Category: Rants

Killing gays around the world

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7_r2zeZq-0
(click the link, embedding the video has been disabled)

Religion and fear-mongering at work – gotta love it. :-/

In related news: Arab and African nations successfully managed to get the United Nations to remove the reference to “sexual orientation” from a resolution condemning unjustified executions. (Reuters link) The vote passed with 79 in favor and 70 against with 43 abstaining or being absent. That’s what happens in a democratic process, when the majority of voters apparently are fucking idiots – namely: Afghanistan, Algeria, Angola, Azerbaijan, Bahamas, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Belize, Benin, Botswana, Brunei Dar-Sala, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, China, Comoros, Congo, Cote d’Ivoire, Cuba, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Democratic Republic of Congo, Djibouti, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Ghana, Grenada, Guyana, Haiti, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Jamaica, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Kuwait, Lebanon, Lesotho, Liberia, Libya, Madagascar, Malawi, Malaysia, Maldives, Mali, Morocco, Mozambique, Myanmar, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, Russian Federation, Rwanda, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and Grenadines, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Africa, Sudan, Suriname, Swaziland, Syrian Arab Republic, Tajikistan, Tunisia, Uganda, United Arab Emirates, United Republic of Tanzania, Uzbekistan, Viet Nam, Yemen, Zambia, Zimbabwe

The Next Financial Crisis

If you have about 45 minutes to spare and want a nice, short summary of one of the many reasons we’re pretty much fucked, go and watch “Overdose: The Next Financial Crisis” on Journeyman Pictures YouTube channel.

In times of crisis people seek strong leaders and simple solutions. But what if their solutions are identical to the mistakes that caused the very crisis? This is the story of the greatest economic crisis of our age, the one that awaits us.

Financial Crisis caused by… porn?

Straight from the you-can’t-make-this-shit-up department: If you ever wondered how the SEC became this ineffective and worthless bunch of bureaucrats who can’t stop fraudsters like Bernie Madoff before they manage to scam people for billions of dollars, even tough they were told for years that it was the biggest Ponzi scheme in the history of mankind… well, here’s why.

Apparently even their senior level staffers, attorneys and whatnot-employees prefer to watch porn all day, rather than doing their goddamn work, while getting paid more than $200k per year.

Of course 17 “senior employees” are only a small fraction of a 4000 people workforce, but if a Washington, DC attorney can spend up to 8 hours a day watching pornography and another regional accountant got blocked by their firewall 16.000 times (yeah, sixteen-thousand times!), you gotta wonder what’s going on at that place…

Firefox blows up VMware Server 2 webinterface

After upgrading Firefox on my main workstation to a more up-to-date release (3.6), it turns out I can’t access the Webinterface of any of my VMware Servers. While some kind of glitch every now and then is to be expected from this “somewhat” buggy piece of sh… uhm, code – this time, logging with Firefox actually manages to crash the management application on the server itself. Yeah, that’s right – at that point you can’t even access it with another browser or the VIC until you kill the hostd and do a /etc/init.d/vmware-mgmt restart. It isn’t even some kind of ancient beta release, but 2.0.2 – the most recent release as of now. WTF?

According to the logs there appears to be some kind of SSL issue:

SSL Handshake on client connection failed.

Turns out Web Access can’t handle SSL3 and Firefox 3.6 has SSL2 disabled per default. Why this manages to crash an application on the server boggles my mind, but at least there’s an easy workaround until VMware manages to fix this:

Go to your about:config page and set security.enable.ssl2 from false to true.

That’s it, done. At least it worked for me – no more issues whatsoever.