ThisMyShiznat

Bruno Bastet, a UN worker living in midtown Manhattan has been making a tax free salary of over $180,000 a year working for the UN, while collecting welfare checks each month as well from the welfare system in France.

It looks like he falsified documentation to build up the ruse that he was still living in France with his wife and children.  Over the past 4 years he has collected about $30,000.

So what do ya think?  Was it worth it buddy?

Original article here from Fox News.

The Govinator is doing some end of summer cleaning on California’s proverbial closets and garages.  Items will be placed on EBAY over the next few days.  To boost sales, good old Arnold is autographing many of  the auctioned goods.

To me, Arnold’s signature on the visor of a 2002 Ford Focus isn’t all that tempting of an offer.  Granted it *is* a piece if history, but not the most exciting artifact I can think of.  The car has a suggested retail value of $4,885, if it’s in “excellent” condition.  That particular vehicle sold for $3,550.01.  It’s combined gas mileage is estimated at 28 mpg, and Arnold’s signature may have actually lowered the sale price by about $65, which coincidentally is the c0st of replacing the visors.

Now Arnold, are you really trying to tell me that there aren’t any of those huge SUV truck things laying around from last year when you could afford them?  You must have a few 2008 Ford Apocalypse’s laying around with DVD players and Navigation Systems built in.  You know the one’s I’m talking about.  The one’s that came with that 14 mpg option from the factory.  I know your Caliafornia and all, but seriously, selling just one of those behemoths would have the same impact as selling 10 of these jokes your putting on Ebay, and from what I can see, it looks like there are only 6 cars on the auction block.

Original article here.

You have to love the midwest.

In Chesterfield, Missouri, the countries ‘largest’ HUMMER dealer has started selling firearms in the same showroom where they sell the 6,000 pound SUVs.

At first thought it seemed like an ill conceived plan to me, but then as I looked into it I began to realize that guns and trucks make perfect sense together, depending on the population density. I wouldn’t recommend setting up this shop in Brooklyn or Queens, but a suburb of Saint Louis might be OK.  Judging from the info that I looked up about Chesterfeild, MO, it might be ok.  I didn’t look into it’s greater area at all for demographics and stuff, but I do know that St. Louis is in the midwest.

A friend of mine once told me that when it’s Thursday in New York City, it’s 1987 in Missouri.  This seems like a very progressive step for 1987.  I’m still not sure if I like it or not though.

View Articles Here and Here.

I didn’t read the whole story.  In fact, I hardly even read part of the story.  I did particularly like the part where it says they were charged with murder and also charged with not reporting to the police that they murdered their son.  Thats basically where I stopped reading.

Full Story

A top operational official in charge of protecting civilian government computer networks has resigned, dealing another blow to the federal effort to enhance cybersecurity.

Original article here from The Washington Post

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I came across a great image from the NYTimes about last years federal budget in comparison to the planned spending for 2009, already set up by the bush administration. The article was originally published September 28th 2008. It mistakenly lists the federal deficit at 5.4 trillion. A correction was released a week later, stating the actual deficit at 9.6 trillion. That’s quite a typo.


The Red Columns represent the proposed ‘bailout funds’ to be allocated for the 2009 budget, addressing problems such as AIG, the Auto industry, the Financial system, and the mortgage crisis.


The Green columns represent the yearly spending in 2008 for things like social security, medicade, tax rebates and the previously named ‘war on terror’.


The ghosted columns represent how much further in debt the country became in 2008, and how much we lost on import taxes by foreign companies finding loopholes.


I am interested to see what this years chart looks like. This graphic was of epic size already. Something like 1260×1681 pixels. Click image to see it full size. You will need to zoom in as well. To zoom, hold down the CTRL and scroll the wheel on your mouse. If your mouse doesn’t have a wheel then your on your own.

If you want to read news on this, a google search for “Typhoon Marakot” will give you plenty of information. I just want to bring you some photographs that I found to be particularly impressive.

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Today a small engine plane and a helicopter collided in mid air over the Hudson.

Following the mantra that lightening never strikes twice, and considering the incident back in January where ‘Sully’ landed the Airbus A320 in the water, I would have thought that the Hudson would be a real safe place to fly a plane for at least the next few years.  Of course I would have been wrong had I been putting any thought into that.  I wasn’t thinking about that though because I had other things on my mind, aside from FAA regulations over the Hudson.  I can definitively say that I wasn’t the only one.

Immediately I asked myself, “How does this happen?”.  Terrorism immediately seems far more likely than stupidity, but this really doesn’t have any of the earmarks representing a terrorist attack.  If this is the best the terrorists had for today, then it would be definitive proof that we are winning the war.  It probably wasn’t though.

In an interview, Bloomberg was asked by a reporter, “Can you, as a pilot describe the airspace and how aircraft indeed have to navigate it.”

Bloombergs answer consisted of a few key statements that stood out to me.

There is a corridor here where aircraft can fly uncontrolled by air traffic.

There is a common frequency used on the Hudson river.

Pilots that fly in this area all the time pretty much always use those
frequencies to announce where they are.

Helicopter pilots pretty much always describe where they are, what altitude they
are and which direction they are going.

There's no requirement that they do that although common sense says, and the
maps do show what those frequencies are.

The term that caught my attention was “pretty much”.  The first time he used it, I saw his face cringe a little.  The second time he said it, he used it with authority.  No looking back.

Basically, to sum up his response, he said that there is no FAA control over the Hudson River airspace, nor is there any controll over the East River airspace.  He did note that there is regulation of the airspace requiring airplanes not to go near buildings, but he didn’t mention the governing body responsible for enforcing the requirements that do exist.

To me, this sounds like the helicopters are flying somewhat ‘willy nilly’ over the Hudson, and are required to provide their own communication between pilots.  As for airplanes, this particular plane took off from a NJ airport roughly 7 miles west of Manhattan.  The airplane was flying south to Ocean City New Jersy.  I’m not a pilot, but I don’t see why the airplane would have needed to fly over the hudson at all.

Bloomberg Interview obtained through FoxNews.com

No, I’m not talking about the Bush administrations federal budget.

Early this morning both Twitter and Facebook were victims of Distributed Denial of Service attacks.  (DDoS)  The attack seems to have hit Twitter first, bringing the social network site to it’s knees.  Shortly after Facebook also began experiencing intermittent issues, though it seems that the Facebook system handled the attack better than Twitter.

In theory, the attackers could have executed a buffer overflow attack by sending packets with 141 characters to the web servers.  Ok.. that’s a lie, but if you know what it means then it’s probably pretty funny.  At a minimum I amuse myself.

Personally, I don’t tweet.  I am even bothered by the SMS protocols restrictions.  For non tech speaking readers, that means I wish text messaging supported more than 160 characters.  140 is just absurd.  Now the Extended SMS protocol does support up to 1000 characters *i think*, but for the most part, cellular carriers don’t use XMS (eXtended Message Service).  Especially if your texting to a cell phone using another carrier.

I read one report about the twitter attack where a marketing executive in Manhattan complained that she couldn’t get to twitter, and didn’t know where to go to find answers because she gets all her news from twitter.  wait..  you get ALL of your news in 140 characters or less?  seriously?  The average news report i read is about 2 pages long, but hey, whatever suits you.

Speaking of the inherent limitations of communicating in such short bursts.  Did you know that Congressmen and Senators tweet with each other while in session?  Yeah, so the people who are running our country are sharing their opinions with each other this way.  I’ll say it one more time.  140 characters or less.

Below is an actual simulated tweet from the congress floor.

Ithink th $ 4 Kulnkerz iz huge sucess the $ alocated wuz sposd2 last 3 mnths and we
ran out in 1week Oh wait the black guy iz taking again.

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Here is some input from twitter users in real life (IRL).

140 characters or less is fine for me because I don’t actually have anything important to say!  This morning twitter was down when I was trying to tell everyone that I bought a pumpkin that looks just like my butt.

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Ok, I’ll stop now.  Please click my advertisers.