Thursday, June 9, 2011

Today in History: Star Trek V - Shatner's Masterpiece Unveiled

Joseph N. Welch


Greetings and Lamentations,


Today in History, Blog Hero, and fellow Villain, William Shatner unleashed his Masterpiece "Star Trek V: Eat it Nimoy" "Star Trek V: The Final Frontier" in 1989. The vision! The scope! Passionate Vulcans! And a Row-Row-Row-Your Boat Chorale to Stand for the Ages. 


Other events in Infamy;

Today's Birthdays

1981 - Natalie Portman
1963 - Johnny Depp
1961 - Michael J. Fox
1951 Bonnie Tyler, Gaynor Hopkins, rocker, Total Eclipse of the Heart 

1931 - Jackie Mason
1893 - Cole Porter


1989 "Star Trek V: The Final Frontier," premieres in USA
1934 Donald Duck made his 1st screen appearance ("The Wise Little Hen")
1931 1st showing of a Donald Duck cartoon
1924 "Jelly-Roll Blues," is recorded by blues great, Jelly Roll Morton
Courtesy of Brainy History

Significant Footnote in history; 

June 9 In 1954, Army counsel Joseph N. Welch confronted Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy during the Senate-Army Hearings over McCarthy’s attack on a member of Welch’s law firm, Frederick G. Fisher. Said Welch: “Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”
Courtesy of the New York Times

A turning point in the "Red Menace" war on Freedom called McCarthyism - when a patriot took on the "good" McCarthy, and held him to the truth. Like a Villain would. Villain Respect (Posthumous Notation) to Joseph N. Welch - you spoke truth to power, and began the liberation of a nation.  

Animal Brains inside Other Animal's Bodies - It's SCIENCE!

One Animal's Body, Another Animal's Brain

By Miss Cellania in Animals & Pets, Mentalfloss, Science & Tech on Jun 9, 2011 at 5:05 am


Recent advances in genetic research have allowed scientists to grow the brain of one animal inside he body of an entirely different species. Is this the dawning of a new era or a scene out of
The Island of Dr. Moreau?
The idea of splicing animals together isn’t a new one The ancient Greeks fashioned a chimera out of a snake, a goat, and a lion; the Japanese made a baku out of an ox, an elephant, and a tiger. Even today, people are inventing new creatures -only now, they’re using a lot more than their imaginations.
Just ask biologist Todd Streelman. Inside his lab at Georgia Tech, Streelman successfully bred a living animal with the brain of anther species. He started with a cichlid, a type of fish found in Lake Malawai, at the southern tip of Africa’s Great Rift Valley. Over the past 500,000 years, hundreds of different species of the cichlid have evolved from a single ancestor, with each new species developing a distinct set of jaws, teeth, brain, and behaviors to fit their respective environments. Streelman took two species of cichlid fish -rock-dwelling cichlids and sand-dwelling cichlids- and figured out a way to grow a sand-dweller’s brain inside the skull of a rock-dweller. From a distance, that might seem like a simple trick in cross-pollination. But it’s no small feat when you consider that the brains of the two creatures are as different as those of chimpanzees and humans.

Todd Streelman


ANIMAL CROSSING
How’d he do it? The trick to Streelman’s success was figuring out how (and when) the brains of different species distinguish themselves during embryonic development. In the earliest stages of life, the brain of almost every animal starts out looking the same. It begins as a small sheet of rapidly dividing cells that are not yet designed for different functions. But this sheet of cells eventually rolls into a tube, and the cells turn into different types of neurons. The neurons then slowly forms connections uniquely tailored to the creature’s lifestyle. In humans, for example, the brain develops a large cerebral cortex capable of processing language and consciousness. In various species of cichlid fish, the forebrain changes and grows depending on its future environment. More specifically, the sand-dweller’s forebrain develops a large hind region for surviving in open water, while the rock-dweller’s forebrain develops a large front region to navigate Lake Malawi’s murky, cavernous bottom.
In both species, the size and shape of the forebrain is determined by the expression of a gene called Wnt1. In sand-dwellers, this gene sends out a strong signal, while in rock-dwellers, Wnt1’s signal is weak. As part of his study, Streelmen took rock-dweller embryos and placed them in water treated with lithium chloride -a salt that’s known to increase the strength of the Wnt1 signal. This caused the rear section of the rock-dweller’s brain to grow until its brain looked like that of a sand-dweller. In other words, by simply  changing the expression of a single gene, Streelman was able to Frankenstein a new fish.

Cichlid embryo
OF MICE AND MEN
While Streelman has proven that he can grow one species’ brain inside another’s body, there’s no telling if his patchwork creations can survive in their natural environments. To date, most attempts to manipulate neural development in animals have led to brains that look promising in the land but fail to function in the real world. In 2002, for instance, researchers manipulated a mouse’s genetic signals to increase the size of its cerebral cortex. The cortex grew dramatically, forming folds indicative of the intelligence in high-order mammals and humans. But the mutation proved fatal, and the mouse died before it was born.
Some scientists posit that the mouse’s death may have had more to do with the complex relationship between the animal and environment and less to do with ill-suited manipulation. Georg Striedner, and evolutionary biologist at the University of California at Irvine, has found that many animals go through a phase during early development in which they’re particularly vulnerable to injury, starvation, or disease. In order for an animal to survive, something in their external world has to protect them. For instance, many species go through a prolonged period of rapid cell division before their brains become neurons. This ultimately leads to a larger brain, but it also means that the animal’s brain is not fully formed at birth. Parrots are a good example. After parrots hatch, their brains aren’t particularly developed, which forces the babies to rely on their mothers for food. That means that the mothers’ feeding behaviors must have evolved at the exact same time that parrots evolved to have larger brains. Otherwise, parrots would have never become so smart.

Cichlid fish
The process of evolving new traits is clearly complicated. Labs can create animals with shiny new traits, but that doesn’t mean the animals can handle the complexity of the world around them. As for Streelman’s fish, no one knows how their manipulated brains will affect their behavior -or, for that matter, how they’ll fare in nature. In many ways, though, that isn’t the point. The goal of Streelman’s research isn’t to grow new and funky animals; it’s to learn how animals evolve. By discovering the relationship between the animal’s genome and its brain development, scientists ultimately hope to pinpoint the genetic basis of of human thought and behavior. It just may be that, along the way, creatures like the chimera and the baku become more than the stuff of ancient folklore.
_______________________


Shameless Screen Grab courtesy of Neatorama

It's SCIENCE! You Fools. SCIEEENNCE!

Tuesday, June 7, 2011

Lose More Weight (and Live Forever!*) with The Pill Diet

The Top 3 Supplements for Surviving the Singularity

Ray Kurzweil
Inventor, Author, Futurist
If you can survive for 34 more years, you have a good shot at living forever, says futurist Ray Kurzweil. Here are his three favorite dietary supplements that will make sure he's around for the singularity.



Ray Kurzweil: I take 150 pills, which is maybe 70 or 80 different things; there's a different story with each one. Although people find that a very aggressive program, it's actually very conservative, because everything I do actually has a lot of evidence. Aging's not one thing; it's many different things.

1) Coenzyme Q10 is very important, particularly at my age, as an antioxidant.

2) Phosphatidylcholine addresses all by itself a major aging process because that substance depletes from your cell membrane and that's why the skin in an elderly person loses suppleness and your organs don't work very well.

3) I'd throw in Vitamin D. It's very important—maybe the most important vitamin to take. There's tremendous amount of research and a consensus that that really does help prevent cancer and other diseases.


You know how some are Shameless Screen Grabs? This was a Shameless Screen Claw - bits here and there reassembled from Big Think. Of course you may know Mr. Kurzweil from his book "The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology". Ray's recommended drugs: Coenzyme Q10 on Amazon, Phosphatidylcholine on Amazon, and Vitamin D on Amazon. The Singularity, seen also as a  Technological Singularity postulates a time when an emergence of a greater than human intelligence manifests. 


And for the hat trick, Emergence describes how complex patterns arise out of many simple interactions. Protocols form, order from chaos. It is the anti entropy. 



* Results May Vary. Side effects may include normal death. 

Monday, June 6, 2011

David Tennant is Peter Vincent



Courtesy of Youtube

Finally, the puzzle comes together. He's not playing a vampire, he's playing the Roddy McDowall role of Peter Vincent - the vampire hunter from the original Fright Night - and he appears to be wearing a ridiculous costume within the story. Whew. 


It's Always Been True: Villains Saving Civilization (to Rule It)

6 Historical Villains Who Were Actually OK Guys




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Hitler. Stalin. Ivan the Terrible. We all love these guys. Which is to say, we hate them and everything they stand for, but we're secretly glad they existed. Otherwise we'd have to learn about the cultural and political tensions behind world history, as opposed to boiling it down to "there was a bad guy who made crap happen because he was evil."
But sometimes in our haste to find a villain in every situation, we wind up painting some people as cackling cartoon villains when they were really just random guys, or even pretty awesome. Here are a few names you might want to give a second chance:
#6.
Genghis Khan
You Know Him As:
Genghis Khan was a barely-coherent fount of animalistic violence, who tore across Asia with his horde of barbarians laying waste to every village in his path, killing the men, raping the women, eating the children, killing and raping the livestock, burning everything down then raping and eating the ashes, etc. Anything that fits under a modern white person's notion of "pillage," Khan did while laughing a guttural, jackal-like laugh.
But in Reality:
What would you think of a guy who brought all the gangs of South Central Los Angeles together into one happy community? Well, deepen the grudges by about a millennium and expand the whole thing to cover one and a half million square miles, and you've got the task Genghis Khan achieved before he was even famous.
Back in the day, Mongolia was just a bunch of scattered nomadic tribes who would wander around, kill each other, wander around some more and basically be laughably irrelevant on a global scale. Then Genghis came along and united the entire clusterfuck in a couple of decades.
And if you're wondering if his "peace talks" were conducted by a thousand burly men with clubs, sorry, Genghis was always more of a politician than a psychopath. He attracted the allegiance of other tribes by spreading the word that life under his rule was crazy awesome. He did away with the sacred Mongolian tradition of "Fuck the soldiers, just fuck 'em" by allowing defeated enemies to join, giving the men a share in the spoils of war and basing promotions on merit rather than politics. Soldiers had never been treated so well by a commander before, or if you think about it, since.
So once he'd turned Mongolia into one big happy family, his next job was to keep them that way. He figured if the people were left to their own devices they'd get antsy and just drift back into the wandering around and killing each other for lack of a better idea, so he arranged activities to keep them organized, like massive hunts or conquering all of mainland Asia. Seriously, that's a leading theory, that Genghis had his armies invade everything in sight as some kind of team-building exercise. Beats the shit out of softball.
#5.
Benedict Arnold
You Know Him As:
Benedict Arnold fought for the British during the American Revolution. Even worse, he did it despite being American. Attempting to use his position as a general in the Continental Army to gain control of West Point then surrender it to the British, he was discovered, thwarted and his name has since become synonymous with "English muffins topped with bacon, poached eggs and hollandaise sauce." No, wait, "traitor," that's the one.
But in Reality:
Arnold actually did all that stuff. Switching sides, trying to surrender West Point, the whole shebang. But you know what? Considering the circumstances, it's hard to say we blame him.

This shameless display of unmitigated gall, however, is inexcusable.
When you look at pre-treachery Arnold, what you find is an almost comical beacon of good old-fashioned American virtue. After his mother died, he single-handedly supported his sister and suicidally alcoholic father; he enlisted to fight off a French invasion when he was 15; he grew up to be a successful capitalist and family man. If he'd fought a duel against somebody for using "Yankee" as an insult, he would've been the ultimate American. What, he did that? Never mind then.
Then there was his record during the revolution. He planned and led the famous siege of Fort Ticonderoga. Somewhere around here his wife died, but he soldiered on, masterminding the strategic invasion of Quebec, where he held position for weeks despite being cut off from the rest of the army and shot in the leg. He held back the British at Lake Champlain, he was instrumental in the Danbury raid, he was essential to the success of the Battle of Saratoga. If he fell off a bridge and died at this point, there would be a 50-foot tall statue of him in Connecticut, made of platinum and diamonds.
The army must have loved this guy, right? Surely by this stage he was being carried everywhere by a living throne of nubile young women. Wait, instead they repeatedly passed him over for promotion with younger, less experienced men? And other officers tried to take credit for his achievements? And he was investigated by congress on baseless accusations of corruption?
Basically, after all his bravery, sacrifice and bullet holes, America seemed to develop a great passion for kicking Arnold in the gut. It didn't help that at the same time they were creating an alliance with France, the bad guys from Arnold's teenage war adventures. Under those conditions, it's understandable that he'd quit the team.
People may have had more respect for him if, rather than being sneaky about it, he'd yelled "Fuck you all, I'm with England now" as he rode off giving everyone the rudest gesture of the times. It's the betrayal that irks people. But hey, America, you started it.
#4.
Antonio Salieri
You Know Him As:
If you've seen Amadeus, you know who Salieri is. He was the personification of mediocrity's envy of genius, a crappy composer who obsessively used his connections to sabotage the career of that insanely talented punk, Mozart.
Finally he ran out of subtlety and just killed the guy, but Mozart got the upper hand in the end by going down in history as a great composer, while Salieri is only remembered as a jealous prick.
But in Reality:
Sure, Mozart and Salieri competed, for teaching posts and royal commissions and stuff. But that's normal. They were in the same business in the same place at the same time; it's inevitable that they'd sometimes be after the same gig. If you get beaten to a promotion by some other guy at the office, it doesn't mean he was plotting against you with all of his murderous hatred, as tempting as it is to think that he was.
No, Mozart and Salieri seem to have gotten along fine. They once collaborated on a cantata, and Salieri later revived Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro. He also premiered a number of Mozart's major works and not only attended The Magic Flute but cheered like a loon--in fact, it gets to a point where you have to wonder what Mozart ever did for Salieri. Unless you count the cantata, which is kind of like Stephen Hawking "collaborating" with your first-grader on his homework.
Actually, the notion of Salieri as a hack is a lie too; he was highly respected, writing more than 40 operas, some of which are still performed today. He also taught such future composers as Liszt, Schubert, Beethoven, even Czerny. True, he wasn't as good as Mozart, but if you don't see a difference between "not as good as Mozart" and "a talentless bum," your standards might be a bit high.
As for killing Mozart, it hardly merits a response; it's a plain fact that Mozart died after several months severe illness. If you paid attention to your one-stop shop for Salieri myths, the play and movie Amadeus, you'll see that even it grudgingly hints at the true nature of Mozart's death, particularly in the part where Mozart spends half an hour getting sick and dying. It still tries to pin it on Salieri, because Salieri deliberately gave Mozart a nasty shock, which caused rheumatic fever in a perfectly logical turn of events.
If that were really how it happened, we have to say, it'd only help Salieri's case. If your idea for murdering your most hated enemy is "I'll scare him to death with a gho-o-o-ost, woooooo!" you're less a murderer than a writer for Scooby Doo.
#3.
King John
You Know Him As:
The bad guy in the Robin Hood stories, "Prince" John, as he is more commonly known for some reason, was a cowardly usurper who tried to seize control of England while his brave and handsome and charming and wonderful and awesome brother, King Richard the Lionheart, was off fighting The Crusades.
He raised taxes like it was going out of fashion, and generally made life miserable for the peasants.
But in Reality:
For starters, if you still think King Richard was awesome, either you aren't aware that he honestly thought God wanted him to go to other people's countries and tear shit up until all the Muslims were dead, or you're a very scary person.
When it comes to John himself, it becomes important to clarify your definition of "bad king." John's reign is generally regarded as an epic disaster for England, but not because he was avaricious or cruel; simply because he was so retarded at being king that he probably wore his crown pointy-side down.

Just look at how disappointed the Pope is, back there.
Everything John touched turned to crap. His marriage led almost directly to him losing a heap of land in France. His military campaign to regain that land was a spectacular fuck-up that cost a fortune, forcing him to raise taxes and earning him a reputation for military incompetence that inspired the nickname "Softsword" (Freudian connotations surely deliberate). The tax hike was not dumped on the peasants as legend suggests, but on the nobility and the clergy, which meant everyone with money and power now hated him.
The sheer scale of his ineptitude gets to a point where it passes contempt and you have to start feeling sorry for the guy. He had a Charlie Brown-esque ability to find utter failure in the most surprising places; hell, his attempt to influence the appointment of an archbishop wound up getting England excommunicated. It's not as though he wasn't smart--he's regarded as one of the foremost legal minds of his day, and weirdly for such a military fuckwit he's credited with creating the Royal Navy--but he had zero charisma, and pretty much all of his kingly instincts were mind-blowingly wrong.
But in the end, we wouldn't have him any other way. Sure, he lost land, lost money, allowed the church to increase its stranglehold on Britain; but if he hadn't been so terrible, if he hadn't done almost everything within his power to make his barons detest him so thoroughly, they wouldn't have been in a position to force him to sign a document that gave them certain inalienable rights they could demand from the king. A little document they called the Magna Carta.
That's right; all of modern democracy, made possible because King John was such a miserable fuck-up. Aren't you glad Robin Hood didn't kill him now?
#2.
Captain William Bligh
You Know Him As:
If you've read Mutiny on the Bounty, or seen one of the several movie adaptations (including the 1984 version featuring Mel Gibson, Anthony Hopkins and lots of titties) then you know Bligh as the evil, shitty captain they were mutinying against.
Bligh was a classist bully who did typical evil captain stuff like work his crew half to death on a scant ration of rancid food. If any of them stepped out of line, by voicing dissatisfaction or passing out from exhaustion or what have you, he would have them flogged within an inch of their life. Also, he looked like a giant warthog who'd just fallen down a few flights of stairs.
Eventually Bligh's handsome and dashing first mate (the Mel Gibson character) had had enough and led a mutiny against him, leaving him adrift in the ocean to die, which is OK because it turns out he didn't. Hooray for the common man!
But in Reality:
Bligh certainly wasn't loveable; he was known to constantly subject his men to a torrent of hurtful, hurtful words. But that's about as mean as he got.
Far from wearing his men to nothing, records show that Bligh was almost obsessive about building them up into godlike paragons of health and vigor. To that end he provided them with a strict exercise regimen which, OK, would've blown. But also he made sure they had a highly nutritious diet, and organized their shifts so that they got plenty of rest. Sure, there were floggings--pretty much the first rule the British navy gave their captains was "if your crew so much as sneezes, flog the living shit out of them"--but it's all about context. Bligh was considerably less flog-happy than his peers, preferring to give his men a stern talking-to and send them off to think about what they'd done.
So why did such a well-fed, well-rested, relatively unflogged crew go apeshit? There are two schools of thought:
1. Despite Bligh's efforts, life aboard the Bounty was still pretty miserable. The ship had been officially classed as a cutter, giving it a small crew and limited supplies, meaning that the men were still overworked and underfed and the whole "godlike paragon" plan was fucked. This wasn't anything to do with Bligh, of course, but when you're generally pissed off about everything and the nearest authority figure keeps shouting at you and has a face like a squashed cabbage, it's human nature to decide it's all his fault and toss the bastard to the sharks.
2. The second version is a lot simpler. The crew had just spent several weeks of leave on Tahiti, lazing in the sun, getting wasted and screwing licentious young natives. Faced with another few months of scrubbing decks and eating hard tack, they simply said "Fuck this shit," dumped Bligh and his cohorts overboard, and went steaming back for more sweet Tahitian booty.
At this point, in what is frequently regarded as the most brilliant piece of seamanship in history, Bligh navigated the crappy raft they set him adrift on nearly 4,000 miles back to civilization, battling illness, hunger and at one point even hostile natives. Considering he went through all this, and later was also innocently involved in the Spithead Mutiny and the Rum Rebellion, only to wind up being remembered as the bad guy, Bligh would also be at home on a list of People the Universe Just Plain Hated.
#1.
Edward Longshanks
You Know Him As:
King Edward I was the evil king in Braveheart. You know, the foul-tempered English prick who marched into Scotland and let his soldiers just start kicking all the Scottish peasants around, until William Wallace finally came and... well, got killed, but he still managed to teach Longshanks a thing or two. Oh, and that son of his? What a total ponce.
But in Reality:
For starters, Longshanks didn't just storm into Scotland because he felt like taking over; he went in to mediate a matter which was on the verge of causing civil war. "So?" you may well ask, "Who asked him to butt into Scotland's business?"...um, Scotland. Scotland asked.
That's right, Scotland more or less begged Longshanks to come over and start meddling in their affairs. Here's a compressed version of how it all went down:
Scotland: Help us, Edward Longshanks, you're our only hope!
Longshanks: Sure, I'll be glad to help. But first, I'll be needing Scotland.
Scotland: You'll be needing Scotland to do what?
Longshanks: To belong to England. I'll be needing you to give me Scotland.
Scotland: Oh. Er. Hm. OK, you can have our country, as long as you give it back when you're done.
Longshanks: ...Sure. I'll give it back. (rolls eyes)
Scotland: Huzzah! I don't see how this could possibly go wrong!
Seriously, Scotland? Had you even met England before? Sure, Edward broke his word, but in the history of hostile takeovers, this one ranks just about highest in "They were fucking asking for it."
Anyway, the whole Scotland fiasco was just the very end bit of Edward's reign. He spent the first 20 years or so at home writing a crapload of laws that revolutionized England forever. Most of them are pretty abstract to the lay person, but for example, did you know he helped implement several statutes which essentially made up England's first constitution? Wow! Or that he eased debt with a series of stringent anti-usury laws? Holy balls!
Braveheart fans, consider this--which is the more noble sacrifice to make for your country: leading your people in battle against an unbeatable enemy, inevitably dying in a blaze of glory? Or being the fucking King of England, and using that insane godlike power to spend decades drafting complex legislation so that the people can enjoy stable governance after you're dead? Yeah, we thought so.
For more from the realm of bad guy retardedness, check out 7 Badass Cartoon Villains Who Lost to Retarded Heroes and The 6 Most Pointlessly Elaborate Movie Murder Plots.
And check out more from the villians to our good guys at Cracked.com's Top Picks.


Read more: 6 Historical Villains Who Were Actually OK Guys | Cracked.com http://www.cracked.com/article_17205_6-historical-villains-who-were-actually-ok-guys.html#ixzz1OXlIwFOp

Shameless Screen Grab courtesy of Cracked 

Villains have always been agents of change - guiding civilization to positive subjugation. If people would only see that a perfect world ruled by Villains is possible (and probably inevitable). 

Saturday, June 4, 2011

You Will Believe in the Future

A Glimpse of Cybernetic Augmentation for the Masses

Deus Ex 3: Human Revolution is a cyberpunk video game coming out later this year. I, for one, am pretty excited. Set in the near future the game is a prequel to the original Deus Ex. For those of you who aren’t video game fanatics, the first Deus Ex is a cyberpunk conspiracy thriller that follows around a transhuman protagonist, JC Denton, as he tries to keep the world from spiraling into Armageddon. Robots, A.I., genetically modified animals, and cyborgs aplenty help and hinder him. Denton himself has several nano-augmentations that give him superhuman abilities (e.g. cloaking, super-strength). Deus Ex 3 explores the rise of general cybernetic augmentation and the corporate espionage that accompanies it. As part of the viral ad campaign you can access the website for Sarif Industries, the leading manufacturer of cybernetic prosthetics. I love the boilerplate:
No one should ever have to give up a normal life because of a random incident, or indeed, lose a dream over a physical limitation. So believes David Sarif, idealist, philanthropist, founder and CEO of Sarif Industries. Pursuing his belief, Mr. Sarif acquired a failing Detroit auto factory in 2007 and repurposed it for the automated manufacture of prosthetics.
The weirdness of the site comes from its nearness to reality. There are links for the stock price and pictures of the interior of the main headquarters. There is even an ethics statement!
A standout piece is the ad for Sarif’s products (cyber hands, eyes, and arms), which seemed like a perfect pastiche of every pharmaceutical ad I’ve seen in the past year: testimonials by attractive people in bright lighting engaging in their favorite cultural or outdoor activities, like rock climbing and football throwing (though mercifully not through a tire wing). Also interesting is the news feed which features headlines I had to research a bit to see they aren’t quite true. The “road to here” also provides a strange alt-history of augmentation and prosthetics that gives you the feeling this all might just be right around the corner. The site’s slickness and dedication to near-reality makes it an eerie predictor of what a future prosthetics company may actually look like.
Follow Kyle on his personal blog and on facebook and twitter.
Image via Sarif Industries

Shameless Screen Grab courtesy of Discover

It's so Evil it's Villainous!

Friday, June 3, 2011

Home Depot - Villainous!

Home Depot Tells AFA To Take A Hike

For months, the American Family Association has been running a boycott against Home Depot because the company "has chosen to sponsor and participate in numerous gay pride parades and festivals."
Today, the AFA's Executive Vice President, Buddy Smith, traveled to a Home Deport board meeting to present the company with a petition bearing nearly a half-million names of those who have vowed to stop shopping at Home Deport stores until the company decides to "remain neutral in the culture war."
But according to this update Smith gave to Bryan Fischer today, it sounds like the Home Depot Chairman Frank Blake basically told the AFA to take a hike and reiterated their commitment to promoting diversity.  Smith was especially troubled by this stance because, as everyone knows, "those who are caught in this trap of homosexuality are in the clasp of Satan":

Thursday, June 2, 2011

Fiendishly Evil: Doctor Who Influences


Image found on Geeks of Doom w/source attribution going to Ript Apparel

Free Upgrades! Exterminations! and an occasional Deletion. Luuuucaaaaas!

Security Updates for Villains: Android

DroidDream Light a malware nightmare, booted from Android Market

A number of malware-encumbered applications were found in the Android Market back in March, but the infestation was brought to a swift end when Google deployed its kill switch. A new variant of the same malware recently resurfaced and was identified by security researchers over the weekend. Google has responded by booting the new round of infected applications out of the Android Market.
The malware was discovered by Lookout, a mobile security company. They found just under 30 infected applications across six separate developer accounts. Several of the infected applications were existing third-party programs that the attacker copied and then repackaged with the malware.
The malware-bearing programs spanned a diverse range of functions, including a scientific calculator, a solitaire game, and a photo enhancement tool. Malicious developer Magic Photo Studio had the most colorful assortment of infected apps, including a soundboard called Sex Sound and a photo gallery program called Beauty Breasts.
The infected applications appear to have been widely downloaded prior to being shut down by Google. Lookout estimates that between 30,000 and 120,000 users have been affected by the attack. We used Google Cache to examine the Android Market pages for several of the malicious apps. The Beauty Breasts program had a 3.5 star rating and been installed between 1,000 and 5,000 times.
The new malware is based on the same code that was used back in March, but it is simpler and has some limitations that make it less potentially dangerous. The original March flavor would attempt to root the victim's phone so that it could install additional software without requiring intervention by the user. The new variant still has the capability to download and install additional software, but it doesn't take root access and consequently has to prompt the user before it can install anything.
Lookout is calling the variant DroidDream Light. Like the previous version, Droid Dream Light will send information back to a command-and-control server. The malware can apparently do its dirty work even if the user never actually runs the application. It hooks into the platform's event system APIs and will launch itself as a background process when the device's call state changes—like when a call is received.
It's worth noting that hooking into the phone's state requires a special permission that is listed when the user installs the application from the Android Market. A savvy user who is paying attention to the permissions would likely realize that phone state monitoring isn't needed for looking at images of breasts and would hopefully think twice before installing the program.
This latest round of Android malware makes it seem like the problem isn't going to go away. Although Google responded to the threat very quickly after it was detected, the number of users who downloaded the applications is still troubling. Armed with a remote kill switch and full control over the Android Market, Google can address threats as they arise, but can't really provide a proactive safety net.

Denver International Airport is One of The Most Evil Places On Earth

Wednesday, June 1, 2011

Security Update for Villains: Sony and Playstation

Don't purchase any games Online from Sony just quite yet...


June 1, 2011 7:49 AM PDT

Tupac hackers to Sony: 'Beginning of the end'

LulzSec is taking tweet shots at Sony.
LulzSec is taking tweet shots at Sony.
(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)
A group that made headlines for hacking the PBS Web site earlier this week is apparently turning its attention to Sony.
The group known as LulzSec has been promising Sony attacks since this past weekend when it posted to its Twitter account that it is engaged in an operation it calls "Sownage," shorthand for Sony Ownage. The group stated at the time that it was working on hatching a plan that would be the "beginning of the end" for Sony. It has yet to reveal what it has planned. But yesterday the group said that the attack was already under way, seemingly without Sony's knowledge.
"Hey @Sony, you know we're making off with a bunch of your internal stuff right now and you haven't even noticed?" LulzSec tweeted. "Slow and steady, guys."
Sony has been in the crosshairs of hackers for quite some time now. In April, the company's PlayStation Network and Qriocity services were breached by hackers, forcing the company to take them offline. Sony Online Entertainment was also attacked and subsequently taken down. Following the breach, Sony announced that the personal information of over 100 million of its users was stolen. However, the company said credit card information was encrypted and, so far, no identity theft has been reported.
After protracted downtime, Sony finally partially restored the PlayStation Network in mid-May in the U.S. and Europe after improving the security of the services. Japan and Asian countries had the PlayStation Network partially restored over the weekend.
Speculation abounds over who attacked Sony. The game company found a file on servers that indicated the well-known hacking organization Anonymous might have been behind the attack. That file was titled "Anonymous" and included part of the group's slogan, "We are Legion."
However, Anonymous has formally denied claims that it was behind the attack, saying that it would "not take responsibility for what happened." It did acknowledge, though, that some of its members may have acted independently to attack Sony's servers.
For its part, LulzSec has also distanced itself from the PlayStation Network hack. The organization took to its Twitter account yesterday to use some choice words to express its innocence.
"You Sony morons realize we've never attacked any of your precious gaming, right?" the group tweeted.
On the PBS front, however, LulzSec has been more than happy to gloat about its hacking prowess. The group wrote on its Twitter account that it was having a "fun battle" with PBS as it posted a fake news story claiming famed musical artist Tupac was still alive. The group also reportedly published the log-in data, including passwords, of PBS workers. The attack resulted from the airing of a "Frontline" episode on PBS, called "WikiSecrets," that shed an unfavorable light on WikiLeaks--an opinion that LulzSec reportedly took issue with.
LulzSec has stopped short of revealing its plans for Sony. But even today, it continues to promise big things for operation Sownage.
"Keep on crying, Sony fanboys," the group tweeted today. "Your tears create the sea and your whining creates the wind that we so gracefully use to traverse onward."
Sony did not immediately respond to CNET's request for comment.
Don Reisinger is a technology columnist who has written about everything from HDTVs to computers to Flowbee Haircut Systems. Don is a member of the CNET Blog Network, posting at The Digital Home. He is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.


Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-20067865-17.html#ixzz1O47in0sH

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Your Job: Power Up on Beer and go on Adventures

Balderine and Picachu prepare to Costumed Citizen Patrol the Bathrooms

The Malignodyn Computer Manufacturing Corporation, LLC will need a Government Bailout now...

The Malignodyn* Computer Manufacturing Corporation, LLC has experienced some difficulty with our Chinese Hard Drive supplier...


Chinese Magical Hard-Drive

A Russian friend of mine has posted this absolutely amazing story.
(here's the original but it's in Russian).

He works at a hard-drive repair center in a Russian town right next to the Chinese border. A couple of days ago a customer has brought a broken 500Gb USB-drive that he had bought in a Chinese store across the river, for an insanely low price. But the drive was not working: if you, say, save a movie onto the drive, playing the saved movie back resulted in replaying just the last 5 minutes of the film.



The whole service center was rolling on the floor laughing. This was not the first time someone has brought a disk like that. And the previous drives were also bought in China... They opened up the drive right in front of the astonished customer. This is what they saw:


It's a 128-MB flash-drive. Working in a "looped" mode - when it runs out of space, it starts overwriting from the beginning. My friend said they're still trying to figure out how did the Chinese do that. Because the drive reports "correct" file sizes and disk-capacity. And the "looped-overwriting" does not touch the other files present on the drive.

The device looks pretty convincing - lots of tech labels and stuff... The Chinese salesman even saved something to the drive to demonstrate that it "works" in the store.

117 comments:


Christof S. said...
The Trick is the controler. The controler thinks, that there are actually 5gigs available and puts data to the storage. The file table is stored in the controler. So the controler puts data to the storage as long as he thinks there is enough space. But in the storage the real data is just written as long as there is acutal space (Let's say 128MB) if there is more data than that it just gets lost.
Christof S. said...
So the trick is to put an controler for 5gb to the storage of 128mb


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New (Temporary) Series: Better Know Your Carnies

Greetings,

In recognition to a heinously lazy Henchman and for others interested, a small diversion into a series called;
"Exquisite Carnies".
Your state fairs will be starting soon, and you may encounter these people. You might even hire a ghostly magician as a henchman...




A Glossary of Carny Slang - find out how they're talking most likely about YOU, you rube.

Photographs of Carnival Workers by John Decker (for photographers of discriminating talents)

A Tribute to the Noble "Ride Technicians".

Fill up on Google Images of Carnies

How to Outwit Carnies at Carnival Games

Flickr Pictures of Carnies

Ghost of Nixon

Carnies may be Circus Folk, but are not to be confused with Gypsies (the Roma), Vagrants, Roustabouts, Hooligans, Hobos, Scary Vagabonds, Migrating Criminals, or Misguided Party Clowns.