Well this certainly inspires confidence, on MSNBC: Internet addressing agency loses its addresses

NEW YORK – This doesn’t sound good: The nonprofit agency in charge of the Internet’s addresses recently lost track of its own.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, said it happened when an Internet registration company it oversees got fooled into transferring the domain names to someone else.

The attack was quickly noticed, and ICANN’s domain names were restored within 20 minutes. However, because many Internet directories retain information for a day or two, visitors could have been redirected to an unauthorized site for longer.

You really have to wonder how this could happen. Why would anyone think ICANN would change it DNS or IP address?

On a lighter note: Rupert Goodwins of ZDNet.co.uk offers his list of the 10 most annoying programs on the Internet.

I only deal with 7 of them, and may be down to 6 if Adobe doesn’t stop with the upgrades.

I wonder what CNN sees as “defiant” in its article: Iran defiant on right to nuclear power

(CNN) — Iran’s government spokesman on Saturday reiterated its right to develop nuclear power for peaceful purposes, a state-run news agency reported.

Gholam-Hossein Elham made the remark to reporters a day after Iran delivered a response to a world powers proposal that Iran suspend its uranium enrichment in exchange for economic and other incentives, the state-run Islamic Republic News Agency reported.

World leaders, such as those from the West, the U.N. Security Council and Israel, have been suspicious that Iran is using its nuclear program to develop weaponry. Iran has consistently disputed that and said it plans to use nuclear power for energy.

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CCN covers one of the minor “problems” with land transfers from military to civilian use: Live bombs haunt Orlando neighborhood. What a surprise, not all of the bombs dropped on a bombing range explode, and the military doesn’t go looking for the duds.

There is a section of the barrier island south of me that people keep agitating to have opened for exploitation. It isn’t going to happen because there is a whole lot of nastiness on that stretch of sand, some of it put there by my Dad in the 1950s when things didn’t operate as planned.

They don’t talk about it, but I’m sure that the first people to go onto that stretch of beach after hurricanes are explosive ordinance disposal guys to see what turned up. There are bombs and warheads going back to World War II hidden under the sugar white sand. The government can never clean up that land to the level that it would be safe to live on.

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No end in sight for the “cauldron” of Northern California: Fires consume more of California

BIG SUR, California (AP) — Weary firefighters got no rest during the holiday weekend as a pair of out-of-control wildfires roared along California’s central coast at opposite ends of the arid Los Padres National Forest.

Despite lower temperatures and lighter wind, one stubborn fire that already had forced the evacuation of Big Sur inched closer to historic vacation retreats.

Farther south in the national forest, wind up to 40 mph fanned a wildfire near Goleta in Santa Barbara County. About 5,000 homes were under evacuation orders, while residents of 1,400 other homes were warned to pack up and be ready to leave on short notice, said county spokesman Jim McClure.

“The fire is expanding and presenting some very complex challenges because of the terrain and the fact that it hasn’t burned in over 50 years,” said Capt. Eli Iskow of the Santa Barbara County fire department. “And it’s close to all the valuables like homes and people.”

The landform makes the fires nearly impossible to fight on the ground. The canyons and gulches act as bellows to the flames, shooting embers and ash great distances. The only effective way of tamping things down is aerial tankers, but money and aircraft are in short supply.

Position: 17.0 N 41.2 W. [10 PM CDT] Updated
Movement: West [280°] near 21 mph.
Maximum sustained winds: 50 mph.
Wind Gusts: 60 mph.
Tropical Storm Wind Radius: 85 miles.
Minimum central pressure: 1000 mb.

Bertha is still moving west along the bottom of a ridge.  Its future track is dependent on when the ridge weakens and allows Bertha to head North.  The computer models are all over the place at this point, so Bertha may threaten the US.  We just have to wait it out.

First it was the odious Kyl-LIEberman Amendment [AKA, S.Amdt. 3017 to S.Amdt. 2011 to H.R. 1585 (National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2008)], another excuse for the Hedgemony to go to war. It served no national purpose, but will be cited as an excuse if the crazies in this administration decide to attack Iran. [Note that Clinton voted for it, while, as usual, “not voting” was recorded for Obama.]

Now we have the House getting into the act with House Concurrent Resolution 362.

Iran is not our friend, and certainly has no reason to be, but since before the Declaration of Independence was signed they have never attacked another country. Our best intelligence estimate is that they stopped doing anything associated with nuclear weapons in 2003. The real leader of the country is on record as saying that nuclear weapons are “un-Islamic”, which makes them forbidden.

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Not speaking ill of the dead, is actually part of our old religious heritage, the ones that most of our ancestors followed prior to the arrival of missionaries of any type.  It, like many funeral traditions, was predicated on calming the spirits of the departed.

Amazingly enough, it is the death of those whose spirits would be thought to be the most evil and vindictive that cause the prohibition to be shattered.

I won’t join in, but the world is truly a better place when some people are no longer a part of it.