Injected with a Poison


Which can I live without more - two of my back teeth, or half of my bank account? And which would I prefer - a friendly dentist, or one who's honest about how much he's going to charge?

I might know when my jaw stops aching.

I'd forgotten that novocaine injections made you feel nauseus for hours even after the nerve numbness fades.

I'm always fascinated by just how stupid people can be. I don't mean how ignorant or misinformed, I mean how confused and how certain in their confusion.

This is a comment made in all seriousness by the poster "armyofghosts" to the Outpost Gallifrey discussion forum:
Im not sure if i believe in globabl warming. Even if things are getting warmer what am i supposed to do about it? Also what is wrong with nicer wether? People complain too much.

The discussion was in response to a report from the Bush administration, on how climate scientists are political zealots who get a feeling of power from creating panic. Which is in itself pretty stupid, though most posters understood it was just the administration persuading itself it could be complacent.

Much of the debate was in the side issue of whether or not climate change is caused by humans (i.e. by industry). Presumably the thinking is that, if the planet becomes uninhabitable because of human activity, we should do something about it. But if it becomes uninhabitable for other reasons, we should let it happen.

Who says physics isn't sexy?

My trojan infection was quite sneaky. So far as I can tell, it looked for files called "setup", and created randomly named duplicates of itself in the same folder - sometimes several. All the duplicates are 126Kb exe files, named with random 7-character strings of upper and lower case letters and numerals.

I'm doing a global search for files that match those parameters, and deleting them. However, I've checked and there's a lot of them in my RAR archives - which of course I made just prior to reinstalling windows - so I'll have to unzip them all and repeat the search.

The trojan disables CTRL-ALT-DEL access to the Task Manager, to make it harder to shut it down while running. But I'm still not sure what it actually does. My firewall blocked some calls out from "CRSS", so maybe it's just garden variety spyware.

UPDATE: I found 152 of them.

5 comments:

  1. 152! holy crap.

    that reminds me I still need to back-up all my photos.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I say absolutely nothing about Physics... Is it sexy because of the movement laws?...
    Just trying to guess... Don't get mad!

    ReplyDelete
  3. The Brian & Minge:
    I found another one. 153 now.

    Ric:
    Click on the "Who says physics can't be sexy" link, and all should become clear. It's a blog about the biology of breeding, the chemistry of coupling, and the physics of friction.

    Why whould I get mad at you?

    ReplyDelete
  4. ... Just because Physics is a serious matter to you, and I was trying to joke about it.
    But then again, I guess I was right all from the start: physics of friction, huh? No doubts about it...

    ReplyDelete