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Glossalalia researched with a brain-scan
Aug. 9th, 2006 09:47 amWhich is probably only interesting if you know what glossalalia is or are interested in brain function.
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Aug. 9th, 2006
http://blog.wired.com/27BStroke6/#1535689
NSA: We are Powerless!
The National Security Agency -- the super secret eavesdropping arm of the military charged with keeping tabs on the communications of the nation's enemies, allies and for the last four years, American citizens -- is facing a power crunch, according to the Baltimore Sun's Siobhan Gorman.
The demand for electricity to operate its expanding intelligence systems has left the high-tech eavesdropping agency on the verge of exceeding its power supply, the lifeblood of its sprawling 350-acre Fort Meade headquarters, according to current and former intelligence officials.
Agency officials anticipated the problem nearly a decade ago as they looked ahead at the technology needs of the agency, sources said, but it was never made a priority, and now the agency's ability to keep its operations going is threatened. The NSA is already unable to install some costly and sophisticated new equipment, including two new supercomputers, for fear of blowing out the electrical infrastructure, they said.
In response, the NSA is quietly sending pleas to its targets via pre-recorded phone calls, text messages and its super-secret microwave "power of suggestion" feature to voluntarily reduce their volume of communications. (You can activate this at home by pressing the "defrost" button.)
They also asked people to:
* Turn off any encryption, at least until September brings cooler weather to the East Coast.
* Make overseas calls at non-peak hours.
* Directly CC: [email protected] for only the most essential terrorist plotting emails
* Try to avoid, in conversation or written communications, any non-relevant uses of the phrases 'jihad,' 'pipe bomb' and 'this country is run by incompetent, ideological nincompoops'
The note closes with my favorite of their slogans: "Help the NSA Help You."
Please do your part -- Remember we are all in this together.
NSA: We are Powerless!
The National Security Agency -- the super secret eavesdropping arm of the military charged with keeping tabs on the communications of the nation's enemies, allies and for the last four years, American citizens -- is facing a power crunch, according to the Baltimore Sun's Siobhan Gorman.
The demand for electricity to operate its expanding intelligence systems has left the high-tech eavesdropping agency on the verge of exceeding its power supply, the lifeblood of its sprawling 350-acre Fort Meade headquarters, according to current and former intelligence officials.
Agency officials anticipated the problem nearly a decade ago as they looked ahead at the technology needs of the agency, sources said, but it was never made a priority, and now the agency's ability to keep its operations going is threatened. The NSA is already unable to install some costly and sophisticated new equipment, including two new supercomputers, for fear of blowing out the electrical infrastructure, they said.
In response, the NSA is quietly sending pleas to its targets via pre-recorded phone calls, text messages and its super-secret microwave "power of suggestion" feature to voluntarily reduce their volume of communications. (You can activate this at home by pressing the "defrost" button.)
They also asked people to:
* Turn off any encryption, at least until September brings cooler weather to the East Coast.
* Make overseas calls at non-peak hours.
* Directly CC: [email protected] for only the most essential terrorist plotting emails
* Try to avoid, in conversation or written communications, any non-relevant uses of the phrases 'jihad,' 'pipe bomb' and 'this country is run by incompetent, ideological nincompoops'
The note closes with my favorite of their slogans: "Help the NSA Help You."
Please do your part -- Remember we are all in this together.
The Laptop Saga Continues!
Aug. 9th, 2006 03:07 pmLet's see. I think my last mention of my laptop was before Phoenix Con Games and that I'd sent it off to be repaired and had pressed my semi-ancient and only partially decrepit Toshiba laptop into service (the Celeron 466 with 192 meg of ram). The service company had been contacted because my hard drive was failing. After having contacted them, the system board failed entirely, no nuthin'. It was shipped off to Illinois to an outfit called Micro Medics about a week before I left for Phoenix.
Last Thursday, the laptop came back. Unfortunately no one was home, but Russet was there Friday, so delivery was successful. I opened the box, the laptop powered up wonderfully, but you could tell that the hard drive was still being erratic (not unlike it's owner). And the power supply/battery charger was missing (as I previously wrote about).
Monday I called Micro Medics to find out (a) why the hard drive was not replaced, and (b) where the hell was my power supply! Their reply: (a) the tech tested it and it tested fine, and (b) "Our shipping/receiving department opens all incoming boxes and inventories the contents. For your laptop, it was recorded that there was a battery, a cd/dvd drive, no recovery cd, and that is it. Ergo, you're screwed, me chummer!"
Needless to say, I was not a happy camper. After lots of thought and talking to a computer geek/electronic repairman neighbor and reading replies to my Saturday post re: charger alternatives, I decided that I should be safe using my wife's adapter. She had an old ThinkPad issued by the observatory that was retired and has a thoroughly dead battery. Said laptop has one purpose in life: to play Set.
Tuesday I take the charger to work, I remove my laptop's battery, and power it up. Everything seems pretty good. I try to Ghost my failing harddrive's OS restore partition, but the drive is just too unreliable. So I install the 100gig HD that I bought before I sent off the unit to Micro Medics. I grab a system CD out of a drawer at work and install Win2000 Pro (pre-patched to SP4), followed by Zone Alarm Pro and all the loverly updates! Amusingly, the longest part of the install process was the format of the disk! Everything went well, and last night I copied ALL of my MP3 collection to my laptop! (took a couple of hours, too! somewhere around 35gig or so)
Today, I've downloaded the IBM/Lenova System Updater, so my sound should now work once I reboot, and that was about the only issue that I had. There's no way I'm going to get Micro Medics to buy me a new adapter, so I hunted eBay and found one (a genuine IBM power supply) in Canada for $5 + $5 shipping, if I don't get that one (it closes Friday), then I've got a line on an outfit in New Jersey that'll sell me a Chinese knock-off for $25 including shipping, so I should have a power supply by the end of next week. Right now I've got to unpack the adapter when I get home so my wife can play Set after she gets home in the AM. :-)
So far, so good. Basically I won't use Micro Medics again, unless my system utterly dies before the warranty expires in December. I now have a nice big drive in my laptop, now all I need is a memory upgrade. I still have some stuff to install, such as Spybot S&D, but I think I'm going to try an experiment: I'm not going to install an anti-virus program just yet.
This is not something that I would recommend to anyone else. I know my surfing and downloading habits make me an unlikely candidate for viruses and other malware, in fact, I've never had a virus infect any computer of which I am the main user (my laptop getting hacked last month was from a piece of software that had a known security hole that I was stupid enough not to upgrade). I've received some viruses in email, but I've NEVER run Outlook or Outlook Express on my personal computers, so the self-executing viruses from 10 years ago or so never hit me.
Basically I'm doing this because my laptop is a little thin on ram, it's only got 256meg, which is normally adequate for Win2k Pro, but anti-virus consumes more resources than you might suppose. So we'll see what happens, and I'll have to make sure that I back up my important stuff to my desktop.
Last Thursday, the laptop came back. Unfortunately no one was home, but Russet was there Friday, so delivery was successful. I opened the box, the laptop powered up wonderfully, but you could tell that the hard drive was still being erratic (not unlike it's owner). And the power supply/battery charger was missing (as I previously wrote about).
Monday I called Micro Medics to find out (a) why the hard drive was not replaced, and (b) where the hell was my power supply! Their reply: (a) the tech tested it and it tested fine, and (b) "Our shipping/receiving department opens all incoming boxes and inventories the contents. For your laptop, it was recorded that there was a battery, a cd/dvd drive, no recovery cd, and that is it. Ergo, you're screwed, me chummer!"
Needless to say, I was not a happy camper. After lots of thought and talking to a computer geek/electronic repairman neighbor and reading replies to my Saturday post re: charger alternatives, I decided that I should be safe using my wife's adapter. She had an old ThinkPad issued by the observatory that was retired and has a thoroughly dead battery. Said laptop has one purpose in life: to play Set.
Tuesday I take the charger to work, I remove my laptop's battery, and power it up. Everything seems pretty good. I try to Ghost my failing harddrive's OS restore partition, but the drive is just too unreliable. So I install the 100gig HD that I bought before I sent off the unit to Micro Medics. I grab a system CD out of a drawer at work and install Win2000 Pro (pre-patched to SP4), followed by Zone Alarm Pro and all the loverly updates! Amusingly, the longest part of the install process was the format of the disk! Everything went well, and last night I copied ALL of my MP3 collection to my laptop! (took a couple of hours, too! somewhere around 35gig or so)
Today, I've downloaded the IBM/Lenova System Updater, so my sound should now work once I reboot, and that was about the only issue that I had. There's no way I'm going to get Micro Medics to buy me a new adapter, so I hunted eBay and found one (a genuine IBM power supply) in Canada for $5 + $5 shipping, if I don't get that one (it closes Friday), then I've got a line on an outfit in New Jersey that'll sell me a Chinese knock-off for $25 including shipping, so I should have a power supply by the end of next week. Right now I've got to unpack the adapter when I get home so my wife can play Set after she gets home in the AM. :-)
So far, so good. Basically I won't use Micro Medics again, unless my system utterly dies before the warranty expires in December. I now have a nice big drive in my laptop, now all I need is a memory upgrade. I still have some stuff to install, such as Spybot S&D, but I think I'm going to try an experiment: I'm not going to install an anti-virus program just yet.
This is not something that I would recommend to anyone else. I know my surfing and downloading habits make me an unlikely candidate for viruses and other malware, in fact, I've never had a virus infect any computer of which I am the main user (my laptop getting hacked last month was from a piece of software that had a known security hole that I was stupid enough not to upgrade). I've received some viruses in email, but I've NEVER run Outlook or Outlook Express on my personal computers, so the self-executing viruses from 10 years ago or so never hit me.
Basically I'm doing this because my laptop is a little thin on ram, it's only got 256meg, which is normally adequate for Win2k Pro, but anti-virus consumes more resources than you might suppose. So we'll see what happens, and I'll have to make sure that I back up my important stuff to my desktop.
They recently celebrated 40 years of service (there's only two of them) and got a press day to theirselves. One thing that I found particularly cool is that they keep their payload level, even while climbing a hill to the launch pads. "...[the] leveling system keeps the shuttle from deviating, only allowing the top of the orbiter to move in an arc about the diameter of a basketball during its journey -- even as the crawler climbs the short hill to the launch pad."
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/behindscenes/crawlers.html
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/behindscenes/crawlers.html