Posts Tagged ‘Microsoft’

LinkSwarm for October 24, 2016

Monday, October 24th, 2016

The latest Clinton Corruption update pushed the LinkSwarm to Monday:

  • National Review published Victor Davis Hanson’s endorsement of Donald Trump. And the moon became as blood…
  • Trump leading in poll that has best track record over last three elections.”

    The poll with the best track record over the last three presidential elections gave Donald Trump a 2-percentage-point edge over Hillary Clinton on Saturday.

    The Investor’s Business Daily/TIPP tracking poll has Trump with 42.1 percent and Clinton at 39.7 percent.

  • Thoughts on #NeverTrump: “They are putting a great volume of energy into bringing about a disaster, for which they will not take any ownership.”
  • No one trusts the media anymore. “Only one in nine Americans believes that Hillary Clinton is ‘honest and trustworthy.’ They don’t trust the media’s cover-up of her misdeeds, and the cover-up of the cover-up of the cover-up.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Why I Now Feel Compelled To Vote For Trump“:

    More than anything, I can’t sit idly by and allow these perpetrators of fraud to celebrate and leak tears of joy like they did when they helped elect Barack Obama in 2008. I have to know I weighed in not only in writing but in the voting booth. The media needs to be destroyed. And although voting for Trump won’t do it, it’s something. Essentially, I am voting for Trump because of the people who don’t want me to, and I believe I must register my disgust with Hillary Clinton.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • And speaking of media bias, the Rolling Stone campus rape hoax case goes to trial. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Here’s a New Yorker piece on the failure of the Euro. It provides a good, but incomplete, overview of the Euro’s failure (nowhere does it note that Europe’s cradle-to-grave welfare state is unsustainable, and it fails to note that none of the nations practicing “austerity” in southern Europe have cut outlays to match receipts). And the myopic policy prescription offered is, of course, more central planning. But there are some good bits. Like this:

    The U.S. unemployment rate hit ten per cent for a single month in 2009 and is now below five per cent; the eurozone unemployment rate hit ten per cent around the same time, and is still in double digits. In some European countries, youth unemployment is more than forty per cent. America’s economy is bigger than it was when the crisis hit. The eurozone’s is smaller. To take just one example, Italy, the third-largest economy in the eurozone, has a per-capita G.D.P. that’s lower than it was at the end of the last century.

    Also this:

    Stiglitz observes that if the countries that committed to the single currency in 1992 had known what they know now, and if people had had the chance to vote on the proposal, “it is hard to see how they could have supported it.” That’s a hell of an indictment.

  • Hey, remember how we were told California’s assisted suicide law would only apply to terminally ill people who wanted to die? Now insurance companies are enouraging suicide rather than pay for life-extending drug treatments.
  • Even The New York Times figures out that new gun laws wouldn’t prevent most mass shootings.
  • Russia is conducting nuclear survival drills. (WSJ hoops apply.) Good thing we have Nobel Peace Prize winner Obama running things rather than that warmonger Bush… (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • College isn’t for everyone:

    But if you’re not sure yet what you want to do, then take time to decide before you spend $30,000, $50,000, or $100,000 you don’t have for something you don’t need. In the meantime, start working. You’ll probably only find low-paying, hard-working jobs at first, but guess what? If you go to college, you’ll be working those same jobs when you get out, only you’ll be four years older and fifty grand poorer.

  • Scientists at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee have discovered a chemical reaction to turn CO2 into ethanol. Better idea than corn subsidies…
  • The Large Hadron Collider “nightmare scenario has come true:

    For the last ten years you’ve been told that the LHC must see some new physics besides the Higgs because otherwise nature isn’t “natural” – a technical term invented to describe the degree of numerical coincidence of a theory. I’ve been laughed at when I explained that I don’t buy into naturalness because it’s a philosophical criterion, not a scientific one. But on that matter I got the last laugh: Nature, it turns out, doesn’t like to be told what’s presumably natural.

  • Hamilton County, Tennessee doesn’t monitor parole tracking devices outside business hours. A good thing people never commit parole violations nights and weekends… (Hat tip: Fark.)
  • This just in: Democratic Representative Shelia Jackson Lee is still an idiot.
  • AT&T trying to buy Time Warner. I’ve got a bad feeling about this…
  • Internet-connected CCTV cameras made by Chinese firm Hangzhou Xiongmai Technology seemed to make up the heart of the botnet used in Friday’s DDoS attack.
  • Yuan hits all time low against the dollar.
  • Microsoft Surface sucks.
  • Texas is goat country.
  • LinkSwarm for May 23, 2016

    Monday, May 23rd, 2016

    This kept getting pushed out by other posts, so enjoy a heftier-than-usual LinkSwarm:

  • U.S. district court judge rules that House Republicans lawsuit against ObamaCare on separation-of-powers grounds can move forward. (Hat tip: Elizabeth Price Foley at Instapundit.)
  • You know how American leftists claim socialist Denmark is paradise on earth? Yeah, not so much. “Denmark’s suicide rate has averaged 20.8 per 100,000 during the last five decades, with its highest level of 32. The American suicide rate averaged only 11.1 during the last five decades, and has never exceeded 12.7. Danes are deeply deprived, driven by severe narcissism, and so more than 11 percent of adult Danes – the supposed happiest people in the world – are on antidepressants.”
  • Why the left hates the Jews:

    The Arab–Israeli conflict is a bitter and ugly one. My own view of it is that the Palestinian Arabs have some legitimate grievances, and that I stopped caring about them when they started blowing up children in pizza shops. You can thank the courageous heroes of the Battle of Sbarro for that. Israel isn’t my country, but it is my country’s ally, and it is impossible for a liberty-loving American to fail to admire what the Jewish state has done.

    And that, of course, is why the Left wants to see the Jewish state exterminated.

  • Vaguely related: “Frank Sinatra’s Love Affair With the Jewish People.”
  • Brazil’s President impeached.
  • This just in: Europe is still screwed.
  • Greece approves new “austerity” measures that they’ll no doubt continue to cheat and ignore while spending money they don’t have.
  • Speaking of Greece, “More than one in five school-aged refugee children in Greece have never been to school, a study has revealed. Child refugees stranded in Greece have been out of school for on average 1.5 years, and many of them ‘cannot even hold a pencil.'”
  • Hezbollah operations chief killed by Syria, but nobody’s entirely sure by who.
  • Why did the feds give Bill Clinton’s pedophile friend Jeffrey Epstein a sweetheart deal?
  • Elijah Woods says there’s widespread pedophilia in Hollywood. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • One billionaire moving to Florida is going to cost New Jersey $140 million in tax revenue.
  • Electric cars don’t lower emissions overall.
  • No sign of a down ballot Republican crackup.
  • Target has shed $10 billion in stock value since announcing its tranny bathrooms policy.
  • Why feminists hate sex: “The new feminist puritans see heterosexual sex as confirming and reinforcing outdated gender roles. That men and women not only have sex but enjoy it is a threat to the notion that both gender and sexuality are merely social constructs, to be crafted and rejected as instinct takes us.”
  • Why did 16 Republican Senators save the agency that’s hell-bent on creating instant public housing slums across America?
  • More than 300 UK CEOs come out in favor of a Brexit.
  • Eye-open infographic on mass public shootings from John Lott.
  • More proof that Social Justice Warriors hate everything, no matter how cute.
  • World’s oldest woman, and last living American born in the 19th century, dies. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Listeria outbreak among frozen fruits and vegetables. “Some of the affected products were sold under brand names such as Earth’s Pride, Panda Express, Signature Kitchens and Trader Joe’s.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Meet the vegan Bernie Madoff. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • Black Pimps Matter.
  • Safety tip: Try not to get killed over cutting in line for the taco truck.
  • Facebook bans conservative for saying that Facebook bans conservatives. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Canadian company working on 20km high space elevator.
  • Jim Geraghty visits NRRAM.
  • The Dallas convention center sucks.
  • Microsoft is gonna Microsoft redux. (Hat tip: Borepatch.)
  • Wikipedia editor contemplates suicide over toxic atmosphere of powertripping.
  • Rehab for Internet addiction. “The program costs $25,000 for 45 days at the center.” Obviously I can’t be addicted to the Internet, because there’s no way I could afford the rehab…
  • I’m stealing this from Ace of Spades HQ:

  • LinkSwarm for May 2, 2016

    Monday, May 2nd, 2016

    I expected to spend the weekend at the Levitation Music Festival here in Austin, but it got cancelled when it looked like t was going to be rained out. However, I did see a makeup show by Slowdive, which was the biggest reason I was attending anyway.

  • Scott Adams: “I give Clinton a 50% chance of making it to November with sufficiently good health to be considered a viable president.”
  • Hillary wants to make it illegal to criticize her.
  • Indiana governor Mike Pence endorses Ted Cruz.
  • Once again, Team Cruz wins the delegate selection fight, this time in Arizona, Missouri and Virginia.
  • Latest poll has Trump and Clinton tied.
  • Trump isn’t fighting the establishment, he’s part of it. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • It’s good for the sake of the world that Islamic State fighters are no-talent assclowns. Maybe they should have drilled them more on military tactics than reciting the Koran. See how many basic military squad function mistakes you can count them making in this video.
  • Obama releases Islamic terrorist who helped attack the USS Cole. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • How progressives embraced eugenics with the same fervor they embrace global warming today. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • Waco biker fight update, including various (inconclusive) videos.
  • “More than two decades ago, we heard the ‘misplaced fears’ and predictions of shootouts in the streets of Texas because of the CHL law. It didn’t happen — and it won’t happen because of SB 11, either.”
  • Abortion clinics are closing in blue states as well.
  • Rabid Puppies dominate the Hugo nominations again. The science fiction establishment was given the opportunity to address Sad Puppies concerns, but instead they continued to doubled down by backing the Social Justice Warriors at every turn. This has turned Sad Puppy voters into Rabid Puppy voters. The 2015 Hugos: “There are problems, but Vox Day is an odious troll.” The 2016 Hugos: “You know what? Fuck them. They deserve Vox Day.”
  • Microsoft gonna Microsoft.
  • Dyson launches a new hairdryer. I really like their vacuum cleaner, which is wonderful for picking up golden retriever hair…
  • For a brief, shining moment, something interesting actually happened at a soccer game.
  • This time of year there’s just so much pollen in the air.
  • Hillary Clinton’s Email Server: Worse Security Than Apu’s Kwik-E-Mart

    Tuesday, September 1st, 2015

    So Hillary’s Super Secret Secure Server was actually hosted on the same server as the not secret and not particularly secure Clinton Foundation email system.

    Which means any hacker that could pwn the Clinton Foundation server (and why wouldn’t they?) could almost certainly pwn Hillary’s private e-mail server, chock full of illegal classified national security information, through any number of exploits or privilege escalation attacks.

    And evidently she was running her emails off an Exchange 2010 Server, which meant it was running on top of Windows, which means there were no end of exploits by which a dedicated hacker could gain control.

    “Oh hey! I’m hosting this list of ISIS secret agents on my Doom III deathmatch server! I’m sure there’s no way that could possibly backfire on me!”

    Or to put it in non-computer terms, she was storing classified information in an unlocked tin box under her bed that everyone in her neighborhood also knew contained bundles of unmarked $100 bills, and she was just hoping no one broke in.

    She’s a major security risk that should never, ever be in the oval office…

    “Those Who Count the Votes Decide Everything”

    Tuesday, June 9th, 2015

    Hey, remember how Microsoft and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation were collectively the largest donor to the Clinton Foundation?

    Well, guess who’s going to be providing the technical infrastructure to tally vote totals for the Iowa Caucuses?

    On Friday, the state’s Democratic and Republican partiesannounced a new system that will be used to count the votes cast by Iowans during the complicated election process. Authorized precinct representatives will use new apps to report results to their party headquarters in Des Moines, Iowa’s capital, when the election takes place early next year.

    The system is powered by Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform and was built by the tech giant in collaboration with its partner InterKnowlogy, which also made CNN’s Magic Wall election result reporting tool. It replaces a set-up that required precinct representatives to call into automated phone systems with no way of authenticating whether the person was authorized to do so and then record votes using their phone’s keypad. Representatives also mailed paper records to the party’s central office.

    If I were one of Hillary’s primary opponents, I’d think I’d want to look at that source code before trusting those tallies to be fair and accurate…

    Vox Provides List of Clinton Foundation Donors

    Friday, May 1st, 2015

    From the blind-squirrel-finds-an-acorn department, here’s another rare interesting and useful piece from Vox that actually lists 181 major donors to the Clinton Foundation that also had business with Hillary Clinton’s State Department.

    Tidbits:

  • Microsoft/The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was the number one donor, giving at least $26,000,000, and possibly a great deal more, as no upper limit was reported.
  • The State of Qatar (and “related entities”) was the fourth largest donor, giving between $1,375,000 and $5,800,000. Rich Qatar individuals are also among the biggest backers of the Islamic State.
  • Goldman Sachs was the fifth largest donor, giving between $1,250,000 and $5,500,000. So much for all that “Occupy Wall Street” rhetoric from Democrats…
  • ExxonMobil was the ninth largest donor, and gave between $1,001,000 and $5,005,000. By liberal standards, shouldn’t this disqualify Hillary from talking about global warming ever again?
  • The “Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa,” of which I was heretofore unaware, was tied for giving the tenth largest amount, between $1,000,000 and $5,000,000. They’re a Gates Foundation-backed entity that appears (from cursory research) to be pushing genetically modified crops (including those from Monsanto and Cargill) as a solution to Africa’s hunger problems. The question is why the money flows from Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa to the Clintons and not the other way around. Except, of course, for the fact that the money always seems to flow to the Clintons, and not the other way around…
  • Monsanto themselves gave between $501,250 and $1,006,000.
  • The American Cancer Society gave between $100,000 and $250,000. Why is the Cancer Society giving money to the Clinton Foundation? Has anyone asked?
  • Semiconductor equipment giant Applied Materials (for which I worked for four years more than a decade ago) gave between $100,000 and $250,000. Doing business globally, there are many reasons they could have sought favorable rulings from the State Department. However, some semiconductor equipment (specifically ion implanters, and possibly others) can be used (with modification) to enrich uranium.
  • This just scratches the surface on a Clinton Foundation scandal where new revelations seem to be dropping every day. But it’s a solid jumping-off point for additional research.

    Also, it offers a opportunity to troll liberals: “Do you think that Ted Cruz receiving money from Goldman Sachs, ExxonMobil and Monsanto makes him a tool of big business?” Then after they answer…

    LinkSwarm for November 21, 2014

    Friday, November 21st, 2014

    Here in Austin, we’re enjoying a temporary respite from Winter in November, but I don’t expect it to last long.

    Links!

    All the lies of ObamCare:

    The growing impression that politicians don’t play straight with their constituents is completely toxic, particularly to Democrats, who actually want to use government to improve people’s lives. It’s one thing to downplay unpalatable choices made in the law; it’s another to never disclose the consequences of legislation until it’s too late for anyone to react. Combine that with the moustache-twirling of a Jonathan Gruber, saying that the idiots should be happy for what they got, and you have basically every conservative stereotype about liberal elites confirmed.

    Also: ObamaCare is designed for people buying insurance through it to get a nasty sticker shock in year two. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

  • House Republicans file suit over Obama’s unilateral actions on ObamaCare.
  • The administration is lying about ObamaCare signup numbers. Again.
  • “Why Texas Could Remain a Republican Stronghold for Another Generation.”
  • “The president’s promises have been proven to be worthless…How many illegal immigrants want to come out of the shadows and identify themselves to law enforcement based upon this promise?”
  • Jay Carney admits that with his illegal alien amnesty, Obama is doing something he previously called unconstitutional.
  • Mickey Kaus thinks the courts could very well act quickly to squash Obama’s illegal amnesty, much as they did with Harry Truman’s steel mill seizures.
  • Aaron Worthing thinks illegals will pass on Obama’s amnesty as a bad deal.
  • “These illegal aliens are willing to do the work that Americans will no longer do — namely, vote Democrat.”
  • How desperate are the Democrats? They’re saying Republican opposition to Obama’s illegal alien amnesty will lead to ethnic cleansing. (Hat tip: Moe Lane.)
  • Top Obama bundler arrested on child rape charges.
  • Lefty lawyer Alan Derschowitz on Harvard’s kangaroo court sexual assault rules: “Harvard’s policy was written by people who think sexual assault is so heinous a crime that even innocence is not a defense.”
  • How come Bill Cosby gets convicted in the media for rape allegations by Bill Clinton gets a pass? “There is more sympathy for a white southerner like Clinton than a black comic like Cosby.”
  • A giant leap backward for woman-kind.
  • Price of ground beef hits record highs.
  • Oh lovely: Microsoft is deploying Daleks.
  • This Week in Jihad for November 24, 2010

    Wednesday, November 24th, 2010

    Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

    Sadly, Jihad doesn’t wait for American holidays, so here’s a roundup of related news: