I own a 2000-vintage, non-digital 8mm Sony camcorder.  We don't use it very often, but I do have a fair amount of footage I'd like to transfer to my computer.  How can I do this without resorting to expensive video capture hardware?

I found this device while looking for solutions; would this do the trick?  TIA for advice and suggestions.

The Red Army Choir joins forces with Finnish rock group Leningrad Cowboys to sing . . . the Alabama national anthem.  The only thing that could top this is the nuns from Sister Act dropping "Like a Virgin".

It's because states are capable of doing this:

Myanmar's junta seized U.N. aid shipments headed for hungry and homeless survivors of last week's devastating cyclone, prompting the world body to suspend further help on Friday.

The U.N. said the aid included 38 tons of high-energy biscuits and arrived in Myanmar on Friday on two flights from Bangladesh and the United Arab Emirates.

"All of the food aid and equipment that we managed to get in has been confiscated," U.N. World Food Program spokesman Paul Risley said. "For the time being, we have no choice but to end further efforts to bring critical needed food aid into Myanmar at this time."

Myanmar's government acknowledged taking control of the shipments and said it plans to distribute the aid "without delay by its own labor to the affected areas."

In a statement e-mailed to The Associated Press, government spokesman Ye Htut said the junta had "clearly stated" what it would do and denied the action amounted to a seizure.

Yeah, anyone actually believe those last two paragraphs?  Now I'm hesitant to even donate to relief efforts, because the money may get wasted by the bureaucratic meddling of Myanmar's government.  If they truly cared about their people's welfare, they'd let relief workers just do their job.  I think the Burmese are a lot more focused on survival than staging an uprising at this point.

How ironic, that bureaucratic inefficiency leads to rather efficient mass murder.  And it's happened time and again.

My friend karmabreeze is offering a selection of her award-winning (and Times Square-displaying¹) photography in an effort to raise money for a yoga retreat.  Go check out her wares and help her out if you can.

http://www.highdesertarts.com/yogasale/

¹ Some of her photos were selected as the Kodak "Picture of the Day" and appeared on their display in Times Square.

Eighty-three-year-old French writer Lucie Ceccaldi minces no words in her contempt for fellow countryman and scribe Michel Houellebecq:

So what is Ceccaldi's problem with Houellebecq? Well, for starters, she deems him an "evil, stupid little bastard," a "liar, an imposter, a parasite and above all—above all—a petit arriviste ready to do absolutely anything for money and fame." Of Elementary Particles [one of Houellebecq's best-known novels], Ceccaldi says: "That book is pure pornography, it's repugnant, it's crap. I don't understand its success at all, that just shows the decadance of France." And the rest of his ouevre: "What's this moronic literature?! Houellebecq is someone who's never done anything, who's never really desired anything, who never wanted to look at others. And that arrogance of taking yourself as superior ... Stupid little bastard. Yes, Houellebecq's a stupid little bastard..."

The punchline:

It should be noted, though, that Ceccaldi is currenly promoting her own memoir, titled L'Innocente, and is obviously trying to gin up interest in the book. And perhaps it should also be noted, in the spirit of full disclosure, that Mme. Ceccaldi is M. Houellebecq's mother.

I bet their family reunions are a hoot.

HT: reason's Hit & Run.

All these stories do is fill me with impotent rage, but I can't stop reading or writing about them:

Interviewing the people in Tracy Ingle's life — his sisters, his foster brother, his friends — you hear one line often enough that it soon becomes a refrain: Tracy is no angel.

Though all express their love and admiration for him — a kind man; a man who can fix anything, they say — they tend to tell you the bad things about him first. A recovering alcoholic, Ingle had a couple of DWIs several years back. When the Arkansas Times spoke to him, he was on house arrest for a 5-year-old failure-to-appear warrant. A car accident in Maryland in 2002 left him with degenerative disk disease in his back and what his sisters said is an addiction to pain killers — though all of his pills are legally prescribed. Up until Christmas 2007, he had several roommates, many of whom had had recent run-ins with the law. Last year, he agreed to fix a stereo in a friend's Mustang — a car that turned out to be hot — and got arrested for receiving stolen merchandise. That case still hasn't shaken out.

No matter what Ingle or those he gave a temporary home to may have done, however, it's hard to imagine he deserved what he got Jan. 7. That night, the North Little Rock SWAT team stormed Ingle's house on a high-risk, “no-knock” search warrant. By the time all was said and done, Ingle had been shot five times — including one bullet that pulverized his femur and left his leg dangling from his body, connected only by a bloody mess of meat, skin and tendon.

According to an evidence list left at Ingle's house after the shooting, no suspected drugs or drug residue were recovered from the residence — only a digital scale, a notebook and a few plastic baggies, all of which Ingle's family members have identified as part of the junk they had collectively stored at the house.

It might seem strange, then, that Ingle currently stands accused of several serious felonies — including two counts of aggravated assault. While the North Little Rock police insist they got a dangerous criminal off the streets, Ingle and his family say the charges are all about appearances — and covering the police.

Here's a guy who is, at most, guilty of poor judgment, and for his trouble he's nearly shot to death, removed from the hospital by the cops (who provide him with substandard medical care, leading to infections in his wounds), and charged with "running a drug enterprise", even though no drugs were found in Ingle's home, and the equipment they seized belonged to his sister, who says she used the scale and baggies for a jewelry-making hobby.

Do these sound like the actions of a government intended to protect rights?  Whose rights are they protecting here?  Does anyone think for a moment this will somehow make our streets safer, will prevent even one person from obtaining illegal drugs?

Radley Balko has more here.  As is becoming typical for these cases, the police have clammed up—and even the judge in the case has slapped a gag order on the prosecutor, Ingle and whatever lawyer he ends up with (he currently can't afford to hire one).

And there's nothing you can do.  Spare me the false bravado: we are truly fucked when it comes to dealing with the unjust actions of the police.  Submit and you can still face jail time for whatever crimes the cops and DA can come up with, not to mention the damage to your home and trauma to yourself and your family.

But fighting back—to actually defend yourself and your loved ones from these power-mad thugs—will earn you a toe tag or possibly a trip to death row.

When private citizens are unable to defend themselves against the criminal actions of the police, and the cops themselves cannot be held accountable, how can anyone deny that this country has become a de facto police state?

The young lady at the end of this video deserves to be buried in scholarships to the school of her choice.  She positively drilled Detroit City Councilwoman Monica Conyers (wife of Michigan Congressman John Conyers) following an embarrassing incident during a City Council meeting in which Conyers referred to President Kenneth Cockrel Jr. as "Shrek".  Later she met with some middle-schoolers to explain her behavior and got schooled herself.  Watch the whole thing; it's awesome.



HT: reason's Hit & Run.

I spent some time yesterday trying to come up with some response to agentsteel53's assertion that horse racing is "cruel and senseless", but nothing persuasive came to mind.  Probably because I'm no fan of the sport.  The kind of racing I like involves four wheels and an engine that burns methanol or dead dinosaur flesh.  All I could think of is that humans have been racing horses almost since they domesticated the beasts, and at least in Western cultures, with horses bred and trained specifically for racing, what you're seeing are the superstar athletes of the equine world.  If one doesn't have a problem with watching humans sprint around a track, then I'm not sure why one would object to horses doing the same.

That doesn't make the news that Eight Belles was euthanized following her race in the Kentucky Derby today any easier to swallow, of course.  Eight Belles, the only filly in the race, finished second behind favorite Big Brown, then collapsed with both of her front ankles broken.  She ran "the race of her life", as her trainer put it.  Ain't that a shitter?  You finish in the money and get turned into glue.  And you have to wonder if it was a wise idea to run Eight Belles against the boys, when there's a race held the day before (Kentucky Oaks) just for the fillies.  I don't know enough about the sport to say for sure.  All I know is, we saw a horse literally run herself to death.

I still can't say if horse racing is a brutal, inhumane sport, but I sure don't see the point of it, either.

It would be disingenuous of me to say I hate lawyers; I'm married to one after all. But shit like this, involving a class-action suit against Creative Labs over the advertised capacity of their MP3 players, convinces me that some lawyers deserve to be shot in the face:

According to the settlement agreement, the lead plaintiffs, who filed their federal lawsuit in California, alleged that Creative had misled consumers by exaggerating the capacity of its MP3 players. The fraud allegation hinged mainly on two different definitions of gigabyte. According to the decimal definition (the only one I knew until today), a gigabyte is 1 billion (10⁹) bytes. According to the binary definition, a gigabyte is 1,073,741,824 (2³⁰) bytes. While Creative used the decimal definition in its advertising, the settlement says, "certain computer operating systems report hard drive capacity using a binary definition." On those systems, a 20GB Creative Zen player would register as only 18.6GB or so, about 7 percent less than advertised.

Now it's true that hard drives use the decimal definition for a gigabyte when advertising their capacities. However, it's not "certain computer operating systems" that report hard drive capacity using the binary definition; it's all computer operating systems. Computer data is stored in binary format, so it can't report capacity in gigabytes using any other definition.

The rank stupidity of all this is that, whether you divide a hard drive's capacity by 1,000,000,000 or 1,037,741,824, it's still the same number of bytes. Only the divisor has changed. So Creative didn't exaggerate the capacity of their players at all; they simply failed to account for the fact that computers use the binary definition of a gigabyte. 20GB decimal = ~18.6GB binary. There's nothing misleading about this, except to consumers who are ignorant of how computers and data storage work. And I don't think Creative has an obligation to educate them; it just has to be truthful.

But in the hands of skilled trial lawyers, this inconsequential difference can be represented to a judge (who quite likely is also technologically ignorant) as a case of deceptive advertising, even fraud, and instead of wasting enormous time and money on defending themselves from this nonsense, Creative opted for a settlement. So if you own a Zen or other Creative MP3 player, you're entitled to buy a 1GB MP3 player at half-price, or 20% off any item ordered from Creative's online store.

For striking this courageous blow for consumers, the lawyers pocket $900,000. If it makes you feel better, in binary that would only be $878.9K.

Update: As ilcylic demonstrates in a comment below, an OS (Linux in this case) can report hard drive capacity in decimal format if it so chooses.  But given that volatile memory storage will always be reported in binary, I'm not sure that resolves the confusion issue.

Even the homeless in America use twice the amount of energy than the global average, according to a new study (PDF) from MIT.

Think about that: you could sleep on the streets, or become a Buddhist monk, and still not be able to reduce your carbon footprint to a level deemed necessary by climate change activists.  And as the study points out, reducing energy usage to at or below the global average "is not obtainable for the average American on a voluntary basis".  I probably don't have to spell out the policy implications here.

And if we are to meet the target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 80% from 1990 levels by 2050, as both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have endorsed, the U. S. cannot emit more than 1 billion metric tons of CO2 annually.  Which the country last did in 1910, when it had less than one-third of its current population and per-capita income (adjusted for inflation) was around $6,000.

A small sacrifice.  It may be important to think about the implications of climate change, but it's just as important to think about the human cost—which politicians rarely consider.

He's just preparing for the coming hyperinflation:

A man has been accused of attempting to pass a $360 billion check, which he claims was given to him by his girlfriend’s mother to start a record business, Fort Worth police said.

Charles Ray Fuller, 21, of Crowley, was arrested on April 22 on an accusation of forgery, police said.

Police responded to a report of a man attempting to pass the check about 4 p.m. that day at the Chase bank in the 8600 block of South Hulen Street, Fort Worth police Lt. Paul Henderson said.

The personal check was not made out to Mr. Fuller and when the bank contacted the check owner, the woman said she did not write a check for $360 billion.

Mr. Fuller was also accused of unlawful carrying of a weapon and possession of marijuana, Lt. Henderson said. He may also face a theft charge in Crowley.

Lt. Henderson said he did not know if Mr. Fuller and his girlfriend were still together.

If I were the DA, I'd drop the charge.  Any guy this stupid isn't long for the world anyway.

How to turn $100 million into scrap metal.

This is a symptom of an overly litigious society, I think.  Instead of making a huge insurance claim, Mazda could possibly offset some of the loss by re-selling these cars at a steep discount but without, say, the benefit of a factory warranty.  It seems people are always looking for bargains, but the first time the brakes fail because the master cylinder was compromised will lead to a lawsuit that could cost Mazda a lot more than the loss on scrapping the vehicles (what kind of deductible is there on a policy that will pay a $100 million loss?).  So the company's risk aversion is probably higher than any potential consumers' anyway.

Still it's a little sad to read about nearly 5,000 new cars being ripped apart before they ever see a dealer's lot.  And maybe a bit zen, too:

Next stop: Schnitzer Steel, a salvage yard down on the waterfront that's home to an immense metal grinder. "You turn 7,000-horsepower hammers loose on them, and they're eaten in 10 seconds," says Jamie Wilson, Schnitzer's manager. A bemused smile spreads across his face as another load of Mazdas disappears into its maw.

Moments later, metal shards -- most no bigger than an ashtray -- sprinkle onto a mountain of scrap near Schnitzer's dock. There, a freighter prepares to take the scrap back to Asia where it will get recycled.

Mr. Wilson looks on and concludes: "It'll all probably end up coming back as cars."

[cross-posted from libertarianism]

The Libertarian Party is calling for more cooperation between Federal, state and local law enforcement to battle the scourge of child pornography:

"FBI Chief Robert Mueller was correct when he said we are losing the war on child pornography," says Libertarian Party Executive Director Shane Cory, referring to comments made by the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation on Wednesday before a House Judiciary Committee meeting. "We have an obligation to protect children from sexual exploitation and abuse, and we can do this by increasing communication between state and federal agencies to help combat this repulsive industry. While privacy rights should always be respected in the pursuit of child pornographers, more needs to be done to track down and prosecute the twisted individuals who exploit innocent children."

Mueller called for "integration" between police agencies and increasing FBI resources to work on child pornography cases, which the LP press release mentions without comment, except to suggest that those resources could be freed up by not prosecuting victimless crimes.

So, yes: child abuse, particularly sexual abuse, is evil and those who engage in it can hang in the courtyard by their genitals for all I care.  But what the hell is the LP thinking here?  They're not even pretending to support the Constitution, let alone limited government, with this view.  The LP is justifying not only the existence of a national police force (which is not authorized by the Constitution), but by implying support for "integrating" police agencies, they're calling for even more Federal intrusion into areas that should by law be the states' domain.

There's only one reason for such an ill-considered and frankly unlibertarian stance from the LP, and it's to further marginalize the radical core of the party.  It started with the gutting of the party platform in 2006 and it continues through attacks on Mary Ruwart, an LP candidate for President and a more radical libertarian than the current leaders of the LP are comfortable with.

Even party founder David Nolan expressed his outrage in a comment:

I am appalled at the national HQ staff putting out a press release that implicitly disowns one of our candidates over such a relatively minor issue. First, because that’s not a proper role for paid staffers to assume, and second because several other candidates have taken overtly anti-Libertarian stances on a number of issues, and none of them have been shot at by the national staff for doing so. This whole fiasco just reeks of cronyism and witch-hunting. Our presidential nominee will be chosen by the delegates to the national convention in Denver, and attempts by the LNC or (especially) the office staff at LPHQ to subvert that process are despicable.

Once again, the New LP demonstrates its willingness to sell out its own principles, and even one of its most dedicated party members, in a futile effort to gain some mainstream political credibility.  It's just pathetic.  If you truly care about the libertarian movement then stop supporting these clowns.

Emerging market economy + totalitarian political regime = irony:

Police in southern China have discovered a factory manufacturing Free Tibet flags, media reports say.

The factory in Guangdong had been completing overseas orders for the flag of the Tibetan government-in-exile.

Workers said they thought they were just making colourful flags and did not realise their meaning.

Book meme from karmabreeze and elsewhere:

What we have here is the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you've read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish.

( the list )

The last pinball factory in the world:

Being inside a pinball machine factory sounds exactly as you think it would. Across a 40,000-square-foot warehouse here, a cheery cacophony of flippers flip, bells ding, bumpers bump and balls click in an endless, echoing loop. The quarter never runs out.

But this place, Stern Pinball Inc., is the last of its kind in the world. A range of companies once mass produced pinball machines, especially in the Chicago area, the one-time capital of the business. Now there is only Stern. And even the dinging and flipping here has slowed: Stern, which used to crank out 27,000 pinball machines each year, is down to around 10,000.

I'm surprised even that many are produced.  And of those, half are sold to individuals.

I remember just a few other pinball manufacturers—Bally-Midway, Williams, Gottlieb—but all of them disappeared, merged or got out of the pinball business.  Of course none of the pinball machines I played held my attention for very long, and I always returned to the video games that slowly took over arcades and bars and even 7-Elevens.

It's a safe bet that more people play pinball on their computers now than the real thing.

I think there's something in the water in the UK.  Besides sheep piss, I mean.  And it's driven the country's graphic designers absolutely nutters.

First it was the logo for London's 2012 Olympics, on which the organizing committee spent about $800,000, and to my eye, looks like a couple of punky chibi characters engaged in fellatio.

Then the UK's Office of Government Commerce unveiled (and then quickly re-veiled) a new logo which "was intended to signify a bold commitment to the body’s aim of 'improving value for money by driving up standards and capability in procurement'":



Uh-huh.  Now tilt your head 90 degrees to the left and see if you agree with an OGC spokesman that "the [logo's] effect was generic to the particular combination of the letters OGC - and it is not inappropriate to an organisation that’s looking to have a firm grip on Government spend."

If you're still puzzled, look below the cut and you'll see what he means by a "firm grip."

( Despite the innuendo, it's SFW )

Here's an earlier example of loony logos, taken from a Manchester transit poster.  I refuse to believe the irony here isn't deliberate.

They hate us for our "freedoms", all right.

Oh, for the fuckin' love of . . .



Much as I dislike the police, I'm not sure a tasing or seven isn't justified for Public Displays of Felonious Stupidity.  As usual, I blame our stellar education system.

Forget traffic jams.  Soon you may be able to use your nav system to avoid getting carjacked:

Japanese automaker Honda Motor Co. will start a new system this week warning motorists when they are driving close to crime hotspots.

Based on information from the police, drivers will get an alert through Honda's on-board navigation system about areas where cars have been damaged, stolen or broken into in the past, Honda said in a statement.

For now it's only available in Japan, which doesn't strike me a country with a rampant auto-theft problem.  But I can also envision motorists in Detroit circling endlessly on the Interstate, trying to find one surface street that doesn't pass through a crime-riddled neighborhood.