Burrowowl

A gaffe is roughly defined as “when a politician accidentally tells the truth.” This is the kind of misstatement that results in press offices racing to rephrase things into a carefully-crafted slate of B.S. that fits better with the message of the day. Earlier today Joe Biden, vice president of the United States, was asked what he would tell his own family in regards to the possibility of a pandemic influenza. Don’t go on airplanes, subways, or other confined places where the air recirculates and the flu can easily spread. That was, unfortunately, a pretty good piece of advice, and politically unspeakable at the moment.

Don’t go on public transit if you have symptoms. That’s the official advice. If you have to cough or sneeze, cover your face. Again, the official advice. Wash your hands frequently. Finally some good advice for avoiding a flu. The other advice has to do specifically with not communicating a flu to other people. If you’ve got the dreaded swine flu, staying off the subway isn’t going to help you. If you have reason to think you have it, get your ass to a doctor.

Nobody wants a public panic or anything, but Joe was just telling it like it is. He doesn’t want his family to get sick in the first place. Oh no.

File under O for “obvious.”

Today the Swedish justice system has found four muckey-mucks from The Pirate Bay guilty and subject to a year each in the klink, along with just under $1,000,000 in penalties each. The charge? “Assisting in making copyright content available.” Huh. The Pirate Bay’s administrators and financial backers were assisting in copyright infringement. Who’da thunk it?

One thing I’m quite unclear on about this matter is why they’ve bothered to fight this (including continuing the operation of the torrent tracker) when apparently they’re going the martyr route. They have been able to offer no defense that their site wasn’t intended to assist in infringing copyrights. This was clearly their intention. The Pirate Bay isn’t a massive clearinghouse for open-source freeware and public domain art. If this is an exercise in civil disobedience, they should be pleading guilty and getting to work on the Swedish nerd version of Letters from a Birmingham Prison.

TorrentFreak link

If you ever find yourself trying to run Disney’s Mickey Mouse Kindergarten or Winnie the Pooh Kindergarten on a Windows Vista Home Premium x64 system, you may find yourself running into the following gem of an error:

Script runtime error
VERIFY: [3s.dcr] OpenForWriting Error:
I/O Error

It then refuses to continue, dumping you back to your desktop. Now, this is a pretty self-explanatory error message, but I fired off a web search anyway. The only page I saw that looks reasonably-likely to provide a solution to this problem wanted me to sign up for an account and provide credit card information. Oh hell no.

As a public service:

After you install, find your shortcut to the launcher and right-click on it. This will give you a pull-down context menu. Select “Preferences” and click on the “Compatibility” tab. Mark the checkbox labeled “Run this program as an Administrator.” Click the button labeled “OK.” Done.

Now every time you use that shortcut you will be prompted to allow it to run as administrator, but it will work and your little kid can stop bugging you about his Mickey game. You’re welcome, Internet.

Earlier this evening, the local paper reported that local congressman Mike Thompson’s office has released a list of all the earmarks he requested for the 2010 federal budget. The total dollar amount is just shy of $395,000,000.00. This was even more than what they reported in this morning’s paper about my representative, Lynn Woolsey; she only asked for $285,000,000.00. Most folks these days seem to like to complain about earmarks, so I’m going to air my complaint too.

Why so little, Mrs. Woolsey? What the heck about district 1 merits $110,000,000.00 more in earmarks than district 6? You see, I’m rather a fan of having my representatives bring home the bacon. I pay my taxes and want my area to get its fair share. I didn’t hire my US Rep to go let some pencilneck in a Virginia office building decide where all the money should go. That guy doesn’t know where Occidental is and whether it really needs wastewater treatment plant improvements. He doesn’t see what happens to south-bound traffic on 101 North of Steele Lane at 4pm on a weekday.

Earmarks are more often good than bad. Some congressmen do a better job of separating the wheat from the chaff than others (Thomspon apparently got $1.2 billion in requests and pared it down to under $400 million, much of which will overlap requests from the White House), but the practice itself is fine. If we don’t like the earmarks we’re benefiting from, we can kick the bums out.

TL;DR – “all politics are local” == “fuck you, John McCain.”

Thompson’s list (PDF)
Woolsey’s list (PDF)