Let me preface this entry with the information that I am writing in the Tunica Uplift region of Mississippi, having fled South Louisiana because of Category 5 Gustav. My house is 40 feet above sea level. Big deal. I rode out Hurricane Andrew and Hurricane Katrina, and regretted it both times. This time I left.
Yesterday I referred to Sarah Palin as "a bimbo with a freak hairstyle." That was wrong on so many levels. She's much worse than that. She's a highly intelligent, beautiful and accomplished woman who believes in everything I detest. I wrote the trash I referred to because I was in a hurry to evacuate my home. I apologize. Sarah Palin is just a dangerously unqualified choice to be Vice President, she is not a bimbo.
More follows...
and excuse any typos. I am using a monitor so small I can barely see what I am writing (my hurricane evac monitor).
Sarah Palin factoids:
- Sarah Palin loves earmarks, and loved the bridge to nowhere (between Ketchikan and Gravina, middle of nowhere). John McCain has said he is against them.
- Some of her fellow Republican Alaskans are troubled by McCain's decision:
State Senate President Lyda Green said she thought it was a joke when someone called her at 6 a.m. to give her the news.
"She's not prepared to be governor. How can she be prepared to be vice president or president?" said Green, a Republican from Palin's hometown of Wasilla. "Look at what she's done to this state. What would she do to the nation?"
Green, who has feuded with Palin repeatedly over the past two years, brought up the big oil tax increase Palin pushed through last year. She also pointed to the award of a $500 million state subsidy to a Canadian firm to pursue a natural gas pipeline that is far from guaranteed.
- Sarah Palin wanted an exit strategy from Iraq. John McCain wants perpetual war everywhere, until the rapture comes or he dies.
- Sarah Palin is hot, and the definition of is in this case is is. She's the first Republican politician I have ever wanted to "have relations with." Cindy botoxed herself into a coma, again, when she got a good look at Sarah. John McCatch-a-nut has been known to hanky panky (as with Cindy originally). Cindy Canes must be worried.
- Feminists are not fooled:
Palin's addition to the ticket takes Republican faux-feminism to a whole new level. As Adam Serwer pointed out on TAPPED, this is in fact a condescending move by the GOP. It plays to the assumption that disaffected Hillary Clinton supporters did not care about her politics -- only her gender. In picking Palin, Republicans are lending credence to the sexist assumption that women voters are too stupid to investigate or care about the issues, and merely want to vote for someone who looks like them. As Serwer noted, it's akin to choosing Alan Keyes in an attempt to compete with Obama for votes from black Americans.
I hope Hillary takes her apart. Hillary should be he first woman President, not a homogenized baby factory from Alaska. It is indeed insulting, to women and admirers of Hillary Clinton alike. Of course DK readers are way ahead of me on this, but I am saying it again (one more... one more...).
I learned through Bruce Sterling of a troubling fact about cloud engineering today, and that has nothing to do with Sarah Palin. It has a lot to do with our nation though. The DoD is about to go cloud in large part. Hello beautiful disaster waiting to happen, let me introduce you to my choice of music: 311, Beautiful Disaster from a BR Convention Center show I taped.
Anyway, An Entire Cloud Was Deleted:
Web based app data storage company FlexiScale had to shut down the entirety of it's service after a cloud engineer deleted an entire cloud. Here's what happened:
Following last month's much-discusseAmazon S3 outage>, most (if not all) of XCalibre's FlexiScale cloud went dark on Tuesday, and nearly two days later, the UK-based hosting outfit has yet to restore service.
According to XCalibre CEO Tony Lucas, the outage has affected "a vast majority" of businesses relying on FlexiScale for on-demand storage, processing, and/or network bandwidth.
Lucas won't say how many cloud-happy outfits depend on his cloud, which went live in October. But he expects some of them will be back up and running this evening UK time. "And other customers will start coming back online from there on," he says. "But we're not sure how long that will take."
As Lucas explained in an email to customers - posted to the Web by CNet - the outage occurred when an XCalibre engineer accidentally deleted one of FlexiScale's main storage volumes. "The problem was caused by human error," Lucas told us. "We've been having some capacity issues - FlexiScale has been growing at about 30 per cent a month in terms of usage. We've been adding capacity and adding capacity and we were in the process of adding even more, when one of the engineers who was tidying things up on the disk architecture made a mistake."
The cons of clouds:
- Web 2.0 runs on a lot of extra money (it ain't free - you pay for services you already have [or should have] locally)
- If a cloud fails (God forbid, electronics still have flaws), you're screwed.
Amazon EC2
went down, and all Amazon sent out was this lousy email (fake, and stolen):
There was a bad hardware failure. Hope you backed up your shit.
Look at it this way: at least you don't have a tapeworm.
-The Amazon EC2 Team
Interesting to note, the U.S. DoD plans to move almost all of it's military computing to an HP cloud system. HP doesn't have half the experience in cloud engineering that Google has, and will certainly make a killing off the deal. Meanwhile, vast amounts of top secret intelligence will be stored and accessed remotely. What a great idea. The administration is really out thinking itself now. "We have lots and lots and lots of data... let's put it all in a cloud controlled by Hewlett Packard. Heh heh!"
There's no reason to worry about DDoS attacks or DNS hacking in the event of global war, right?
Also, the troops need more gear to lug around.
They'll all be cybernetic soon anyway.