I’m hoping some hip readers stumble upon this. Once upon a time, all the way back in the 80s, a DJ at WYSP in Philadelphia would bring in some of his own stuff and play it. He called his show the Ricky Mess. I loved it. I would get home from work at midnight, get myself together and then not go to bed. It ruined my life. Not really, it was already a wreck, but I really enjoyed it. Anyway before I would fall asleep I would put a cassette in my boombox and hit record so I could listen in the morning. (Anything to avoid listening to Howard Stern - ugh) Anyway I wound up with a treasure trove of tapes and great music that I would never have heard if it weren’t for this Rick Allen. Sometimes the tape would run out before he would come back on and say the names of the songs he played. Over the years, I have been able to piece together just about everything I heard, either from him saying the name during the show, from satellite radio (it shows the title and performer - that was huge) even a couple from youtube. I had three songs left, and I stumbled across one from some RWNJ blog “Proof Positive”. But there are two songs left. My tape has long ago wandered off, but the songs are still vivid in my head. One is “The Viper Song” but performed by a guy with a very familiar voice with a band that sounds like the kind you would find on David Letterman, with a couple of solos in the middle. It ran around five minutes or so. It was a really cool version (to me, anyway). The second one is a more subdued number. If I had to guess the title, it would be “I Really Want to Turn the Whole World On”. It roughly followed the tune of an old Chicago tune “Wishing You Were Here”. If either of these sound familiar, please let me know. I would really be grateful.

Patent Trolls Want $1,000—for Using Scanners:

When Steven Vicinanza got a letter in the mail earlier this year informing him that he needed to pay $1,000 per employee for a license to some “distributed computer architecture” patents, he didn’t quite believe it at first. The letter seemed to be saying anyone using a modern office scanner to scan documents to e-mail would have to pay—which is to say, just about any business, period.

If he’d paid up, the IT services provider that Vicinanza founded, BlueWave Computing, would have owed $130,000.

The letters, he soon found out, were indeed real and quite serious—he wasn’t the only person getting them. BlueWave works mostly with small and mid-sized businesses in the Atlanta area, and before long, several of his own customers were contacting him about letters they had received from the same mysterious entity: “Project Paperless LLC.”

“I was just mad,” he said.

Vicinanza soon got in touch with the attorney representing Project Paperless: Steven Hill, a partner at Hill, Kertscher & Wharton, an Atlanta law firm.

“[Hill] was very cordial and very nice,” he told Ars. “He said, if you hook up a scanner and e-mail a PDF document—we have a patent that covers that as a process.”

It didn’t seem credible that Hill was demanding money for just using basic office equipment exactly the way it was intended to be used. So Vicinanza clarified:

“So you’re claiming anyone on a network with a scanner owes you a license?” asked Vicinanza. “He said, ‘Yes, that’s correct.’ And at that point, I just lost it.”

Nothing succeeds like persistence – unless you’re Orly Taitz.

The 52-year-old lawyer-dentist-real estate agent from Laguna Niguel brought her years-long battle to oust Barack Obama from the presidency to a federal courtroom Thursday in Sacramento.

Her appearance was part of a last-minute bid to stop the counting of electoral college votes in Washington D.C. that will pave the way for the president’s second inauguration Jan. 21.

She failed. Again.

I think that bumps her win/loss ratio to 0/183, more or less.

Link

This is an effort to grant the wishes of the fundamentalist Republicans in “tea party” states that would like to be on their own, without any government help, in case of a natural or man-made disaster.

Nearly 3 “signatures” in less than a day. Needs a big FREEP.

Link

So, it seems we will have John Boehner to kick around a little longer, since the feral children couldn’t get their shit together enough to depose him. I believe I made the point earlier this week that it was entirely possible that Boehner will keep his job because nobody really wants his job enough to take it away from him. You want to be the Grand Marshal Of The Tournament Of Dolts Parade? The ringmaster of Cirque du Idiotes? The concierge in Bedlam? Hell, neither do I.

Link

Plug that into your Drake equation and see what you get. My personal suspicion is that the chemical precursors of life & life itself in one form or another also abounds.

Planets Abound

PASADENA, Calif.—Look up at the night sky and you’ll see stars, sure. But you’re also seeing planets—billions and billions of them. At least.

That’s the conclusion of a new study by astronomers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) that provides yet more evidence that planetary systems are the cosmic norm. The team made their estimate while analyzing planets orbiting a star called Kepler-32—planets that are representative, they say, of the vast majority in the galaxy and thus serve as a perfect case study for understanding how most planets form.

“There’s at least 100 billion planets in the galaxy—just our galaxy,” says John Johnson, assistant professor of planetary astronomy at Caltech and coauthor of the study, which was recently accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal. “That’s mind-boggling.”

“It’s a staggering number, if you think about it,” adds Jonathan Swift, a postdoc at Caltech and lead author of the paper. “Basically there’s one of these planets per star.”

The Next Chernobyl?

The showdown over Iran’s nuclear program is likely to accelerate in 2013 as sanctions tighten, Israel threatens military strikes, and the centrifuges keep spinning. While most attention will be focused on the two most oft-discussed sites of uranium enrichment — Natanz and Fordow — a third site on the gulf could prove to be this year’s most dangerous nuclear wild card.

Tucked between two sleepy coastal fishing villages, the Bushehr nuclear power plant has long been seen as the “acceptable” face of Iran’s nuclear program. Built by Russian engineers and monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency, it is already producing electricity, and most nuclear experts agree that it does not merit the same level of concern over weaponization as Iran’s other nuclear sites.

Bushehr, however, could turn out to be the most dangerous piece of Iran’s nuclear puzzle for another reason: haphazard planning and ongoing technical problems mean it could be the next Chernobyl, igniting a humanitarian disaster and explosive economic damage across the oil-rich region.

Technical problems in the past 12 months have raised serious concerns about Iran’s capacity to competently operate the facility. The plant was shut down in October to limit potential damage following the discovery of stray bolts found beneath its fuel cells, the Reuters news agency reported, citing a Russian industry source. Western officials expressed concern about the plant after an I.A.E.A report in November stated that Iran had informed the agency about unexpected fuel transfers. Last week, the emir of Kuwait, Sheik Sabah al-Ahmad al-Sabah, called upon Tehran to work more closely with the I.A.E.A. “to ensure the safety of the region’s state and its people.”

Meanwhile, Russian scientists have delayed the transfer of operations to their Iranian counterparts. That is now expected to occur in March.