The Terrorists Are Laughing At Americans

New Haven, CT joins Boston as a great example of how America is turning into a country of bed wetters.

From the NY Times version of the article:

Daniel Salchow and his sister, Dorothee, planned to spend a pleasant afternoon marking a trail for fellow members of their offbeat running and drinking club.

Instead, they wound up in police custody after their clue of choice — flour — set off a bioterrorism scare and forced hundreds of people to evacuate an Ikea furniture store on Thursday.

[...]

Dr. Salchow said that after the 9/11 attacks, club members started using chalk to mark courses. But as fears eased, they went back to flour because it is biodegradable. He said they would start using chalk again or find somewhere else to run.

Jessica Mayorga, a spokeswoman for Mayor John DeStefano Jr., said the city planned to seek restitution from the Salchows, and will meet Monday to decide how much.

Ms. Mayorga said they should not have used the flour if they knew it had caused scares in the past.

“You see powder connected by arrows and chalk, you never know,” she said.

IT’S FLOUR AND CHALK. WASN’T THE CHALK AND THE ARROWS A GIANT FUCKING CLUE? Does no one anywhere in law enforcement in New Haven have the ability of having a single fucking critical thought?

I die a little on the inside when I read these kinda of stories. Are people really that afraid of their shadow? 0.00001% of the population of the US died due to terrorism in the last 10 years. Are you the readers of this blog pissing yourselves every time you leave your house over it?

Update: John Cole at Balloon Juice says it better than I could. Where is this rugged individualism and “These Colors Don’t Run” strength that we’re all supposed to have?

Ubuntu and Floppy Drives

This is pathetic:

https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+question/5826 and https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-utils/+bug/107843.

Translation: Oops. We forgot to test a common use case but it works in the old release and in the development release but we are not going to bother to take the effort to fix it in the most recently released version. We don’t care if this is broken in the branch most of our users are using even if it was reported months ago and the fix looks fairly easy to implement. That is some serious suckage right there for a “desktop” environment.

Excuse me while I go back to trying to figure out how to use fdformat when the usual device nodes for specifying the capacity and type of floppy are no longer created in /dev.