Camera bearing laptop?

New laptop has one.  It's buried in the bezel, it only can see out when the lid is raised.  All it can see is my smiling face when I am using the machine.  There is an app to take a selfie for use as account photo.  I have much better selfies I took with a real camera on a tripod.  If there is an app to do video conferencing with it I haven't found it.  I cannot image using it to take pictures the way you do with an Ipad or a real camera. 
   I suppose it's there 'cause it's so cheap as makes no matter.  A couple of bucks for a chip, the lens is molded into the bezel so that's basically free. 
   There is a LED that comes on when the selfie app is running the camera.  I wonder if the LED is hardwired or software controlled.  Could an embarrassment app take a pix of me in my underwear and keep it secret by not turning on the LED?  Not that I work my computer in my underwear very often; it's too cold around here for that.
   Anyhow, to satisfy my paranoia, I placed a bit of masking tape over the lens.   Just in case NSA or KGB wants pix of my kitchen table. 

Dow is down 84 points, just this morning.

It's close to breaking thru the 16000 level, which takes the Dow back better than a  year.  The TV newsies haven't picked up on this yet, but Win 8.1 stock market app has.  The TV newsies are chatting up Ebola, although there is little that hasn't been said, repeatedly, to report. 

Isolation, Texas Health Presbyterian style.

With a second nurse contracting Ebola at the Texas hospital, it has been announced that 70 odd hospital workers are still under observation due to contact with the index patient.  For a guy who was "in isolation" that's a lot of contact.  I'd think you could give first rate care, 24/7 with no more than 4 or 5 people coming in contact with the patient.  Seventy odd sounds like every curious person in the hospital visited the index patient, just to see how he was doing.
   As to how the poor nurses got infected, could be a lotta things.  Some fault in the protective gear, a bad or missing zipper, a loose elastic, a rip, a tear.  Getting out of the gear is tricky.  There are live infectious Ebola virii on the outside of the garment.  You gotta get out of it, without ever touching the outsides of the gear.  Easier said than done. Or Ebola may be much more infectious than is believed.  
   Either way, they both have my best wishes and full sympathy.

NYT reports Iraqi Chemical Weapons coverup.

It's history by now, but the Times reports that US troops occupying Iraq discovered sizable quantities of artillery shells filled with poison gas.  The troops claim they were told to hush the matter up.  This just came on the TV news this morning.
    Somehow this just doesn't sound right.  Much of the justification for invading Iraq and deposing Saddam Hussein came from the belief that Saddam was building nukes.  Colin Powell went before the UN and laid his reputation on the line accusing Saddam of having or building weapons of mass destruction.  After the occupation of Iraq we launched a serious search for the weapons which continued for a year.  When it failed to find much, if anything, of nuclear weapons it was a serious embarrassment to the Bush administration.  It is to Bush's credit that he refused to allow the manufacture of evidence  of nuclear weapons.  A few small caches of rockets with chemical warheads were discovered and made the news.  Small means they would have fit in back of a single pickup truck.
  There was a strong desire to find evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Saddam's Iraq, and I cannot believe that a sizable cache, like the NYT is talking about, was not publicized at the time.

Indian Summer

Enjoy it while it lasts.  Sun is out, leaves are bright, it's good and warm (72), warm enough to bask on the deck.  Winter is coming.

Telephone Scam

The phone rang today.  The accented voice on the line claimed my computer was sucking in bad stuff off the net, and he worked for Microsoft, and wanted to help me.  I was suspicious but decided to play along and see what his scam was.  About the time he got me to download from www.teamviewer.com, I told him I would call him back.
   A quick Google for PNF scam turned up a dozen accounts of this scam.  So, I never did find out just what the scam was,  but, I can repeat to all of you, that unsolicited phone calls from companies are scams.  This call was trying to get me to download some dreadful virus.
  If you don't already know, beware of phone scammers.

Alamo In the Ardennes. John C. McManus

A reasonable WWII history book about the bitter fighting of the Bulge.  The Germans secretly built up a vastly superior force, three full fledged armies, and hurled it against the Ardennes sector which was held by a single American division.  The outnumbered Americans put up a stubborn resistance which slowed the enemy down until Patton's Third Army could come into action.  It's a good story, although the author's prose gets sort of pedestrian. 
    The cover illustration is striking.  A photo from the national archives shows three US soldiers walking thru a snow covered forest.  The weather is miserable and the expressions on the soldier's faces do not show happiness.  And yet, they are well equipped.  All three of them have good warm parkas and good boots with puttees to keep the snow out of boot tops.  They are heavily armed, each carries a personal weapon, they have two bazookas and are lugging 250 round steel boxes of machine gun ammunition.  Grenades dangle from their web gear. 
   It's a long way from the industrial heartland of America to the Ardennes, but we managed to get these soldiers and a generous supply of weapons and gear, into action, at the right place and the right time.