Joe's Random Ramblings

Anybody who is active in the Open Source community knows about the ridiculous claims of The SCO Group, formerly known as Caldera Systems (now in Chapter 11 Bankruptcy) against Linux. Go to Groklaw for all the details...
Anyway, on an investor forum somebody posted a very fitting analogy about the minuscule stock price movement and the impending demise of The SCO Group (TSG, not to be confused with the Santa Cruz Operation.)
It had me laughing quite a bit. The main part of the post:

This indicates that SCOxq.pk has some slight brain functions. Not enough to do anything useful, but it means we can't harvest the organs yet.

If the bid and ask move up and down without volume, that doesn't mean the patient moved in their sleep and certainly not that it is waking up, just that someone adjusted the electric hospital bed.

If the price moves up, with volume, look for hidden wires. Someone is using the nearly lifeless body as a puppet.

If the price moves down with volume, get away, and wash your shoes. SCOxq.pk's vital fluids are leaking out through old injuries that aren't healing. The stuff that comes out may be infectious.

Hopefully the lab reports will come back from Dr. Kimball. Then Dr. Gross can move the patient into operating theater #7. That is where they will prepare organs for transplant, if any of them are healthy enough for transplant.

Dr. Gross will supervise the organ removal. The autopsy will happen in the same operating theater. The whole thing will be dissected. Everything will be carefully documented. Samples of everything will be kept for future legal action. The entire set of CxO's will be kept.

It is a big operating theater. There will be many spectators watching the organ removal and autopsy. Some of them will be able to vote on how Dr. Gross should proceed. It will be complex and slow.

The most complex procedures will be the disgorgements.

Some of the professionals have not been paid yet, and they aren't complaining. I think that means they'd rather avoid the discomfort of disgorgement.

Stick a fork in it, the Clinton campaign is done.
Even with Obama's bad couple of weeks, Hillary couldn't score. Her slimmest of wins in Indiana shows that even her last-minute populistic "gas tax break" BS didn't get her anywhere. People see through such transparent populistic crap (there is a lesson here for McCain, of course...)
Obama is the Presidential candidate for the Democratic Party.

RawStory reveals that the chairman of the San Diego GOP, Tony Krvaric, is a software pirate.
From the article:

Online research reveals that Krvaric is the co-founder of Fairlight, a band of software crackers which later evolved into an international video and software piracy group that law enforcement authorities say is among the world?s largest such crime rings. After co-founding Fairlight in Sweden, Krvaric established U.S. operations for the organization, including an arm headquartered in Southern California?a major center for the computer and video game industry.

This is particularly juicy since he "claims that he was inspired by the legacy of Ronald Reagan and criticized the European system for not providing an economic climate that would ?encourage free enterprise and competition.?
Free enterprise and competition seems to include software piracy in his view...

And of course, how did he get his Greencard and became a citizen with that background?
The article seems to imply that he ran his company while he was in H1 status. That's already a violation of immigration laws...

Update: Here is the second part of the story.

As a long time Slackware user, the recent announcement of Slackware 12.1 was a very welcome event. So I went to the Torrent download page to get the Slackware 12.1 DVD.
However, upon launching ktorrent, the KDE torrent client, to start the torrent download, my DSL connection went haywire. I had to reset the DSL modem (a Siemens SpeedStream 4100) and also reset the network port.
After searching for clues on the Net, I found that disabling DHT and limiting the number of connections (to 20 connections per torrent) solved the problem.

So, I got the Voter Information Guide for the June 3 elections in California.
Reading through the Propositions, it quickly became obvious that Prop. 98 is rather misleading and deceptive.
On the surface, it seems to be about Eminent Domain. But looking closely, it turns out that its main purpose is to get rid of rent control laws.
With this proposition, rent control laws would phase out, i.e., when somebody moves out of a rent-controlled apartment, the landlord could increase the rent for the new tenant at will. It is obvious that this would lead to people being "encouraged" to move out, e.g., by the landlord neglecting repairs, pest control, etc.