Okay, this is seriously fucked up

I was chatting with a young man today who was kinda’ handsome.

We talked for a while about HIV.

And then things got down right evil.

He has invited a young guy over with the intent of infecting him intentionally with HIV.

With his knowledge btw.

I am not a lawyer, but this is just wrong.

I know my share of “bug chasers” but this goes way beyond the pale.

I have lived with this illness for over 11 years and it is in no way a gift.

It is not my business, but inviting me to join in makes me a co-conspirator of sorts.

I am so washing my hands of this guy.

As Pris said in “Blade Runner”, “Then we’re stupid and we’ll die.”

As we all shall, so what’s your hurry?

God why would a 25 y/o infect a 16 year old kid?!

I just don’t understand anymore.

<GRUMBLE>

Don’t ever darken my doorway again…

:o(

It is a grey and rainy Thursday morning and almost everything hurts

I suspect that the hair on my head would as well except that I currently don’t have any up there right now.

The hair hurting bit I have always found very curious and I have experienced it on many occasions.

So riddle me this Batman…

If the hair on my scalp is sensing pain, why not my beard?

For the moment that will have to remain a mystery.

Edward has an earache bad enough that he is going to the doctor this morning to have it checked out.

The G-unit’s new PC seems to now have most of his data back.

Albeit via the King Solomon method and it will confuse G to no end I am sure.

Why the previous owner split a 160GB hard drive into two 80GB drives still escapes me.

And as a result G’s My Documents folder needed to be split in two as well.

His C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\My Documents\My Music\iTunes folder now lives on the second partition.

For sake of argument call it D:\My Music\iTunes.

I am sure that there is a way to redirect iTunes to another logical drive but since I never use iTunes (and seeing that the G-unit will not stop masturbating long enough for me to even look at it) I will have to learn about it now it seems.

I really do hate having to learn applications that I never use.

I really should have gone for the Etch-A-Sketch at this point I think.

To re-boot it you simply turn it upside down and shake…

<G>

I have restricted his user rights and only Edward and I have admin powers now.

That should limit the damage that he can do for a while at least.

If any of you can help me out here it would me most appreciated.

Giuseppe has been driving both Edward and I nutz for two days now.

It is probably a 5 minute fix but I just don’t know where to look.

HELP!!!

Peace

Namaste’

John

;o)

While it does not seem obvious to most

The mass storage device in your computer is after all a mechanical device and hence it is subject to wear and tear.

At 7,200 rpm’s these motions do add up over time, like to the tune of 31,449,600 million rotations per year.

And at that rate even ferro-fludic bearings reach end of life failure points.

G’s machine survived a fire 3 years ago and it still went on all this time.

Until last week.

While the discs still spin up and the drive controller still reports the correct geometry, it is otherwise lost to the world.

Using my PATA/SATA USB interface I can query the drive, but only to a degree.

I can see 411 folders, but they are all totally empty.

It seems that having a journalized file system like NTFS ain’t all that it is cracked up to be after all.

In my 30 years in IT/DP management has taught me one thing (if nothing else).

Backup, backup backup.

And then backup your backups, just to be safe.

‘Cause once it is gone, it is gone for good boys and gurls.

It is simple to do and most no one that I know does it on a regular basis.

Restore points don’t count btw, they only save your system’s registry files, not your data.

If your drive shits the bed you are basically hosed.

On all of my machines I have two physical hard drives C: and D:..

The C: drive contains the O/S and the applications; the D: drive has all of the data.

And there is a bonus there; by splitting the drive access across two controllers you can double the bus bandwidth.

It is an old Win9x trick, but it still works.

And yes there is a registry tweak that allows you to point the (My Documents) folder to another drive letter.

But it is beyond the scope of this discussion.

I love the XP invert selection function; it allowed me to move only the contents of the My Music to the same folder on the D: drive with one click.

Now for the last of the turkey, since my dog grabbed my sandwich right off of the counter and it was gone in 30 seconds.

I so want to spank her, but she is an old bitch and has had enough hurt in her life

A good scolding will have to do for now.

Some food, a Temazepam, a cup of tea, and a good hard wank.

Not necessarily in that order…

Peace

Namaste’

John

It is Wednesday and frankly

I feel like crap today to be quite honest, so I am going to just lay low today I think.

Neither Edward or I have felt right since getting our swine flu shots, G is okay but nothing ever seems to phase him.

Having a nice cup of tea and doing my mail and my Tribe stuff.

I will see what else G's machine needs (he said he wants Firefox back) and I will try to inspect his old drive and see if there is anything left to rescue on it.

The "disc read error" is a weird one that I have not seen before.

It does not sound like a drive failure since BIOS would have found it on boot strapping, so the drive's physical geometry still seems to be intact.

If the MBR table was damaged I would expect to see a "missing operating system" message not a read error.

It is a puzzle, and you know how I love puzzles...

I will yank his old drive and see what is there, if anything to recover his iTunes.

Gonna' kill off any turkey that is left.

200mgs of Seroquel and I will be fine.

The upstairs neighbors are being a bit noisy today.

Peace

Namaste'

John

Christmas Trivia: Why do People Kiss Under the Mistletoe?

(2009-Dec-02) -- Pucker up! It's time for a holiday smooch!

Sure, mistletoe is easily the sexiest of all parasitic plants about, but how did this whole lip-locking thing under a parasitic plant tradition begin?

Like many of our traditions, the mistletoe make-out session started in Europe and worked its way across the Atlantic.

According to Norse mythology Baldur, the god of peace was, was shot and killed by an arrow made of mistletoe.

After the other gods saved his bacon and brought him back to life Frigga, the goddess of love, transformed mistletoe into a symbol of love and peace.

Thus, everyone who passes under it must receive a kiss.

Hey, it's the best excuse to kiss a perfect stranger that you're ever going to get.

So give us a kiss, and we’ll buy you a Guinness…

;o)

Sub-notes:

Mistletoe is the common name for a group of hemi-parasitic plants in the order Santalales that grow attached to and within the branches of a tree or shrub. Parasitism evolved only nine times in the plant kingdom; of those, the parasitic mistletoe habit has evolved independently five times: Misodendraceae, Loranthaceae, Santalaceae (formerly considered the separate family Eremolepidaceae), and Santalaceae (formerly treated as the separate family Viscaceae).

Although Viscaceae and Eremolepidaceae were placed in a broadly-defined Santalaceae by Angiosperm Phylogeny Group 2, DNA data indicates that they evolved independently.

The word 'mistletoe' is of uncertain etymology; it may be related to German Mist, for dung and Tang for branch, since mistletoe can be spread in the feces of birds moving from tree to tree. However, Old English mistel was also used for basil.

European mistletoe, Viscum album, is a poisonous plant that causes acute gastrointestinal problems including stomach pain, and diarrhea along with low pulse.

The name was originally applied to Viscum album (European Mistletoe, Santalaceae), the only species native in Great Britain and much of Europe.

Later the name was further extended to other related species, including Phoradendron serotinum (the Eastern Mistletoe of eastern North America, also Santalaceae).

European Mistletoe is readily recognized by its smooth-edged oval evergreen leaves borne in pairs along the woody stem, and waxy white berries in dense clusters of 2 to 6.

In America, the Eastern Mistletoe is similar, but has shorter, broader leaves and longer clusters of 10 or more berries. In the United States, Phoradendron flavescens is commercially harvested for Christmas decorations.

The largest family of Mistletoes, Loranthaceae, has 73 genera and over 900 species.[3] Subtropical and tropical climates have markedly more Mistletoe species; Australia has 85, of which 71 are in Loranthaceae, and 14 in Santalaceae.

Cheers and may we all get lucky this Christmas season.

Peace

Namaste’

John

;o)

WHO: Treat HIV patients sooner

By MARIA CHENG
AP
LONDON (2009-Nov-30) --People infected with the virus that causes AIDS should start treatment earlier than currently recommended, the World Health Organization said Monday.

The U.N. agency issued new guidance advising doctors to start giving patients AIDS drugs a year or two earlier than usual. The advice could double the number of people worldwide who qualify for treatment, adding an extra 3 to 5 million patients to the 5 million already awaiting AIDS drugs.

WHO's previous HIV treatment advice was published in 2006. Since then, several studies have shown people with HIV who start drugs earlier than recommended have a better chance of surviving.

WHO now advises doctors to start HIV patients on drugs when their level of CD4 cells — a measure of the immune system — is about 350. Previously they said doctors should wait until patients' levels hovered around 200. In most Western countries, doctors start treating HIV patients when their CD4 count is about 500.

David Ross, an AIDS expert at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said there is compelling evidence HIV patients should start treatment sooner. People with HIV who aren't on AIDS drugs are more likely to catch a potentially fatal disease like tuberculosis or develop other complications when they do start the drugs, Ross said.

WHO's new recommendations also advise pregnant women with HIV to take the drugs earlier and while breast-feeding. The agency also said countries should phase out the use of the commonly used AIDS drug stavudine because of its toxic side effects. If countries with large outbreaks adopt the guidance, many more people could live longer, healthier lives, said Hiroki Nakatani, a top WHO official in a statement.

Still, WHO's advice raises questions about how countries and donor agencies will pay for the lifelong AIDS treatment. About 4 million people worldwide are receiving AIDS drugs, but another 5 million are still waiting in line. With its new recommendations, WHO guessed that another 3 to 5 million people now qualify for the drugs.

It may also be difficult to convince HIV patients to start the drugs sooner, when some may not have any AIDS symptoms. Putting more patients on the treatment for a longer period of time could also encourage drug resistance.

Ross said many AIDS programs in Africa are already struggling. He added there were anecdotal reports of clinics turning away new patients eligible for treatment because they didn't have enough drugs to treat them.

Some experts said the new WHO guidance could add billions to the cost of global AIDS programs. "WHO may be biting off more than they can chew," said Philip Stevens, a director at International Policy Network, a London-based think tank. "I'm not sure how this will be possible to achieve, other than by cutting lots of corners," he said.

On the Net:
www.who.int/hiv


And Stavudine AKA d4t (Zerit) is vile shit, I took it for eight years and it killed the long nerves in my hands and feet.

As a result I have now have peripheral neuropathy and it is most likely irreversible at this point and I am in pain much of the time.

But I did start HAART (Highly Active AntiRetroviral Therapy) 11 years ago when my CD4's were 495 and I am now at very comfortable 1,155 and in pretty good shape all thing considered.

I survived AZT which almost killed me while on vacation at Disney, made it througt d4t, and finally fired my ID guy after eight years because he didn't know what the Hell he was doing.

I have a new Infectious Disease doctor who is one of the best on the East coast, a new shrink that I like, and I am now on Truvada and Viramune and am doing very well.

So, in celebration of World AIDS Day just let me say that I am happy to still be here to be able to write this.

And in remembrance of all who are no longer with us...

Peace

Namaste'

John

:o(

Leaked document says EU fears Obama backs 'three strikes' for Net pirates

Sam Gustin
RSS
Feedwww.dailyfinance.com
(2009-Nov-29) -- Controversy over the secret global agreement on copyrights and counterfeiting being pushed by the United States erupted Monday after a leaked European Union document emerged suggesting the U.S. is pushing other nations to adopt a draconian global uniform policy. If established, the treaty could involve re-writing the law in many countries -- including the U.S. -- to include a "three strikes" policy similar to one recently passed in France, as well as possibly even jail time -- yes, jail time -- for Internet pirates.

President Barack Obama used an executive order last spring to keep the negotiations secret on "national security" grounds, but for the last several weeks, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, as it's called, has elicited growing cries of alarm.

Last month, potential members of the agreement, which include the world's rich nations -- and pointedly not China or other so-called developing nations -- concluded their sixth round of talks in South Korea. The next round is scheduled for January.

Europe 'Taken Aback by the American Position'

The leaked document is dated Oct. 29 and was published two weeks ago at linksaktiv.de, the website of a left-of-center German political party, says Michael Geist, a law professor who has been closely monitoring the issue at the University of Ottawa, where he holds the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law. "I don't even think they knew what they had," he says.

"This document provides evidence of an attempt by the United States to drive countries toward a three-strikes policy, and it would also dramatically change U.S. law," Geist told DailyFinance.

The United States Trade Representative, Ron Kirk, who reports directly to President Obama, is currently negotiating the agreement on behalf of the American public, which Geist believes is woefully uninformed about the treaty, thanks in large part to its secrecy.

"There is complete omission of any kind of balance here, because it is being strictly driven through the prism of rights-holders," Geist says, speaking about Hollywood and the major American entertainment companies.

"Even the Europeans were taken aback by the American position," Geist says.

In the text, the EU representatives expressed alarm over the apparent lack of balance in the U.S. position, which, again, has not been made public. "This is a very important deficit of the current text," the EU said in the document. "It is politically very important to emphasize balance and fairness, to mention culture and individual creators and not only industry."

Information Blackout Is in Force

Geist suggested there is a reasonable middle ground, but in light of the treaty's secrecy, it is difficult to know where the negotiating parameters lie.

"I think a lot of people would be okay with protecting content, but this is about access," Geist says, referring to the ability of Internet providers to cut off the service of suspected internet pirates in exchange for a "safe harbor" from prosecution. In order to monitor Internet traffic for potential infringement, the providers would use controversial surveillance techniques, including "deep packet inspection," through which they would would track users' web activity for violations.

Last week, Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, an independent, and Democrat Sherrod Brown of Ohio wrote to the Obama administration expressing their concern over the treaty. "The public has a right to monitor and express informed views on proposals of such magnitude," the senators argued. "For that to happen, they need to have access to information, including relevant meeting details such as time, place, agenda and participants, reports or minutes of meetings, and key documents and negotiating texts distributed to all members of the negotiation."

But the U.S. and other nations have refused to release information about the talks, leading watchers of the agreement to rely on leaked documents -- and causing a whirlwind of rumor and speculation without mush basis in fact.

Chris Israel, the second Bush administration's coordinator for international intellectual property enforcement, told DailyFinance last week that it makes sense to conduct the talks in secret. "The process behind ACTA is not substantively different from similar trade agreements," said Israel, managing partner at PCT Government Relations, which represents a major media company involved in the talks that Israel declines to name.

"This is an agreement between leading economies on intellectual property that seeks to tie together various individual bilateral agreements in a more comprehensive way. It's just a good thing to do," Israel said. "But it's not something you can negotiate online in the blogosphere. This involves senior officials talking in confidence with each other, going over the text line by line."


This is just EVIL folks!

Pass it along to everyone that you know...

On the Net:

www.dailyfinance.com/2009/11...-for-ne/


:o(

Posted a new YouTube Video

The British prog-rock group Alan Parsons Project formed in London in the mid 70's by Englishman Alan Parsons and Scotsman Eric Woolfson.

As the Alan Parsons Project they released their first album in 1976, Tales of Mystery and Imagination and although it's experimental sound kept it from lighting up the charts, critically it was generally well received.

No doubt Alan Parsons Project are best known for their sixth album Eye in the Sky (1982), which produced their most well known hit "Eye in the Sky" as well as the instrumental "Sirius". In addition to album work the pair wrote and produced many film scores, most notably for Ladyhawke (1985).

Some lovely CGI work on this one btw.

I do so love "The Alan Parson's Project"...

www.youtube.com/watch

Title: Some Other Time

Artist: Alan Parsons Project

Album: I Robot (Vinyl 1977, CD 1990)


In a matter of a moment

Lost till the end of time

It's the evening of another day

And the end of mine

Now the starlight which has found me

Lost for a million years

Tries to linger as it fills my eyes

Till it disappears

Could it be that somebody else is

Looking into my mind

Some other place

Somewhere

Some other time

Some other place

Somewhere

Some other time

Like a mirror held before me

Large as the sky is wide

And the image is reflected

Back to the other side

Could it be that somebody else is

Looking into my mind

Some other place

Somewhere

Some other time

Some other place

Somewhere

Some other time...

Peace

Namaste'

John

;o)

Big Bang Machine Sets Power Record

By ALEXANDER G. HIGGINS
AP
GENEVA (2009-Nov-30) - The world's largest atom smasher on Monday broke the record for proton acceleration previously held by a U.S. lab, sending beams of the particles at 1.18 trillion electron volts around the massive machine.

The Large Hadron Collider eclipsed the previous high of 0.981 TeV held by Fermilab, outside Chicago, since 2001, said the European Organization for Nuclear Research, also known as CERN.

The world's biggest atom-smasher, the Large Hadron Collider, set a record for proton acceleration Monday, breaking a record held by a lab near Chicago since 2001, scientists said. The $10 billion machine went through extensive repairs last year. Here, scientists work to restart the machine on Nov. 20.

The latest success, which came early in the morning, is part of the preparation to reach even higher levels of energy for significant experiments next year on the make-up of matter and the universe.

It comes on top of a rapid series of operating advances for the $10 billion machine, which underwent extensive repairs and improvements after it collapsed during the opening phase last year.

CERN Director-General Rolf Heuer said early advances in the machine located in a 17-mile tunnel under the Swiss-French border have been "fantastic."

"However, we are continuing to take it step by step, and there is still a lot to do before we start physics in 2010," Heuer said in a statement. "I'm keeping my champagne on ice until then."

The organization hopes the next major step will be to collide the proton beams at about 1.2 TeV before Christmas for an initial look at the tiny particles and what forces might be created.

Ultimately, scientists want to create conditions like those 1 trillionth to 2 trillionths of a second after the Big Bang — which scientists think marked the creation of the universe billions of years ago.

Physicists also hope the collider will help them see and understand other suspected phenomena, such as dark matter, antimatter and supersymmetry.

The level reached Monday isn't significantly higher than what Fermilab has been doing, and real advances are not expected until the LHC raises each beam to 3.5 TeV during the first half of next year.

CERN said one of the two small beams of protons first broke the energy level Sunday evening when it was accelerated from the initial operating energy of 450 billion electron volts late Sunday evening.

"Three hours later both LHC beams were successfully accelerated to 1.18 TeV," shortly after midnight, the organization said.

Beams were colliding last week at low energy, to make sure the machine was working properly. But they have yet to be smashed together at higher intensity.

Steve Myers, CERN's research and technology director, said he had been at CERN when it switched on the last major particle accelerator, the Large Electron-Positron collider that operated from 1989-2000.

"I thought that was a great machine to operate, but this is something else," he said. "What took us days or weeks with LEP, we're doing in hours with the LHC. So far, it all augurs well for a great research program."

CERN said operators will continue preparing the 2,000 superconducting magnets and other parts so that the energy can be increased safely.

Attempts to make new discoveries at the LHC are scheduled for the first quarter of 2010, at a collision energy of 7 TeV (3.5 TeV per beam).

The electron volt is an extremely small measure used in particle physics. One TeV is about the energy of the motion of a flying mosquito, but it becomes signficant in the submicroscopic collisions of the collider.

The energy is concentrated in the hairline beams of particles that whiz around the accelerator at near the speed of light. Although apparently small to the outsider, CERN uses a great amount of electricity and powerful equipment to raise the energy of the beam.

The speed can increase only slightly when the accelerator steps up the power, but that raises the force with which the protons will collide, revealing more insight into what makes them up.

It may take several years before the LHC can make the discovery of the elusive Higgs boson, the particle or field that theoretically gives mass to other particles. That is widely expected to deserve the Nobel Prize for physics.

The LHC operates at nearly absolute zero temperature, colder than outer space, which allows the superconducting magnets to guide the protons most efficiently.

Physicists have used smaller, room-temperature colliders for decades to study the atom. They once thought protons and neutrons were the smallest components of the atom's nucleus, but the colliders showed that they are made of quarks and gluons and that there are other forces and particles.

More than 8,000 physicists from labs around the world also have work planned for the Large Hadron Collider. The organization is run by its 20 European member nations, with support from other countries, including observers from Japan, India, Russia and the United States, which have made big contributions.


We are getting there, inch by inch...

;o)

IBM's quest for cognitive computers hits a milestone: Simulating a cat's brain

Melly Alazraki
www.dailyfinance.com
(2009-Nov-29) -- The brain is an amazing thing. "It consumes less power than a light bulb and occupies less space than a two-liter bottle of soda," writes Dharmendra S. Modha, manager of cognitive computing at IBM (IBM), in his blog. Yet it performs functions no computer can -- many of them quite basic. Think of those blurry, squiggly jumbles of letters and numbers that web sites use to make sure they're dealing with a human being. Your brain can sense, perceive, reason, and coordinate different functions in a constantly changing environment; it can handle ambiguity and abstraction.

There's not an app for that -- yet. But computer scientists at IBM have a longterm goal of achieving cognitive computing, a mindlike artificial intelligence, allowing computers to handle far more complex systems, such as finding patterns throughout the Web, the way humans can pick out a face from a crowd.

Thinking Like a Cat

To that end, Big Blue announced two milestones last week: simulating a cat's cerebral cortex and unveiling a new software that maps how a brain works. For the first, scientists and university collaborators used the Blue Gene supercomputer (with 147,456 processors and 144 terabytes of memory). The simulation ran 100 to 1,000 times slower than a real cat's brain, but it simulated one billion neurons and 10 trillion synapses -- more than the amount in a cat's brain.

The simulated cat's brain isn't a virtual cat. The simulation is intended as a tool allowing researchers to study behavior and dynamics within the brain.

The scientists also unveiled a software application called BlueMatter. Using a certain type of MRI, the software can map the workings and connections of the brain's regions and how they communicate when given stimuli.

Obviously, an array of supercomputers that still can't do basic brain functions isn't close to being an artificial brain. But as researchers make advances in neuroscience and computer science, they're closer to building a computer that can emulate a brain's function. IBM's goal is "building a compact, low-power, compact cognitive computers that approach mammalian-scale intelligence and use significantly less energy than today's computing systems."

Up Next: Monkey Business

Cognitive computing could be used in numerous applications: to monitor complex systems such as weather and traffic, to find and analyze patterns in large amounts of data, and to predict problems while accounting for context and previous experience. IBM predicts these innovations will spark new industries, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is interested.

Next, the researchers plan to simulate a monkey's brain. Simulation of a human cortex could come within the next decade, assuming a continuing rate of advances in computer chips and memory storage, Modha says. A human scale cortical simulation will probably require four petabytes of memory -- that's 4,000 terabytes, or 4 million gigabytes -- and running these simulations in real time will have to perform more than one exaflop/s, or 15 quintillion calculations per second.

Soul of a New Machine

But simulating the brain's brawn is the relatively easy part. The real challenge will be achieving the brain's essence: how to wire up a cognitive system. Neuroscience, despite significant advances, is still far off from achieving that. So it's far too early to estimate what this feat could mean to IBM, but we can expect great things. It's in the company's heritage -- maybe in its DNA -- to stay at the forefront of technology and computer science.

For now, other questions arise, many of them seemingly from the realm of science fiction. Could a cognitive computer gain consciousness? Could it be self-aware? And how would that change the meaning of the concept of the human soul?

Could human brains be uploaded to computers and become entities run on a machine or a robot? And if cognitive computers could mimic all brain functions, they could also learn -- so could they then progress and improve their own designs beyond human intelligence, thus achieving the concept of singularity? For now, we'll have to wait and wonder.


Well if anyone can do it Big Blue will probably do it 1st...

;o)