LogicSmith

Ranting about Terry Shaivo

2005-04-01T08:01:00.000-08:00

Figured I might as well throw my two cents in on this subject...

First, this woman has been brain dead for 15 years. Medical science could not bring her back to conciousness, and it's doubtful if the damage to her brain could be fixed even with the promises made by nanotech proponents.

Second, we have a highly misplaced sense of priorities here. Congress debated this for three days. Assuming each politician worked a full 8-hour day, this would have been 535 x 8 x 3, or 12,840 person-hours wasted on one person. I could understand this if Congress had no other problems to fix, but clearly they should have other priorities.

Third, to all the protesters out there, GET A LIFE! If you want to attack a problem, pick one that has more impact. For instance, the 1,500 + soldiers of ours cut down in the prime of life because our President had a bug up his butt about Saddam and Iraq. Face it, there WERE no weapons of mass destruction there. The intelligence community told the President what he wanted to hear, not what they had any evidence of. This is a much bigger problem than one brain-dead human.

Find another problem to point your efforts at...there are thousands, from schools who cannot afford teachers, supplies, or protection, to drunk drivers that kill thousands every year. There's certainly other more deserving problems that need manpower and brainpower to solve, so get off your butts and solve THEM rather than worrying about one problem that affects one human.

Jeez, people, arrange your priorities better! Please!

Vacation Videos

2004-06-15T06:13:00.000-07:00

I finally got around to plugging my mini-DV camcorder into my computer's FireWire port. Barely a few minutes later, I had brought in my video footage and created a movie in the free Windows MovieMaker. This is one of the most painless new applications I've ever used. Now I'm going to have to get off my rear and scan in all those vacation videotapes I've made over the past few years. With ArcSoft ShowBiz, creating a DVD that plays on regular DVD players is also painless.

Pods

2004-06-02T09:49:00.000-07:00

I've discovered an interesting way to move - Pods. Pods are basically personal cargo containers. You can fit 3 of the 16-ft ones on one flatbed semi trailer. We filled one over the weekend - took 3 days to fill it with boxes and some furniture all the way to the top. They'll store it locally until we sell the house, then we fill two more with furniture and send all three to Kansas City, where we plan on buying another house. It's a lot cheaper than a moving company...

Raw Deal

2004-05-19T10:06:00.000-07:00

Jeremy Sivits was sentenced today to the maximum penalty for Iraqi prisoner abuse. That sentence consisted of 1 year in prison, reduction in rank, and a bad conduct discharge. However, the "abuse" was more "humiliation" than anything else, and it certainly wasn't any worse than many fraternity initiation parties.

According to this article, Jeremy questioned the orders he was given and was told by both his superior officer and the military intelligence officers present to shut up and follow the orders, which he did.

Seems to me the military overreacted here in the glare of the media spotlight...it will be interesting to see what this "superior officer" and the "military intelligence" officers receive in the way of punishment, if any.

I mean, after all, isn't one of the purposes of this "war" to further the fight against terrorism, and to gain information that would help us in that fight? If stripping prisoners naked for purposes of interrogation is legal by the Geneva Convention, then what's the problem? After all, the Iraqis were certainly treated better than their own government would have treated a similar prisoner of war.

2/3 of the way there

2004-05-14T10:18:00.000-07:00

In yesterday's test flight of the Space Ship One craft, it reached an altitude of 40 miles (212,000 feet), 2/3 of the height necessary to win the XPrize. Apparently its computer died on the ascent, but was rebooted successfully after the craft fell to 50,000 feet. My hat's off to the guys at Scaled Composites - I hope they win this and go on to build a 6-passenger version that can go to the space station.

New Hardware

2004-05-12T13:53:00.000-07:00

Just finished building a new system, using an AMD Athlon 64 and new motherboard and RAM. Seems pretty fast, but I won't know for sure until I install a 64-bit version of Windows.