Is nature out of control? MSNBC Proves How Incredibly Stupid They Are

Is it just me or is this the dumbest headline you have ever seen? Nature out of control? Has nature ever been “in control” in the first place? The article from MSNBC never asks this pressing question.

Its the same thing with the global warming myth. Can you imagine a time when mankind has become so egocentric that we believe that we can control nature?

So here is MSNBC doing what all news agencies do to keep the sheeple watching their crappy network. Trying to scare the masses into believing that somehow humans are responsible for all these earthquakes.

Now that the global warming issue is being debunked, I can already see the next big socialist cause. Global Earthquakes. Somehow a correlation will be made to scientifically prove that man is responsible for earthquakes.

I got it. Its because our automobiles are putting extraneous forces on the earth’s crust, thus causing the planet to to be pulled in a million different directions at once, creating the earthquakes we are having today. That’s the ticket . . .

Chile is on a hotspot of sorts for earthquake activity. And so the 8.8-magnitude temblor that shook the region overnight was not a surprise, historically speaking. Nor was it outside the realm of normal, scientists say, even though it comes on the heels of other major earthquakes.

One scientist, however, says that relative to the time period from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s, Earth has been more active over the past 15 years or so.

The Chilean earthquake, and the tsunami it spawned, originated on a hot spot known as a subduction zone, where one plate of Earth’s crust dives under another. It’s part of the active “Ring of Fire,” a zone of major crustal plate clashes that surround the Pacific Ocean.

“This particular subduction zone has produced very damaging earthquakes throughout its history,” said Randy Baldwin, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey.

The largest quake ever recorded, magnitude 9.5, occurred along the same fault zone in May 1960.

Even so, magnitude-8 earthquakes occur globally, on average, just once a year. Since magnitudes are given on a logarithmic scale, an 8.8-magnitude is much more intense than a magnitude 8, and so this event would be even rarer, said J. Ramón Arrowsmith, a geologist at Arizona State University.

Is Earth shaking more?
The Ryukyu Islands of Japan were hit with a 7.0-magnitude quake on Friday night. News of that tremor, the Haiti quake and now Chile may make it seem as if Earth is becoming ever more active. But in the grand scheme of things, geologists say this is just Mother Nature as usual.

“From our human perspective with our relatively short and incomplete memories and better and better communications around the world, we hear about more earthquakes and it seems like they are more frequent,” Arrowsmith said. “But this is probably not any indication of a global change in earthquake rate of significance.”

Coupled with better communication, as the human population skyrockets and we move into more hazardous regions, we’re going to hear more about the events that do occur, Arrowsmith added.

Thousands rattle the Earth daily — but only a few cause utter devastation.
However, “relative to the 20-year period from the mid-1970s to the mid 1990s, the Earth has been more active over the past 15 or so years,” said Stephen S. Gao, a geophysicist at Missouri University of Science and Technology. “We still do not know the reason for this yet. Could simply be the natural temporal variation of the stress field in the earth’s lithosphere.” (The lithosphere is the outer solid part of the Earth.)

While the Chilean earthquake wasn’t directly related to Japan’s 7.0-magnitude temblor, the two have some factors in common.

For one, any seismic waves that made their way from Japan to the Chilean coast could play a slight role in ground-shaking.

“It is too far away for any direct triggering, and those distances also make the seismic waves as they would pass by from the Haiti or Japan events pretty small because of attenuation,” Arrowsmith told LiveScience. (Attenuation is the decrease in energy with distance.) “Nevertheless, if the Chilean fault surface were close to failure, those small waves could push it even closer.”

In addition, both regions reside within the Ring of Fire, which is a zone surrounding the Pacific Ocean where the Pacific tectonic plate and other plates dive beneath other slabs of Earth. About 90 percent of the world’s earthquakes occur along this arc. (The next most seismic region, where just 5 to 6 percent of temblors occur, is the Alpide belt, which extends from the Mediterranean region eastward.)

Colliding plates
The Chilean earthquake occurred at the boundary between the Nazca and South American tectonic plates. These rocky slabs are converging at a rate of 3 inches (80 mm) per year, according to the USGS. This huge jolt happened as the Nazca plate moved down and landward below the South American plate. This is called a subduction zone when one plate subducts beneath another.

(Over time, the overriding South American Plate gets lifted up, creating the towering Andes Mountains.)

The plate movement explains why coastal Chile has such a history of powerful earthquakes . Since 1973, 13 temblors of magnitude 7.0 or greater have occurred there, according to the USGS.

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Here is what we here at the BrokenCountry have been waiting for. The media and the scientists to blame the snow storms around the world on global warming. These people think we are all idiots. Here is a passage from the following article,

Do these people think we are fools? This is just the normal cycle of the weather. Weathermen cannot accurately predict what is going to happen tomorrow, yet they are trying to convince us that they know what is going to happen one hundred years from now. I believe they are the fools. Ed.

Poor Al Gore. The second major blizzard to hit Washington, D.C. is fueling the fire for conservatives who say that the nonstop snow pokes holes in evidence backing global warming.

Amid reports that the area was facing another 10 to 20 inches of snow, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) took the Twitter-sphere Tuesday to take a jab at Gore, who is one of the foremost proponents of the government action to counter global warming, The Hill reported.

It’s going to keep snowing in DC until Al Gore cries “uncle”

He’s not the only conservative jumping on the global warming is bunk bandwagon. During a speech Monday at the Sierra-Cascade Logging Conference in Redding, Calif., former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin lampooned studies supporting global warming as a “bunch of snake oil science,” the AP reported.

After all, it stands to reason that if the world is getting warmer — and the past decade was the hottest on record — major snowstorms should become a thing of the past, like Palm Pilots and majority rule in the Senate, Time magazine notes. But:

Brace yourselves now — this may be a case of politicians twisting the facts. There is some evidence that climate change could in fact make such massive snowstorms more common, even as the world continues to warm.

Because it turns out that hotter air — i.e., global warming — can hold more moisture, thus creating MORE snow, not less. As pointed out by meteorologist Jeff Masters at Weather Underground:

Record-breaking snowstorms are not an indication that global warming is not occurring. In fact, we can expect there may be more heavy snowstorms in regions where it is cold enough to snow, due to the extra moisture global warming has added to the atmosphere–an extra 4% since 1970.

Of course, one or two snowstorms does not global warming make. As Time notes, “weather is what will happen next weekend; climate is what will happen over the next decades and centuries.”

In the meantime, let the global warming snowballs fly.

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The plunge in tourism has resulted in soaring unemployment and home foreclosures, a shortened school year and an exodus from the state. Some residents blame the visiting President Obama.

Reporting from Kailua-Kona, Hawaii – Between dealing with terrorism threats and crises abroad, President Obama is unwinding in Hawaii with his family this week. They’ve snorkeled in pristine bays and dined in fashionable restaurants. Tourism officials only wish there were thousands more visitors like them.

Tourism is the glue that holds this island state’s finances together, keeping its streets clean, its workers paid and its children educated. But for the last two years, vacationers and conventioneers alike have abandoned Hawaii in favor of less exotic destinations closer to home. The result is an unprecedented slowdown in the industry and some cavernous cracks in the state’s budget.

Hawaii was so short of cash last year that it furloughed teachers and suspended school for 17 Fridays during the academic year, giving students the fewest school days of any state in the union. Home foreclosures and bankruptcy filings are soaring. The unemployment rate has more than doubled over the last two years to 7.0%. Though that’s well below the national average of 10.0%, it’s a stunner for a place that just a few years ago boasted a jobless rate of less than 3%.

For the first time in a decade, the number of Hawaiians receiving welfare benefits has increased. Crime is up on the island of Oahu this year, even as it fell nationwide. And as if things weren’t discouraging enough, an army of rats in Honolulu’s Chinatown is afflicting the already beleaguered restaurant trade.

It’s the “worst recession in our lifetimes,” said Marcus Oshiro, chairman of the state House Finance Committee.

The number of visitors to the islands in November fell 17% from 2007, and total spending by air visitors for the first 11 months of 2009 decreased $1.3 billion from the same period in 2008.

Tourism officials are hoping that the Obamas’ visit can begin to turn that around, with images of sugary beaches and 30-foot waves being beamed back to mainlanders.

“We believe that having images of Hawaii in the media — especially now when it’s 20 degrees below in some places — can only put the desire for a Hawaii vacation in future travelers’ minds,” said Marsha Wienert, tourism liaison for the state.

But some Aloha State natives are blaming Obama, a Hawaii native, for at least part of the slump. They say he didn’t do them any favors last year when he said firms receiving government bailouts shouldn’t be taking trips “to Las Vegas or go down to the Super Bowl.” He might as well have said Hawaii.

Lavish conventions and corporate junkets have come under fire since it was revealed that troubled insurer American International Group Inc. spent $443,000 at the St. Regis Resort in Dana Point just days after accepting an $85-billion federal bailout. The backlash has cost luxury destinations such as Hawaii a bundle. More than 100 corporations and associations scrapped Hawaiian conferences or business retreats after Obama’s comments, according to Hawaii’s Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism.

“We’re losing the group business that’s either canceled due to economic reasons or concerns about being seen as a company going to Hawaii,” said Keith Vieira, senior vice president and director of operations for Starwood Hotels & Resorts in Hawaii and French Polynesia.

Some Hawaiians are underwhelmed by the return of their native son. In the scruffy town of Wahiawa on Oahu, far from the beaches and fancy hotels, some locals waiting by a pawnshop for the bus were decidedly ambivalent about the president.

“It’s not good here — there are no jobs,” said Hu Toelupe, who said she didn’t expect to see the president and didn’t care if she missed him.

The drop in jobs has especially hurt Hawaii’s Big Island, which traditionally feels a slowdown first and recovers last as opposed to Oahu, the most populated island, said Joseph Toy, president of Hawaii tourism research firm Hospitality Advisors. In November, hotel occupancy on the Big Island was a meager 40%, he said.

Occupancy at hotels on the Big Island and Kauai fell to 54% from 72% and to 60% from 78%, respectively, over the last three years, says TZ Economics, a local research firm. The drop in hotel revenue exceeds $1 billion across the state, according to some estimates.

On a recent sunny afternoon at Uncle Billy’s Kona Bay Hotel on the Big Island, only cats scurried around the manicured grounds. The balconies and outdoor restaurant were deserted. A lone woman sat smoking by the circular pool.

Across the street at the Kona Inn Shopping Village, a jewelry store, tour operator and an arcade called the Fun Factory were all closed, padlocks on their doors.

“It’s never been this slow in 25 years,” said Patrick McFeeley, a photographer who owns the Picture Store, which sells photos of giant waves, lava flows, palm trees and other iconic Hawaiian images from a shop overlooking the sea.

There’s hardly a tourist spot on the planet that hasn’t been hurt by the global slowdown. But Hawaii has proved particularly vulnerable. Situated 2,900 miles off the West Coast, it’s dependent on air travelers and cruise ship passengers at a time when many nervous consumers are contenting themselves with “staycations.”

The tourism decline here accelerated in early 2008, as the U.S. economy faltered and employers axed tens of thousands of workers. Suddenly, a tropical vacation became an unthinkable luxury to many consumers. In April of that year, Aloha Airlines and ATA Airlines closed, cutting the number of airplane seats coming to Hawaii by 15%, said Wienert, the tourism liaison. Then two cruise lines redeployed ships to other ports of call.

“We’ve gone through two years of huge declines in our tourism industry, which has resulted in huge declines in revenue for Hawaii business and government,” Wienert said.

A number of ritzy hotels are in foreclosure or have changed hands because of financial difficulties. Shops around the upscale areas are feeling the slowdown too.

“Usually at Christmastime, you couldn’t walk through the mall, it was so crowded,” said Dion DeBois, who works at a jewelry store at the upmarket Kings’ Shops at Waikoloa Village, about 30 miles north of Kailua-Kona. “Now, nobody’s traveling,” he said, glancing outside, where a man with a guitar sang to a row of empty plastic chairs.

That’s made Hawaii, which is trying to close a $1.2-billion budget shortfall, eager to find new sources of income. Green power is at the top of the list, said Russell Pang, a spokesman for Gov. Linda Lingle. The state has pledged to obtain 70% of its energy from renewable sources by 2030. It’s trying to lure entrepreneurs to make the state a hotbed of clean technology and homegrown power.

And many here are thrilled that a consortium of universities has chosen Hawaii as the site for the world’s biggest telescope, which could spawn construction and research jobs.

But there’s nothing on the horizon to replace tourism any time soon. Even though signs are emerging that more Americans will start traveling again in 2010, some Hawaiians are giving up on paradise for good. In 2009, more residents left Hawaii than moved here for the first time in a decade, according to census data.

Sonia Grimme, co-owner of Surf and Sand, a beachwear shop on the Big Island, is thinking about moving back to her native Taiwan with her husband and 12-year-old son. She’s worried that her son isn’t getting the education he needs in Hawaii; he now stays home and plays video games on furlough Fridays.

“The system is broken here,” she said. “He can get a much better education in Taiwan.”

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Everyone likes to see a good video of a large building being completely reduced to rubble.

This video goes one better.

The footage, taken on December 30, shows a 22-floor residential building being demolished in the city of Liuzhou in southern China.

Scroll down for video

So far so good: The building in Liuzhou, southern China, seconds before the planned demolition

We’re still ok: The initial blast successfully breaks the building into two parts

Er… that’s not looking so great: Half of the building tumbles sideways in a cloud of dust

Best laid plans: The other half of the building remains standing – but leaning precariously to the side

But disaster is narrowly averted when the demolition goes wrong.

Instead of crumbling into a contained heap of rubble, half of the building crashes sideways to the ground, narrowly averting disaster.

Even more alarmingly, the other half is left still standing – but leaning precariously to the side.

Not quite as planned: Another view catches the moment half the building goes down while the other half remains leaning

Shoppers in Liuzhou carry on, unperturbed by the dangerously leaning building

In video footage, onlookers can be heard shouting in awe as the blast is carried out.

The demolition failed due to technical reasons, the China Daily reported. Experts had intended for the building to break in to two parts – but the rest of the experiment had, clearly, gone awry.

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Incredibly enough, Kate Gosselin has suddenly anointed herself the official psychologist for all women that give birth to litters of children. Who does she think she is? What makes her qualified to be dispensing advice to anyone? Because she has a TV show? So now Kate Gosselin is like Oprah? It’s the old ” I got a TV show so now I know stuff” syndrome. Kate Gosselin tricked her ovaries into thinking they were supposed to have six children at once so suddenly she is a foremost authority on the subject? I think that anyone that messes with nature like that is a nut. The idea that Mrs. Gosselin named her latest book “Multiple Blessings” is reprehensible. Your children were not blessings. They were manufactured by doctors in test tubes with a predictable outcome.

Has anyone told Jon Gosselin that his hair plugs look like doll hair? Barbie and Ken have a better head of hair. I don’t know who did that to your head but you should file a malpractice suit. Nice genetic trait to pass down to the little dollar signs you call children. You should have gone for the whole head transplant. People that cheat genetics for financial gain. The whole situation is sickening. FK

News article below

Kate Gosselin has a piece of advice for the Whittier mom who gave birth to octuplets: People will judge you, people will gawk at you, but “keep your head up, and do your absolute best for your children.”

Kate is the star of TLC’s hit TV show “Jon & Kate Plus 8,” which follows the never-boring life with her husband, Jon, and their eight children — a set of twins and a set of sextuplets.

“I felt like I had octuplets … I had eight in three years,” Kate said. “[The news of the octuplets' birth] caused me to review the feelings and emotions I had when my six were born! So overwhelming!”

The birth of the octuplets to Nadya Suleman, a Whittier woman “who loves children,” has raised concerns about the number of embryos implanted and whether the procedure was within medical guidelines.

We asked Kate to reflect on the day-to-day realities that lie ahead for the new mom, the octuplets and their six siblings. (Truth be told, we originally tried to interview the Duggars, who have 18 kids and their own TV show on Discovery, but they declined because, believe it or not, they said they couldn’t relate to having eight infants all at the same time.)

Kate answered questions via e-mail from Chicago, where she is doing a book signing for Multiple Blessings: Surviving to Thriving with Twins and Sextuplets.

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If the Goracle wants to stop global warming perhaps he should go on a diet. How much air is he consuming at that enormous weight? Not to mention the tremendous dumps he takes and flushes down the toilet. Geez

The lawmakers gazed in awe at the figure before them. The Goracle had seen the future, and he had come to tell them about it.

What the Goracle saw in the future was not good: temperature changes that “would bring a screeching halt to human civilization and threaten the fabric of life everywhere on the Earth — and this is within this century, if we don’t change.”

The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, John Kerry (D-Mass.), appealed to hear more of the Goracle’s premonitions. “Share with us, if you would, sort of the immediate vision that you see in this transformative process as we move to this new economy,” he beseeched.

“Geothermal energy,” the Goracle prophesied. “This has great potential; it is not very far off.”

Another lawmaker asked about the future of nuclear power. “I have grown skeptical about the degree to which it will expand,” the Goracle spoke.

A third asked the legislative future — and here the Goracle spoke in riddle. “The road to Copenhagen has three steps to it,” he said.

Sen. James Risch (R-Idaho) begged the Goracle to look further into the future. “What does your modeling tell you about how long we’re going to be around as a species?” he inquired.

The Goracle chuckled. “I don’t claim the expertise to answer a question like that, Senator.”

It was a jarring reminder that the Goracle is, indeed, mortal. Once Al Gore was a mere vice president, but now he is a Nobel laureate and climate-change prophet. He repeats phrases such as “unified national smart grid” the way he once did “no controlling legal authority” — and the ridicule has been replaced by worship, even by his political foes.

“Tennessee,” gushed Sen. Bob Corker, a Republican from Gore’s home state, “has a legacy of having people here in the Senate and in public service that have been of major consequence and contributed in a major way to the public debate, and you no doubt have helped build that legacy.” If that wasn’t quite enough, Corker added: “Very much enjoyed your sense of humor, too.”

Humor? From Al Gore? “I benefit from low expectations,” he replied.

The Goracle’s powers seem to come from his ability to scare the bejesus out of people. “We must face up to this urgent and unprecedented threat to the existence of our civilization,” he said. And: “This is the most serious challenge the world has ever faced.” And: It “could completely end human civilization, and it is rushing at us with such speed and force.”

Though some lawmakers tangled with Gore on his last visit to Capitol Hill, none did on the Foreign Relations Committee yesterday. Dick Lugar (Ind.), the ranking Republican, agreed that there will be “an almost existential impact” from the climate changes Gore described.

As such, the Goracle, even when questioned, was shown great deference. Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.), challenging Gore over spent nuclear fuel, began by saying: “I stand to be corrected, and I defer to your position, you’re probably right, and I’m probably wrong.” He ended his question by saying: “I’m not questioning you; I’m questioning myself.”

Others sought to buy the Goracle’s favor by offering him gifts. “Thank you for your incredible leadership; you make this crystalline for those who don’t either understand it or want to understand it,” gushed Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), who went on to ask: “Will you join me this summer at the Jersey Shore?”

The chairman worried that the Goracle may have been offended by “naysayers” who thought it funny that Gore’s testimony before the committee came on a morning after a snow-and-ice storm in the capital. “The little snow in Washington does nothing to diminish the reality of the crisis,” Kerry said at the start of the hearing.

The climate was well controlled inside the hearing room, although Gore, suffering from a case of personal climate change, perspired heavily during his testimony. The Goracle presented the latest version of his climate-change slide show to the senators: a globe with yellow and red blotches, a house falling into water, and ones with obscure titles such as “Warming Impacts Ugandan Coffee Growing Region.” At one point he flashed a biblical passage on the screen, but he quickly removed it. “I’m not proselytizing,” he explained. A graphic showing a disappearing rain forest was accompanied by construction noises.

The Goracle supplied abundant metaphors to accompany his visuals. Oil demand: “This roller coaster is headed for a crash, and we’re in the front car.” Polar ice: “Like a beating heart, and the permanent ice looks almost like blood spilling out of a body along the eastern coast of Greenland.”

The lawmakers joined in. “There are a lot of ways to skin a cat,” contributed Isakson, who is unlikely to get the Humane Society endorsement. “And if we have the dire circumstances we’re facing, we need to find every way to skin every cat.”

Mostly, however, the lawmakers took turns asking the Goracle for advice, as if playing with a Magic 8 Ball.

Lugar, a 32-year veteran of the Senate, asked Gore, as a “practical politician,” how to get the votes for climate-change legislation. “I am a recovering politician. I’m on about Step 9,” the Goracle replied, before providing his vision.

Prospects for regulating a future carbon emissions market? “There’s a high degree of confidence.” The future of automobiles in China and India? “I wouldn’t give up on electric vehicles.” The potential of solar power in those countries? “I have no question about it at all.”

Of course not. He’s the Goracle.

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I watch the History Channel …. a lot. I have been watching a promotional commercial for a show called Mega Disasters. This particular episode deals with a “mega drought” in the western United States. In this promo a voice is heard saying ” There has been unprecedented drought in the western United States since 1997.”

It seems that ratings are more important to The History Channel that factual accuracy. The whole episode is predicated on the myth we like to call global warming. Here is the promotional information I found on The History Channel web site.

Recent warming trends in seawater and air temperature point to a possible mega drought in the next thirty to fifty years. Could we be facing a replay of the Dust Bowl of the 1930s on an even bigger scale? Scientists working with government authorities are highly cognizant of the need to conserve. Is it too late? Jump ahead to a scenario seventy years into the future–a twelve-year drought has left the country unstable and economically depressed. Cities across the west lie abandoned, states fight over limited water supplies and we are now dependant on other nations for food. Society has devolved into a desperate battle for survival as individuals fight over the scarce resource.

Can you believe this bull shit? Better yet, can any of you remember the last time you saw any original programming on The History Channel that wasn’t designed to get bigger ratings? This is all based on “theories” by a bunch of scientists that hate America! And here is The History Channel fabricating a show based on the very same junk science!

I have every intention of getting some sort of response from The History Channel. Until then, I will watch like everyone else so’s I can see whats going to kill me … er …. whats going to kill me next. JD

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MICROSOFT’s formerly tame blogger has bitten the software company that made his name when it employed him as a “technology evangelist”.

Robert Scoble writes the Scobleizer web log, one of the most-read sources of technology commentary on the internet.

He owes his status to the three years he spent at Microsoft, where he was given free rein to comment on the company’s affairs from the inside. The Economist magazine has credited Scoble with playing a significant role in softening the software giant’s former reputation for monopolistic bullying.

In the past, Scoble has tended to be sympathetic about Microsoft’s failings. However, he was provoked into stinging criticism last week after a series of triumphalist remarks, including some disparaging comments about Google made by Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive.

At a “global summit” of its most-valued software developers, Microsoft repeatedly declared that it would “win” in search and other parts of its Windows Live internet strategy.

“The words are empty,” Scoble responded. “Microsoft’s internet execution sucks (on the whole). Its search sucks. Its advertising sucks. If that’s ‘in it to win’, then I don’t get it.”

He continued: “Microsoft isn’t going away. Don’t get me wrong. They have record profits, record sales, all that. But on the inter-net? Come on.

“Microsoft: stop the talk. Ship a better search, a better advertising system than Google, a better hosting service than Amazon, a better cross-platform web development ecosystem than Adobe, and get some services out there that are innovative.”

Scoble’s comments reflect wider concerns — shared by some Microsoft insiders — that the poorly understood Windows Live initiative is failing to make the impact expected when it was unveiled 18 months ago.

Windows Live was pitched as the centrepiece of Microsoft’s response to Google and other companies offering web-based services. It was seen to be a key focus for Ray Ozzie, who has replaced Bill Gates as Microsoft’s chief software architect.

Talking to Stanford University business school students in California, Ballmer said Google had built only one good business and “everything else is sort of cute” — in other words largely irrelevant.

This also provoked Scoble’s ire. “You’re up against a formidable competitor and one you’ve never seen before that has some real, significant weapons that you can’t deal with.”

LiveSide, a website that tracks the development of Windows Live, is among those who are unimpressed. “Windows Live isn’t making much of a dent in the marketplace,” it says on its Our View page. “It’s a nontopic. Market research shows Live Search to be losing share if anything, and certainly not gaining.

“What Windows Live lacks, specifically, is an identity. No one can describe it, no one from Microsoft has even tried.”

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Since the early days of DOS (and even with the Mac OS), there has been a slow shift within the operating-system concept from increased functionality to increased featurism, neither of which are needed.

This has resulted in a strange situation where the monoculture of Microsoft Windows and the subcultures of Linux and Mac OS X have made the computing scene both stagnant and dangerous.

Unless the computer is re-architected from scratch, which will not happen in the next 100 years, we are set on a path of never-ending misery. Windows Vista proves it.

Let’s begin with the way things should have gone.

It began with DOS, which was a clone of CP/M before that. Each time a new version came out, it was for one reason only: to add the functionality of newer peripherals, disk drives, ports and more.

A new device would emerge from the labs, and it would be accommodated by an OS upgrade. At first the device would be accommodated by clever patches, and then the patch would be incorporated into a release of the OS.

If you were interested in weird new features, such as a GUI [graphical user interface], these would be separate programs that ran under the OS (not on top of the OS).

Until Windows came along, the OS — whether CP/M, MS-DOS, or anything else, for that matter — was constantly criticized by the big-iron mainframe builders (IBM et al.) as not being a true operating system.

This critique was the beginning of the end, and a key to understanding what went wrong.

Nobody running small desktop machines from 1975 to 1990 knew or cared that the OS was merely a file loader. In fact, nobody actually knew what that meant.

Why did you need a complex OS on a microprocessor-based machine running Lotus 1-2-3 anyway? You didn’t, but that “it’s just a file loader” complaint never ended.

So, IBM — which had been in bed for years with Microsoft’s file loader — took a dislike to the situation and convinced Microsoft and itself that something more substantial should be developed.

This happened just as various iterations of Unix began to crop up on small machines. Unix was a real operating system, and, golly, it was neat to use. Instead of running practical programs and actually getting jobs done, you could toy with the innards of the machine with the OS. What fun!

Anyway, IBM began to develop OS/2, and Microsoft figured it had a better idea with Windows, both of which were more than file loaders (although not much more).

Over time, the features of these new OSs became more important than the system’s performance or anything else. They would have glowing icons, transparent pop-ups, smooth scrolling and all the things that used to be utilities sold by third parties.

Within no time, Microsoft decided that everything should be part of the OS, although these features had nothing to do with the OS.

The company went to court to argue that the browser was part of the OS. Media players were part of the OS.

One assumes that Microsoft would have argued that the word processor was part of the OS if it didn’t have a near-monopoly on word processing already.

In ways nobody could have predicted, what was once an efficient file loader evolved into a clumsy monstrosity that required massive amounts of memory just to run. But did it ever become a genuine OS, or just a file loader with benefits?

It became a clunker, in fact, with a pretty face and a high price tag like a Park Avenue hooker using too much makeup to hide the fact that she’s old.

Now we have Vista. It turns out to be nothing like what was promised. What a shock. It has a few new features, but I’d question if it’s actually more functional than what we’ve had before.

As an aside, I’m fascinated by the fact that Mac users all think Vista is great. These are folks who have long since bought into the Steve Jobs notion that the sizzle is more important than the steak.

PC users have traditionally preferred the steak over the sizzle. So what happens now?

We start by playing with Vista and listening to the inevitable complaints and praises. But this OS is not designed to be a good candidate for upgrading older systems. This is something of a new phenomenon.

Thus, people about to phase out old machines might be a little more experimental. And that means trying Linux.

This transition period will not be like all the others. There will be more orphan machines than ever before. It might take years before Vista can achieve even 50 percent market share.

Anything can happen. I’ll be watching. Now, let the reviews begin!

Go off-topic with John C. Dvorak.

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A display of celestial fireworks is expected tonight and in the early hours of tomorrow as showers of “shooting stars” light up the night sky.

Astronomers are predicting that between 80 and 100 vibrant streaks of light an hour should be visible from the ground, even for observers who do not have binoculars or telescopes.

The light show, known as the Perseids, are not caused by real stars but by tiny meteors, objects the size of grains of sand, which burn up in spectacular fashion as they slam into the Earth’s upper atmosphere. The meteors are travelling so fast – about 37 miles per second or 60 times the speed of a bullet – that they vaporise instantly as they hit the relatively thick atmospheric barrier that protects the Earth from the vacuum of space.

Claire Gilby, a spokeswoman for the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, said meteors could appear anywhere in the sky but the best view in Britain should be towards the north-east where the sky will be the darkest, away from the glare of a waning gibbous Moon.

There is no need for binoculars or telescopes because the naked eye provides a wider angle of view. And shooting stars are best seen from out of the corner of your eye due to the way that the eye’s most light-sensitive nerve cells are arranged away from the central focal point of the retina.

“Weather permitting, the sensitivity and wide field of view of the human eye are perfect for watching the Perseids. So, to see the Perseids, all you need to do is sit back and watch the night sky,” Ms Gilby said.

The Perseids appear every July and August as the Earth’s orbit around the Sun crosses the dusty tail of the comet Swift-Turtle, whose centre or nucleus is many millions of miles away. It is these dust particles that burn up to produce the effect of shooting stars.

Meteors are travelling at up to 157,000 mph when they hit the atmosphere at a height of about 60 miles. At that speed they compress the air in front of them to such an extent that it causes temperatures to rise to 1,650C – enough to vaporise the material instantly in a flash of light.

Meteors can range in size from something the size of grit to objects as big as a pea or a marble. Bigger meteors can sometimes survive the encounter with the atmosphere to reach the ground, when they are called meteorites.

The comet, named after the two American astronomers, Lewis Swift and Horace Turtle, who discovered it in 1862, is the largest object known to make repeated passes near to Earth.

In fact in the early 1990s one astronomer caused some alarm by predicting that the comet could one day pass close enough to Earth to actually hit us – a prediction that was quickly downgraded to a near miss, which will occur sometime in the year 3044.

When the Perseids appear they seem to fly out of the constellation Perseus – hence the name – but in fact this is an optical illusion. It is the same illusion that causes snowflakes to come straight at you from a single point on the road when you drive through a snow storm.

The early hours are usually the best time to see the Perseids because this is when that point of the Earth begins to face the direction in which the meteors are coming from – the constellation Perseus.

As the Earth slowly rotates, the side facing the direction of its orbit around the Sun runs into more grains from the cometary tail. This direction is right overhead at dawn, which is why about twice as many shooting stars are seen before dawn than at sunset

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I remember when Madonna first broke on the music scene, it was kinda corny pop music that young girls seemed to enjoy, but as Madonna grew older, her music began to suck really bad, and she at one point decided she was from England because she started talking with an english accent. It was rediculous. She then began to talk about herself in the third person as if she were royalty.

I remember it like it was yesterday, hearing that idiot talking like she was actually someone to be taken seriously. She would get on her soapbox and piss and moan about topical news and politics that she knew nothing about. It was really quite pathetic.

Well ladies and gentlemen, my greatest dream has come to pass. Madonna got old. And I’m not talking old like Jaclyn Smith, who is still a very attractive woman. I am talking old like Cher. Madonna looks like an old gypsy!!! She has this big gap in her teeth, her eyes are a mess, Her nose has gotten bigger and she is beginning to get that big hump in her back and all ….. It just doesn’t get any better than that. To see this vapid, self centered bitch turn into an old shrew just makes my day! I can’t believe that after her last album sold just 20,000 copies that anyone would pay to see he in concert. P.T. Barnum was right. There is a sucker born every minute. JD

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Here is something I like to poke fun at from time to time. Global Warming. The “chicken little” sky is falling crowd. This group of motards sit around in fear. They are afraid of virtually everything. I have a few friends that are part of this group and when I talk to them about it, they are afraid to walk out their front door for fear that the sky will come down and crush them where they stand. For the record, there is no such thing as global warming. Consider this. The Staples Center here in Los Angeles (where the Lakers play) has about 950,000 square feet of space which houses about 38 million cubic feet of air space to heat and cool. It takes about 2850 tons (One ton equals 12,000 british thermal units an hour) of heating/air conditioning system to warm the building 1.5 degrees an hour on an average day. A cold day for us here in Los Angeles is about 45 degrees. It would take 2,266 automobiles at an idle an hour to do the same thing if you could fit them all in the building at the same time. Most of this heating would happen because of the heat produced by the power train itself, not the exhaust. The earth has enough air to fill roughly 2.5 billion Staples Centers, give or take a few hundred. Let’s not forget that the earth is creating fresh air all day long as well. Based on these numbers it would take fifteen billion, eight hundred million SUV’s running at about 2,200 RPM (roughly eight times idle) to heat the earth one tenth of one degree in TWENTY FOUR HOURS!!! Think about that before you start to cry about global warming.

Read the article

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This is the new Dojak Blog. Here is what I intend to do with this site. I want to point out on an almost daily basis how the weak and apathetic in our society are responsible for what is now going on within the body politic. This is your fault mother f*&%er!!! All of you that sit on your fat ass and cry about how your vote doesn’t make any difference and the “who cares anyway” crowd. I am going to do a PODcast from this site as well. It will be about news of the day, politics and why illegal immigration needs to be stopped. I also intend to ruin as many political careers as possible Starting with David Dreier, Congressman of the 26th district (where I live) of California. For those of you that don’t know, A bunch of us dopey Californians got together and in a grass roots effort nearly unseated Mr. Dreier in one of the most conservative districts in California. And get this…. We ran a lesbian Democrat againt him!!! For those of you that are not familiar with Mr. Dreier, he is the chair of the House Rules Commitee, which makes him the third most powerful man in Washington. So here it is, I hope you will enjoy my tirades and contribute as much as you can.

Regards;
John De Gennaro

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Check this shit out. Microsoft actually tells it’s customer base not to use Internet Explorer because of potential hacks!!! This is amazing. Again proving to the world that Microsoft is the best company in the world at selling inferior product.

Internet Explorer

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