cobolhacker.com

I’ve done one of these before.  It must be seen to be believed.

This is one of Arctic Cooling’s massive, passive GPU heatsinks.  In this guy’s rig there is maybe a half inch of clearance between the top of it and the port side of his case.  If you look close, I even bothered to stick these cute little heatsinks to all eight of the DDR2 microchips.  I did the northbridge on this system too (annoying work at the best of times) and had to mod the GPU heatsink slightly so that it would fit over top the fairly tall CoolerMaster Blue Ice northbridge cooler.  And yes, the fan on it glows blue.  How l33t is that!

A guy posted a comment on the original story regarding the attack on Flight 253.  He basically said, “Naked flights, you know they are coming.”

Sadly, he might be right.  I’m kind of curious to see how much the security types are going to turn the screws and how long before the public simply don’t bother to fly anymore.  I personally have no interest in flying these days.  The kind of bullshit you have to deal with at the airport is too much and this kind of thing is only going to make it worse.

The irony is that monster security at the airport didn’t detect the potential bomber.  An Air Marshall didn’t take him out.  It was passengers on the plane who took care of it.

Okay.  This is cool.

The dude you’re hearing is filming a Space Shuttle launch from inside a commercial flight nearby.

Look how fast it’s going.

You’d better believe it, it only takes 10 minutes to get to orbit, but to attain a low Earth orbit requires an orbital velocity of 7500 meters per second or so — around 27000 kph.  Faster even than the 401.  That’s why the Shuttle has such big fuel tanks.  And if you think that’s nuts, it takes maybe 150,000 kph to escape the solar system.

This is more of a Halloween story, but whatever.  Section 365 of the Criminal Code of Canada declares:

365. Every one who fraudulently

(a) pretends to exercise or to use any kind of witchcraft, sorcery, enchantment or conjuration,
(b) undertakes, for a consideration, to tell fortunes, or
(c) pretends from his skill in or knowledge of an occult or crafty science to discover where or in what manner anything that is supposed to have been stolen or lost may be found,
is guilty of an offence punishable on summary conviction.

I’m not making this up and go here if you don’t believe me.  But it’s nice to know that if you are actually a real witch or sorcerer or whatever, you are not committing a crime.  Gosh, Canadian law thinks of everything!

bob is older today.

bob feels older today.

bob’s body is more broken today.

bob says, “meh.  still here.”

Downtown Iqaluit looks like this:

A lot of towns in Nunavut look like this.  An old friend of mine works there.  Braver man than me – I have this phobia of being in a place without trees and fields and stuff like that.  Guess its all about where you grew up.

photo courtesy of Vincent K. Chan

I got to thinking about the climate change conference in Copenhagen and I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s not going to do jack.

Now before you go thinking of me as an environment hater, let me assure you that I am not.  I tend to side with the hippies on this one.  At the very least we need to study the problem more to figure out what is happening and how to stop it, if it can be stopped.  But Copenhagen is not going to do that and I don’t think Canada should agree to anything there.  Here’s why.

When you look at carbon dioxide emissions per capita, Canada looks really bad, in fact we are number 10 on the list just behind the U.S. and just ahead of Australia.  But this is a global problem so per capita means nothing – we must consider total man-made CO2 output of the entire planet.  And when you look at total carbon dioxide emissions per country you get a much different picture.

Canada is 8th on that list, still a fairly shameful place to be, but the numbers speak for themselves.  51.8 percent of the CO2 in the world is generated by the top five countries and those countries are: China, United States, Russia, India and Japan.  If Canada slashes CO2 emissions by one quarter we are only saving the world around 136,000 tonnes of CO2, a spit in the bucket compared to those lot.  In fact, a 10 percent cut in CO2 by China or the U.S. is more than all the CO2 that Canada emits in a year.

To make the greatest change to CO2 emissions would require tremendous change from those five for there to be any real global impact.  The rest of the world can agree to punishing sanctions and it really isn’t going to do much except cause suffering in those countries.

And this is why Copenhagen is going to fail.  What do you suppose the chances are that any of those five countries besides maybe Japan, are going to agree on substantial reductions in CO2?

on this blustery, snowy, bastard of a day i see people wandering around miserable but i don’t see them dying by the thousands.  how could this be?  swine flu was going to kill us all.  it was spanish flu++

british researchers have discovered (through brilliant scientific methods like noticing people weren’t dying by the thousands) that h1n1 isn’t all that dangerous.

gosh.  i feel a great sense of relief because i didn’t bother to get my shot.  there were some calling for the arrest and quarantine of people like me.  i’d tell them if i could that i’m not antivax i’m just anti-bullshit.

but the bullshit train is off the chain.  this is our world today.  my prediction is that something new will be trying to kill you next year.  the news will start up in the summer.

Michael Geist offers delicious nugget of irony: the CRIA is being sued for copyright infringement.  It seems that while the CRIA wants to make you into a criminal for personal file sharing, their members have been selling Chet Baker’s work without paying his estate.  Apparently this is a common practice with music labels.  Makes you wonder who is giving them legal advice because “it’s better to beg for forgiveness than ask for permission” doesn’t seem like a sound legal strategy when one is bootlegging.  In this case, it could cost them six billion.

Personal file copying is just that.  Personal, you and some friends, no money is changing hands.  Selling the work and pocketing the money without giving the artist a cut is piracy.  At least what piracy should be defined as in a rational world.  I hope they get nailed to the wall for this.

http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2009/12/07/copenhagen-climate-change-open.html

That’s 15,000 (you read that right) delegates planning to attend the UN conference on global climate change in Copenhagen.  I’ve been trying to figure out how much CO2 is generated by such a large gathering.  In fact, I’m kind of curious as to why so many people are required to debate this.

Think of all the energy and resources required to host a conference that size.

• Plane rides for at least half of them
• Train rides and/or car rides for the other half
• Food and drink to nourish them
• Places for them to stay for two weeks
• A massive venue for them to meet
• Transit to move them around while they are there
• An army of people to run it all

Not that I think addressing the issue of global climate change is a bad thing, but that is an awful lot of resources to be allocating on, let’s face it, a gathering which will probably amount to nothing more than a global meet and greet.