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Lemmy died on 28th December at the age of 70. The Guardian has some of his best quotes (with swears etc.)

In your twenties, you think you are immortal. In your thirties, you hope you are immortal. In your forties, you just pray it doesn’t hurt too much, and by the time you reach my age, you become convinced that, well, it could be just around the corner. Do I think about death a lot? It’s difficult not to when you’re 65, son.

The BBC and the Guardian both recently reported that Pope Francis has officially recognised Mother Theresa' second miracle, and that her canonisation is expected to take place in Rome in September.

The BBC article states , "The miracle involved the healing of a Brazilian man with several brain tumours in 2008, the Vatican said."

The Guardian article, however, goes into more detail about the controversial nun and discussed the incident of another alleged miracle, as documented by Christopher Hitchens. "A Bengali woman named Monica Besra claims that a beam of light emerged from a picture of Mother Teresa, which she happened to have in her home, and relieved her of a cancerous tumour. Her physician, Dr Ranjan Mustafi, says that she didn't have a cancerous tumour in the first place and that the tubercular cyst she did have was cured by a course of prescription medicine."

Mother Theresa, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, is said to have amassed vast wealth and enjoyed the best private health care money could buy, while the poor and sick in her missions in India endured illness without proper medication, pain relief and even had to use second-hand hypodermics, despite the huge sums of money donated to the "good cause."

All miracles are open to public scrutiny, so there should be no doubt!

Let us examine the evidence. Or not.

I was watching the morning news the other day, and opened the computer to record KSHE's "Lone Klassic"... and it was in Linux. What the hell? Apparently I should have shut it off the night before, because Microsoft had apparently installed an update and then rudely and maliciously rebooted the computer. It was in Linux because kubuntu is the default OS in GRUB. So I rebooted again, selected Windows, and the little thing came up and... just sat there. Ten minutes later I still had a black screen.

I pulled the battery and tried again. Ten minutes later and I still had a black screen. So when I'd yanked the battery again and restarted it, I selected "Windows Recovery" from GRUB. An Acer screen came up with selections for reinstalling Windows. The first wiped the hard drive, the second kept your files. I picked that one; there was data on the hard drive I hadn't backed up in a few days, including a new story I'd started the night before and was on a roll with.

Twenty minutes later the first progress bar said "1%".

I'd decided a long time ago to get a DVD burner for the old Dell, until about three weeks ago when I'd taken it apart to install the video card and hard drive from the old HP that had computed its last. There were no slots that would fit the card (older computer than I thought, I guess) and the drive ribbon was a single drive ribbon. I probably have a spare double drive ribbon in the basement, but since the card wouldn't work in the Dell, there really wasn't any point. I'd decided then to get an old laptop that already had a DVD burner. So this was the time, because I had writing to do and the install was going to take all day and half the night.

I drove to the pawn shop and bought an HP laptop with Windows 7 and a DVD burner. It's a lot bigger than I like a laptop to be, but the smaller, cheaper one with a DVD burner ran Window 8, and I didn't want to deal with that garbage. Windows 7 is still the least annoying and least problematic of all of MS's OSes.

Of course I had to download Windows Defender and Firefox with IE, install Firefox, uninstall Norton and McAfee and Bing Bar and all the other effluent that comes with a new computer, reconfigure everything, and download and install Open Office and all the other programs I need.

Meanwhile, the Windows reinstall on the Acer had hung. Damn, I was going to lose everything I'd written the day before, since Windows had surely overwritten GRUB. I got lucky; it hadn't. So I went into Linux to copy everything to thumb drives, since I still can't get it on my network (time to try a new distro). I even found some movies I thought I'd permanently deleted by mistake months ago!

After I saved the data on thumb drives I rebooted again, went back into Windows restore and let it wipe the drive. That was the next morning, and it took all day. By then I had the new laptop running pretty smoothly and was writing again. The next day was mostly spent getting the old Acer back to normal. I was amazed and pleased that it had destroyed neither Grub nor Linux.

I'd lost a few passwords and haven't yet reset them all, and lost all my bookmarks.

That new computer is too big, but it's a lot faster than the Acer.

So I turn the TV on this morning and it wouldn't pick up channel 49. Flipped through the stations, and all of them had really screwy colors. I have my fingers crossed that it's the converter and not the TV, since the converter had fallen off the shelf last night. I hope it is, because they're not expensive and TVs are. I'll find out when I play a DVD.

Ever wonder who the top trolls are around these parts? Yeah, me too. So I wrote up a quick script to find out. Now keep in mind our moderatorlog table only goes back so far; it gets the tail end trimmed off every so often by one of our slashd jobs. Without further ado, here are our top ten finalists, excluding Anonymous Coward and counting only Troll moderations:

1. Ethanol-fueled: 430
2. Runaway1956: 187
3. The Mighty Buzzard: 157
4. Hairyfeet: 129
5. jmorris: 114
6. frojack: 105
7. aristarchus: 98
8. zugedneb: 60
9. MichaelDavidCrawford: 59
10. VLM: 55

If you didn't make it this time, keep trying! If you want to have a gander at the whole list to see how close you got, here it is.

A year or so ago, an executive from an electronics company (Apple, if I remember correctly) spoke of the lack of innovation in television sets since the 1950s, and my reaction was “He’s either stupid or thinks I am.”
        In the 1950s televisions had knobs on the set for changing channels. Remote controls were brand new, expensive, limited in capability, and used ultrasound rather than infra-red.
        The screens were vacuum tubes, and most were monochrome. Color television was brand new, and it was nearly 1960 before any stations started broadcasting in color. Rather than being rectangular, color sets were almost round; even black and white sets weren’t true rectangles.
        They had no transistors, let alone integrated circuits; the IC had yet to be invented, and transistors were only used by the military. They were a brand-new invention. TVs didn’t have the “no user-servicable parts” warning on the back. When the TV wouldn’t come on, as happened every year or three, the problem was almost always a burned out vacuum tube. One would open the back of the set and turn it on. Any tubes that weren’t lit were pulled, taken to the drug store or dime store for replacement. If that didn’t fix the problem you called an expert TV repairman.
        The signal was analog, and often or usually suffered from static in the sound, and ghosts and snow in the picture.
        There was no cable, and of course no satellite television since nothing built by humans had ever gone into space.
        However, there is one thing about television that hasn’t changed a single iota: daytime TV programming.
        In the 1950s most folks were well paid, and a single paycheck could easily pay for a family’s expenses. Most women, especially mothers, stayed home. As a result, daytime TV was filled with female-centric programming like soap operas, game shows, and the like. Usually there were cartoons in the late afternoon for the kids.
        Today the rich have managed to get wages down so low that everyone has to have a job. The demographics of daytime television have radically changed as a result. Now, rather than housewives (of which few are left, and we now have house husbands), who can watch daytime TV? Folks home from work sick, both men and women, folks in the hospital, the unemployed, and retired people.
        Yet daytime TV is still as female centered as it was when I was five. Soap operas, talk shows with female hosts and female guests discussing topics that would only appeal to women, and game shows.
        What’s wrong with the idiots running our corporations these days?

So, here's the recent happenings on twitter in as few words as possible:

Kotaku: Fuck gamers

Bethesda: Fuck Kotaku

Kotaku: Help us, gamers!

Gamers: LOL

SJW: BUT ETHICS!!!

Expounding on what I feel ban-worthy as linked in a recent story I subbed...

These are my opinions not site policy. That said, they are also my minimum requirements to remain on staff.

Over-the-top spam: This means dozens of spam comments to a single story, automated or not. Anything less can and should be dealt with by simply modding the comments as Spam.

Gross/repeated illegal activity: Linking to copyrighted works and other illegality of the minor variety that we notice should be resolved by editing the comment in the database and letting the user know why their comment was edited in a reply. Bans should be reserved for things such as illegal and credible threats or multiple instances of minor illegal activity that was not ceased when notified that it should be.

Opinions, truly held or of a trollish nature: Absolutely never should this be criteria for a ban.

The meaning of "site bans": Banning an account or IP address from posting to the website. I don't have as much issue with IRC bans, it's a secondary means of communication for us not our primary one.

Any further clarification or other questions, feel free to ask.

I plan to buy a house next spring, so I'll almost certainly need a new refrigerator. There's a problem: they don't make the fridge I want, and never have. I can't figure out why.
        Refrigerators today are quite different than antique ones, using a different coolent because of the ozone layer, better insulation, the use of rare earth magnets in the motors, and other improvements.
        But they're still incredibly wasteful.
        The fridge I want has two vents outside, much like dryer vents but insulated. There is an electronic outside thermometer, one in the refrigerator, and one inside the freezer.
        When the temperature outside is above seventy fareignheight, the heat taken from the fridge is vented outside, so the air conditioner doesn't have to work harder to cool the hot air refrigerators let out inside the house.
        Under seventy the air is vented into, rather than outside, the house. If the heat is on, it doesn't work as hard.
        But most of all is winter. It's ludicrous that we pump the heat from our freezers with a lot of energy expenditure, while freezing air is right outside that could come in the intake hose and freeze and cool your food. At freezing, this fridge doesn't need the compressor at all and compressors take a lot of energy to operate.
        I don't know why nobody is selling those things.

There is an article in the Guardian called Britain is heading for another 2008 crash: here's why.

The premise seems to be that government running a budget surplus leads to contraction in the private sector i.e. recession. Therefore, austerity will continue to make things worse for us.

The reasoning is very simple, perhaps simplistic.

You may be objecting at this point: but why does anybody have to be in debt? Why can’t everybody just balance their budgets? Governments, households, corporations … Everyone lives within their means and nobody ends up owing anything. Why can’t we just do that? Well there’s an answer to that too: then there wouldn’t be any money. This is another thing everybody knows but no one really wants to talk about. Money is debt.

I understand that people may borrow money to invest in e.g. a business where they might need to buy machinery and to pay staff before the profits start to roll in, and that hopefully the profits will be large enough to pay back the load and to make a living, but that's where my small brain gives up.

What is the rest of the story?

Also, note the graph of house prices.

Update: here come the sub-prime mortgages again. Only this time we, the public, have to bail out the banks when it all goes horribly wrong. Remember how they changed the law after the last crisis, so that the same terrible fate would not befall the banks again.

The UK's descent into fascism accelerated today when Home Secretary Theresa May introduced a McCarthyist witch-hunt against "extremists" of all kinds in the public sector.

In other news, David Cameron has positioned the UK as China's best friend in the West ahead of all other countries. He had to promise never to speak to the Dalai Lama ever again though, to be best friends with China

Amnesty International and other groups concerned with human rights issues in China are expected to protest in St James' Park on Tuesday and it is expected that there will also be a pro-China protest.