More News from the Religion of Peace

Muslims behave badly. Even when they are Americans. Even when they wear our uniform.

FORT HOOD, Texas – A soldier opened fire at a U.S. Army base in Fort Hood, Texas on Thursday, unleashing a stream of gunfire that left 12 people dead and 31 wounded. Authorities killed the gunman, and apprehended two other soldiers suspected in what appears to be the worst mass shooting at a U.S. military base.

The shooting began around 1:30 p.m., Lt. Gen. Bob Cone said at a news conference. He said all the casualties took place at the base's Soldier Readiness Center, where soldiers who are about to be deployed or who are returning undergo medical screening.

"It's a terrible tragedy. It's stunning," Cone said.

A law enforcement official identified the shooting suspect as Army Maj. Malik Nadal Hasan. The official said Hasan, believed to be in his late 30s, was killed after opening fire at the base. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the case publicly.

Why do we suffer these people to live amongst us?

Prime covers the story.

UPDATE: Ralph Peters opines at the NY Post.

Adventures with Windows 7: Day 4

Day 4: Networking

My laptop, running Windows XP, was already connected to the internet via the same wireless router that connected the desktop to the internet, so the physical connection was in place. The laptop's ability to access files on the desktop had ceased working, however, first on the "Vista side" of the desktop, and then on the XP side. I hadn't really done much in the way of troubleshooting the XP side since by the time it broke I knew I would be upgrading the OS anyway. But I spent a long time trying to fix the network on the Vista side, without success.

So I was happy that creating the network in Windows 7 was so easy. Win7 discovered the XP laptop automatically. In the networking options, Win7 has a "home" setting for maxiumum access. It also has something called a "homegroup" (yes, it's one word; is this an effort to appeal to urban minorities?), but to use homegroup, all computers must be running Win7. Since my laptop is still XP, I had two things to do. First, I had to rename my laptop's workgroup name to match the workgroup name on the desktop. Second, I had to enable file sharing for all files on the desktop that I wanted to be visible on the laptop. That's it! Once these two steps were done, I could click on the workgroup name in My Network Places --> Entire Network --> Microsoft Windows Network, enter my username and password (the same username and password that I used to login to the desktop), and I was good to go. It doesn't require us to create a special file on a memory stick and execute it on all the participating computers, like we had to with XP and Vista. It oocurs to me that for all my complaints about Microsoft's business practices, their product is consistently better than it has to be, considering its de facto monopoly status.

How to Destroy an Economy

From the Washington Times:

Since February, the EPA has placed 175 surface coal mining projects under review and halted 79 of them because of their effects on surface water. For 30 years, the agency did not object to the air pollution caused when miners blast dirt into the air to expose coal deposits. Now, invoking the Clean Water Act, the agency is moving to block, at least for now, the projects when they sully nearby streams with the same pollutant.

The agency also has, for the first time, revoked a permit for a surface mine because the project in West Virginia could violate the Clean Water Act.

More broadly, the agency has announced there could be a link between greenhouse gas emissions and public health and welfare - a prelude to new mandates for corporations to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions. The agency also agreed to allow California to regulate tailpipe emissions, increased fuel efficiency standards for cars for the first time in more than 25 years and won White House approval to rein in greenhouse gas emissions from the nation's largest polluters.

And that's just the beginning.

I remember a magazine article from long ago about Vietnamese refugees stuck for years in Thai refugee camps. The Thais had no use for them, and they were rightly afraid to move back to Vietnam. (Are there still such camps in Thailand?) One line from the article I remember crystalized the damage that this kind of dislocation could do. It said that there were working-age young men, born in exile, that had "never seen a water buffalo."

There are many skills that, once lost, are very difficult to recover. They are the kind of skills that are passed from journeymen to apprentices, not the kind learned from books and academic journals, and therefore not the kind with which Obama's minions have any experience. Once the opportunity to practice the skill is suppressed (or regulated away), the skill rapidly decays.

The EPA is almost certainly costing a lot of coal miners their jobs. These miners are not suddenly going to put on a shirt-and-tie and start doing office work; they will likely be stuck in the economic equivalent of a refugee camp. Further, they will lose the opportunity to pass their skills to the next generation of miners. And I'm pretty sure this is not the way of growing the economy out of the recession.

And what for? I've never lived anywhere in the U.S. (and I've lived a lot of places) where I couldn't drink the water or breathe the air. For whose benefit, exactly, is the EPA undertaking these regulations?

Adventures with Windows 7: Day 3

Day 3: Multi-OS file access

I started this post to complain that Windows 7, installed on the "C" drive, would not allow access to the user files on the "D" drive, on which I have installed Vista. But since I noticed the problem, a passle of automatic updates installed on both the Vista side and the Win7 side, and now there doesn't seem to be a problem.

Another legacy app failed: Creative Memories Memory Manager, a digital photograph organization tool. Version 1 didn't run on Vista either, and the upgrade I downloaded from the Creative Memories website locks up and crashes. (Windows 7 apparently terminates programs automatically that hang on "Not Responding" for more than 30 seconds or so.) Version 2 did run on Vista, so this is a disappointment, but Mrs. Φ recalls having to get with MM tech support to make it work, so maybe they can help us through the process again. OTOH, the Creative Memory website doesn't claim version 2 works on Win7. It does say that version 3 works on Win7, but v3 is a $16 upgrade.

What do you think about charging money for "upgrades" that do nothing but work on newer operating systems? MMv3.0 does provide new features, so I suppose they are entitled to compensation for providing something new. But how difficult would it have been to put out a v2.1, say, that maintained the same features of v2.0 but ran on Win7?

Yeah, I know: they're a private company and can charge whatever people will pay, etc. Just sayin'.

Election Roundup

My voting jurisdiction didn't have an election yesterday, but around the country, it was a mixed day:

On the upside:

• Virginia and New Jersey have new Republican governors. Best of luck, gentlemen; you're going to need it.

• Maine voters overturned the legislature's gay marriage law. Gay marriage is now 0 for 31, every state to which it has been put to a popular vote.

On the downside:

• Hoffman loses in NY-23. On a positive note, he did better than insurgent candidates usually do.

• Ohio votes for gambling, regulation, and reckless spending. How did such a fine state come to this? The campaign for casino gambling made the claim that Ohio gamblers were losing their money out-of-state. Now they can lose their money to casino companies headquartered in (I assume) New York.

Adventures with Windows 7: Day 2

Day 2: Hopes Rise and Fall

As I was browsing the new features of Win7 Ultimate, I discovered something called Windows XP Mode. This is an XP virtual environment run directly within Win7 specifically for legacy (XP) applications. XP mode runs over another feature called Windows Virtual PC, that allows the creation of a virtual operating system environment for any operating system for which the user has a valid license. Both are downloadable for free for users of Win7 Pro, Win7 Ultimate, and some versions of Vista.

My first thought was that this might allow us to run those old Disney Interactive programs without dual-booting. Unfortunately, it turns out that these programs require the CPU to have something called Intel Virtualization Technology. (There is an AMD equivalent.) Although my laptop has it, our family desktop does not.

Microsoft has a downloadable program that checks to see if your CPU has the technology and whether the technology is enabled in the BIOS. If your CPU has it, then Virtual PC could solve any issues of backward compatibility with old software, even beyond the capability I wrote about yesterday. According to Microsoft, the main limitation appears to be accessing peripherals from within Virtual PC.

Every Age Has Its Own Horrors

From the Washington Times:

A San Francisco cosmetics company has ignited an outcry among pro-lifers for including an unexpected ingredient in its anti-aging creams: skin-cell proteins from an aborted fetus.

Children of God for Life, a watchdog group that monitors the use of fetal material in medical products, called last week for a boycott of all treatments manufactured by Neocutis Inc., which acknowledges that the key ingredient in its product line was developed from an aborted boy.

"There's just no excuse for using aborted babies in skin-care products," said Debi Vinnedge, executive director of Children of God for Life, a 10-year-old organization based in Murfreesboro, Tenn. "The reaction, the shock and anger I've seen is incredible."

In a statement released Friday, in response to a wave of condemnation from pro-life and religious blogs, Neocutis defended the use of its trademarked ingredient, Processed Skin Cell Proteins, or PSP, arguing that the fetal cell line was harvested in a responsible, ethical manner for use in treating severe dermatological injuries.

Can lampshades be far behind?