Atomictumor

Knoxnews reports that a drug and slack crackdown at the Molten Salt Reactor here in town cost at least two people their jobs.

Apparently, according to the paper, Bechtel Jacob’s ballbuster squad inspected a ‘break trailer’ where they found employees watching TV, sleeping, and playing cards.  They then decided to check the place for pot, calling in Roane County 5-0, and by golly they found “residue” in the trailer.

They then spread out, searched the cars in the parking lot and pee tested all 50 employees.  Pot was found in one car, and one employee refused to submit to the test, so both of those peoples were fired.  Four employees were found to be “non-negative”, and apparently they’re going to some sort of secret tribunal
Man, what happened to the day when people fought this kind of crap?  I know, I know “But AT, marijuana is baaad, and its not legal, mkay?”, and I agree, whoever was smoking up at the office needs to go.  However, theres no reason to fire somebody based on the possibility that they may have smoked it in the past 30 days at home, or in Amsterdam, or somewhere else completely unrelated to the job.

Seems like complacancy has dropped down on the American worker, and the corporate world is now capable of unreasonable search and seizure of your wee-wee provided that they give you a paycheck.  This is still completely unacceptable to me, whether or not the position is a government job.

For me, tho, the best part is the last paragraph:

Most nuclear work at the Molten Salt Reactor has been suspended for several months because of a fluorine leak earlier this year. The cleanup plan called for additional training this fall and restart of fuel-removal tasks in November. It was not immediately clear if the latest incident would alter that schedule.

OK.  So, what we have here appears to be employees with nothing to do but sit around the house, get high, and watch the tube.   All the sudden, the jackbooted Bechtel Jacobs thugs swarm the trailer, the break trailer, and get pissy that people aren’t being productive?   So they accuse all of them of being doped on the job?

Screw that.  Hell with Bechtel Jacobs, and DOE, and this whole damn mess.

Well, like they’ve been warning since the early 90s, North Korea, the economic powerhouse of the Asia Pacific area, is now packing a nuke.  Or at least, they were, until they blew it up the other day.  Its a safe bet they have another.

That, and they also allegedly have a missile capable of reaching, if not the west coast of America, then certainly any old coast of Japan or South Korea.

Well, it took 50 years, but now we have a crazy ass regime that’s all nuked up.

OK, now I know there are probably a billion differences between the situation causing a fire at a hazardous waste facility in Apex, NC, and the way that Oak Ridge stores similar waste, but I can’t help but look at the goings on in Apex and wonder.

Seems to me that whats happening there could easily happen here.
Just a little bit of early morning fearmongering.

So a couple of hackers at a recent geek convention in San Diego demonstrated that there is a massive exploit available in Firefox with regards to the way the browser handles Javascript.  The duo has elected, however, not to share the exploit with Firefox, which seems kinda wierd to me.

Regardless, Mozilla is taking it seriously, and apparently word around the campfire is that Firefox’s once vaunted security is all hype.  Theres a lot of people taking it further, stating that open source is insecure by nature because it allows all the troublemakers and script kiddies access to the code in order to find these exploits.

Poppycock, I say.  The only reason for closed source (i.e., where you can’t read the source code) software is copyright.  Pure and simple.  While open source allows anybody to see it, meaning these bad people can find Java exploits and holes, it also allows ANYBODY TO SEE IT, meaning that all these smart college kids with nothing to do and an aim to get a name out on the internet to pad their resume can find these holes and patch ‘em before they’re exploited.

Which is what I still can’t understand about these electronic voting systems, because they’re running on closed source, proprietary software.  In MY America, the voting system is transparent, but I guess then the terrorists could use it to steal elections…

Squirrels don’t like me.

Back in the day, I’d hang out at my buddies house in Chattanooga being generally thuggish and troublesome, but I stayed away from one particular tree in a neighboring house, because The Squirrel lived there.

Now, I don’t know what I did to the squirrel to piss it off, but lemme tell you, it was pissed. Maybe it was some kind of reincarnation thing, where I smote it in a past life or something, or maybe it just didn’t like the cut of my gib, but that bastard would shoot to kill whenever I approached. My little brother, my friends, anybody else were OK, but if I got within 20 or so feet of the mother tree, I’d get a warning chirp, then an attack cry (like a squirrelly ululation), then a high velocity walnut to the temple.

That bastard had some accuracy and range to go with that super-throwing-death arm that it possessed. Once I heard the cry, I’d know I came too close. There’d be no outrunning The Squirrel, because it’d clip you with at least two nuts before you got out of range. You never quite knew where they were coming from either, on account of the uncanny camouflage of The Squirrel.

Since then, squirrel activity seems to have become more and more aggressive. The hickory nut tree in my back yard only seems to drop nuts when I’m outside, leaving me to think they’re dropbombing me. I’m now almost certain they were responsible for the crack in the windshield that the poor Volvo received last year.

To that end, I was dismayed by two events.

First, I found this report from Mountain View, CA, indicating that guerilla squirrels are aggressively attacking 4 year olds and others this summer, indicating that the philosophy of The Squirrel has moved westward, as all philosophies inevitably do, in preparation of worldwide adoption. This is a problem, because while the government has been sure to work up laws authorizing torture and wiretapping, this is only effective against human opponents. In fact, as the American intelligence organizations are loathe to admit, the squirrels series of chirps, in the .01 and 10 KHZ range, has been found to be uncrackable thus far.

Theres no way to know what they’re planning in our back yards, but you can bet its going to be ugly, and probably nutty, as well.

Second, and more importantly, is that I crushed one of the bastards to death on Laboratory Road while driving to pick up the paycheck yesterday. Of course it was accidental, one of those moments when the beast is in the median of the road, not sure whether to zig or zag, and darts out. It cleared 3 of the wheels, but that rear passenger wheel came out of nowhere and nailed the poor bastard.

I can say its accidental all day long, but it won’t make a difference. They’re going to want vengeance.