Alt Press Review | Weezer – Hurley

Great album.. check it out especially if you were disappointed with Weezer’s previous piece of shit “lets try out Pop Rock” album.

-Spyder

Originally posted by: Mitchell Sturges

1. Being gay is not natural. Real Americans always reject unnatural things like eyeglasses, polyester, and air conditioning.

2. Gay marriage will encourage people to be gay, in the same way that hanging around tall people will make you tall.

3. Legalizing gay marriage will open the door to all kinds of crazy behavior. People may even wish to marry their pets because a dog has legal standing and can sign a marriage contract.

4. Straight marriage has been around a long time and hasn’t changed at all; women are still property, blacks still can’t marry whites, and divorce is still illegal.

5. Straight marriage will be less meaningful if gay marriage were allowed; the sanctity of Britany Spears’ 55-hour just-for-fun marriage would be destroyed.

6. Straight marriages are valid because they produce children. Gay couples, infertile couples, and old people shouldn’t be allowed to marry because our orphanages aren’t full yet, and the world needs more children.

7. Obviously gay parents will raise gay children, since straight parents only raise straight children.

8. Gay marriage is not supported by religion. In a theocracy like ours, the values of one religion are imposed on the entire country. That’s why we have only one religion in America.

9. Children can never succeed without a male and a female role model at home. That’s why we as a society expressly forbid single parents to raise children.

10. Gay marriage will change the foundation of society; we could never adapt to new social norms. Just like we haven’t adapted to cars, the service-sector economy, or longer life spans.

. Always on, Always Connected. It’s not about killing time. It’s about getting stuff done.

via Paris Hilton now rocks the BlackBerry Torch | CrackBerry.com.

OpenOffice Will Survive « Revelations From An Unwashed Brain
by the oracle @ LockerGnome

OpenOffice Will Survive.

However, the time between updates may increase by a large margin.

That’s what I take from the current problems that are causing fear and loathing in the open source camp. Many are afraid that Oracle is going to become as big a problem for OpenOffice as it has for OpenSolaris.

The difference is that OpenOffice has safety in numbers, being estimated at garnering a full 10% of the office productivity market. OpenSolaris is a miniscule part of the overall small operating systems market, usually categorized as “Other”.

Read the rest of this article at: Revelations From An Unwashed Brain

Chris·ti·an·i·ty / [kris-chee-an-i-tee] – 3 Dictionary Results

1. The belief that a cosmic Jewish Zombie who was his own father can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree.

2. A religion which has only ever had one real practitioner. However, it does have billions of other would-be practitioners who fall far, far short of the standard and often miss the point entirely.

3. A really cool religion, because if you follow it then you can go around raping, beating, and killing people, and as long as you confess your sins at the end of the day and repent you’ll go to heaven!

- From the Urban Dictionary

It must be nice to be so rich that you can just write a restitution check to compensate for destroying an Ocean.

- Christopher “SpyderBite” Whalen

The Stupid People Do Count After All

I’m working on a side project at the moment that is more time consuming than I anticipated. Once I get my schedule re-aligned I’ll be belting out the blog updates more consistently again. Until then, here’s an interesting and very funny little factoid from a friend of mine who works in a DVD production studio.

Some DVDs/Blu-Rays & DVRs are timed to begin playing the movie or recorded show automatically after pre-determined amount of time at the main menu and/or while paused.

The reasoning: Based on studies from returned “defective” devices and patterns in customer service calls, it is to account for the “stupid” people who are unable to figure out how to begin the play process from either state.

Well, it couldn’t be a more beautiful day today if the Point of Origin re-occurred and we started over from scratch. So, I am going to go out and enjoy it!

Christopher “SpyderBite” Whalen

ATM skimming alone is responsible for $350,000 of fraud daily exceeding a billion dollars in losses annually.

A recent news report of a skimming scam in Long Island, N.Y., netted thieves more than $200,000 from ATMs at five branches.

Skimming today is far more sophisticated than in the past. Skimmers can include blue tooth and texting technology that send the data to the criminal anywhere. Keypads can be compromised by devices that overlay the exiting pad and transfer the data remotely.

ATM scams and fraud go beyond skimming to crimes that are very physical such as ram raiding to remote malicious software hacks.

Read the whole article at: ATM Security Threats Increase – Reviews, News, and How To Geeks.

Apple Sets The iPhone Free. But It Is Still Under House Arrest.

What the iPhone jailbreaking ruling means – CNN.com

WikiLeaks’ Contribution to Obama’s Inevitable Choice | BuzzFlash.org.

THE FIFTH COLUMNIST by P.M. Carpenter

In lightning response to WikiLeaks’ release of more than 90,000 classified reports that unshockingly depict a ghastly intersection of America’s increasing helplessness and the Taliban’s accelerating strength, National Security Adviser Jim Jones unleashed a minor barrage of mind-numbing bureaucratese:

“These irresponsible leaks will not impact our ongoing commitment to deepen our partnerships with Afghanistan and Pakistan; to defeat our common enemies; and to support the aspirations of the Afghan and Pakistani people.”

Well, as long as “these irresponsible leaks” won’t degrade our foolish consistency of despotic alliances or upset the delicate, self-negating balance of “common enemies” and deep “partnerships,” we should be OK; which is to say, Jones’ critical insertion of the qualifying “irresponsible” was superfluous at best.

Another, anonymous White House official varied Jones’ theme of linguistic torture:

“[I]t’s worth noting that WikiLeaks is not an objective news outlet but rather an organization that opposes U.S. policy in Afghanistan.”

Now there’s one of the hottest chestnuts ever among prominent logical fallacies: attack the source, however irrelevant the source itself may be to the principal story. One can imagine the biting critique of a Goebbels Dispatch: “It’s worth nothing that Edward R. Murrow’s CBS Radio is not an objective news outlet but rather an organization that opposes German policy in the skies over London.”

Yeah, OK, so now we’ll witness the full force of tiresome predictability: Liberal bloggers and commentators will go berserk in denouncing executive secrecy and right-wing bloggers and commentators will go equally berserk in denouncing First Amendment treachery.

This two-sided outrage will last for roughly 48 hours, admittedly a rather pleasant diversion from the 72-hour outrage over the Sherrod Affair, in which liberal bloggers denounced right-wing racism and right-wing bloggers denounced liberal racism. There’s nothing like one of these enlightening “national debates,” don’t you think?

But, official and unofficial horseshit aside, from all of the NY Times’ thousands of words this morning in its reporting of Wikileaks’ leaks, this line jumped out at me with uncommon power:

“While current and former American officials interviewed could not corroborate individual reports, they said that the portrait of [Pakistan's] spy agency’s collaboration with the Afghan insurgency was broadly consistent with other classified intelligence.”

With other classified intelligence? Pakistan’s super-”secretive” doings with Afghan insurgents is about as mysterious as today’s hamburger specials in the Daily Shopper.

This, from a month ago, and again, the Times:

“Pakistani officials say they can deliver the network of Sirajuddin Haqqani, an ally of Al Qaeda who runs a major part of the insurgency in Afghanistan, into a power-sharing arrangement” — a promise that positively dripped with implications of all manner of Pakistani collaboration. Indeed, “Some officials in the Obama administration have not ruled out incorporating the Haqqani network in an Afghan settlement, though they stress that President Obama’s policy calls for Al Qaeda to be separated from the network.”

Then this, my absolute favorite part: “American officials are skeptical that that can be accomplished.” One marvels here at the euphemistically soft expectations of concrete disbelief.

What’s more — and this, once again, from a month ago — Pakistan’s spy agency took the rather uncharacteristic step of open diplomacy, blurting that America’s Afghanistan campaign “will not succeed,” largely because as the “security situation … become[s] more dangerous,” America’s dedication to Afghanistan will eventually wane to invisibility.

It’s my scarcely singular but unwavering conviction that Obama’s commitment to Afghanistan is, by now, almost wholly a negative one: that is, he stays only because he doesn’t know how to get out. I’m, let’s say, “skeptical” that he believes any more than the time of day from Gen. David Petraeus, while the geopolitical and domestic political fallout of withdrawal ramifies monstrously in his mind. As retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey said the other day in a television interview, Of course there’s an alternative to continued American deployment — the alternative being “a disaster of monumental proportions.”

A some point, however, Obama must accept that America’s disaster is separable from Afghanistan’s — whether it is or not — and thus he must allow the inevitable fallout to begin. After all, he’s no more straitjacketed in leaving than he is in staying.

For personal questions or comments you can contact him at fifthcolumnistmail@gmail.com