… slam you in the ass on your way out.

Chris Willett is leaving the discussion about “elevatorgate” or so he says here. I am certain, though, that he is not. Nobody writes a letter like that then really walks away. And as far as I’m concerned he’s more than welcome to stay in the discussion, not that I have any say in who remains in the discussion and who does not.

This happened around midnight or 12:30 in Aurora, Colorado, which is near Denver. There is someone in custody. The mall theater was showing “The Dark Knight Rises.” The shooter fired from the front of the theater, shooting into the audience, after releasing a canister of some sort of gas.

10 people died at the theater, including some very young kids; four died at the hospital; 10 or so are being treated at the hospital; presumably the others said to be injured were treated at the scene. Some are being treated for chemical exposure.

The FBI has claimed that this does not appear to be terrorism. Yeah, I know, I’m heading for the dictionary just now.

Most of the injuries are not gunshot wounds, but from “shrapnel” caused by gunshot wounds, according to an Aurora police spokesperson. That makes sense. We wouldn’t want to blame guns for anything they didn’t actually do.

The police are looking everywhere for explosives: the theater, the parking lot where the gunman was arrested, and the gunman’s apartment.

This from Slashdot:

“Microsoft has apologized and promised to rectify the fact that one of its developers slipped a sexist phrase into Linux kernel code supporting Microsoft’s HyperV virtualization environment. In that code, the magic constant passed through to the hypervisor reads ‘0xB16B00B5,’ or a slightly camouflaged ‘BIG BOOBS.’ After Linux developer/blogger Matthew Garrett criticized Microsoft for the stunt, the predictable debate over sexism in the technology world ensued. Microsoft issued a statement to Network World apologizing and added, ‘We have submitted a patch to fix this issue and the change will be published in a future release of the kernel.'”

HREE is the NetworkWorld link.

Now, my question is this. What was really being said? Because I think there are two possible interpretations here. 0xB16B00B5 could be parsed as BIG BOOB S for Big Boob Steve Ballmer, or it could refer to the female body parts.

I’m going for the Steve Ballmer theory.

Climate gate involved the criminal theft of computer based data from University of East Anglia (UEA) researchers by global warming deniers. According to Julian Gregory ,Detective chief superintendent, “the data breach was the result of a sophisticated and carefully orchestrated attack” and that there was no evidence to suggest that anyone working at or associated with UEA was involved in the crime.” However, the criminal perpetrator, we assume a member of the global warming denialist community, was not discovered and the statute of limitations for this particular criminal act runs out in November. Thus, the investigation closed Wednesday.

Leo Hickman has the full story here.

The world’s oldest functioning bra has been discovered. Details are here at the Smithsonian. The same thing happened to me once: I discovered a secret panel in the big-old house I was living in, and there was a crawl space. In it I found WW I era discharge papers from the Italian Army and a whalebone corset from the same time period. This new bra, though, is much older. It is from the 15th century. I’m surprised that people didn’t think that the bra was that old.