Introducing Microsoft Eeewww!

Imagine booting up your computer and going to check your email. As you read a message from your dad talking about the family’s Christmas plans, an ad for Christmas tree decorations appears beside the message. Your friend writes you and is talking about how school is going, and buying textbooks, and ads for bookstores and finding schools near you appear. Then you decide to start writing the essay you have to get done for school, and ads for places where you can get cheap essays and plot summaries spawn in a frame beside your essay. Frustrated, you turn on some music. Every so often, in between your songs, ads for online music stores are played. Is this the case of some idiot filling their computer with spyware? Sadly, no. It’s Microsoft’s vision of the future.

Yep, Microsoft wants to make it possible for advertiser’s to gather data from your personal files to help them target ads at you by allowing the very programs you use to write those files to mine it out and serve it up to them. Personal files. Like the files you don’t want shared with the world. They might have private information in them, information that might lead to having your identity stolen if it fell into the wrong hands, which is very possible if your files are used as fuel for advertisers.

Then, they want to throw those ads in your face by cramming them on the same screen where you’re trying to do productive work. They even want video-editing programs to show video ads! Yeah, because annoying the piss out of your customers is going to make them support the advertisers. Right. What rock has Microsoft been under? Have they not noticed how much people hate spyware and adware? They must have, because they created a program to supposedly help combat it. It’s horribly inadequate and not worth downloading, but they did make one.

Can’t you just imagine the great fun that using a computer running windows will become if this goes through? I doubt it has a chance, but if it does manage to succeed, I’ll seriously consider linux or the Mac.

Update On The Drunks Looking For Cabs Thing

It looks like there’s a solution to the problem of the drunks demanding cabs late at night and waking up the whole neighbourhood. I guess the city approved a plan to set up taxi stands during those late-night crazy hours. I didn’t think there would be enough cabs to make that work, but I’m glad there are. Now the neighbours can get some much-needed sleep.

Teach Your Children Well, Or Better Yet, Let Them Teach Themselves

Man, England is going to hell. They have CCTV’s everywhere, nobody going to jail for things they should go to jail for, and now, a bunch of people responsible for education think that kids should set their own tests and grade themselves.

Hmmm, I can’t see any problem with that, can you? I guess, if they follow through with this, they wouldn’t have to worry about low test scores. Everybody would ace every test!

I start to wonder why we’d have teachers at that point. They want the kids to pick the questions, high school students to make up homework assignments and devise marking schemes, and the kids to grade each other. I’m just picturing the students who were in my grade nine class, and what it would have looked like if the teacher had let that idea loose on us. My classmates liked to wrestle over desks and throw rulers. I don’t think they were too into self-assessment.

I’m amazed that a whole group of people thought this idea was a good one. Then again, it just goes to show how good self-assessment is.

Maybe It’s Part Of The Plan To Kill Off A Few Extra Children

You know, we really shouldn’t be too surprised when China uses high amounts of lead in the toys they make. I mean, this should already be a no-brainer. But it becomes especially unsurprising when they are too cheap to build a bridge over a raging river so some of their kids can get to school, so the little ones have to be hoisted over by cable. One kid actually said, “I used to dream of having a bridge, but then I learned that my dream
was too expensive.”

Too expensive? For China? Who filld this kid’s head with bullshit? Why do I bother to ask? They have more than enough dough to build a bridge so some kids don’t go swimming in the river.

Now a bridge is being built, but only because the image of the little ones got out to the media and China thinks it looks bad.

And we still call them a developed nation. I don’t know what they have developed into, but it’s not good.

Poisonous Stupidity

Ok, why is it that the completely dumb among us do things to themselves that should earn them a Darwin award, but manage to live? The latest moron is Matt Wilkenson.

Strike 1. He kept a pet rattle snake.
Strike 2. He put it down his throat because he thought it would be funny.
Strike 3. It bit him, shooting enough venom straight into his throat to kill 12-15 men.
He should be out!

Nope. After doctors stuck a breathing tube down his throat, injected several rounds of anti-venin into him and then put him in a medical coma for three days, he’s still alive, kickin’, and just as stupid, saying things like “It was kind of my own stupid fault.” Kind of? Well, that’s a start.

It doesn’t seem fair that he’s going to be fine, but someone else will have something happen to them that’s completely out of their control and die.

Would This Be Ouch, Or Would It Be Fuck Fuckity Fuck Fuck Ouch!?

Don’t ask me how things like this happen, because I don’t know. but what I do know is that it would have sucked a big juicy hard one to be Venezuelan car accident victim Carlos Camejo who, after being declared dead, surprised medical examiners by waking up during his autopsy, or as the article so eloquently put it, was
“woken from his undead state by the “excruciating pain” of a scalpel to the face.”

The Top 20 Most Bizarre Experiments Of All Time

This is a very interesting and at times very frightening list of some of the strangest scientific experiments ever conducted. While some of them seem like things dreamed up by people who are flat out nuts, quite a few of them offer up a not always flattering glimpse into how the human mind works.

#7: The Stanford Prison Experiment

Philip Zimbardo was curious about why prisons are such violent places. Is it because of the character of their inhabitants, or is it due to the corrosive effect of the power structure of the prisons themselves?

To find out, Zimbardo created a mock prison in the basement of the Stanford psychology department. He recruited clean-cut young men as volunteers — none had criminal records and all rated “normal” on psychological tests — and he randomly assigned half of them to play the role of prisoners and the other half to play guards. His plan was that he would step back for two weeks and observe how these model citizens interacted with each other in their new roles.

What happened next has become the stuff of legend.

Social conditions in the mock prison deteriorated with stunning rapidity. On the first night the prisoners staged a revolt, and the guards, feeling threatened by the insubordination of the prisoners, cracked down hard. They began devising creative ways to discipline the prisoners, using methods such as random strip-searches, curtailed bathroom privileges, verbal abuse, sleep deprivation, and the withholding of food.

Under this pressure, prisoners began to crack. The first one left after only thirty-six hours, screaming that he felt like he was “burning up inside.” Within six days, four more prisoners had followed his lead, one of whom had broken out in a full-body stress-related rash. It was clear that for everyone involved the new roles had quickly become more than just a game.

Even Zimbardo himself felt seduced by the corrosive psychology of the situation. He began entertaining paranoid fears that his prisoners were planning a break-out, and he tried to contact the real police for help. Luckily, at this point Zimbardo realized things had gone too far. Only six days had passed, but already the happy college kids who had begun the experiment had transformed into sullen prisoners and sadistic guards.

Zimbardo called a meeting the next morning and told everyone they could go home. The remaining prisoners were relieved, but tellingly, the guards were upset. They had been quite enjoying their new-found power and had no desire to give it up.

The full article is here, and it’s a great read if you’ve got some time to kill.

You were attacked bya what?

This is just weird. Nancy Campbell and her eight-year-old daughter were walking around in their Oregon neighbourhood when they were attacked by a…Llama? Yep, it was a llama. What’s even weirder is it didn’t escape from a petting zoo. It was someone’s private pet! Wanna know something even weirder? It was diagnosed with the strangest name for a syndrome ever. Berserk Llama Syndrome. Yup, that’s the technical veterinary name for the disorder. And here’s the kicker. Four other llamas have been euthenized in Oregon for having this disease. Um, don’t move to Oregon.

What is Wrong With This Judge?

This is another one of those cases where I have no words.

Mitchell Pask was convicted by a jury of felony child-enticement because he tried to lure a nine-year-old child to a park shelter for sex, but then the judge dismissed the case, saying the shelter wasn’t secluded enough!

Yup. You heard me right. The jury saw the shelter, deemed it secluded, and convicted accordingly. he did try to lure her there, talking about sexy girls and offering her candy. He even gestured towards the shelter’s bathroom, asking her to follow. Thankfully, she refused. He is also up on charges of disorderly conduct involving touching a woman’s breast, and he has previously molested a 12-year-old girl. Yeah, that’s the case where you want to dismiss over a fucking stupid technicality.

Why do we try by jury if a judge can just overturn the whole fucking thing? Is this judge related to this guy? Why else would he quibble over whether a place was secluded enough? Thankfully, he is still being held because of that case involving him touching that woman’s breast, so he’s not going anywhere, and the prosecutors are appealing. Hopefully, he won’t be so lucky the second time.