…so far, seems to be this one: Recipe for an ‘Ice Age’ mess: Thaw, rehash, refreeze:

Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs seems to be suffering from freezer burn. Once fresh, the story is now buried under a hoary coating. [...] Its consistently sweet message notwithstanding, the retread plot is a bore. [...]

The species are more plentiful this time, but Ice Age resorts to bathroom humor and gross bodily fluids to fill the landscape.

A much more favorable article from the same newspaper: ‘Ice Age’ warms up to dinosaurs in third installment:

» Read more…

Here’s how they make money out of Jacko’s death:

• TIME has rushed on the market a lame “Special Commemorative Edition”, dated July 7th. I really don’t like the way they did it, but it will nevertheless sell volumes. And you can “buy a print of this cover starting at $15.95″. Jeez.
• Newsweek has also just issued a special edition, dated July 13th and priced $6.95 (instead of the regular $5.95). Less than stellar in contents, but overall OK.
• USA Today was a greedy one. They have found 3 ways of making money:
  1. They reissued the June 26 edition that announced the death. Not only that 90% of the newspaper is of no interest today, but instead of the regular price of $1.00, the reissued one costs $4.95!
  2. They made a glossy commemorative edition on sale for $6.99.
  3. They made a second special edition (“an essential collector’s item on the King of Pop’s life and legacy”), for $4.95.

Death is profitable for some.

Wow, Pirate Bay was bought! Here’s the Reuters news, and the press release. Gee. Whatever.

I’m in America for less than 24 hours already. OK, what’s left in the queue?

• Why are they labeling some forms of paracetamol (acetaminophen) as “Non-Aspirin”? I mean, how can you label something for what it is not? Could we label lemonade as “non-beer” and tofu as “non-cheese”?
• Finally, their FDA decided “that prescription drugs that combine acetaminophen with other painkilling ingredients should be pulled off the market”, because… “acetaminophen is the leading cause of liver failure in the U.S., sending 56,000 people to the emergency room annually”. Gosh. Now the maximum single dose of the drug will be 650 milligrams instead of 1 gram.
• Finally again, there are some reactions to one of the various forms of discrimination against the white people (euphemistically called “positive action”): Our view on diversity in the workplace: Firefighters ruling draws new lines on race and hiring. Go figure, promotion was denied to some white firefighters who had scored highest on a test, but eventually the Supreme Court ruled that this was wrong.
• And, figurez-vous, there is more than MJ’s unfortunate death. There is still place for celebration (no, not the 4th of July!): 1959 saw jazz take giant steps in popular culture.

P.S.: Oh, I forgot…

• Kneaders Bakery is fabulous! And Bajio is not bad for a Mexican food restaurant…
• I discovered yesterday that the state sales tax for the food sold in all kind of restaurants is bigger than the regular sales tax: it’s 7.85% in Utah, versus 6.85% the regular sales tax and 3% the grocery food sales tax!
• But hey, when they find E. Coli in something else every now and then… After an issue with some donuts by Nestlé, now it’s in some beef!
• Did you know that the correct name of some state of the nation is “Rhode Island and Providence Plantations”? (I bet you didn’t.) Well, the idea is that it might get shortened… or maybe not.
• The dogs don’t lie… or do they? Take a look at this: ‘Scent lineups’ stink to critics. You can’t even trust dogs anymore…

În mai puţin de 24 de ore mă voi sui într-un avion care mă va duce într-un final acasă. Din păcate, dacă mă uit de peste ocean la viaţa politică şi la climatul general de acasă, îmi vine deja să caut o frânghie şi-o bucată de săpun. În ce ţară de căcat şi în ce mizerie morală trăim…

Ca să mă mai cheer up (oare?), am selectat două reacţii care m-au răcorit puţin. Prima, un comentariu de acum câteva zile, iaca ăsta, care se termină aşa:

Însă vorba ta, sictirul îl merităm cu toţii, fiindcă în loc să iasă minimum 500.000 de oameni în stradă zilnic, să ia cu asalt toate cocinile, ăă instituţiile publice şi să-i spânzure pe porci, ăă politicieni, noi stăm şi nici nu mai ştiu ce facem. Ne facem că trăim şi ei se fac că ne conduc. Porcii dracu’.

Asta a fost pe un blog “liberal”. Acum, de pe un site de (foarte) stânga, vă recomand postarea Vreau!, care începe aşa:

Locuiesc într-o pauză publicitară. Nimic din ceea ce sunt nu mai există în afara reclamei. Sunt pe rând Jacobs, Dorna, Nokia, Tnuva, Colgate şi asa mai departe. Sunt tot ce mi-am dorit să am. Am un job ok, vorbesc engleza, ţin legatura cu centrul de suport şi îmi petrec cel puţin 12 ore pe internet. Sunt exact unde mi-aş fi dorit să fiu şi exact cu un pas în spate de unde voi ajunge.

Sunt visul din spatele clipului publicitar.

Took from Witch hunts and torture:

Former FBI special agent Ali Soufan testified before a Senate Judiciary Committee subcommittee in mid-May that when CIA contractors took over from him the interrogation of accused al-Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah, Zubaydah stopped producing reliable information when the contractors began employing waterboarding.

The history of the Inquisition tells us the same thing about the practical limits of torture. And there are some interesting similarities between then and now. The Inquisition targeted a particular population of individuals who were deemed to be an immediate threat to the public safety. It was held that witches killed babies, that they caused male impotence, female infertility and miscarriages. They spoiled the crops and caused the plague. And so on.

» Read more…

QOTD:

The government owes the world $11.4 trillion — $37,000 for every person in the U.S. In the next fiscal year, the government will add $1.8 trillion to the deficit. [...] Every day [...] the U.S. needs to borrow $15 billion to fund the deficit, says Axel Merk, portfolio manager of the Merk Hard Currency fund. “Someone has to buy all that,” he says. More important, the U.S. has to repay it. [...]

Will the nation cure its debts by raising taxes and cutting spending?

“Sure,” says Merk. “And then we will all fly to the moon.” Otherwise, he says, “Inflation is the answer.”

Otherwise, today’s Wizard of Id sums it up pretty well.

Designing Through a Depression links to the site of an allegedly revolutionary bulb: “an electron stimulated lightbulb that is as efficient as a CFL but is mercury-free”, namely Vu1.

I don’t get what’s so revolutionary in the idea of a device that «uses accelerated electrons to stimulate phosphor to create light, making the surface of the bulb “glow”.» Isn’t this the very principle of the original phosphor-based B&W CRT?

It seems to me that they’re just improving an old technology. Circa 1922.

• The bloody moron is now… two morons! Bryce Harrington has used the defective cells of his brain to declare with regards to the infamous Intel bug in Jaunty: “I think we can close this one now.  The issue is largely resolved in Karmic, and the commentary on this bug seems to have degenerated past usefulness.  Other bug reports are tracking kernel patches and other fixes proposed for Jaunty.” The shithead seems to be unable to understand that the bugs keeps being valid in Jaunty as long as there is no official fix for Jaunty, and the current release is Jaunty! “Largely resolved in Karmic” is a supreme arrogance.
• OK, I should really take into consideration ElRepo, once back home. I’m not familiar with the Dynamic Kernel Module Support (DKMS) concept, and I don’t even want to understand it, but commander Dag has been very persuasive in providing a raison d’être of ElRepo: using kmod instead makes it much more convenient for the end user!
• It looks like Rahul has noticed Odiecolon.repo, and there is a short thread on epel-devel-list. I must find some time to explain them “the whys” and we’ll see then…
• I really tried Sugar on a Stick. No matter what I tried, I couldn’t find anything that could be beneficial to the kids, nor I could consider it as a brilliant design of anything. On the contrary, it only confirmed my preconception that Sugar is 100% shit and a waste of time and resources.
• That was a funny one, although constantly “innovating” (read: moving to some other place) the keyboard’s keys annoys me: Who moved my ‘Delete’ key? Lenovo did. Here’s why. So they made ESC and DEL huge. Now what?

That’s it. I was so curious to watch this movie that I had to buy the DVD ($19.99 at Target), and then to spend about 3 hours with it — deleted scenes, making of, all the extras had to be seen.

I didn’t know anything about Revolutionary Road (I have not read the Wikipedia page, for it tells the whole plot), except that:
» Read more…

Well, my last days in the “middle of nowhere a few miles south of SLC, UT” are an annoyance mostly because this face of America is a complete boredom. Real life must be in places like NYC or San Francisco, not in places like this one.

This might be the last set of random opinions and ramblings on America before I leave them in the afternoon of July 1st, so I’ll make it huge and eclectic.

A few days ago (was it Friday?), a rainbow broke the monotony, after a short rain. It was 8:30 PM!
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Pour faire un résumé d’un résumé de quatre articles parus dans Le Monde (un, deux, trois, quatre), je citerai quelques possibles raisons de la faillite de la gauche européenne (et j’ai bien dit faillite, pas défaite):

• Au lieu de mener une politique “pour tous”, la gauche est devenue un conglomérat de forces qui s’évertue à mettre en avant les intérêts de divers groupes dont les membres se considèrent comme opprimés en raison de leur identité commune et marginalisée, qu’il s’agisse de race, de religion, d’orientation sexuelle, de spécificité des sexes, d’intérêts culturels, de handicaps physiques et mentaux, etc.
• La conséquence pratique en est que la priorité accordée précédemment par la gauche à des programmes sociaux universels a été remplacée par des programmes qui s’adressent à des “groupes identitaires” spécifiques. Ainsi, la politique de gauche, plutôt que de rassembler, est devenue antimajoritaire.
• Il existe en Europe un nouveau prolétariat. Pourtant, ces opprimés (immigrants, femmes salariées, pauvres, travailleurs précaires, mères célibataires) ne trouvent pas leur place dans la social-démocratie moderne. Celle-ci a produit une élite composée de technocrates bourgeois formés dans les meilleures universités et les grandes écoles. Elle n’est pas le reflet de la société et de ses inégalités. Où est la gauche d’en bas ?
• De façon tout aussi symptomatique, les syndicats européens ne sont plus des acteurs majeurs du monde de l’entreprise et ne restent puissants que dans le secteur public. Or la gauche doit réanimer son rapport au syndicalisme. [...] Une faiblesse majeure de la gauche est de n’avoir plus de relais dans le monde du travail.

» Read more…

I’ve run by accident into The “Anti-For” Campaign, which includes a link to the Anti-If Campaign.

Morons.

First of all, only a maniac and a delusional can believe that the syntax of Haskell or that of Erlang are “simple and easy to understand”. This kind of people are only propagating unnatural programming languages. It’s like saying that the Chinese and the Japanese are simpler than English and French, just because their paradigm is different and they’re less verbose, and that we should all stop using English and French and start learning Chinese and Japanese.

To understand what is that these programming nazis are actually wanting, you should probably want to read Life after Loops and Eliminazione dei for in c# 3.5.
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From here:

Disclaimer: “These opinions are my own, though for a small fee they [can] be yours too.”
– Dave Haynie

While the media is focusing on MJ’s sudden death, and then on Obama’s bills on health care, environment and whatnot, the NPR is reminding us that Obama is still “a new Dubya”: Proposal Offers Specifics On Preventive Detention.

There are new developments with regards to Obama’s speech at the National Archives on May 21, when he proposed a new system of “Indefinite Preventive Detention”… without charge, which is nothing less than legalizing the Bush legacy!

As one columnist noted: “Proof of guilt? In 21st-century America, there is no longer any need for such annoyances. Human rights? Ha-ha. That’s a good one.”

I suppose everyone is anxious to read the full details of Obama’s new unconstitutional gulag Konzentrationslager system (for non-Americans only though). We’ll soon have a better understanding of the twisted mind of the most colored hypocrite America ever had.

I’ve just installed it on a junk laptop that runs XP. I can’t tell if it’s really doing something or not, I should probably wait for reports in the blogosphere about Microsoft Security Essentials failing to prevent an infection, etc.

As the official page stopped offering a download link, the guinea pigs Windows users willing to try it can download the installer from JCXP or from Vista123.net.

Died today:

• Michael Jackson, at 50
• Farrah Fawcett, at 62

Thank God I’m not that famous to die (bad joke, I know).

There isn’t much to say after a 10-hr sleep (8 PM to 6 AM), right? It was quite a hot day yesterday (90F/32C), and today the forecast is for 93F (34C).

The queer thing is that dream I had. Extremely epic. I guess it does qualify for “nightmare”, although it’s more a task for papa Freud. OK, it’s a secret story, I’m keeping it private, in the hope I’ll forget it altogether. Most likely, it’s a sign of unaccomplishment…
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I am not retracing Tocqueville’s steps, I am retracing my own steps. And this is not America, but only a very small spot of it, a vertical strip between Interstate 15 and State Street, somewhere south of Salt Lake City.

72 hours since I am here, and I dare to say that I’ve almost adjusted the timezone. I am nevertheless tired, because I normally hate the meetings, but now I have to go through 7 days and half of meetings and group discussions. After only two full days, I realize that meetings are nice… unless you’re part of them.

This piece of America hasn’t changed much since May 2004, the first time I’ve met it–except maybe for a relatively successful Walmart that has been replaced by two other stores with fewer visitors.
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