They try to up sell you on nitrogen which has nominal to NO practical value when fitted to your average car. I had read anecdotally that Honda were not a fan of the practice and I send a tweet to see if I could get a reference for this. 

There you go.  I’ve been to this dealer twice and while the service was done quickly,the waiting area is clean, nice wifi,play area and coffee  It’s only been after the usual chat re, “service this to Honda’s requirements to keep the extended warranty valid”How they then want to add injector cleaning agents, N2 and suggest a transmission flush on a < 30k car, a 30k MANUAL car is beyond me. Despite declining the injector cleaning they billed me for it anyway and took money of the air filter instead. They must have some kind of weird  bonus structure going there but a 30k car that’s performing well does not need it. 

Needless to say I’ll be using another dealership  for future warranty work.

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In this article from the AZ Republic a newspaper that decides what stories we can comment on, this not being one of them,the word psychic is not in quotations yet the word excessive is. I’m going to attack,for it’s not possible to gently chide, suggest or be reasonable when dealing with the local government licensing woo-woo is bullshit. I’d love to know by which standard Gilbert are verifying the psychic’s services. Who on the council ensures that the chakras are handled in the correct manner and that no psychic residue escapes into the streets?

That made me a little angry. What made me a lot more angry was her concern of passing on the pricing of the licensing to people yet the comfort with charging money for fairy tales is quite ok. The rest is a free advert from the paper without challenge to what could be considered as a reasonable question aren’t you full of crystal powered poop?

Psychic wins battle with Gilbert over permit

A Gilbert psychic has challenged the town’s license and permit fees and won.

Paula Parris said the requirements to get a license and permit as a fortune teller in Gilbert were “excessive,” costing her $1,300 more than most other businesses.

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Akamai Technologies is extending its content delivery network to the Apple iPhone as it introduces the Akamai HD Network, a system for streaming high-definition live and on-demand video to a variety of devices. Source.

It’s been said twice in the comments over at Mashable that HD streaming to a device that cannot render HD is a bit of a non starter. It’s not been said with a Douglas Adams line from Dr Who.   May as well get started then.

“The concept is simply staggering. Pointless, but staggering” 

Actually it’s not that staggering. While there’s a case for streaming HD it’s maybe better if the end device could actually  utilize it.The  iPhone’s can not and is  likely been mentioned just to fulfill the buzzworthy compliant criteria of the release.

The iPhone’s max output currently is 640 x480,the screen resolution of the device itself is  is 480 x 320.  HD is usually considered to be 720 or above but realistically anything under x2 ( 960) the resolution is really stretching the term and  even the mighty 3GS currently falls far short of either mark without an external screen and short of the mark with one.

Thankfully a better post than I can justify the time in writing,without need to claim lack-of-talent, appears over on the streaming media blog. with the main thrust of the argument coming from the Workflowed blog.

Akamai…..as long as it’s above 700 kbps and starts as an HD source, it can be considered HD. So the house of cards of the iPhone claims in the rollout of the Akamai HD Network rests on HD ‘quality’ that’s below that of today’s average standard-definition stream

And in my unrefined language.

 Just because you start out with a HD source doesn’t make that which you receive HD. If I were to hold my cell phone to the speaker for you to hear the song would you be happy with the term CD quality being used to describe it? If I have ATT iPhone it’s unlikely the call would last long enough to finish this experiment. That’s the second part. Even running at 640×480 with 2.5Mbps , back to those iPhone specs again, you are still not HD and are still exceeding what you could likely extract from ATT on your iPhone. 

In short Penn and Teller don’t need to do a show about this claim because it’s prima fascia  Bullshit!

Want HD Video on the iPhone? Akamai Is Making it Possible

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When I was in need of a quick pocket camera to go on vacation I stumbled on this at Walmart,the camera seems to be exclusive to them, for a considerable sum under the usual selling price.  A few days before I bought a cheap point and shoot Panasonic which also has a video function.

No matter how much I read about the acceptable nature of crappy sound and video online the garbage coming out of my sanyo hd100r  would seem to be taking the piss.  Why even make such a lo-end piece of crap  at the risk of poisoning your brand?  ( Thankfully I paid nowhere near the msrp but it’s not hard to see why.. ) 

It’s autofocus hunts for faces like Cheney and then pulls the trigger at the incorrect time. It’s hideous at capturing indoors without a spare nightsun(the lights you get on the bottom of helicopters) and it’s not so hot with movement during daylight.  It’s garbage.  The panasonic tz5 on the other hand does 720, it’s HD, can focus ,and works in lower light and it’s a  point and shoot camera that does video. The Sanyo is a video camera that can do stills, er no it can’t since they too suck.
 
Why even compete at the crappy end? There’s nothing here that makes me want to try a better Sanyo, all they’ve done is out crapped the market at a higher price than Aiptek.

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The conclusion of Medical Examiner Mark Fischione is that the cause of death was due to “complications of hyperthermia due to environmental heat exposure.” The manner of death is ruled an “accident.”

No one could forsee that forced exposure to the AZ sun would result in any health issues. You would spend longer in jail for forgetting a dog in your car should our “protectors” happen upon it. Ha you actually thought there was anyone here to be held accountable , nope  it’s the usual accident. How can a willful institutional decision,without which you can’t explain the existence of the holding area  under their complete control, be an accident?

For the state to even call this an accidental death is repugnant.Yep we have a defacto death penalty for victimless crimes and a pathetic write up in the state’s paper-of-record.  Thankfully one group of investigative reporter from the near MSM model still takes the time. Phoenix New Times 

Coroner’s report confirms heat death of Perryville prisoner

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We know how many people are shot breaking into houses, we know how many of them failed to carry out the seemingly easy step of disarming the homeowner and then , and this is the part I don’t get, successfully using a gun against the hapless fool who bought the thing.

And more here. http://en.wikipedia.org/ikw… which has faults pro and con re his work.

The myth that your own gun is more dangerous to you than not having one is on the face of it absurd but people have taken the time to refute the origin of this case. “protection or peril an analysis of firearm-related deaths in the home” where the original 43 times more likely figure the VPC uses. Its’ not an easy thing to sum up in a paragraph other than htt://guncite.com/gun-contp... has material from the original study author, Kellermann, that acknowledges errors in his initial work.
Later work suggests that it’s a 65-2 ratio http://www.saf.org/LawRevie… in favour of the armed:. Seem believable? The daily info is out there, story after story of self defense use

Let’s get back to today’s bullshit from the Brady bunch.

“Mexican criminals, and traffickers who supply them, cannot get the guns they need in Mexico because of Mexico’s strong gun laws,” Brady Center President Paul Helmke said in a news conference. But in border states Texas and Arizona, he argued, weaker gun laws provide easy access to a significant supply of high-powered arms.

Spot the logical error? Because it’s illegal to get guns in Mexico ,you know their strong gun laws that prevent them getting gun, they get them in the USA to bring back to Mexico where those amazingly strong rules appear to have headed out for a siesta. 

(BTW it’s illegal for a non resident of the border states to buy them without transferring them to an FFL) Since when did a fucking drug cartel get all civic minded and sentimental about paperwork?

Also what’s this bullshit re “high powered arms” relative to what? It’s emotive , unchecked, tripe and irrelevant without context much like the organization that spawned it. Yep all that research and I end up on an ad hominem attack.

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I’m a contrarian by nature so it comes as no shock that while I make no secret that I enjoyed the Cramer train wreck as entertainment I wasn’t a huge fan of the message that was sent.I’ve heard this message echoed back in the office that the Daily Show is about the only place to get real news. Really   Here’s a more realistic evaluation from “Better living through software“  blog.

If it took a Jon Stewart show for you to realize that Cramer is a clown, you are not the sharpest pencil in the box, and you have no right to feel smug.

You can see it in the comments on the original post,that people seriously believe that this is a credible venue for news/analysis. Throughout this mess no one seriously has questioned why 401k’s  exist in the first place.Talk about benefits, entitlements are a real distraction from the main issue. We were forced into 401k’s, to use professional money managers , hah! and to pay for the retirement of others or pay a penalty for arranging our own security.  Until we get back to basics on why we need an intercessionary relationship between our labor and future security it doesn’t matter who plays piggy in the middle.

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Amongst other things Roach takes a look at ectoplasm, EVP that’s the people that listen to noise and claim to hear things, past lives,attends a class in the UK on how to be a medium. She also looks at the science of testing “psychics” like DuBois and other cold readers that are cynical ,delusional or both ( my bias). That blunt an answer is something this book isn’t going to provide for you but it’s probably a good thing that she’s not attempting to do that.

She’s a very entertaining writer,her footnotes amusing,and there’s real science to follow up on. I just didn’t learn as much as her prior works since it’s hard to accumulate a body of evidence for life after death when all we have is evidence of bodies.

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“Well you’re atheism is  just a religion  anyway “ 

I get that one often. The need to drag people to their level    is one of the ideas that Bill O Reilly  espouses , you can’t justify bad action by pointing out another’s bad  to make your point . I didn’t say  O’ Reilly manages to walk that walk but  it’s an ideal, kinda like the Christ myth on which the followers of both = Major Fail.  Most negative reviews  reference this sentiment and here’s an example From Glen Whipp at LA.com which neatly encapsulates the form of dementia.

“…thought is absent in “Religulous,” as is imagination. The movie is Maher’s monument to Maher, as ugly and hateful as anything he decries in the film.

Yep  Bill Maher is the equivalent of crusaders,  suicide bombers and those that rape children.  Sounds like a psychotic* idea. A movie about ideas, EVEN , if you believe it to be a bad movie is not as hateful  as the wanton destruction of sentient beings by blowing up families in a market because  you’re invisible friend tells you too? 

I call bullshit because this guy is  as deserving of the phrase “and then there’s this asshole”  as anyone claiming to be a critic.

Movies Maher ridiculous in ‘Religulous’

*the term is also used in a more general sense to refer to mental disorders in which mental functioning is sufficiently impaired as to interfere grossly with the patients capacity to meet the ordinary demands of life.

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By now you’ve guessed that we’re not talking about Curtis and his gang but the kind of bright light, flappy flappy harp playing  goody two shoes types that  schlep around carrying messages from the “Almighty”  , whose omni presence  doesn’t stretch to a decent two way communication system  with his creation apparently, and  seemingly  are there to give you   a push , a warning  or whatever help you may need to stay out of harms way.   Here’s a fun story I like to relate about a marketing manager at a prior company ( a few back) that crashed her car on the way back to the office after lunch.

Her eyes were closed while driving . There wasn’t a foreign object in there, not squinting from the sun   or   taken by a sudden bout of narcolepsy but..  they were closed because she was praying.    Guess what ? She felt lucky that she was praying as the accident could have been so much worse OTHERWISE!  55%    Adults , Voters, Drivers, EEP!

Guardian Angels Are Here, Say Most Americans – TIME

In a poll of 1700 respondents, 55% answered affirmatively to the statement, “I was protected from harm by a guardian angel.”

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Anyway.  Let’s get back to the portable nuclear generators and how fricking handy these will be if we can  avoid the people that work at Jiffy Lube ever getting these in for service..

Answer to an Amory Lovins Disciple Who Believes in Conservation, Solar, Wind and Micropower : CleanTechnica

Hyperion Power Generation, for example, is focusing on a heating unit that is small enough to fit on the back of an over-the-road truck that can produce 70 MW of thermal energy constantly for several years. I spoke to the company founder for The Atomic Show Podcast and he explained how his company is establishing the supply chain needed to build 4,000 units that will be able to provide heat for about $3 per million BTU. By comparison, liquified natural gas sold in Japan last week for $20 per million BTU.

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 Erin was telling me that the “hardest” animal in existence could survive ,exposed, in the vacuum of space.  Bullshit I said, the hardest animal  is a pig with a flick knife and everybody knows that.  Looks like I was wrong. 

You’d never guess from looking at these clips that the millimeter-long
tardigrade is the world’s toughest animal, found from deep ocean to
Himalayan mountaintops, able to survive at a single degree above
absolute zero.

Tardigrade (Water Bear)

These things are so cute that there needs to be a plushie made in their honour.  I look forward to sharing their DNA soon.

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Erin with Teller. ( I love his voice, his writing’s rather good too)

I’ve been a fan of Penn and Teller since being exposed to them in the mid 80′s and one of the life goals, as far as I have plans, was to see them perform live. That’s another collective 40 years experience up on stage and if they were great in the 80′s they are now fucking amazing. During the intervening time I didn’t turn out to be an atheist as I always was one, as are all newborns it’s only the prevailing culture that tells a three year old that he’s a Christian child and sadly he’s doomed to burn in hell unless he thanks the zombie jew for his gift of ever lasting life, feeling sick yet?

There’s enough material on who Penn and Teller what they believe in and their reputation as the bad boys of magic when most of the mainstream ,magically speaking, were just bad. Note I said mainstream since there are amazing entertainers such as Jamy Ian Swiss, Jerry Sadowitz and Tom Mullica ( Well he makes me laugh)

I kinda have to mention the Pendragons as the other act I’d love to see live and not just because she’s hot. She’s hot and they’re talented.

That’s not telling you much about P an T though but I wanted to let you know I am predisposed to magic as an art form and non belief as a science.

The show is 80 minutes long and costs about $1 a minute , that may sound high but think about how long it takes to swallow a $5 beer, not that high now is it?

What you get is not just entertainment but some amazingly open lessons on just how fallible we are when we’re paying attention to that which others wish us to look at. Their usage of a video camera in one piece had an audience member focusing on the close up magic for the big screen while they are missing the large changes going on around them all while they pull a meta magical moment by pulling the same trick on the audience. That’s a big lesson people think they can spot the obvious but study after study has shown that a preoccupied brain misses the elephant, or bear, in the room. It’s hilarious until you take it out side of the theater and realize that it’s our default view. Just try to see the person in front of you when looking through a 2000 year old lens.

Secondly, and still on the topic of invisible friends, the attack on psychics ( as Penn says fake psychic is a redundant term) in a manner that’s far more humane than I have been able to come up with. E.g. the believer isn’t stupid, just that they made a mistake in choosing to believe an evil human. I don’t think that works, works for people with the belief but isn’t that a regressive statement to the point were the person starting the religion is the only evil one out there:)

They still have some pg13 moments, include art ( Fire eating is , well not a trick it’s exactly as described) and the bullet trick , the way they do it, continues to amaze.

I love seeing the transparent cup and balls and Teller’s pet red ball which I am failing to recall the name of, regardless, it’s a thing of beauty. Toss in the flag burning , or is it, the live music and their willingness to sign and meet with the audience afterward this was for once, a nice birthday outing. That they expose themselves to idiots like me that try not to go cotton mouth / blurt or ask silly questions plus sign my metal bill of rights is too classy for word. Actually my question is a good one but likely not a fair one to ask and will be the subject of another post.

Bought Penn’s book, Sock, so look out for a review on that.

Sock by Penn Jillette Read more about this book…

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At a recent Father-Daughter Purity Ball, the girls ranged from college
age to a tiny 4-year-old dressed in purple who climbed into her
father’s arms to be carried

I wonder if they take a toddler to AA too? These people , these people that define innocence yet take their fucking 4 year old ( is there irony in there folks? ) to events like this. I am nowhere near taking Dobh, or myself , to a fetish ball in the near future but maybe I need to take a play from my ‘moral superiors’.

I can only hope that they are trying to create a super sexually fucked up batch of women to compete with the Catholic education / Baptist pastor’s daughter that have been highly reviewed by some of my friends.

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Don’t Make Me Come Down There sticker
$2.00

Don’t Make Me Come Down There sticker. Just a subtle warning from the
Almighty, to his so-called followers, lest they continue spreading
hatred and division in His name!

New Products for Freethinker science lovers darwinfish holders civil right workers and many others

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Interview with director on ,Daywatch, his prior movie

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How does one tell that which invisible apart? I’m confused. The obvious answer is ignorant stupid people but hey the shaman has a prettier way of saying it.

“These are vendettas. It is not that people really bewitched somebody,”
he says, adding he believes that witch hunts are really about people
expressing hatred and coming up with an excuse to hurt someone.

What this illustrates? That Sam Harris is mainly right in his book,”The end of faith”. Religion is a framework within which the true nutballs are given license by their society to believe/ behave in manner that wouldn’t arise without an invisible friend to redirect your actions against. Without the casual believers it’s hard to imagine the fanatics would have the moral framework in which to operate and seen for the criminals they really are.While many found that Harris’ conclusion re a form of personal spirituality / mysticism to be a replacement for organized religion was not bleak enough ( yeah some atheists demand rigidly defined areas of rational thought ) yet this one case points to a better way forward. What’s better billion believing in 1 “gawd” or a billion gods believing that they are Elvis?

Deadly hunt for ‘witches’ haunts Kenya villagers – CNN.com

- It may be difficult for Western cultures to fathom, but in Western Kenya, beliefs in ghosts and witches are very real. And sometimes they have deadly consequences.

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I dropped my involvement with the national party a couple of years back which is a shame as I’d like to double remove x 23 any association with the kind of people that think that Barr = liberty. He may say that he doesn’t want the boots of the Fed on your face but he’s not so forthcoming over about the fifty pairs on a state level that can regulate with the same disregard for the people they’ve claimed lay under their control.

Classically Liberal

Has quite a few posts on this odious man from Georgia.

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Out of interest the only pop science book that I have lost is called ” Chaos” by James Gleick

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Imagine that – only 1.6 percent atheists, yet their beliefs are becoming the law of the land. A minority forcing its will on the majority – isn’t this the classic definition of tyranny?

Well apart from obvious that all the believers aren’t believing in the same god it makes for oh say interesting discussion to claim that since under 1% of people are of the Hindu faith , the other 99% are not, in fact they could be atheists in relation to the Hindu pantheon. So any faith that doesn’t have numerical supremacy loses .You just have to love large democracies.

I despair at this “we’re under attack” mentality. USA has the highest adherence amongst the developed world yet. So is he saying that 1.5% of non believers are more capable of getting shit down and modifying society to their will than the faithful? Maybe less time spent listening to how flawed and evil we are allows for some practical improvements to be made?

I’m tired of the atavistic call to all the founders, or most of them or just the ones we really like in the US pantheon are god happy ergo country = god happy and a Christian nation. They were also male so can I apply the same principle here to who gets to say what happens?

He also uses a loose definition of tyranny which can be, in this last century at least, the masses going along with the plan. Lastly I could give a flying spaghetti monster about your inner mental life till it affects mine. I can’t get my head around how we’d know if your praying without such a public display being required so this stopping you thinking is not something you can lay at the feet of the non theist.

You stopped thinking by yourself when you adopted a millienia old creed that is as relevant to life in the 21st C as Paris Hilton is to string theory.

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Now if the polar bear   braided the hair of a little girl,Changed from Coke to Pepsi or  migrated to the woods and then used a porta potty that may be news.  Otherwise I think there’s a few more items that should be placed in that enclosure for the bear to play with:D

The Frankfurter Allgemeine news website reports that Knut “senselessly murdered the carp”, fishing them out, playing with them and then leaving the remains.

BBC NEWS | Europe | Shock at polar bear’s carp kill

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Seriously my reivers diet of flesh , blood and offal when combined with inactivity has not only caught up with me it’s taken an early lead. That is going to stop. Oh that an my ancestors. Bastards that’s why we never invite you around to dinner ( Oops riffing off DNA there)

Dark Ages..

Dr’s , medical journal and chance running into people with the same condition. Unlikely. The most you get is a pamphlet of organizations that survive by your condition surviving:D So you get 2-3 xeroxed copies

Today.

If I relied on the hand outs , about gout, without a doubt I’d be a more depressed otter. As it is, and as it seems to be with most conditions, the cause and effect has been established by the women in white coats, a reduction of Xtra beef causes less whY does this hurt? Sadly it’s mostly the widest bromides with information that is taken from the most extreme cases and then generalized into rules for everyone. E.g Low sodium. for those that need it great, sadly that means “everyone” since the medical people don’t want to send wrong messages. e.g hey ethnic group a : you are more at risk from this but to make you feel better we’ll tell everyone to do the same. Same with gout.

Now I have to work out what’s true for me.

Gout Pal Interactive – Discuss Gout Symptoms and Treatments With Friendly Gout Sufferers

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