Daily Archives: April 4, 2009

Gun Nut Kills Three Cops in Pittsburgh

You have probably heard about the shooting in Pittsburgh. The details are still sketchy, but word on the street is that the shooter, who killed three cops, was upset about a law placing some restrictions on gun ownership. He was also upset about secret government activities that “they are not telling us about.”

Do what extent does Gun Nut = Paranoid Maniac who should not be trusted near firearms?

UPDATE:

Police chief Nate Harper says the motive for Saturday’s shooting isn’t clear. Friends say the gunman recently had been upset about losing his job and that he feared the Obama administration was poised to ban guns.

Neighbors said the shooting began at about 7 a.m. and that two officers were shot almost immediately.

“When I looked down I saw two police officers laying in the street,” said Don Sand, who lives across the street and was awoken by the sound of gunfire.

A short time later, more officers, SWAT teams and other law enforcement arrived and a third officer was shot, Sand said.

“They couldn’t get the scene secure enough to get to them. They were just lying there bleeding,” Sand said. “By the time they secured the scene enough to get to them it was way too late.”

Gail Moschetti, who lives diagonally across the street from the Poplawski house, said she heard hundreds of shots as she and her husband took refuge in their basement. Tom Moffitt, 51, a city firefighter who lives two blocks away, said he came to the scene and heard “hundreds, just hundreds of shots.”

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How many more out of control shooting events do we need before we simply place severe restrictions on gun ownership?

For a long time I was willing to take the rights of gun owners seriously. But most gun owners seem to want not even the most sensible and basic restrictions, and continue to argue that they should be left entirely unregulated, as events such as this one continue to happen, and possibly increase in frequency. Obviously, these NRA-symps cannot be trusted to make the kind of important decisions that need to be made.

Gun nuts: If you don’t start getting real, your worst fears may well be realized as we sane people come to take your guns away forever. Start making sense or get out of the way as the rest of us march forward towards a more civilized world.

Did Conflicker Flop? Yes. Why? Nobody knows.

Contrary to what some have suggested, the worm did, in fact, do what it was expected to do — it activated, giving the worm-masters full administrator-level control over some five million infected PCs, and making itself much more difficult to detect and fight. The worm generates URLs by which the master computer communicates with infected machines, constantly staying ahead of the efforts of security experts to shut them down. Beginning yesterday, the botnet began communicating over 50,000 domain names in 116 countries — a dramatic increase over the 250 URLs used by previous versions of the the worm.

source

Experts expect that the worm is going to re-awaken at some time in the future and possibly actually do something. In the mean time, you ma want to get rid of it if is on your system.

If you run Windows, the best way to get rid of the computer is to get a Mac or a Linux computer. There are probably other ways to do this but I don’t really care. If you are running Linux, this worm can’t directly affect you. But if you have a network with some windows computers on it, from the Linux perspective, you can do this to deal with the worm on your network.

The Ice Ages Matter (Even Today)

A very large percentage of the earth’s land masses were covered by glacial ice during the last glaciation. Right now it is about 10%, but during the Ice Age it was much more. Enough of the earth’s water was trapped in this glacial ice that the oceans were about 120 to 150 meters lower than they are now. The thicker ice sheets were one or two kilometers thick, and they tended to slide around quite a bit, grinding down the surface of the earth and turning bedrock into dust and cobbles.

Continue reading The Ice Ages Matter (Even Today)