User:	chibister
	Date:	2009-12-25 15:06
	Subject:
	Security:	Public

Hope you all have a nice holiday. Mine was nice, my parents bought me new rear speakers for my car. :) I'm off to South Carolina tomorrow for a week (so excited to see Mattie~!), then Italy in 11 days! Oh man, I'm so excited. So much delicious food!! :9

	User:	nanikore
	Date:	2009-12-21 18:11
	Subject:	Cerebus Syndrome
	Security:	Public

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CerebusSyndrome

	User:	nanikore
	Date:	2009-12-18 14:02
	Subject:	I may have just found the new source for my daily news.
	Security:	Public

http://www.imao.us/

	User:	nanikore
	Date:	2009-12-17 12:01
	Subject:	The Climategate Sham Continues
	Security:	Public

This oughtta make everyone feel just great about Copenhagen (after all, feeling good is what it's really about): http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703514404574588673072577680.html

Imagine a "dream" agreement emerging from Copenhagen next week: The U.S. agrees to cut greenhouse emissions 80% by 2050, as President Barack Obama has been promising. The other developed countries promise to cut emissions by 60%. China promises to reduce its CO2 intensity by 70% in 2040. Emerging economies promise that in 2040, when their wealth per capita has grown to half that of the U.S., they will cut emissions by 80% over the following 40 years. And all parties make good on their pledges.

Environmental success, right? Wrong. Even if the goals are all met, emissions will continue rising to nearly four times the current level. Total atmospheric CO2 will rise to near 700 parts per milion by 2080 (the current level is 385), and—if the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) models are right—global temperature will rise about six degrees Fahrenheit at mid latitudes.

From this plot, it is clear that most of the last 420 thousand years (420 kyr) was spent in ice age. The brief periods when the record peaks above the zero line, the interglacials, typically lasted from a few thousand to perhaps twenty thousand years.

These data should frighten you. All of civilization developed during the last interglacial, and the data show that such interglacials are very brief. Our time looks about up. Data such as these are what led us to state, in the Preface, that the next ice age is about to hit us, any millennium now. It does not take a detailed theory to make this prediction. We don’t necessarily know why the next ice age is imminent (at least on a geological time scale), but the pattern is unmistakable.

The real reason to be frightened is that we really don’t understand what causes the pattern. We don’t know why the ice ages are broken by the short interglacials. We do know something – that the driving force is astronomical.

	User:	nanikore
	Date:	2009-12-16 19:16
	Subject:	p.s.
	Security:	Public

WHAT'S UP WITH THESE NEW LIVEJOURNAL ADS THAT BLANKET THE ENTIRE SCREEN

	User:	nanikore
	Date:	2009-12-16 19:12
	Subject:	NBA Games Fixed By Crooked Refs, News At 11
	Security:	Public

Tim Donaghy, former NBA referee who went to the slammer for fixing NBA games that he officiated, was coming out with a tell-all book about how he and his buddies (i.e. the other referees) did it: http://deadspin.com/5287011/tim-donaghy-has-not-been-enjoying-prison-updated

The book he is writing is a "tell all" about his 13 years in the NBA and how he successfully picked winners of NBA games 70-80% of the time. It is about his knowledge of special relationships between referees and players and coaches, as well as the NBA's manipulation of games and playoff series.

Pat Berdan, a senior consultant at Executive Prison Consultants and Donaghy's liaison to the publisher, said that the decision not to publish the book came two weeks ago. He said it was the result of a threat of legal action by the NBA.

"Somehow, the NBA got wind of the project and let Random House know in a threatening-type correspondence that they would object to the publication of such a book and they threatened that they would sue if they did go ahead and do that," said Berdan, who didn't see any letters from the NBA. "Random House considered that and ... just pulled the plug on it."

"The NBA never threatened a lawsuit or anything else," NBA vice president of basketball communications Tim Frank wrote in an e-mail to ESPN.com.

Berdan said the book was vetted, including one final look by a senior attorney from Random House, and was ready to go to press when the company decided not to publish the book.

"Our supposition is that they became aware that the book is coming," Berdan said. "The major houses knew the book was coming. So it's conceivable that the NBA found out the book was forthcoming and it was a reaction to the general information. There's no question that they have a certain degree of contempt toward Donaghy."

We had another variation of this gag simply referred to as the "first foul of the game" bet. While still in the locker room before tip-off, we would make a wager on which of us would call the game's first foul. That referee would either have to pay the ball boy or pick up the dinner tab for the other two referees. Sometimes, the ante would be $50 a guy. Like the technical foul bet, it was hilarious — only this time we were testing each other's nerves to see who had the guts to hold out the longest before calling a personal foul. There were occasions when we would hold back for two or three minutes — an eternity in an NBA game — before blowing the whistle. It didn't matter if bodies were flying all over the place; no fouls were called because no one wanted to lose the bet.

We played this little game during the regular season and summer league. After a game, all three refs would gather around the VCR and watch a replay of the game. Early in the contest, the announcers would say, "Holy cow! They're really letting them play tonight!" If they only knew...

During one particular summer game, Duke Callahan, Mark Wunderlich, and I made it to the three-minute mark in the first quarter without calling a foul. We were running up and down the court, laughing our asses off as the players got hammered with no whistles. The players were exhausted from the nonstop running when Callahan finally called the first foul because Mikki Moore of the New Jersey Nets literally tackled an opposing player right in front of him. Too bad for Callahan — he lost the bet.

I became so good at this game that if an obvious foul was committed right in front of me, I would call a travel or a three-second violation instead. Those violations are not personal fouls, so I was still in the running to win the bet. The players would look at me with disbelief on their faces as if to say, "What the hell was that?"

	User:	nanikore
	Date:	2009-12-16 12:55
	Subject:	women drivers
	Security:	Public

	User:	nanikore
	Date:	2009-12-15 01:54
	Subject:	Somebody in Taiwan is peddling Intel's engineering samples
	Security:	Public

6-core Gulftown on sale on eBay
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=280433524140

	User:	nanikore
	Date:	2009-12-14 11:43
	Subject:	Legality
	Security:	Public

I had a discussion with someone about something, which somehow segued to the topic of legal fine print. This is what I said: