Digital photo frame PWN463 redux

This time it’s on the install disc...

We have recently learned that Samsung has issued an alert affecting its SPF-85H 8-Inch Digital Photo Frame...

The alert involves the SPF-85H 8-Inch Digital Photo Frames w/1GB Internal Memory, designed to work with Windows-based PCs via a USB connector. They were sold between October and December 2008 for about $150.

The alert concerns discovery of the W32.Sality.AE worm on the installation disc SAMSUNG FRAME MANAGER XP VERSION 1.08, which is needed for using the SPF-85H as a USB monitor.

This isn’t the first time...

Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 17:11:25 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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Tribalism in America

Thought-provoking comment by Ed Foster at Tam’s (excerpted at length here because Blogger doesn’t permlink comments):

...The problem with so many Irish-Americans (I can say this, as I was raised in a Gaelic speaking house by my little old County Galway grandmother) is that they still act as if there were NINA^[1] signs in the windows of every business and school.  I respect the hell out of an ethos and sense of loyalty that could keep a people together through eight centuries of madness and wholesale butchery.  The idea that a poor rural people could stand up and beat the greatest empire the world had ever seen, after being defeated every two or three decades for thirty generations, puts a certain extra cockiness in my step.
...
But America’s been good to its Irish Catholics, and they are the wealthiest, best educated Christian ethnic group in the country, running neck and neck with the Jews in both categories.  In the bigger cities, you’ll still see the big-armed Mick cops and firemen with their bulldog tattoos.  One of them is a son of mine.  But you’re many times more likely to see a stockbroker, a lawyer, a successful businessman.

And yet, the urban Irish, a brutally conservative people, secure in their upscale ghettoes and Catholic schools, are so often still the power brokers in the Democratic political machines their grandfathers created.  They say things they have no belief in, consider public hypocricy nothing more than a tool, and maintain an essentially European political world in the cities they control.

The urban Italians and Poles are no different.  No suprise there, as they were “Americanized” in the churches, parochial schools, and colleges built by the Irish, and prospered in direct proportion to the degree they assimilated into the local machine. In a very real sense, none of these people have ever left Europe.

I’m prouder of the Irish side of my heritage than I am of the Scottish side.  This one small country gave us more presidents than any other, along with Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone, Francis Marion, Simon McKendrick and Simon Girty, Jim O’Hara, Tim Murphy and two thirds of George Washington’s Continentals.  But the “Suicidal stubborness,” the desperate tribalism that showed so well at places like Bennington and Fredricksberg, with the 7th Cavalry and the Lost Batallion, has a dark side, at least in the cities.

It is the cynical ideal that honesty is an absolute only among the tribe or personal friends.  The difference between the kind of Irish Catholic you’re likely to meet in Iowa (think Frankie Morrisson, otherwise known as John Wayne) and a big city politician manipulating the remnants of a people’s cultural memory.  What makes it all the more difficult is that the city Mick is going to have the same cheerful, chatty, likeably gregarious manner as the Americanised Mick.
...
My mother was a private detective, and was not the least bit naive or given to foolish sentimentalism.  But, again out of tribalism, she was on the town Democratic comittee.  She came home one night, laughing to beat the band, and wrote down verbatim what she had just heard from John Bailey, the Connecticut equivalent of the Daleys and Kennedys.  He, after hours of putting up with a roomful of Middletown Sicilians, had found himself in a corner with several other Irishmen and more Jameson whiskey than he needed.  His comment was “I’ll tell you how to run the Democratic Party.  You buy off the Guineas with highway contracts and office jobs for their nieces.  You give the Jew lawyers their fair share.  You throw a bone to whatever witch doctor is running the ghetto this week.  But you never let control out of the hands of the Irish.”

That's what we see in Chicago and New York, Boston and St. Louis.  It’s the mistrust, the clannishness, the ruthlessness that made sense in a beleagued collection of rebels a century or two ago.  And it’s given us one of Boss Daley’s discreet sociopaths as POTUS.

I’d rather have Obama as President, considering the only option is that utter moron (and Irish Catholic machine politician) Joe Biden.  Or, God help us, Nancy Pelosi, one of the few women in politics that make me smile at the name Hillary Clinton.  At least Obama is bright enough to realize he isn’t very bright, and essentially has handed everything except the speech reading over to a melange of Clinton and Bush II bureaucrats.

But the more I look at the mess my cousins have made in urban America, the more I think the next conservative President we get should offer the choice of secession to the big coastal cities.

It’s easy for those of us out here in flyover country to ignore the degree that “big-city Democratic politics” remains “big-city Irish politics.”  Oh we see the names: Kennedy, Daley, O’Neil, but the people in the smaller cities and rural areas who bear those names have, over the last hundred years, by and large assimilated into the community.^[2]  Today for many of us, “Irish” is something you can be on St.Patrick’s Day, not the defining aspect of a person’s identity.  So we forget.

But the tribalism which Ed laments above remains, and it seems to go a long way to explaining how the Democratic Party works, as well as much of its ideology.  When “tribe” is elevated, relations with “outsiders” tend to be tribe-based (Bailey’s “guineas, Jews, and ghetto”).  If government is primarily an engine for dividing up spoils, then strong tribal membership is the way to ensure, in some rough-and-ready way, that you get your share.

And tribes fit very comfortably with the 19^th century left’s penchant for dividing society into classes, although “classes” have an important advantage over “tribes:” All it takes to create a new class is for someone to identify it.   Once created, the new class can join the existing tribes in lining up for “its share.”  It’s all part of the process!

Where’s the individual among all these tribes?  Well, if he’s smart, he’ll find one to align with, lest he become William Graham Sumner’s “forgotten man,” the c who pays the cost and takes the consequences of a’s and b’s efforts to “help” tribe x.

On the surface, “tribal” government appears a good way to stay in power:  Give each tribe enough to keep them quiet.  Make them believe they’re getting one up on the others.  Then steal the rest.
 
Of course it all falls apart if, sometime, a tribe turns up that won’t buy in and  can’t be bought off.

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Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 03:52:48 GMT | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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Less television from the networks = more local shows?

From the AP:

[NBC CEO Jeff] Zucker told analysts at a media investor conference [Monday]... that NBC is considering cutting the number of hours or perhaps even the number of nights it provides programming. - “Zucker says NBC may scale down programming hours”

I recall when the TV network feeds weren’t a 24-hour-a-day thing: In the late 50s the typical weekday began at 8am (7am for the Today Show), paused for an hour at noon, paused again from 4pm to 7pm and then finished at 11pm (except for the Tonight Show, which started at 11:15pm and finished at 1am). Weekend programming was even sparser. Stations filled their remaining hours with a mixture of old movies,^[1] cartoons, a few locally-produced programs, and syndicated-on-film off-network shows like Official Detective, The Lone Ranger, and Robin Hood. The few non-network independents got by with a mix of sports, more movies, and, as time went on, off-network reruns. And most stations were off-the-air overnight. So stations don’t absolutely need the nets, although having an affiliation makes filling all those hours much easier.

Having said that, I’m not sure what to make of this:

Several affiliates welcome the possibility, and said Saturday night seems like a logical place to give local content a shot. NBC affiliates board chairman Michael Fiorile was pleased to hear Zucker raise the possibility. “The affiliates asked NBC to do this last summer,” said Fiorile, who seemed somewhat surprised that Zucker had not brought it up sooner.

Affiliates stressed that producing local programming isn’t cheap, but it is a differentiator in the vast landscape of viewing options. “Our niche these days is localism,” says WSAZ Charleston-Huntington (WV) General Manager Don Ray...

If they’re really talking about producing local programming, well, I wish them luck. Don’t get me wrong: “Local” is good. “Local” can generate tremendous followings.^[2] But “local” takes an enormous amount of money and resources to be done right,^[3] especially when compared to what it takes to throw a switch on the satellite receiver. And most affiliates are unready. They lack the personnel and the facilities to do anything beyond an occasional special event. Then there’s the problem of selling enough advertising to cover the costs. And the weak economy militates against staffing up in anticipation of some (uncertain) future reward.

So my prediction is that while network cutbacks may result in more shows “originating” from local facilities, most of those shows won’t really be local. Expect local news to get more time (it’s quick, easy, and only incrementally expensive). Possibly high school sports- which require facilities, but are extremely marketable.  We may get to see a few more old movies. The rest? More Cops, more Judge Judy, and (in unrated hours) more “Paid Programming.” And, possibly, more hours of test cards.

A “renaissance” of local broadcasts? Not gonna happen.


(Loosely) related:

Via: IP (Zucker) and Hear 2.0 (affiliates)

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Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 01:38:52 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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Today’s WTF moment, courtesy of the Harvard University English Department

“There is no such thing as writing that is indigenous or ‘native’ to England...” - Harvard University’s proposed new undergraduate English curriculum, as quoted by Inside Higher Ed

Via:  Insty

Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 15:20:55 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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How to write an apology letter

Wow, we messed up.

Our saving grace is that you, our customers, cared enough to let us know we were being idiots.

We're as happy to have you as customers as we are embarassed that we ran a testimonial from Lon Horiuchi.

We printed off every email about this, rolled them each into a ball, and threw them at the employee who included the testimonial.

We're really sorry!

To show our contrition, we are offering 5% off to anyone who places an order for delivery in 2009 who mentions our poor taste in testimonials between now and December 31.

In the future, we'll pay more attention to who we use to talk about our products.

Respectfully,
The management

Unfortunately, that’s not what they wrote.

Backstory here (and here).

Via:  Tam

Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 17:01:17 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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Starve, too

Not just freeze in the dark:

It all started in 2007 when the United States Supreme Court ruled that the gases emitted by belching and farting livestock amounted to air pollution.  The EPA has now taken that ruling and decided to tax livestock operations that have more than 25 dairy cows, 50 beef cattle or 200 hogs at the following rates; $175 for each dairy cow, $87.50 for each beef cow and $20 for each hog.

Let's see, the pork producers in my area have been losing between $20 to $30 per shipped hog all summer long what with the high price of corn that none of us corn farmers were able to get or lock-in for our harvested grain.  Add another $20 on top of that loss and, Hell, they should be able to fly in their corporate jets to Washington and ask (with a straight face) for a bailout from Congress. - Frank James

Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 21:01:49 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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“You sold us the murder weapon. Now we’re orphans, and it’s all your fault!”

“...Wronged by the very system they worked hard to set up...”

...An association of community-based organizations has filed a federal civil rights complaint against two of the three largest Wall Street rating firms, charging that their inflated ratings on subprime mortgage bonds disproportionately caused financial harm to African American and Latino home buyers across the country.

The complaint, filed by the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, alleges that Moody's Investors Service and Fitch Ratings enriched themselves by assigning high ratings to bonds backed by mortgages “that were designed to fail” because of “unfair payment terms and insufficient borrower income levels.”

The firms “knew or should have known” that subprime loans disproportionately were marketed to minority consumers -- a process known as “reverse redlining” -- and that those borrowers would ultimately default and go into foreclosure at high rates- The Los Angeles Times

Mickey Kaus:

Didn’t community-based organizations push for exactly this sort of reverse-redlining?  I think they did.

Never satisfied, are they?

Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 03:30:58 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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Once upon a time, I thought the Catholic church knew what the hell it was doing

No, it’s not the government (this time)!

Muslim prayer rooms should be opened in every Roman Catholic school, church leaders have said.

The Catholic bishops of England and Wales also want facilities in schools for Islamic pre-prayer washing rituals.

The demands go way beyond legal requirements on catering for religious minorities.

But the bishops - who acknowledge 30 per cent of pupils at their schools hold a non-Christian faith - want to answer critics who say religious schools sow division.

Unbelievable.

Via: The Jawas

Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 01:07:18 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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When in doubt, make stuff up

From a (mostly content-free) BBC story about the European Union’s  announcement of a new program to catch “cyber criminals:”

In a statement outlining the strategy the EU claimed “half of all internet crime involves the production, distribution and sale of child pornography”.

I’m sorry, but this is B.S.  Do “the EU” seriously expect me to believe that the amount of kiddie pr0n “production, distribution and sale” on the internet comes anywhere close to equaling the amount of credit-card fraud, data theft, Nigerian phishing scams, “illegal” gambling, junk e-mail, black-hat hacking, copyright infringement, and terrorist activity put together?  Pull the other one, it’s got bells on.

(And it’s not as if governments haven’t been caught making stuff up before.)

Via: Slashdot

Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 19:52:03 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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