Meddling

It would’ve worked, too, if it weren’t for those meddling kids!

There are 614 posts filed in Meddling (this is page 42 of 62).

Time for a new drug war strategy

I was surfing WRAL’s webpage the other day and, like many of their web visitors, got stuck in their gallery of arrest photos. Like the “rate me” sites like Am I Hot Or Not?, the parade of suspect photos pulls you in, making you want to click just one more time to see what’s next.

Anyway, I was clicking away one afternoon when I noticed a pattern. Of the suspects arrested for drug violations, the overwhelming majority of them were arrested for the possession or sale of marijuana. While there were some arrests for other drugs, marijuana was far and away the drug most often cited.

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Deal with it: spammers already have your email

A postscript to the state park spam snafu: some folks seem to be under the mistaken impression that this incident exposed their email address to spammers. I hate to break it to them, but spammers already have their email addresses. They have yours and mine and everyone else’s. If you’ve ever emailed anyone, anywhere, then your email address is ripe for the picking by spammers.

There’s nothing magical about your email address that keeps it from being easily guessed by spammers, if not outright copied. Why some people still think that by keeping their address “secret” they’ll somehow cut down on spam is beyond me.

The Kmart “layaway angels”

Call my cynical, but I’m really suspicious of the “Kmart layaway angels” story. I love thinking that there are good people out there who would help anonymous others out of a jam. The cynic in me, however, wonders if Kmart set this up as a viral marketing campaign. And the protective person in me worries that poor people are now going to load up their layaway purchases in the remote chance that an angel will sweep in and rescue them for free.

It was Dec. 6 when a woman paid off the layaway for three strangers at a Kmart in Michigan. Since then, scores of people from Missoula to Las Vegas have followed her lead.

“There are people in line and they will just start paying off people’s layaways,” Aldridge says. “It’s given people big hearts this year. It’s bringing people together.”

via Layaway angels’ payoffs snowball at Kmarts | layaway, kmart, woman – The Orange County Register.

Louis CK tops $1 million in downloads

Comedian Louis CK filmed his standup act and, rather than putting it into the Hollywood distribution system, posted it on his website for a $5 download. This weekend he surpassed $1 million in sales, just 12 days after he posted it. He’s tripled the money he put into it and the money’s still flowing in. The best part is that he gets to decide how to divvy it up, not Hollywood with its shady accounting!

It’s a great example of an artist connecting directly with his fans, cutting out the middleman. No wonder those Hollywood suits are pushing for dictatorial control over the Internet with the SOPA bill. They’re losing control and they know it.

hi. So it’s been about 12 days since the thing started and yesterday we hit the crazy number. One million dollars. That’s a lot of money. Really too much money. I’ve never had a million dollars all of a sudden. and since we’re all sharing this experience and since it’s really your money, I wanted to let you know what I’m doing with it. People are paying attention to what’s going on with this thing. So I guess I want to set an example of what you can do if you all of a sudden have a million dollars that people just gave to you directly because you told jokes.

via Louis CK: Live at the Beacon Theater.

What Really Happened Aboard Air France 447

Popular Mechanics published and translated a partial transcript of the cockpit voice recorders of the doomed flight Air France 447. As the flight data recorders indicated, one of the pilots was pushing the nose up the entire time the stall took place. The voice recorder does not indicate why the first officer made this simple but tragic mistake, however. It simply indicates the level of confusion in the cockpit, and the unfortunate fact that the other two pilots realized the error far too late.

We now understand that, indeed, AF447 passed into clouds associated with a large system of thunderstorms, its speed sensors became iced over, and the autopilot disengaged. In the ensuing confusion, the pilots lost control of the airplane because they reacted incorrectly to the loss of instrumentation and then seemed unable to comprehend the nature of the problems they had caused. Neither weather nor malfunction doomed AF447, nor a complex chain of error, but a simple but persistent mistake on the part of one of the pilots.

Human judgments, of course, are never made in a vacuum. Pilots are part of a complex system that can either increase or reduce the probability that they will make a mistake. After this accident, the million-dollar question is whether training, instrumentation, and cockpit procedures can be modified all around the world so that no one will ever make this mistake again—or whether the inclusion of the human element will always entail the possibility of a catastrophic outcome. After all, the men who crashed AF447 were three highly trained pilots flying for one of the most prestigious fleets in the world. If they could fly a perfectly good plane into the ocean, then what airline could plausibly say, “Our pilots would never do that”?

via Air France 447 Flight-Data Recorder Transcript – What Really Happened Aboard Air France 447 – Popular Mechanics.

How to shoot down an F-117 – lessons from the Serbian war

I had heard rumors of this before but this is the first time I’ve learned the details of how the Serbs defeated America’s stealth and cruise-missile technologies.

The myth of a push-button war grows smaller each day.

The Serbian battery commander, whose missiles downed an American F-16, and, most impressively, an F-117, in 1999, has retired, as a colonel, and revealed many of the techniques he used to achieve all this.

Colonel Dani Zoltan, in 1999, commanded the 3rd battery of the 250th Missile Brigade. He had search and control radars, as well as a TV tracking unit. The battery had four quad launchers for the 21 foot long, 880 pound SA-3 missiles.

The list of measures he took, and the results he got, should be warning to any who believe that superior technology alone will provide a decisive edge in combat. People still make a big difference. In addition to shooting down two aircraft, Zoltan’s battery caused dozens of others to abort their bombing missions to escape his unexpectedly accurate missiles. This is how he did it.

via Military Technology / Videos | How to shoot down an F-117 – lessons from the Serbian war | Military technology and military videos.

Break-in, one year later

Michael Darnell Green


Speaking of anniversaries, today is the first-year anniversary of the break-in of our home. Though Michael Darnell Green was arrested for a string of break-ins around our home at the time, our home was not among those that Green confessed to burglarizing.

Since that time, I’ve become convinced that Green was the burglar. Our burglar appeared to know what he was doing and by all accounts Green is a seasoned professional. He certainly fits the description offered by my neighbors and by the surveillance video that shows the suspect. It could be that Green didn’t remember our home because the detectives taking him around the neighborhood didn’t lead him through the woods the way Green most likely approached our home. Green also was unsuccessful in entering our home, so he might not have remembered it as clearly as the others. He allegedly hit so many homes, I wouldn’t be surprised if he couldn’t remember them all.
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Occupying the high ground

My thoughts on the whole Occupy Wall Street movement have just changed considerably. I just watched the video of UC Davis Chancellor Katehi walking to her car, surrounded by thousands of completely-silent student protesters. Calling it the “Walk Of Shame,” the silent protest was in response to Katehi’s order which resulted in the egregious pepper spraying of a dozen peaceful protesters on the UC Davis campus Friday.

As Garance Franke-Ruta of The Atlantic points out, Friday’s unprovoked attack was much worse than the above video shows, with police holding the peaceful students and directly pepper-spraying them in the face and throat.
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Some see nothing wrong with reporter being detained

I’m appalled at the number of knuckle-draggers weighing in on the N&O executive editor John Drescher’s column today about the detainment of a reporter covering the take-down of the protesters in the abandoned Chrysler building in Chapel Hill. It seems there are quite a few who see nothing wrong with the police detaining a reporter in contradiction to our country’s First Amendment rights. Some apparently think she got what she deserved.

Here’s what the cops should do in the future: check a reporter’s credentials. If the credentials check out, kindly ask the reporter to move out of the way and go back to your work. Do not handcuff the reporter as the reporter will not harm you. And certainly do not order them to cease taking pictures from a pulic location as this would most assuredly be a violation of First Amendment rights.

I don’t think this will go away anytime soon, and nor should it.