Facebook has long lost its luster, so it’s just sad to be reminded that Friendster still exists at all. Recently, I’ve even been getting spam messages from my friends’ hacked accounts. Here’s an example:

Date: 07/7/2008 3:08 pm
Subject: Hey
Message:
Hi,
it’s been a while since we talked,
I hope you are doing good.
I got a new page for the cam app, take a look!
[link to spam site]

Smart, those spammers. They know I’ll open a message from a friend. That is, of course, until I start ignoring all Friendster messages altogether. Which begins now.

With all the Obama/Clinton poll-watching, armchair campaign strategizing, and hand-wringing over which democratic candidate is “electable,” it’s been easy for me to forget that there are people who really stand for what I believe. Dennis Kucinich articulates those beliefs with such passion and clarity that it breaks my heart, knowing that he has not one chance in hell of becoming President for the foreseeable future. But I can at least watch him go and hope for our collective future.

More Kucinich on YouTube

The Poor Man Institute » How can I put this?

Call it a triple-layer cake of dead-on brilliance. Poor Man serves up a humorous intro to Olbermann’s lucid celebration of Clinton’s righteous, pointed fury.

PS: You should all be reading “The Poor Man Institute.” And watching Keith Olbermann. And working to get Bill Clinton back in the White House. Constitution Shmonstitution. The dude abides.

Those of you who know me know that I Hate Tom Friedman. My disgust with him and his approach to reality is so thorough that when asked why I Hate Tom Friedman, I usually make something of a game out of it - let me pick a random op-ed and see how many sentences get my blood pressure up.

But I can’t imagine playing that game any more, because if I ever read this article again, my head is going to explode. Seriously - I Fucking Hate Tom Friedman:

The “real reason” for this war, which was never stated, was that after 9/11 America needed to hit someone in the Arab-Muslim world. … The only way to puncture that bubble was for American soldiers, men and women, to go into the heart of the Arab-Muslim world, house to house, and make clear that we are ready to kill, and to die, to prevent our open society from being undermined by this terrorism bubble. Smashing Saudi Arabia or Syria would have been fine. But we hit Saddam for one simple reason: because we could, and because he deserved it and because he was right in the heart of that world. And don’t believe the nonsense that this had no effect. Every neighboring government — and 98 percent of terrorism is about what governments let happen — got the message. If you talk to U.S. soldiers in Iraq they will tell you this is what the war was about.

You should, too.

A poster to a political discussion group I take part in sent one of the recent STRATFOR reports on the escalation situation in Israel and Lebanon, the gist of which was that Israel had no choice but to seize this unique political/strategic opportunity to eradicate Hezbollah’s weaponry, and that a ground invasion is necessary to achieve that goal and therefore likely imminent. Parsing the report and its context gave me my first opportunity to scrawl some semi-cogent thoughts on the war that has been occupying a large part of my attention for several days now. Here goes, with links, after the jump:

• Lousiana congressman William Jefferson (D-New Orleans) is the subject of a recently released FBI affadavit detailing evidence of extensive corruption, allegedly receiving millions of dollars in bribes to help promote or accelerate the regulatory approval of a variety of business dealings. He is said to have stored nearly $100,000 in cash in his freezer. [Link]

• Finnish cartoon death metal band, a parody of itself that has become an extremely divisive issue in their native country, won the European music competition known as ‘Eurovision Song Contest,’ beating out competitors from dozens of genres representing countries across Europe. When they entered, a Finnish member of the European Parliament was quoted as saying that “Lordi could embarass Finland when it takes the EU presidency in July 2006.” About their win, the lead singer says: “It just goes to show that Europe is not such a bad place.” [Link]

• The New York Stock Exchange, itself a recent entry into the realm of the publicly traded, has made what is now the frontrunning offer for the European exchange ‘EuroNext.’ In doing so it has leapfrogged several suitors, including the German Deutsche Börse, and looks poised to take control of the largest platform for exchange of European corporate equities. [Link]

• Financial speaker Larry Williams, who claims to be “the only futures trader in the world to repeatedly trade $1 million of his own money live at seminars around the globe” was arrested in Australia on charges of evading the taxes due on proceeds from his ten books - “nine on futures and stock trading and one on the true whereabouts of Mount Sinai.” [Link]

From a recent, lefty petition:

“Seriously, this war and war budget are beyond crazy. Newspapers are saying another $72 billion is a shoe-in. How have we let this happen? How can we stop it? One clear way is forcing any half-responsible Reps to stop funding what most Americans and most Congresspeople know is a losing mistake.”

It seems to me that the war is over. At this point, we’re deciding whether or not to fund the reconstruction of iraq. I may not like that fact that we’re in this situation, but nor do I see much of a choice. The power vacuum that we would leave in our wake at this point could be catastrophic in the middle east, with effects rippling globally.

I’ve had little time to read up, recently. What justfication is there to simply pull out?

So, my email over at Fastmail.FM just went down for three days. Note that I pay these people $100 a year to give me essentially the same service as Gmail. I have continued with them simply because I still haven’t yet grokked Google’s don’t-sort-it-we’ll-search-it-for-you way of dealing with email.

Their explanation?

The drives we use have a guaranteed lifetime of 3 years and were only 15 months old. Given that RAID 6 can support up to 2 drives in an array failing, the chance of any 2 drives failing at the same time is an extremely rare occurrence. However in this particular case, 3 drives all failed within a remarkably short period of time! At that moment, we had effectively lost access to all data on the unit, and had to resort to our disaster recovery scenario, our daily incremental backups.

“Extremely rare,” indeed. Given their ratings, the chances that three of these drives would fail within the same six-hour period is 1 in 84,000,000,000. That’s assuming an even distribution in failure probabilities. If failure is more likely at the end of a duty cycle (as expected), their explanation is even less plausible. As soon as a Google offers IMAP support and assurances that their nascent AI isn’t feeding on my email, my hundred dollars is going there.

I know my probability calculations are wonky, btw (i.e. 3 drives failing together vs. 3 drives out of X drives failing together.) Suffice it to say that it was unlikely thing.