Screwing With Army Recruiting

Nice to know you can get arrested in this country for merely standing in front of a military recruiting building dressed as an Abu Ghraib detainee. This guy's being charged with misdemeanor disturbing the peace and felony charges for making a bomb threat and using a hoax device.

Be sure to read the whole article, paying particular attention to the comments made by police officers back at the station when friends came to bail this guy out. Don't you just love how the very people who are supposed to be enforcing the law let their personal politics become the driver behind depriving a person of his constitutional rights?

If these charges stick, I'm moving to Montana.

Enron Bastards Caught on Tape

Read this.

It seems the most compelling argument against deregulation of utilities is that you can't trust money-grubbing greedy bastards to avoid artificially raising demand for said utilities.

Just like fuckwad stock brokers who pump and dump, Enron traders shut down power plants to artificially create demand and then gave it to the State of California up the pooper with their pricing, laughing all the way to the bank.

Jerks. All of them. I hope they rot in jail.

VH Is Back

I've heard the new Van Halen song "It's About Time" on the radio a couple times. It's due out on a new greatest hits collection coming out next month called Best of Both Worlds. The new song sounded a bit strange to me, but I'm starting to dig it. (I felt the same way when OU812 came out - it took a week or so for the new songs to grow on me.) In any case, the new song starts out with some very heavy guitar. Eddie detuned big time for this one (it sounds like he's tuned down close to D-flat on his low E string). The old fans are going to eat it up, while the new sound might attract some new ones - there's definitely an element of "the seven string sound" in there with Eddie detuning his guitar about as low as it can go.

I'm hoping that VH can bring about a return to guitar-centric rock in mainstream music today. There's so much manufactured crap out there right now that Eddie and the boys might have to save us from it like they saved us from disco in the '70s.

Gimme the Code, Dammit

This Wired News article explains perfectly a frustration I've had with modern motor vehicles. Soon after buying my Corvette, I found out that handheld units existed that would let me dump the factory data out of the 'vette's computer and into the device, overwriting the existing programs with custom-tuned programs. To me, the big question was "Why don't a get a CD and an interface cable with the car, so I can tweak this stuff with my laptop?" Well, I guess the answer is "Because mechanics want to charge me for this capability and if I get this stuff from the factory, they won't be able to make money."

Same frustration with my 2002 Cannondale Cannibal ATV. The only difference between this quad and the next one up (the Speed) the line is some tweaks to the computer. Bump the Cannibal's rev limiter up to 10,000 RPM and adjust some of the curves and you essentially have a Speed. But the interface cable and software are proprietary, so there's no way to do this without visiting a Cannondale-certified mechanic or paying over $1,000 to buy the stuff on the black market or on eBay.

So now we might get a law that will force auto manufacturers to turn over this information. Sounds good to me. I hate not being able to work on my car myself.