitely going to work.

Encrypt Your E-Mail – Wired How-To Wiki:

This is much more important than what you think. The US Government’s position is that an email is like a post card, there is ZERO expectation of privacy.

ZERO.

The same way you can’t keep your postman from reading your post cards, you just can’t keep your email from being read as it bounces from server to server on its way to be delivered.

By the way, there’s no such thing as infallible encryption. The only thing you can do is make it as hard (hard is defined as expensive) as possible for somebody to break into one of your encrypted emails or files. You can use easily available software, like Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) or its free/open source equivalent, GPG, to protect your communications good enough so it is literally impossible for anyone to try to crack them by brute force.

That is, unless that “anyone” is a nation state with very deep pockets, and you happen to be of interest to them. Remember when I said it isn’t infallible? In order to break something like PGP, you don’t have to break the message itself, all that you need to do is be careless about protecting your private key, and/or using a weak pass phrase for the private key.

Either of these things will make it easier for an individual or company to be able to brute force into your protected communications.