BaSH PR0MPT

You all know I have a penchant for the internet hate machine, but I have to admit I can’t get their stupid Jesus loving song out of my head. They’re back, swapping Barbie for a more accosted demi-god deity, Jesus. Their new track is creepy, it’s dubbed Playmate to Jesus, but the lyrics don’t really have that Christfag (and I use it purely in internet speak for god botherers, no offence to my gay readers) undertone happening, but they’ve definitely got that stupid something that made them a smash in the 90′s, not that you’d freely admit you own an Aqua album … but we all do. :(

Whether it’s Lene’s haunting vocals, or Rene’s laid back “I don’t English well” MC style mixed with creepy capes, weird hoods yanked straight from the head of Laibach’s lead singers head (another Euro-pop-pseudo-goth band (equally shameful, don’t admit you know who they are)) while leaning over to try and take a peek at Lene’s duct tape covered nipples (there’s plenty of nudes of her out there, use google you sick fucks), they’ve always been catchy as fuck, and it goes without saying their new track is equally addictive. Support a dying pop band, give it a whirl. You know you want to.

Now that I’ve successfully abused parentheses adequately, on with the video. Hide your shame, and pretend you didn’t listen to this; most of all, pretend you didn’t hit repeat.

If ANY supernatural powers existed, they’d be $1,000,000 richer courtesy of the James Randi Education Foundation who are still offering the same cheque since the 1970′s, unclaimed. So, if you know ANYONE who pretends they have powers, call them out, expose them, make them uncomfortable. It’s 2011, we shouldn’t suffer that kind of barbarity of the mind.

Psychic Sally is a scam artist. This is no surprise. Psychology Professor French writing in the Guardian exposed this behemoth she-beast and her exploitative ways the other day, I reproduce it here for your reading pleasure:

According to her website, Sally Morgan is “Britain’s best-loved psychic”. She is certainly a very successful psychic – she has just released her third book and is currently filming the third series of Psychic Sally on the Road for Sky LIVING. But an incident that took place a few days ago may cause a few of her fans to wonder whether Morgan is deserving of their adoration. Could it be that, like so many self-professed psychic superstars in the past, Morgan is nothing more than a self-serving con artist?

Let me describe what happened so that you can make up your own mind. On Monday 12 September, a caller named Sue phoned the Liveline show on RTÉ Radio 1, an Irish radio station. Sue said that she had attended Morgan’s show the previous night at the Grand Canal Theatre in Dublin and had been impressed by the accuracy of the readings she made in the first half of the show.

But then something odd happened. Sue was sitting in the back row on the fourth level of the theatre and there was a small room behind her (“like a projection room”) with a window open. Sue and her companions became aware of a man’s voice and “everything that the man was saying, the psychic was saying it 10 seconds later.”

Sue believes, not unreasonably, that the man was feeding information to Sally through an earpiece attached to her microphone. For example, the voice would say something like “David, pain in the back, passed quickly” and a few seconds later Sally would claim to have the spirit of a “David” on stage who – you’ll never guess – suffered from back pain and passed quickly.

A member of staff realised that several people near the back of the theatre were aware of the mystery voice and the window was gently closed. The voice was not heard again.

Sue speculated, again not unreasonably given the history of psychic frauds, that the man was feeding Sally information that had been gathered by engaging members of the audience in conversation in the foyer before the show began. This is a technique widely used by psychic fraudsters, as audience members will naturally discuss with each other who they are hoping to hear from “on the other side”, how their loved one died, and so on.

Subsequent callers to the radio programme supported Sue’s account.

The theatre’s general manager, Stephen Faloon, claimed that the voice heard by the audience was actually the voices of two members of staff working for the theatre, not someone supplying information to Sally. Sally Morgan Enterprises also denied that the medium was being fed information during the show.

This episode is reminiscent of the exposure of faith healer Peter Popoff by James Randi in 1986. Popoff would wow his audiences by giving specific and accurate details of their medical problems before claiming to cure them with his divine powers. This information was, according to Popoff, provided to him directly by God. It was certainly an effective technique, as at this time Popoff was raking in around $4m per month (tax-free) from his poor, sick and uneducated followers.

Randi, with the assistance of investigator Alexander Jason, convincingly demonstrated that Popoff was actually receiving the “divine” information from his wife via a hearing aid. Following his exposure on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, Popoff declared bankruptcy in 1987.

In a more rational world, that would have been the end of Popoff’s career as a faith healer. Sadly, we do not live in a rational world. Popoff is back, earning more than ever by fleecing his flock using exactly the same techniques that Randi exposed, plus a few new ones, such as the sale of “Miracle Spring Water”. According to ABC News, Popoff’s ministry received more than $9.6m in 2003 and more than $23m in 2005. In that year, Popoff paid himself and his wife a combined total of almost a million dollars (not to mention two of his children receiving more than $180,000 each).

Since the heyday of mediumship during the Victorian era, exposure as frauds has typically done little to diminish the popularity of alleged psychics in the eyes of their followers.

It is important to realise that many self-professed psychics, possibly the majority, are sincere in their beliefs that they possess a “gift”. Such practitioners are probably unintentionally using some of the same techniques used by so-called cold readers to convince themselves and their sitters that they are tapping into some paranormal source of information. Because the cold reading technique is not being exploited deliberately and systematically, such readings are usually unimpressive to anyone except hardcore believers.

But con artists can use cold reading to convince complete strangers that they know all about them. It relies on the clever use of language, careful observation, intelligent guesswork, and the production of vague and ambiguous statements that the sitter interprets (and remembers) as being more specific than they actually were. In a skilled practitioner, cold reading can produce much more impressive results than the rather amateurish readings produced by most psychics.

Even cold reading has its limits though. If a psychic reading is full of very specific and accurate details, produced on the basis of very limited interaction with the sitter (as in Popoff’s case), it is more likely to be the result of “hot reading” – information collected prior to the start of the reading.

While the activities of performers like Popoff, who deliberately and knowingly exploit their vulnerable followers and are motivated by nothing more than personal greed, would be condemned as immoral by most reasonable people, the moral issues are not quite so cut-and-dried when it comes to deluded but sincere psychics who may not even charge for their services.

The fact is that many bereaved people are comforted to receive “evidence” that their loved ones are waiting for them “on the other side”. Some may feel that even if Morgan is deliberately conning her audience with fraudulent techniques, this is outweighed by the comfort that she brings. However, given that tickets for her sell-out Dublin show cost €40 each and there were reportedly brisk sales for her books and DVDs, this appears not to be her only motivation.

Phone-in caller Sue, who believed that Morgan had psychic powers before her experience at the theatre, described herself as being “totally disappointed” and insisted that she would not be attending such shows again. Maybe some of her friends and others sitting near her that evening will follow suit. Sadly, however, history suggests that most of Sally’s followers will continue to adore her and pay the high prices demanded to see her in action.

I just realized I didn’t know something. I usually store tomes of irrelevant information and can answer almost any question someone can pose. But I didn’t know this. Not often that happens so I read up on it.

I was warming the shower water up and I thought isn’t it weird how in cold countries pipes burst from freezing? Then I realized, hot rises cold sinks, right? Why do icebergs float?

Hot is less dense, cold is denser! So, if hot expands and cold contracts … why does water get larger when frozen?

It’s because the O is negatively charged and the two H’s are positive. Water molecules roll over each other forming hydrogen bonds that break due to molecular energy in the water, but as it approaches 4C it slows significantly and water gets denser and heavier like other materials but when it hits 0C the energy preventing hydrogen bonding isn’t present so the charged atoms attract to one another and bond to form a magnetic crystalline hexagonal lattice, a strong supportive structure allowing the frozen water to expand outwards.

This is also the reason snowflakes have a peculiar shape that one sees in crystallization.

Online gamers have achieved a feat beyond the realm of Second Life or Dungeons and Dragons: they have deciphered the structure of an enzyme of an AIDS-like virus that had thwarted scientists for a decade.

The exploit was published yesterday in the journal, Nature Structural & Molecular Biology, where – exceptionally in scientific publishing – both gamers and researchers are honoured as co-authors.

Their target was a monomeric protease enzyme, a cutting agent in the complex molecular tailoring of retroviruses, a family that includes HIV.

Figuring out the structure of proteins is vital for understanding the causes of many diseases and developing drugs to block them.

But a microscope gives only a flat image of what to the outsider looks like a plate of one-dimensional scrunched-up spaghetti. Pharmacologists, though, need a 3-D picture that “unfolds” the molecule and rotates it in order to reveal potential targets for drugs.

This is where Foldit comes in.

Developed in 2008 by the University of Washington, it is a fun-for-purpose video game in which gamers, divided into competing groups, compete to unfold chains of amino acids – the building blocks of proteins – using a set of online tools.

To the astonishment of the scientists, the gamers produced an accurate model of the enzyme in just three weeks.

Cracking the enzyme “provides new insights for the design of antiretroviral drugs”, says the study, referring to the lifeline medication against the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).

It is believed to be the first time that gamers have resolved a long-standing scientific problem.

“We wanted to see if human intuition could succeed where automated methods had failed,” Firas Khatib of the university’s biochemistry lab said in a press release.

“The ingenuity of game players is a formidable force that, if properly directed, can be used to solve a wide range of scientific problems.”

One of Foldit’s creators, Seth Cooper, explained why gamers had succeeded where computers had failed.

“People have spatial reasoning skills, something computers are not yet good at,” he said.

“Games provide a framework for bringing together the strengths of computers and humans. The results in this week’s paper show that gaming, science and computation can be combined to make advances that were not possible before.”

iPhone 5 will be unveiled on the 4th of October.

Sources have told tech blog AllThingsDigital that Apple’s new CEO, Tim Cook, will preside over the launch and that the iPhone 5 would go on sale within a few weeks after the announcement.

But the blog also said that Apple could “change its plans anytime soon”.

While the iPhone 5 will be the star of the show, the tech industry will be more interested in the performance of Mr Cook.

The event will mark the first time the public and investors get to see him as Apple CEO, which could set the tone for his new role.

Apple’s outgoing CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs has always been closely identified with Apple and its product innovations – the Mac, the iPod, the iPhone and more recently the iPad. Since his decision to step down was announced in August, many investors expressed fears his departure would change the company.

AllThingsDigital said “the pressure will be on Cook to turn in a good performance”.

“What will be interesting to see, of course, is if Jobs himself will also make an appearance, which is something that is likely to be determined by his health, in a decision that will be made very close to the event,” it said.

Apple released the iPhone 4 in June 2010 and sold 20.34 million of the devices last quarter.

Read more: http://www.news.com.au/technology/smartphones/iphone-5-on-october-4-well-thats-what-a-technology-blog-told-us/story-fn5sd1vk-1226143230175#ixzz1YXtGbTkP

Why am I not surprised? Yet why was I not aware of this? During the Roast of Charlie Sheen, Seth MacFarlane said something odd, “You can abuse drugs, you can abuse your spouse … but don’t you ever call a Jewish guy by his actual Jewish name.”

Now given that Sheen’s mother is Jewish it can be argued he too is, regardless of whether he goes to temple or likes leather straps, thems the rules, or so your grandmother will tell you.

My mind boggled, surely pissing Chuck Lorre off or causing a religious controversy couldn’t destroy an eight year franchise like Two and a Half Men, which would have gone on for another eight no doubt.

I googled and found the following article explaining it buried up the arse end of google. Now before I paste, allow me to say, Ashton Kutcher is a wooden boring actor who plays some pot addled childman (think reverse manchild) stuck in a near middle aged body. Two and a Half Men is rubbish now IMHO. Now, the googlage that indicates yet again, religion ruins all things fun;

The Anti-Defamation League has weighed in on Charlie Sheen’s radio rant on Thursday, especially the actor calling Two and a Half Men co-creator Chuck Lorre by his Jewish name — Chaim Levine.

“By invoking television producer Chuck Lorre’s Jewish name in the context of an angry tirade against him, Charlie Sheen left the impression that another reason for his dislike of Mr. Lorre is his Jewishness,” said Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director in a statement to The Hollywood Reporter. “This fact has no relevance to Mr. Sheen’s complaint or disagreement, and his words are at best bizarre, and at worst, borderline anti-Semitism.”
And the ADL aren’t the only ones upset. An Los Angeles-based Rabbi who works with Oakland-based Jewish Voice For Peace said Friday he was “sad” over Sheen’s remarks. “These are very angry and crazed people,” said Haim Beliak in an email.
Meanwhile Sheen, who has referred to Lorre as a “maggot” and a “clown,” insists he is not an anti-Semite.
“I was referring to Chuck by his real name, because I wanted to address the man and not the bullshit persona,” he told TMZ.
Following Sheen’s outburst, CBS and Warner Bros. pulled the plug on Men for the remainder of the season.

As per my second last post predicted; today Microsoft has decided to drop plug-in support, including Adobe’s Flash, from the default version of Internet Explorer 10 that will come with Windows 8. Microsoft has decided to fully embrace HTML5, which will prevent slow downs or the battery life from draining faster that Flash and other plug-ins have caused on current computers.

To be able to get flash support, the user will have to use the desktop version of Internet Explorer 10. The default browser in the Windows 8 new user-interface will be plug-in free.

Dean Hachamovitch, the Internet Explorer VP, said, “For the web to move forward and for consumers to get the most out of touch-first browsing, the Metro style browser in Windows 8 is as HTML5-only as possible, and plug-in free. Running Metro style IE plug-in free improves battery life as well as security, reliability, and privacy for consumers. Plug-ins were important early on in the web’s history. But the web has come a long way since then with HTML5.”

Portal, the original first-person puzzle masterpiece that was bundled with Valve’ Orange Box back in 2007, is now completely free on Steam until September 20 for bot Mac and PC. So for those of you who played Portal 2 and were rather confused by the opening segments, you now have no excuse for not knowing the backstory behind the epic Chell vs. GLaDOS escapades.

The whole deal is part of a program by Valve called Learn With Portals, using the Portal franchise to help kids learn physics and critical thinking. Man, when I was a kid, all we had was Oregon Trail. Get your free copy of the original Portal here while you still can!

Speaking with Kotaku, Valve has expressed no interest in making games for any portable devices, including the 3DS and Vita. Valve is focused at making games for the PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. “We’re about people sitting on their couches or at their desks,” said Valve writer Chet Faliszek.

Kotaku had asked Faliszek if Valve had any plans of bringing Counter-Strike Global Offensive to the PlayStation Vita. “We haven’t forayed into that space. It’s just not a space our engine has been looked at or optimized for.”

Ido Magel did say “[Valve is] slow to move on to new platforms.” This does leave the door open in the future for Valve to make portable games, but with their engine not optimized for portable gaming it might be several years.

It’s recently hit the news that Adobe are creating a ‘fix’ for Flash on iPad and iPhones. Erroneously reported by news.com.au, who stated:

“Apple and Adobe have long been rivals, after Apple refused to allow Flash coded websites and videos to play on its iPhone and iPad devices.

dobe has snuck one in the back door, creating a work around that converts files from Flash to a more Apple friendly format called Http Live Streaming.

The catch is that the Adobe never asked Apple’s permission to bring Flash to Apple tablets.

The fix is also hugely expensive.

Users who want to see their Flash content converted for an Apple format will have to pay Adobe a fee US$4500 ($4344).

For now, it looks like iPad users are stuck viewing a lot of blank spaces on their favourite websites until Apple and its rivals work out some kind of solution.”

As usual with technology based articles from News Limited sources, they’re wrong in many instances. Flash Media Server has always cost thousands, so ‘users’ (who I’m assuming they mean content distributors) won’t have to pay to view content on their device.

The bad blood between Apple and Adobe started when they joint developed the PDF format, which Apple provides and uses without license fees to end users. Adobe however, saw an opportunity to exploit the vacuous minds of office gimps, and quickly pushed to make their software user friendly (see: for stupid people), and now many governments around the world solely use and rely on PDF format, wasting tax payers money on license fees of extremely high costs, merely because they’re too daft to be able to word process or use any of the plethora of free and superior alternatives out there.

Flash video is already in web standard video format, it’s merely the memory hogging program that is both a secrity breach and a system efficiency destroyer. MPEG4 using the h.264 encoder is created by default, but the way Adobe process it is using bloatware programs instead of hardware. All non-adobe formats can be decoded by a GPU at the chip, where as Flash has never been designed for full motion at NTSC or PAL settings, even far below a base level 24 fps.

iPad users aren’t stuck viewing a lot of blank spaces. Most content providers have updated to HTML 5, bringing an end to the Adobe controlled rich media distribution system that intellectually challenged media production houses have forced us to tolerate for years. The costs of these outlandish licenses Adobe charge comes back to bite the user in the arse by inflating overheads and of course all corporate expenditure directly affects end product cost.

Apple not allowing Flash on it’s products is great and empowering news for the consumer though. It means that the tens of thousands of dollars in license fees companies have to pay per terminal won’t be charged, and content distribution will be easier, more efficient, and most importantly, perfect for mobile devices.

Using bloatware soft decoding instead of hardware at the GPU chip burns through system resources and battery power, draining the potential power of our devices for greater usability.

With version 4.5 they have added HTTP Live Streaming for iOS devices, which will serve the exactly the same video file but in an HTTP wrapper rather than a Flash wrapper. It’s not “bringing Flash to Apple Tablets”, it’s not “sneaking one in the back door” and neither Adobe nor anyone else has ever needed Apple’s “permission” to stream HTTP video. The only fudging is that HTTP streaming should be the default method, with Flash being a fallback. We already serve h.264 with a Flash front end now, and iOS devices just grab the video referred to in the HTML. It’s not rocket science.

You really thought buggies can do burn outs? Geez. Say, want to buy the Opera House? I know a real estate agent who’ll sell you it. In other news … Kentuck did screw over a bunch of Amish.

Nine Amish men in the US who refused to display an orange reflective triangle on their horse-drawn buggies have been ordered to jail for not paying court-imposed fines.

The men belong to the ultraconservative Old Order Swartzentruber Amish sect in western Kentucky. They object to the triangles because the bright colour violates their modesty code.

The Courier-Journal reports that the men say paying the fines would amount to complying with a law they believe violates their religious strictures.

Graves County District Judge Deborah Hawkins Crooks sentenced the men today to 3-10 days in jail.

The Kentucky Court of Appeals in June denied the defendants’ appeal on the misdemeanour convictions.

iPhone 5 is scheduled for a potential october release! So save up your pocket money kids, and get ready to give those old 4′s to your mother, friends, or girlfriend.

For the second time in little over a year, an Apple employee has lost an advanced and unreleased iPhone model in a public place, CNET said today.

The most recent incident came after an Apple employee misplaced his iPhone in San Francisco’s Mission District in July. Apple security scoured for the device over the following days and determined that the phone had been taken from a Mexican restaurant.

Apple officials believe the iPhone may have been sold on Craigslist for as little as $200. It’s also highly probable that Apple are intentionally leaking their devices to stir up a storm, given their savvy marketing techniques and their adaptability of leading the way with technological revolutionary items!

While Apple has not announced any plans to release a new iPhone, there have been numerous unconfirmed reports that the company was planning an October launch date for the iPhone 5.

CNET reported that no details about the phone – such as its operating system and design – have been revealed in the latest blunder by an Apple employee.

In April 2010, the gadget blog Gizmodo paid $5000 in cash for a then-unreleased iPhone 4 that a 28-year-old Apple engineer had left in a German beer garden in Redwood City, California.

Two men were charged on misdemeanour theft charges for selling the iPhone 4 to the blog. They are scheduled to be arraigned on Thursday (tomorrow AEST).

The already secretive company reportedly took even more extreme measures to protect itself from information leaks after the 2010 incident, including transporting iPhones in locked and sealed containers to carriers such as AT&T for compatibility testing.

Apple and Craigslist declined to comment on the latest iPhone-gone-missing episode, and the San Francisco Police Department said Apple did not file a police report related to the matter, CNET reported.