Windows 8 forgot the ABC's

Back on the last decent Windows to come out of Redmond, you could right click on your desktop, click on "sort by name" and all your desktop icons would be arranged in alphabetical order.  Convenient.  On this year's Windows 8.Flake  the right click on the desktop is still there, and the "sort by name" is still there, and the icons get moved around when you click on it but they don't get moved into alphabetical order.  In fact the order seems purely random, although repeatable, you get the same strange order each time. 
   Micro$oft managed to spend untold amounts of programming time but all they get is a fatter slower product with broken features.  Stuff that used to work, doesn't anymore.

Cannon Mountain Ski Weather

I have four inches of fresh new snow on my deck.  From my deck it is an easy walk to the Peabody slopes chairlifts.  It started snowing sometime before sunrise and is just tapering off now, a little before three in the afternoon.  It's just above freezing, so the snow is heavy and wet, with a bit of cold it will freeze hard making an excellent base.  The wind isn't blowing so the snow fell on the trails and stayed there. 

San Bernadino

The shootings at San Bernadino yesterday were horrible.  My deepest sympathies to the victims and their families. 

Academic Deathwish

Some college student demonstrators are calling for more "ethnic (black) studies" programs.  Talk about self destructive impulses.  Although a black studies course may make blacks feel better about being black, they won't do a bit of good when it comes to finding a job. 

Congress can't just pass a bill anymore

They gotta stick onto a "must pass" bill.  This morning Fox was talking about a bill to offer medical benefits and other stuff to the 9/11 first responders who are said to be having silicosis of the lungs from working in the cloud of cement dust raised up when the Twin Towers fell.   Sounds like a worthy bill.  They ought to just vote it thru.  But, the Fox newsies were taking the Congressional leadership to task because they did not "attach" this bill to the highway bill, and how bills that are not attached to "must pass" legislation don't stand a chance.
   This ain't right.  If the bill is good, Congress ought to pass it.  They shouldn't be playing "You don't get your bill unless I get my bill." games.  That's childish. 

Driving down to Washington

Decided to spend Thanksgiving with daughter and her fairly new husband down in DC.  I drove just to avoid giving TSA a chance to hassle me at the airport.  Had a fine holiday, fine turkey dinner, good time. 
   Daughter owns a house in Washington NE, not far from H St.  The H St trolley project is still sucking taxpayer money after five years.  They have the track laid, the over head wire strung, and the trolley cars running, empty.  After five profitable years for the contractors, they still won't carry passengers, they just run empty trolleys up and down H St.
   The neighbor hood is mostly black.  I was impressed with how nice the neighbors were, friendly, cheerful, helpful, really nice.  Perhaps DC is far enough south that the southern charm is still alive.  
   The car, new to me, even if it is a 2003 Buick, ran like a top all the way down and back.  Burned maybe a half a qt of oil, got 26-27 mpg.  Lot of trucks hauling lots of product over the road.  Even if some of 'em are empties, they wouldn't be on the road unless they were headed somewhere to pick up a load.  So even with Great Depression 2.0 still on, a lotta product is being made, then shipped, and paid for.  The truckers and the bus drivers are still polite and professional.  They stay in lane, they signal, they drive straight, good safe drivers.  I took the scenic route on the way down, crossed the Hudson on the Newburg bridge (60 miles north of Manhattan)  then took old US 202 at Flemington NJ for West Chester PA.   Avoided a pile of tolls.  It's scenic and maybe a couple of hours longer.  On the way back I took the toll route, I95, Delaware Mem. Bridge, I290, Jersey Pike, GW Bridge.  Managed to get off the GW Bridge onto the Henry Hudson Parkway up the west side of Manhattan, nice views of the Hudson.  Picked up the Cross County Parkway to the Hutchinson River Parkway to the  Merritt Parkway, to the Wilbur Cross Parkway, all the way to I91.  made the whole trip, including a quick stop at Mac's Market in Franconia in 9 1/2 hours. 
   

Tis the Season To be Jolly

Yeah, BUT NOT BEFORE THANKSGIVING.
This is the Grinch posting here.  Christmas season, and decorations, and music on the radio should NOT start until AFTER Thanksgiving.
   I know the retailers want to get a jump start on the Christmas selling, but there is a limit.  If you stretch Christmas shopping season all the way back to March, you don't actually sell more stuff, you just spend more time doing the selling. 

Mouse and Mouse pad beats Win8 touchscreen

Taking Flat Beast (my laptop) on the road for the first time.  Some things work good, like Flat Beast detected and logged onto daughter's WIFI router automatically.  Email comes thru and everything.  What with lack of deskspace and such I am working the laptop from the lap.  And I miss the real mouse, which don't work so good on a overstuffed couch.  The built in touch pad is flakey and jumpy, and it lacks left and right buttons to click.  And the whole touchy feelie screen is ineffectual.  The slider thumbnails don't slide under a finger touch, the icons are too small for my full sized fingers, and the whole screen is more touchy flaky than touchy feelie. 
   Tomorrow I drive home, and day after that I can get back to web surfing from a real desk with a real mouse. 

War on Coal presses forward

The US Senate just passed two "resolutions" one disapproving EPA regulation about to be applied to working coal fired power plants, and a second one disappoving EPA regulations of new and modified coal fired power plants. 
   Our noble NH Senators, Shaheen and Ayotte, vote against both resolutions.  Thanks guys.  I'm paying 25 cents a kilowatt hour and you voted to increase the price of my electricity.
   And "resolutions" are pretty weak tea.  You want to get EPA's attention? You cut off their taxpayer funding, all of it.  A "resolution" of disapproval doesn't mean anything. 

Why are drug prices so damn high?

Answer: Because the drug companies spend to damn much on marketing.    The biggies all have armies of salesmen, with sample kits, company cars, and expense accounts.  The salesmen visit every doctor in the land at least once a month.  They take the doctor out to lunch, and they buy pizza for his staff.   At lunch they push their company's line of pills. 
   This is the most expensive way to market a product imaginable.  It works, and if everyone in the industry does it, everyone has to keep up.   Paying all those salesmen takes a big pot of money, and the drug company has to get the money from somewhere.  Guess where it comes from?
   Economical marketing is to merely offer the product on the Web and get some articles placed in the medical trade journals.  A step up from that is to open brick and mortar stores.  The special sales call is as expense as it gets. 
   Not sure what we can do about it, other than taxing it.  Right now, sales expenses are a legitimate business expense and can be deducted from income.   Not sure if I like the idea of the IRS telling companies how much they can spend on various business activities.  Maybe some public interest group could lookup and publicize how much the drug companies spend pushing drugs to doctors.

Lion's Gate disappointed in box office for Hunger Games Part II

Wall St Journal had this.  The opening weekend box office was $101 million, the lowest of any of the Hunger Games movies.  The was in the Business & Tech section which just writes about money matters. 
   Funny, they didn't say a word about the quality of  Hunger Games Part 1.  It was nothing like as good as the first one back in 2012. And I'm pretty sure every fan who went to Part I was disappointed as well, especially as the first one was one of the best movies Hollywood released that year.   So naturally the box office is down.  Make a poor movie and you don't make as much money. 

Surveillance at Mosques

Dunno if I am ready for mounting video cameras on mosques, but I see nothing wrong with undercover agents going to a mosque, mixing with people, talking to people, finding out what is going down.  They are places of public worship after all. Terror plots are discovered and defeated mostly when someone gives the cops a tip.  To get tips you have to have connections, you gotta know people, they gotta know who to call or talk to. 
   BTW,  you don't want to close mosques, no matter how rabid they get.  As long as the mosque is open, it's easier to keep an eye on suspicious individuals.  Close the place and they just go underground, which makes it harder to keep track of  'em.
   You deal with rabid imams with informal pressure.  You find some community leaders, other clerics, parishioners, local businessmen.  If your police force is on the ball they will know who these people are.  You explain to this group that the imam is going over the line, that he is stirring up trouble, and you give them some good quotes from the Koran that counter the imam's rants.  Put your community leaders group together with the problem imam and have them apply some pressure.  

What makes the Greenback Green?

The United States enjoys the best currency in the world.  You can spend US dollars anywhere.  People will buy our debt, US treasury bills, eagerly, even though they don't pay much interest.  It's a great deal, they give us hard cash, we give them paper.  If things get tight, we can simply print more greenbacks to make expenses, or redeem T-bills, and everyone will accept them.  US dollars are a pure fiat currency, we don't promise to redeem them for precious metals.
  The Russians would kill to have the ruble treated like the dollar.  Right now nobody will accept rubles in payment if there is anyway to avoid them.  Reason?  The Russians don't have anything to sell.  Rubles are only good to buy stuff from Russia, and who wants Russian made goods?  Driven a Russian built car lately?  The Russian airlines advertise that they fly only Western built airliners (Boeing or Airbus) rather than Russian ones, which have a nasty reputation for crashing.
   Whereas the holder of US dollars can buy top quality US made products, as much as they can afford.  We have the product to sell.  US dollars may not be backed by gold, but they are backed by the productive capacity of the US economy.  You need just about anything, you can buy it in the US,
  With one exception.  There is a US law preventing the sale of crude oil, something which we now have in quantity, thanks to fracking.  We ought to repeal that law, just in the interest of keeping the currency strong.  The greenies want to keep the prohibition on sale of crude oil, mostly 'cause they want to discourage oil production of any sort.   Well, even greenies gotta pay the bills.  We import a lot of stuff, and we gotta pay for it somehow.  And with Obama borrowing the country into who knows what, we need to keep the greenback green.

Let's change the name to confuse the ignorant

We used to call 'em ISIS or ISIL.  Now Obama and the newsies are calling them Daesh.  Wonder why that happened?  Has ISIS been so successful that they want to stop talking about 'em?  So change the name and who is the wiser.  Good work Obama. 

Where do I stand on Republican Presidential Candidates?

Well, actually I am still standing on the fence.  I have some problems with some of them, others are still pretty much a blank slate.
1. The Donald.  Fun to watch on TV, a great showman putting on a good show.  But he is a bull in a China shop and his mouth runs faster than his brain.  He has already offended a lot of people, and I figure if elected he would alienate everyone in the US in about two days, and everyone overseas in another few days.  How can a US president get anything done when everyone in the world is scheming how to get even with him?  The president's bully pulpit is one of the strongest things a US president has going for him.  It doesn't work so well when everyone is all mad at him.  Plus, early (not too reliable) polls show him loosing to Hillary. 
2. Rand Paul.  He is an isolationist.  He plans to pull back to North America and let the rest of the world go to hell in a handbasket.  This didn't work last time, in the 1930's the isolationists prevented us from dealing with Hitler while he was small enough to slap down.  That caused WWII.  Once is enough.
2.  Ben Carson.  Helova nice guy.  I'd go with him except he is so soft spoken I have trouble seeing a President Carson telling a Bashar Assad where to get off, let alone a real tough nut like Putin.  And he occasionally says things that make him look ignorant or naive. 
4. Ted Cruz.  Good talker.  Made a good impression at the Grafton County Lincoln Reagan dinner up here this spring.  Kimberly Strassel at the Wall St Journal thinks he is a opportunistic flip flopper.  She claims he is trying to woo Rand Paul isolationist voters by talking up isolationism.  She calls him a grandstander, who worked for a government shutdown over Obamacare, tried for a filibuster in defense of gun rights, and holding the Senate in session to protest Obama's immigration orders.  He has voted against defense authorization bills and voted to shut down NSA metadata collection.  Kimberley follows this stuff more closely than I do.
5. Marco Rubio.  Not bad.  Good talker.  Kinda young, but that might be OK
6. JEB Bush.   I'm not ready for a third President Bush no matter how meritorious JEB may be.  Seemed kinda lackadaisical on the campaign trail up here. 
7.  Carly Fiorina.  Made a fine impression speaking at the Littleton VFW in Sept.  She is smart, well informed, dresses appropriately (especially important for women), and knows her audience.  She was saying want the voters wanted to hear in Littleton.  Impressive resume, running Hewlett Packard puts her in the big leagues.
8.  All the rest of 'em.  Who knows?

Can you read my code?

True Allele is a computer program that separates mixed up DNA samples.  For example a blood sample from a crime scene where both the victim and a suspect were cut and bled in a struggle.  Now we have defense attorneys, a disreputable bunch, claiming that True Allele is falsely pointing the finger at their clients. 
   To fix this, the attorneys want to look at the source code of the program.  The program's developer, Mark Perlin, says "No way.  It's a trade secret". 
   This is a baloney argument on the attorney's part.  My day job for 40 years was looking at other guy's computer code and fixing the bugs in it.  It's tough.  And there is no way an outsider can look at the C source code and know anything.  Computer code is opaque to the point of unreadable, and there is no way any number of lawyers and their  hired computer scientists can tell anything by reading the code of the program.
   Mark Perlin has brought the program's test suite, and the test results into court, and he, correctly, says that tests and test results are the only way to know that the program works as advertised. 
   Far as I am concerned, the attorneys want to look at the code as a way to delay justice being done on their clients. 

John Kerry is a total disgrace. Rationale for Charlie Hebdo??

John Kerry let his real thinking slip out the other day.  He said the Paris massacre is different from the Charlie Hebdo massacre because there was a "rationale" for the Charlie Hebdo murders.
  He is saying that people who publish stuff that ISIS doesn't like are fair game for ISIS.  And this turkey is an American secretary of state.  And we have a president who appointed him and who has not fired him for the "rationale" remark.  Kiss freedom of speech goodbye.

How to stop ISIS

ISIS is a movement, an ideology, trying to become a nation state.  It's strength is ideological.  ISIS is strong enough to draw young people from Europe and the US to travel to Syria and take up arms with them.  It's strong enough to get Western useful idiots to cover for them.  It's ideals and motivation are unspeakably vile.  Stopping ISIS is not only a military problem. We have to name  their ideals, their ideology, and motives as anathema thru out the world. 
   For openers, people who travel to ISIS lands and take up arms with ISIS are levying war against the United States, adhering to our enemies, and giving them aid and comfort.  That's treason, Article III Section 3 US constitution.  We should at least lift their US passports,  put them on the no-fly list, revoke any security clearances they might have, or hope to obtain, and put their names on a public traitor's list.  Or anything else that the law allows.
   We need a good comedy movie, making the ISIS people look like uncouth barbarians, and stupid to boot. Not to say ugly and gross.  Some TV episodes on the same vein would be good.
   We need to get Muslim clerics of some seniority to publicly condemn ISIS.  And repeat for each new ISIS atrocity.  And we need to apply some heat to our own intellectuals when they make excuses for ISIS.  
    We need to clear them off the Internet.  I've mentioned this before.
    We need to cut off their access to banks, credit cards, time payments, traveler's checks, wire transfers.  And embargo them.  And prevent them from selling oil.
    We need to put a no fly zone over any friends or allies in the ISIS lands.  Enforced by USAF and Patriot missiles.
   We need to have Christian clerics preach the words of Jesus after each ISIS atrocity.   Make the points about thou shalt not kill, love thy enemies, and contrast it with ISIS brutality.
   We need to close down madrassa's, world wide.  Madrassa's don't teach reading, writing, and arithmetic, they teach hatred.
   Then we need to do the military things, invade the ISIS lands, depose the ISIS government structures, prosecute and punish ISIS criminals,  set up a decent system of elementary education, set up honest and fair courts, set up a humane police force, do land reform so the peasants who work the land have good title to it.  Establish a democratic free enterprise capitalist government.  We vet the candidates and select for honesty, at least a high school education,  a clean record in regards to ISIS activity, drug running, smuggling, and protection racketeering.   We write the constitution and we enforce it when necessary.  We include strict term limits on all officeholders. We count the votes in elections.
   To do the military things we need US forces, and we need local allies.  Just having troops from Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, carrying their national flags, will do a lot to quell ISIS resistance.  Skip Turkey or Israel, too many hard feelings from past times.
     

Reuters doesn't know the difference between mirrors and lenses

Telescopes are getting bigger.  Back in the day (1940's), the 200 inch Mt Palomar telescope was the absolute last word.  Today, under construction in Chile, is the Giant Magellan Telescope,  (GMT) with 327 inch mirrors, seven of them ganged together, yielding a combined aperture of 981 inches.   That's really really big. 
   Funny, the Reuters people, in this article , describe the GMT as using lenses.  That's not right.  Big telescopes have used mirrors for better than the last 100 years.  Reason, chromatic aberration.  Mirrors reflect light of all colors the same way.  Lenses don't, red light bends differently than blue light, causing color fringes in the image.  The extreme case is the rainbow of colors you get when sunlight shines thru a glass prism.  Just to double check, I googled up the GMT website, and as I knew, GMT uses mirrors. 
  Translation, the Reuters people don't know the difference between mirrors and lenses, and are ignorant of the development of telescope art over the centuries.  This is fairly typical of newsies,  a profound ignorance of everything technical. 

Long Range Strike Bomber (LRS-B)

Aviation week had two opinion pieces (Commentary) on the LRS-B.  Neither of them breathed so much as a word about the contract challenge that they emailed to magazine subscriber's last week.  The two commentary pieces called the program well managed, the bids reasonable.  Nothing about the contract award.  They did say that the costing was based upon "Average Procurement Unit Cost" as opposed to "Unit Recurring Flyaway Cost".   Av Week says  the Average Procurement Unit Cost includes spares, support equipment and other essential stuff, which the Unit Flyaway did not.  Spares can cost.  Engines make up roughly a quarter of the cost of an aircraft.  Back in the day, we had four spare J75 engines on base to support 20 single engine fighters.   If  LRS-B is spared to the same level, that increases the price of the engine buy by maybe 20% over the life of the program.   Spare gyros, spare radars, spare landing gear, all that is expensive.  Support equipment, we used to call that "ground power",  air compressors, generator sets, hydraulic mules, tractors, bomb lifts, cockpit ladders, air conditioning sets, tow bars, it all adds up. 

Taking Syrian Refugees to the US

You know, in that tidal wave of Syrian refugees, there has gotta be some good people, hard workers, people who want to become Americans and who would make good ones.  We oughta skim the cream of the crop.  Obama wants to take 10,000? Go for it. 
   Go to the biggest refugee camp, the one closest to Syria.  Pitch a big tent.  Raise the American flag outside.  In side have cold CocaCola and hot coffee, courtesy of the house.  Have a bunch of Syrian Americans, who speak Arabic do the interviewing.  Ask for their family names, parents, siblings, cousins, uncles, aunts, nieces, and nephews.  Run family names against US blacklists.  Reject those with Islamist terrorist family.  Accept the obvious winners, medical doctors, engineers, technicians, businessmen.  Accept married men (they must have wife and kids with them) Accept unaccompanied minors who look like they could get themselves adopted in America.  Accept single young men who express a desire to become US citizens, and/or enlist in the US armed forces.  Accept Christians, Yazidis, Druze, Jews and any other non Muslims that there might be.
   Reject anyone suspected of ISIS leanings, or activity.  Reject anyone who admits to criminal activity, drug running, and the like.   Reject anyone educated in a madrassa.  Reject anyone who looks, acts, talks, or dresses suspiciously.  Reject anyone on US blacklists.
   Issue a temporary US passport and air tickets to the accepted.  Tell them we are offering them a chance to become Americans. Tell them if they show disloyalty to the United States, get caught communicating with Islamic terrorists, or get in trouble with the law, they will be shipped right back here, in handcuffs.
   Wanna bet we could fill our quota of refugees with  good useful citizens?  And let the Europeans cope with the dregs we leave behind?  And we could make some heart warming propaganda video showing happy refugees debarking on US soil, finding jobs and housing, sending their children to US public schools. 

Zap the Islamic Terrorist websites

According to Internet chatter and some input from the newsies,  a lot of dangerous ISIS terrorists are recruited, motivated, and launched, via Islamist websites.  For example that Major Nedal sp? who did the Fort Hood shooting, Richard Reed  the shoe bomber, and others.  The flow of young people to Syria to join ISIS is blamed upon Internet recruiting. 
   If this is so, we ought to shut these sites down.  We can do it.  The big backbone carriers that power the Internet are all US (last time I looked anyhow) and it would be simple for them to simply drop all traffic to or from Islamic websites into the bit bucket. Poof, no more Islamist website.  All that is needed is to have the URL of the Islamic website and it's gone.
   This will take some organization but it's doable.  Best and nicest would be a court, to which evidence would be presented, condemning the website as Islamist terrorist.  Then a court order to the Internet backbone carriers to black hole the website would follow.
   The Islamist websites would change their names, or start up new ones as a counter measure.  Even if the same offensive website pops up a day later using a different URL, a couple of such moves and they loose their audience.  When the fruitcake's favorite hate site stops existing, how do they find it's new address?
    And we ought to speak to the search engines.  Tell 'em to never display anything from Islamic terrorist websites.  

Massive air strikes.

The French  flew a mission to Rakka, some burb in Syria that ISIS calls its capital, today.  As retaliation for the Paris massacre on Friday, an air strike on Monday ain't too shabby.  Ten fighters dropped twenty bombs.  Massive this is not.  Even if some Fox newsies call it massive.
   In the old days, I would stand on the flight line in the early morning at Korat RTAFB as we launched the morning strike on Hanoi, always 60 F-105's loaded with six 750 pounders apiece.  And I always watched the afternoon strike, another 60 aircraft with six bombs apiece take off around 1 o'clock.   I'm not gonna call 10 sorties and 20 bombs "massive". 

Obama stays eloquent for 45 minutes on TV

The question all the reporters asked was "What are you gonna do about the Paris massacre?"  Obama evaded gracefully, evaded the followup questions, and managed to spend 45 minutes on live TV saying that he isn't going to do anything on account of the Paris massacre.  He still wants to bring in a LOT of Syrian refugees to the US.  He isn't going to take any action, military or otherwise against ISIS.
   Obama claimed that Syrian refugees would be "vetted" before they are allowed into the US.  Hah.  Tell me about how you gonna do that.  Pick up the phone and call Baghdad?  And ask if Mohammed so-and-so is an ISIS terrorist?  Who's gonna answer that phone?  Assad's flunkies? ISIS, the other rebel groups?  And  even if they wanted to, can they check public records in a country undergoing a civil war?  I don't think so.
   Syrian refugees are a gamble.  Most of 'em are probably harmless refugees, some of 'em are ISIS, some of 'em are Al Quada, some of 'em are other bad things.  And they all look alike.

Sword of Summer, by Rick Riordan

It's out, it has made the WSJ best selling hardback fiction.  Subtitled "Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard".  I enjoyed it.  Rick Riordan started writing about Percy Jackson, a teen aged New York kid who gets mixed up with the gods of Greek mythology.  Those were good enough to get the first two books made into fairly decent movies.  This book has a teen aged Boston street kid get mixed up with the gods of Norse mythology.  As a long time resident of Boston, I enjoyed the various local references, Longfellow Bridge, Charles St, Boston Aquarium, Bunker Hill, all places I have been to and know fairly well. 
   It's a "young adult" book but I liked it, even if I am no longer a young adult.  The protagonist is a decent teenager, who is given (stuck with) a horrible problem, he rises to the occasion, and with some help from his friends, wins thru in the end.  There is a gutsy girl friend,  some strange relatives, and some difficult to handle gods.  Good fun.

Picking a College

College is VERY expensive.   Too expensive to waste.  You go to college to improve your prospects of a good job after graduation, to learn something of value, and to graduate, actually get that degree.
   You want to avoid colleges like Mizzou, which made nationwide headlines after it's president resigned under pressure from black radicals.  No teaching or learning is gonna happen there, not for months, and a showing a Mizzou degree to an employer will get you laughed at now. 
   So how do you weed out the crazy places?  Well, first off, visit their website.  What activities do they take pride in?  Opening a new laboratory or running off a climate change demo?  Check the student groups on campus.  Chapters of things like the American Physical Association or IEEE are good signs, chapters of ACLU or SDS are bad signs.  Count the faculty, tenured professors and part timer "adjunct" professors.  Count the student body.  Divide students by faculty members to find the student faculty ratio.  Count the number of courses offered.  Sort the courses between real learning (English, physics, history, math, etc) and talky talky courses (gender studies, sociology, anthropology, ethnic studies,art history, etc.).  Remember that professors of talky-talk courses are apt to egg students on to doing political demos with non negotiable demands. 
   Visit the campus and talk to students and faculty.  Get the students to talk about the faculty.  If the students are contemptuous of the faculty, that's a bad sign.  If the faculty are contemptuous of students, free market capitalism, American exceptionalism, and first amendment freedoms, that's a bad sign.  Read the posters on the bulletin boards.  Find some college blogs and read them when you get home. 
   You are looking for a place with a reasonable campus attitude, like we are all here to learn stuff, and we understand that as American college students we have it pretty good in life.  You want to avoid a place full of grievances, racism, class envy, and spite.   If everyone is mad at something or somebody, the place may blow up either while you are there, or after you graduate, reducing the value of your expensive degree.

Democratic TV Debate last night

It came on late, 9 PM.  We are down to Hillary, Bernie, and O'Malley.  Due to the Paris massacre, they opened up with foreign policy.  All three tried to sound tough without talking about sending US forces to deal with ISIS.  No one mentioned Obama's troop withdrawal from Iraq that turned the place over to ISIS. O'Malley wanted more and better intelligence.  He failed to mention that intelligence does us little good without the will to act on it, to strike the enemy.  All three were four square for doing something, but they all avoided promising real action.  Everyone was in favor of having the locals, Turks, Sunnis, Saudis, Egyptians, anybody except Israel,  get in the fight.
  After the first commercial break, they changed the subject to free stuff, how much each candidate would furnish, how high they would set the federal minimum wage ($15 vs $12), and how a few harmless soak-the-rich taxes would pay for it all without raising the national debt.  Right.
  I went to bed before it was over.  God help the United States if any one of those turkeys becomes president.   

Paris

First, my sincere sympathies for the victims of this unprovoked terrorism.  To loose a loved one to terrorism is a greatest sadness I can think of. 
The only thing for us to do, is get them before they get us.  Obama is worthless for this, he lacks the stones to even call them Islamic extremists.  Maybe the French can lead the way, they are a second rank industrialized power, with an army.  They could whip a third world insurgency.  If they wanted to, they could send a decent sized force to Syria to clean house. 

Washing Windows 8

The Micro$ofties stuffed Windows 8 chock a block full of crapware,  programs that suck up RAM and CPU time but don't actually do anything for you.   Every so often I go out on a crapware hunt, and I always find something.  Today I scored three kills.  First off is a program "DasHost.exe".  It is supposed to alert you to incoming email, sometimes.  My email client, Thunderbird, has been successfully detecting incoming email for years with out it.   After a net check, the consensus of opinion was "worthless", so I went after it.  It's a service.  Services are little (and some times not so little) programs that Windows runs behind your back. They all suck up precious RAM, and hog CPU time. They show up in Task Manager as processes and there is a special Windows program to manage them.  Go to Control Panel.  Pick Admin. Tools. Pick "Services".   Find "Device Association Service.   First STOP the Device Association Service.  This shuts down the copy running in RAM at that moment.  Then hit "properties" and change the startup type to "disabled".  That preventsWindows from starting it up on the next boot.
   While you are in there, find service "Themes" and give it the same treatment.  Themes suppores the fancy Aeroglass look in the display.  It sucks up a lot of CPU time and I don't like the look, I prefer the standard old Windows look. 
   My last kill today was "Power2Go Gadget".  This is not a Micro$oft program, and several websites called it useless.  It is NOT a service, so you cannot zap it thru the Services program, like Dashost and Themes.  I found it with Task Manager, and the Windows 8 Task Manager can stop it, and prevent it from reloading (disable it).  I'll double check tomorrow to see if it stays dead, but it's stopped now.
   For doing all this, laptop feels livelier, it can keep up with my typing now. 
   Be careful messing with services.  Back in XP, there were a couple of services, Remote Job Entry for one, that were essential to Windows.  If you disabled Remote Job Entry in XP, Windows would never boot again.  The only fix was to reinstall Windows from scratch, a tedious task, especially if you lacked the install CD-ROM discs.  I suspect the Micro$ofties have planted similar booby traps in Win 8, but I don't know what they are.  So don't disable anything unless you are sure, or have searched the internet and found an authoritative site like Black Viper to say that you can disable it without a disaster. 

Doing National Hari-Kari

World War II was a total disaster for Japan.  They suffered enormous casualties, we sank their navy, we sank their merchant marine, we nuked their cities, and the ones we didn't nuke, we firebombed.  Then we occupied the Home Islands, hauled Japanese leaders up in front of a War Crimes Trial, imposed a new constitution, and rewrote a lot of Japanese law to make it favorable to free market capitalism and democracy.  We ran the place until the 1950's. 
   A worse outcome to a war is hard to imagine. 
   And the leadership that took Japan to war with the United States knew they would loose. And they did it anyhow.  There was an independent staff study by top Japanese academics predicting total disaster.  There was Admiral Yamamoto who had spent a lot of time in the US, spoke English well, and he said "For the first six months we shall run wild, but I have absolutely no confidence after that."  There was Matsuota, the foreign minister who had grown up as a foster child in California.  The Japanese knew that America had a huge population, a vast national territory, highly industrialized, blessed with abundant natural resources, and out weighed and outclassed Japan in every category. They knew war with the US would lead to defeat.
   And, they should have known that they didn't need to go to war with the US.  Japan's national goal in those days was to take over China. They had made a good start, and there was no reason to beleive that they could not finish the job.  Japan was depending upon imports of iron and steel and crude oil from the Unitied States.  And we did not approve of a Japanese takeover of China.  We finally imposed an embargo (traditional American action) upon Japan.
    This put a bind upon the Japanese.  They all knew that they would run out of steel and oil in a matter of months.  But, there was plenty of oil in Dutch Indonesia, not far away.  Hitler had invaded and occupied Holland, which left the Dutch colonial regime in Indonesia kind of blowing in the wind.  Japan could have obtained plenty of oil from Indonesia, either by trade or by force.
   We, the Americans, would not have approved, but we had Nazi Germany to deal with.  The entire American establishment, political, military, business, the papers, all agreed that proper US strategy was to do Germany first.  Germany was bigger, stronger, more advanced, and closer than Japan. Plus the isolationists made life difficult for the Roosevelt administration to do anything internationally.   The Japanese should have known that they could do pretty much anything they wanted on their side of the Pacific, and all the Americans would do about it is write diplomatic nasty grams.  
   But, the Japanese plowed ahead and attacked Pearl Harbor.  They didn't have to do it, it led to a disastrous military defeat, they knew it would, but they did it anyhow.  

Hoot, the movie

A heart warming flick about three decent kids, who manage to do some good.  Came out a long time ago, 2006, low budget ($16 million) didn't make the nut.  Too bad.
Logan Lerman has the starring role.  In 2006 he was only 13 years old.  He plays the role well, at least as well as Daniel Radcliffe played Harry Potter at age 12.  A couple of other child actors who I never heard of before play the other members his gang.
   Enjoyable.  More so than the average new flick today. Netflix has it.

Long Range Strike Bomber (LRS-B) program halted.

The losers (Lockheed Martin and Boeing) filed a protest of the contract award to Northrup Grumman.  GAO ordered a stop work for 100 days while they sort thru the paperwork.  Take a 3 month schedule hit right there.  GAO might, after the 100 day hangup, approve the contract award or order the contract rebid, which will take a year. 
   The losers objections are unclear, and mostly unpublished.  What has come out is the Air Force looked at the bidder's re recurring engineering bids and using a lot of bad past experience doubled  all the bids.  Not a bad idea,  contractors typically bid low to get a foot in the door, thinking that they will be able to get their profit margins back up when the Government orders changes, which it always does.  But, what ought to happen when the contractor's underbid, is the government holds them to the original contract.  Fifty years ago, Lockheed under bid on the C-5 job.  USAF made them eat the difference between what Lockheed spent and what Lockheed bid. 
   Fifty years later, USAF lacks that kind of stones.  And, the last big program USAF put out for bid, the KC-46 tanker job, was a disaster.  Boeing protested the award to Airbus, got the contract rebid, and walked away with it.  And Boeing is doing cost overruns and schedule slippages right now. 
   It's hard to tell from where I live want the real story is.  Could be, GAO is allowing a frivolous protest to slow the program down.  Could be USAF did another KC-46 style bungle.  Could be Pentagon procurement regulations are so screwed up that nothing works.  Any way, the program is delayed by the bureaucrats, and delays always raise the cost to the taxpayer. 

20 Best Handguns

Washington Times internet posting here.  They show nice big pictures of 20 different handguns, nineteen of 'em automatic pistols, and one snub nosed revolver chambered for a ridiculous load.  The automatics are a mix of full sized service pistols and tiny belly guns.  Most of 'em were just under $500, which is significant money for most of us.
   First time buyers should be aware that it is extremely difficult to hit anything with a pistol.  If you can find a pistol that fits your hand properly, you can vastly improve your chances of hitting the bad guy.  A story.  Back in USAF they issued us .38 revolvers for target practice and qualification.  The issue revolvers were in miserable shape.  All the checkering was worn off the wooden grips, the grips had been marinated in gun oil for 20 years and they were slippery.   Each shot made the grip twist in the hand, throwing your aim off for the next shot.  The grips were too small to get all your fingers around, my pinkie finger either waved free in air, or  slipped underneath the butt and damn near dislocated with each shot.  My target shooting was miserable with the issue .38
  Later, on a sandpit shooting afternoon, a friend let me shoot his commercial .38 revolver.  It had nice big wood grips, good sharp checkering, nice and dry, good smooth trigger, shot like a dream.
   Before you shell out $500 for a handgun, you want to shoot the thing, say twenty rounds, and see if it agrees with you.  Then think about revolvers.  A home defense gun  might spend 20 years in a night table drawer, loaded, unloved, unlubricated, but that one time something bad happens, you want it to work.  A double action (pulling the trigger cocks the hammer) revolver is good for this.  You just pull the trigger and the gun goes bang.  No safeties, no slide to work, no magazine releases to avoid.  And it stores loaded, and un cocked, all the springs uncompressed.  In automatics, the magazine spring is fully compressed when the magazine is loaded and the hammer or striker is cocked.  Over the years, compressed springs can weaken, or even break. 
   Pistols come in various sizes, too damn big (Dirty Harry's .44), service pistol (cop's holster gun) and pocket pistols.  Service pistols shoot best, they have enough weight to soak up the recoil of a decent load, a long enough sight radius to be easy to aim, big enough grips.  Unless you are planning to carry the gun in your pocket, there is no reason to mess around with pocket pistols.   They are harder to shoot, harder to get a hit with, and are often chambered for wimpy little loads that won't stop a bad guy, but just make him mad.
     You want a handgun chambered for a standard, widely available load.  These are .38 Special, 9 mm Luger, and .45 ACP.   There are a lot of other loads out there.  Any thing less than .38 special isn't big enough, anything more than .45 ACP is too damn big.   The lighter the gun, the harder it will kick, which throws your accuracy off.  The shorter the barrel, the fiercer the report.  For example, the classic 1911 .45 government model automatic pistol weighs 39 ounces, has a 5 inch barrel, and handles the big .45 ACP load reasonably well. I have seen ads for little pocket pistols weighing only 14 ounces, with 3 inch barrels chambered for .45.  I would not care to shoot one, too much kick, too loud a report.