perkonis

In December 2003, German citizen Khaled el-Masri boarded a bus in Germany for a holiday in Skopje, Macedonia. Instead of a restful vacation, the Muslim man of Lebanese heritage says he ended up in a Central Intelligence Agency isolation cell in Afghanistan as a suspected terrorist.

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Nuclear fusion is the most promising, yet a very challenging method of producing clean energy that can meet the ever growing demands without worrying about fuel. Scientist have yet to succeed in harnessing the power in an affordable way, but by using the KSTAR furnace, the government wants to start commercial fusion power generation in 30 years.

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So here’s the Cliffs Notes version of the season for them so far…

In Monaco they were heavily criticized and investigated for allegedly using team orders to keep Hamilton behind Alonso. The stewards cleared them in this one, but the British press vilified them for compromising their golden boy, Hamilton.

Next, Ferrari fired Nigel Stepney and it was then discovered that he had passed some 780 pages of Ferrari technical documents to Mike Coughlan. Coughlan was, and still is I believe, an employee of McLaren. The FIA was gracious enough to invite all parties to a hearing of the World Motorsport Counsel. It was decided at that McLaren was guilty of being in possession of Ferrari intellectual property, but there was no evidence that they had used it. Therefore, there was no penalty issued to McLaren.

Oh, then there was the Hungaroring fiasco where Alonso sat in his pit box long enough to block Hamilton and prevent him from completing his last flying qualifying lap. The stewards again requested the company of the team and this time penalized Alonso by stripping him of his pole and placing him 6th on the grid. They also stripped McLaren of any Constructor points before they even lined up for the race. The team has an appeal scheduled for September 19.

McLaren decided to file an appeal to the WMSC counsel verdict that was to be heard on September 13. That changed yesterday when the FIA announced that they have new evidence in the case and once again requested the honor of the presence of the team. In the original hearing, the FIA stated that, should further evidence be found, they reserved the right to ban McLaren from the F1 championship for not only 2007, but 2008 as well. In that light, this latest invitation probably isn’t Max wanting to share high tea with Ron.

And just for good measure, the stewards of the Italian Grand Prix fined McLaren $50,000 for the use of an unapproved gearbox in the Hungarian Grand Prix. I guess they had run out of other ways to penalize them.

I really don’t think I would want to sit in on any kind of meeting at Paragon on Monday.

Spam is spam is spam. I try to stay on top of it, but some days it’s difficult.

To help me keep the crap comments out of here (and I don’t mean mine, thank you very much) I have been using the Akismet and Simple Trackback Validator plugins and blocking the worst offenders in my .htaccess file.

It works well, but that’s a lot of work. Unbeknownst to me, I could have just gotten some “protection” against the spammers…

/cue Godfather theme

Anikrichard | anlikivanna.80@mail.ru | wwwwww.com | IP: 72.9.235.218
hello , my name is Richard and I know you get a lot of spammy comments ,
I can help you with this problem . I know a lot of spammers and I will ask them not to post on your site. It will reduce the volume of spam by 30-50% .In return Id like to ask you to put a link to my site on the index page of your site. The link will be small and your visitors will hardly notice it , its just done for higher rankings in search engines. Contact me icq 454528835 or write me tedirectory(at)yahoo.com , i will give you my site url and you will give me yours if you are interested. thank you

Not Spam — Sep 5, 11:31 AM — [ View Post ]

Hopefully I won’t receive a horses head in my inbox for declining this gracious offer.

As a consolation prize, I would like to present the award for Dumbest Comment of the Year. This will also be in the running for Dumbest Comment Ever.

I got tricked into a chick flick last night. It was an honest mistake (honest). As I flipped past one of the movie channels I saw a large dog - a mastiff I believe - wearing roller skates. Now, if you ask a guy if he wants to watch a large dog on skates, one of two things will happen: he will respond “Oh hell yeah!” or he will lie. So, naturally, when that voice in my head asked if I wanted to watch that I thought “Oh hell Yeah!”

I was disappointed to discover that roller skating dogs was most definitely not a major theme to the movie. This was like the TV equivalent of being Rick Rolled. I sat down to watch something cool and, instead, saw a lot of shopping, crying, and rain. I’d been tricked. I am hard pressed to think of a movie that involves those three elements that isn’t a chick flick. Come to think of it, I’m hard pressed to think of a flick that does prominently feature skating mastiffs. I could almost feel the TV sapping the testosterone from my body, so I told the wife she was on her own and bailed.

So, of course, I promptly went searching for videos of skating dogs.

Lucky me. I got to do a clean install of XP sp2 today. All told, including Windows updates, it took me just shy of 4 hours. Yeah, 4 hours just to install an OS.

The initial install appeared to go OK, but on first boot I found that Windows hadn’t recognized my sound card, video card, wifi, modem, and network card. 0 for 3 on the networking front. Fortunately I had another computer sitting here that would connect to the internet and a thumb drive. Woohoo! Sneakernet! That’s progress for you.

Then I got to start on the updates. All 107 of them. SP3 would be nice to have some day. And I haven’t even gotten to installing software yet.

All told, that’s 4 pieces of hardware not recognized, 1 Windows Genuine Disadvantage installed, 107 updates, and 11 reboots.

Yet people seem to think installing Linux is difficult.

It started innocently enough. A quick text message reminding me that I hadn’t paid my cell phone bill. Oops. No problem, I pay nearly almost all my bills online so I’ll just head over to Sprint’s site and give them some jack. Quick and easy, right?

Wrong.

My first inkling that this wasn’t going to be quick and painless came when I couldn’t log in. Sorry, wrong credentials. Thanks for playing.

Ok, I keep a list of my usernames and passwords in my head where they routinely become corrupted. So I hit the “Forgot password” link only to be told that my username doesn’t exist. Hmmm, that’s not right. The next logical step was to hit the “Forgot username” link and give it my email address. Ah, I do exist (Good to know) and would receive an email with my username shortly.

Apparently in Sprint terms shortly means about 45 minutes at which time I received a stunningly brilliant message… (more…)