OmniNerd

Court Orders Google to Disclose Personal Info

Fri Jul 04 15:20:59 -0500 2008

Since YouTube caught on a few years ago, people have uploaded clips of their favorite TV shows and movies as well as videos they made themselves, which has of course raised the ire of media producers. Yesterday, during a court case on the legality of this issue, U.S. District Court Judge Louis Stanton ordered Google Inc. to turn over personal data pertaining to YouTube users' viewing habits to Viacom, in order to prove users watched illegitimately copied content more than user-generated content.

This landmark decision may be setting a dangerous precedent for the future of privacy on the Internet and who has access to personal information, but when Google raised this issue in court, the judge dismissed the concern as "speculative." Also significant is the issue of where the users live. Does a U.S. court have the right to decide what happens to personal information for international users?

Viacom also wanted access to Google's search engine source code, but the judge denied that request, stating that it would compromise Google's competitive edge.

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Controversial Weapon Used by British in Afghanistan

Wed Jul 02 09:39:08 -0500 2008

When your enemy is hiding deep within a cave or reinforced building, oftentimes bombing the target simply shakes things up rather than causing actual harm. One weapon to mitigate this weakness currently in use by British forces in Afghanistan is the Hellfire AGM-114N missile. The AGM-114N is known as a thermobaric munition designed to expel a fine cloud of volatile mixture, in this case fluorinated aluminium powder, that penetrates deep into the structure, whereupon a secondary charge ignites the cloud. The resultant explosion violently burns all of the oxygen out of a localized area (especially in a cave) creating a suction, vacuum effect that can crush the bodies of enemies hiding beyond normal blast range. Thermobaric weapons are not a new technology and have been used in the past by Russians against Chechnya and employed on few occasions by American forces. However, the weapon comes with a negative international stigma that led the British Ministry of Defense to debate for 18 months whether it could be used. The MoD finally authorized thermobarics after re-designating them as more friendly: "We no longer accept the term thermobaric [for the AGM-114N] as there is no internationally agreed definition. We call it an enhanced blast weapon."

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French and Swiss Scientists to Destroy Earth in August

Tue Jul 01 07:26:46 -0500 2008

What do you get when you cross seventeen miles of super cooled magnets, a handful of laboratory mice and some mad scientists? If the doomsayers are right, the Earth will be destroyed when the Large Hadron Collider creates miniature black holes and theoretical strangelets in August. According to the physicists, the types of collisions the LHC will produce happen everyday in the upper atmosphere and the Earth has yet to be destroyed by this natural process. "Obviously, the world will not end when the LHC switches on," explains one project scientist amongst others that are unconcerned and find the particle accelerator harmless. "If I thought that this was going to happen, I would be well away from here."

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Economy Hurts Nevada's Brothel Industry

Tue Jul 01 05:35:34 -0500 2008

As oil topped a record $143.67 a barrel, another segment of the economy revealed its misfortune. Nevada's brothels report business is down by as much as 25% because trucker's disposable income has diminished with the rising price of diesel. The prostitutes have to offer discount rates and even gas cards to attract their customers. Brothel owner Bobbi Davis states, "Instead of spending $500 out here, they might only spend $300. I see it every time they raise gas prices." Not only brothel owners are hit by the hard times. Dancers in strip clubs face declining tips and higher costs, leading many of them to seek higher paying roles in the sex industry, boosting the number of applications at the brothels to be amongst Nevada's legal prostitutes.

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Thoughts on Virtualization Software for Apple OS X

Mon Jun 30 13:59:38 -0500 2008

Even for the most simple of network operations, having multiple servers can be a necessity. Take OmniNerd for instance. As sweet as it is on the front end, behind the scenes are multiple development machines, a code test environment and a deployment test environment amongst others. But since nobody has been making multi-million dollar cash donations to the cause, we needed to utilize virtual machines to keep costs down. I've been using virtualization software for almost ten years now and was pleased to know there were many options available for OS X. But how to decide? I chose the following criteria to base my assessment:

minimal impact on the host environment
ease of remotely accessibility (preferably bridged networking)
ability to take snapshots
dynamically sized virtual disks
price of the software

I did not care about desktop integration features. Although nice for a development environment using GNOME/X, the dominant interface to these servers would be remote terminals. At my disposal was Parallels, VirtualBox and VMware. Fortunately, factors 3 and 4 were available on all three virtualization solutions and both Parallels and VMware supported bridged networking. Each guest operating system was installed identically following a prescribed disaster recovery plan. This guaranteed that each "idling" virtual implementation was exactly the same.

I began by constructing the test platform using version 3.0 of Parallels Desktop (build 5584). While the application was very nice and featured some fancy integrations with OS X, it did have a critical flaw for hosting a test environment. When the installed system was completely idle, OS X showed the Parallels hypervisor consuming 20% of the host's CPU cycles. A cursory Google search revealed a forum on the Parallels site where a number of users complained of the same host resource usage. When a patch was released (builds 5600 and 5608), the Parallels update indicated the host CPU usage problem was fixed. Unfortunately, when configured to optimize the host's performance, it reports in excess of 30% CPU usage while the guest operating system was idling. After switching to boost the virtual machine's performance, the host reported more than 40% of the CPU in use while the guest idled. This was completely unacceptable.

My next foray into constructing the test platform utilized VirtualBox version 1.6.0 released by Sun. VirtualBox comes with a clear advantage over the competition - it's free! However the big strike out of the box was that bridged networking is not included in the OS X release. This meant I was required to configure port forwarding within the network address translation in order to make the guest visible across the Internet. I must commend VirtualBox, however, in that configuration is very easy and based on named labels instead of IP addresses which allow the guest to continue being mapped no matter what IP it was assigned. Everything seemed fantastic with this product until I walked away. At my last glance, the CPU usage was minimal when the guest was idling. Within ten minutes, though, the host CPU spiked upwards of 60% and remained as such. Figuring it must be a fluke, I reinstalled not only the virtual software but several guest environments and regularly saw this behavior. VirtualBox was now performing worse than Parallels.

My final test environment installation utilized version 1.1.3 of VMware Fusion. The features within VMware were immediately impressive, like its ability to actually use multiple processors instead of simulating only one. After installing the test platform to specification, I was pleased to notice the idling VMware hypervisor used less than 2% of the host's CPU (optimized for host performance). When VMware was optimized for guest performance, roughly 10% of the host's CPU cycles were used. I was not pleased with the difficulty I encountered with the networking - although I might add it does not seem to be a function of VMware. When configured in bridged networking mode, the guest was visible to all machines on my local network but the Apple Airport Extreme would only return ICMP Network Unreachable errors for anything on the external network. After that problem was resolved, VMware only exhibited one more peculiar quirk. Regardless of the performance mode chosen, VMware Fusion would cease responding to the remote terminal - although the terminal session would never timeout. The virtual machine would only respond when a new session was initiated and it would be slow to respond at first before performing quickly again.

At the end of the testing, VMware technically was the only virtualization platform that met the critical factor of not significantly imposing itself on the host system. Due to the glitch in getting VMware to "see" beyond the Apple Airport, Parallels was superior for time from installation to live configuration. VirtualBox has its virtue as well; a $0 price tag is difficult to ignore. What are your impressions with virtualization software options for the OS X platform?

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New OmniNerd Poll

Mon Jun 30 10:11:15 -0500 2008

Cast Your Vote - I am most afraid of dying?

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Mugabe "Victorious" in Zimbabwe

Sun Jun 29 06:35:19 -0500 2008

Several months ago, the election between the incumbent Mugabe and rival Tsvangirai resulted in a requirement for a subsequent run-off because the challenger did not win enough of the votes by Zimbabwen election rules. Since that time, supporters of Tsvangirai have been threatened and killed. Tsvangirai himself has sought sanctuary in the Dutch embassy. As expected, Mugabe's shut out of Tsvangirai's political campaign, execution of his supporters and forced votes by gunpoint resulted in an upswing of votes for the current president. Mugabe announced his victory within hours of the voting booths shutting down. The world should be used to "democratic" elections like this, one of the most notoriously publicized elections within the past decade occurred when Saddam Hussein's won 100% of the votes in Iraq in 2002.

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Grand Theft Auto Lawsuit Goes Unclaimed

Thu Jun 26 08:39:42 -0500 2008

Three years ago, the video game industry was shaken up by the discovery of what became known as the "Hot Coffee" modification to the Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas game. With some software hacking, disabled code in the game was re-enabled allowing players to engage in a sexual mini-game. The incident spawned a renewed interest in the whether video games and their content were having detrimental effects on youths playing them and spawned a class action lawsuit against the company for the allegedly offensive material players were exposed to. While the lawsuit was won and the company required to pay out millions to the players, only 2676 parties have claimed their damages which have amounted to between $13,000 to $93,000 total. Take-Two's legal department comments, "they brought a meritless lawsuit that had no business being brought to court at all." It sounds like another case of Americans maintaining a false mask of decency in public, when the reality of the community standard is far more primal.

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Offensive Language versus the Community Standard and an Illusion of Decency

Wed Jun 25 12:46:23 -0500 2008

Part of the test for obscenity defined by the Miller vs. California case requires that a work or behavior fall outside the accepted norms of a community standard. In the past, lawyers would have to build their own statistical model defining a community standard. A new Florida case is relying upon Google Trends to define the community standard by comparing popular local activities against various terminologies to establish their client's production of orgy films. Using Google Trends, the lawyers have established the community searches for orgy more often than they search for wholesome things like apple pie. They further include statistics showing the community's favor for boobs over surfing despite being a beach community.

On another note, the passing of comedy genius George Carlin resurfaced perhaps his most famous routine regarding the Seven Words You Can Never Say On Television (YouTube). Although he was arrested that evening for offending members of the audiences, the routine's transcript went all the way to the Supreme Court as evidence in the FCC vs. Pacifica Foundation case regarding decency on public television. Yet in the thirty years since those words were famously grouped together, it's no longer uncommon for prime time shows to include shit, piss or tits and the remaining four (slightly more extreme) can be heard by listening in the hallways of any school or metropolitan street corner. While words are defined as offensive, they are part of common parlance and therefore part of the community standard.

With that bit of contemporary background established, it is quite clear that ignoring smaller homogeneous pockets, society as a whole has no issue with swearing and has been doing so since the beginning. Curses can be heard everywhere from television, PG movies, common outbursts and casual conversation. Is it the word itself or the intent that is offensive?

Let us consider Harry, a construction worker installing roofing on a new home. He fumbles and drops his hammer over the side where it falls through the windshield of the foreman's brand new F-150 whereupon:

the highly conservative Harry grimaces and exclaims, "Oh FUDGE!"
Harry defaults to the lingua franca of the job site and exclaims, "Oh FUCK!"

If it's simply the word that is offensive, then obviously only the second scenario would cause a mother to cover her child's ears as they pass by on the sidewalk. And if it's simply the word that is offensive, one really must ask - why? What is so offensive about the verb to fuck that is not offensive in to copulate? Perhaps another classic example would have been the famous tire-changing scene from A Christmas Story where Ralphie looks back upon having had to eat soap [again], "Only I didn't say "Fudge." I said THE word, the big one, the queen-mother of dirty words, the "F-dash-dash-dash" word!" The simple substitution of the word fudge would have saved Ralphie from a mouthful of soap, despite the utterance of the phrase carrying the same connotation.

Let us now consider the act of cursing where Jamal, Joseph and Piérre have decided to insult your mother.

Jamal says, "Yo mommas a bitch!"
Joseph declares, "Your mom's a jerk!"
Piérre eloquently states, "Ta mere c'est une grosse putain!"

Again, is the offensive quality of the statement the words themselves or the meaning behind it? It's obvious Jamal has spoken using both insulting intent and colloquially accepted terms of offense. While Joseph has the same intent, he cannot bring himself to say the word bitch but does that make the meaning any less offensive? Just as the Matrix's Mirovingian described swearing in French as "wiping your ass with silk", Piérre's commentary is effectively more insulting than Jamal's. But the word putain is not amongst the common parlance of an American so it, in and of itself, does not immediately inspire offense. For that matter, hearing the equivalent of any swear in a foreign language would not offend the layperson simply due to their own linguistic ignorance. Does that mean phrases like arschloch [german], baise-toi [french] or kus umak [arabic] are non-offensive acoustical noises if you do not know what they mean? If a person becomes suddenly offended to find out the meaning of arschloch after hearing the term applied to them, why are they not equally offended at being called a jerk in the same context?

I am of the opinion that any particular word is innocuous and generally meaningless without the context of both its surrounding words and the context with which it was used. When conservative Harry exclaimed, "Oh FUDGE!" it was done in the same context of accident, self anger and brooding worry. It would seem certain words have an offensive connotation simply because society has trained itself to forbid them throughout so many generations. If a curse or swear is considered offensive by intent, there should be no wiggle room for a social conservative to simply exchange word X for word Y and continue to proclaim themselves righteous.

My rant is not to be read as an abdication to run amok using all the words and phrases on a whim leading to some sort of cataclysmic event where the secular advocates are ruining society. Rather, it is to look at the reality of the community standard that lies covered up by the white sheet we publicly describe as defining our community standard. It is to consider George Carlin's original statement from three decades ago - they are just words that were assigned an arbitrary stigma of "badness" while arbitrary substitutions are somehow "okay."

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Americans Not Confident in Congress

Mon Jun 23 12:03:20 -0500 2008

Three out of four Americans have no confidence in President Bush, but his approval ratings have been dragging well below 50% for such a long time nobody bats an eye at those figures. A Gallup poll indicates that Americans have finally had it with the houses of congress as well. Amazingly, the President's rating is twice that of Congress, which scores an abysmal 12% confidence rating. Confidence ratings are different from approval ratings (where Congress scores a similarly poor 19%). Likely factors contributing to the low confidence in Congress include the economy, foreign policy and their basic failure to deliver on the platform upon which they were elected - seemingly to curtail the war on terror and to stand up to the President.

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New OmniNerd Poll

Mon Jun 23 08:28:55 -0500 2008

Cast Your Vote - Will gas prices affect your summer vacation?

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A New Age-Old Use for the iPhone 3G

Sun Jun 22 14:40:11 -0500 2008

The technically advanced video, software and internet capabilities acclaimed by Apple's iPhone 3G are quickly acquiring a growing interest from the adult entertainment industry. In addition to the "usual" download of movies and pictures, the potential for somewhat interactive porn is possible because of the touch screen and the recently available programming SDK kit. Jennifer Bowcock, an Apple spokesperson, informs her company does not condone iPhone porn distribution and will ban the content from official iPhone applications, but admits nothing can be done about browser access or possible third party applications distributed via their own means. Meanwhile many big players in the adult entertainment industry are preparing their wares for the debut of the iPhone 3G.

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Showcasing The Good Stuff

Sat Jun 21 20:01:02 -0500 2008

For veteran OmniNerds, the new side menu addition may seem very reminiscent of the old version 2 "pulse" that was at the top of the front page. It's a new feature that we're calling the "showcase" and we intend to do just that, i.e., showcase content on the site that might otherwise get lost in the mix.

For now, there are only a few items to browse through, but more will be coming soon. While we're working on these additional items, we'd like your input. What content would you like to showcase? Throw out your ideas in the comments and we'll see what we can do.

You'll notice a few other changes on the site: the communism/democracy/oligarchy is dead and gone, the login works a tad differently, and some of the style has changed oh-so-slightly. We've got a few more tricks up our sleeves that we're going to add in this summer so keep your eyes peeled.

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Contract Awarded for Chemical Robotics Development

Sat Jun 21 08:31:54 -0500 2008

DARPA has awarded the iRobot Corporation a 3.3 million dollar contract to develop and build a robot that is soft and flexible enough to ooze through small openings or cracks and still be functional enough to perform DoD tasks. Some of the initial specs for the chem-bot design include "Morphability in all three dimensions"; "Architectures that can sense and morph responsively to openings, e.g., using local tactile sensing and flexible backbone structures; or architectures that themselves morph or dissolve, then reconstitute." Also of importance perhaps is the requirement for "Modest power requirements. ChemBots may be self-powered, self-consuming, or energy-scavenging."

Past attempts at morphing robot design have been carried out by intricate mechanical means somewhat similar to Hasbro's Transformer action figures. This new endeavor seems to have the old science fiction horror film "The Blob" as its main inspiration.

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New OmniNerd Poll

Tue Jun 17 13:57:00 -0500 2008

Cast Your Vote - Ever fallen in love?

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Certificate of Deposit vs High-Yield Savings Account

Thu Jun 12 10:23:45 -0500 2008

I'm at it again. I've compared the high-yield savings account to numerous things, and the certificate of deposit is the latest investment vehicle to catch my eye. I received an ad in the mail from Discover, who is currently touting some of the best CD rates out there (according to bankrate.com), at least starting at the 2-year mark. With the recent plummet of interest rates (e.g., my "high-yield" savings account with Apple Bank dropped from 5.27% last year to just over 2% last month, and then recovered slightly to 2.71% right now), I find the idea of a locked-in rate being more attractive.

Is this backwards thinking, however? I don't want to fall into the same trap as novice investors, who sell-low and buy-high. The key question, of course, is what interest rates will do in the future. I can always shuffle my money around easily between high-yield savings accounts (I recently opened an account with OneUnited Bank), so I'm not concerned with which of them has the current high rate - just if a CD would be better.

As far as I can tell, the main contributing factors include:

Investment amount - Let's assume this is less than $25,000 (and thus not able to qualify for most rate incentives in this category).
How long I'm able/willing to leave the money untouched - These funds represent my "6-month expenses" emergency fund, so they need to be relatively liquid. However, I don't anticipate having to use them unless there's an emergency (e.g., car wreck, lost job, etc.).
How the market is expected to perform - I have no idea on this one, but there's a lot of historical data.

As the likelihood of an emergency is small, should I stick the money the longest CD I can find and accept the penalty (which would be about 9 months simple interest on the amount withdrawn, if the terms are similar to Discover's)? Or, should I choose the shortest CD length with an interest rate higher than currently available in savings (e.g., a 1.5 year CD with Discover is 3.71% APY vs 3.60% APY in savings at OneUnited)? Or, should I invest fractions of my emergency fund in CDs of varying lengths so as to have some of it maturing every six (or twelve) months?

Of course, if interest rates decide to skyrocket (and stay there), any CD I get right now would end up being a poor decision. So, what's the best method to predict interest rates? (I considered plotting the daily history since 1990 and then analyzing situations similar to the present.)

What's your approach and how would you see things if in my position?

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