Dr. Scott Clark posted a link to the United Reformed Churches in North America final report on Federal Vision. I also linked it on my sidebar here. As you can discern from the title, the URCNA study committee concentrated on the issues surrounding justification. As with every orthodox Reformed denomination, the UCRNA rejected Federal Vision as a serious theological error in the church. Dr. Clark posted an excellent summary. I highly recommend it.

Happy Independence Day to all in the U.S.A. who work for a living and produce wealth! The vision of 1776 seems like a long-past dream these days, along with the values that made this country great. We once appreciated that sacrifice, hard work, and diligence brought prosperity. Now, we see on the one hand that scam artists robbing people of their life savings through bogus investments, and on the other hand the government is robbing our future with trillion dollar per year deficit spending and confiscatory taxes.

For anyone paying attention, we’re seeing the effective use of Alinsy’s Rules for Radicals by Obamessiah’s lap dogs. Che Obama’s character assassins are masters of the politics of personal destruction. The issues are irrelevant, only personal attacks count. Against the myth of Global Warming? Against abortion? Want to keep your civil rights under the 2nd Amendment? Serve honorably in the military? Then you’re a potential enemy of the state. Reminds me of George Orwell: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.“

Firefox 3.5 released on June 30, but that release hasn’t made its way into the official Ubuntu repositories yet. I’m not in a huge hurry, but I did upgrade to the new version in a 64-bit Ubuntu Jaunty 9.04 virtual machine. It turned out to be pretty easy.

First, you need to add Fabian Tassin’s repository (HT: Talking in Circles):

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/fta/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main

to your software sources. Open System -> Administration -> Software Sources, then click on the Third-party Software Tab:

Adobe released an alpha version of its Flash plugin for Linux back in February (last update as of this post was Feb 24, 2009). Normally, an alpha version would best be avoided by ordinary users because “alpha” designates a very early build that probably isn’t stable. However, in this case, a  huge number of users have tried it for months and have very few issues with this build. I was seeing occasional crashes due to the 32-bit Flash plugin under the excellent nspluginwrapper, so I decided to give Adobe’s 64-bit alpha a try.

A few of the gems sent to me today:

And the great American message of liberty:

Lesson over for today.

I wondered how abortion would rank in the death statistics for young children. The reason is that someone on the radio said that the most dangerous place for a child in America was inside their mother. It struck me that that’s a testable hypothesis.

The latest death data for children I found at the CDC site with a quick Google search was for 2005. On the CDC site, I found that the overall death rate from < 1 year olds from all causes (except abortion) was 693 per 100,000 population. I used the table there to back out the total population of < 1 year olds used in their calculation:

28,440 * 100K / 693 = 4.1M

I found the 2005 abortion data on this site. Using the 4.1M population figure calculated above, I added the number of aborted children to get a true total population:

4.1M + 1.21M = 5.31M

With this population combined with the AGI abortion stats of 1.21M, I calculated the baby death rate due to abortion:

1.21M * 100K /5.31M = 22,787

So, the death rate due to all causes (not including abortion) for children < 1 year old in 2005 was 693 per 100,000. The death rate for babies in the same year in abortions was 22,787 per 100,000.

Looked at another way, in 2005, 42.5 times more children died in abortions than from all other causes combined. Sobering.

These calculations clearly show that the most dangerous place for a child in the US is indeed inside its mother.

Another reference is even more sobering. Hitler and his Nazis murdered 6M Jews plus about 6M others (politicians, communists, gypsies, the mentally ill, etc.) for a total of 12M people. Since 1973, Americans have murdered about 49.6M preborn babies, over 4 times the number of people murdered by the Nazis.

The American Holocaust. Think about it.

On the other hand, those who’ve had abortions can repent and find the graces of forgiveness and healing in Jesus Christ. Only Christ can provide the peace that surpasses all understanding. Jesus forgives all who turn to Him and trust in Him alone for their salvation. No exceptions.

I just posted a more detailed article on the proceedings of the 37th PCA General Assembly relative to the role of women in the PCA over at Greenbaggins. I will follow up with more details on this and other topics at GA.

I drove down to Orlando last week for the PCA’s 37th General Assembly. The recession definitely hurt attendance. The PCA usually averages between 1200 and 1400 commissioners at GA. This year we had 1021 registered at the opening. My understanding is that we needed 1000 for a quorum, so we barely made it. We also need about 1250 to break even on the costs, which we did not make.

This will be a general article hitting four highlights, which I hope to follow with several more posts with greater details.

The big news seems to be on the overtures asking for a study committee on the role of women in the PCA. In my and many others’ opinion, this was just a more palatable attempt to get at the issue of deaconesses in the PCA which failed last year. James River and Susquehanna Valley Presbyteries submitted identical overtures calling for a study committee to study the role of women in the church. Coincidence?

The Overtures Committee recommended answering both in the negative by a 40-34-2 margin. After an hour-long debate (see below) over the majority and minority reports from the Overtures Committee, the Assembly voted against a study committee by a narrow 446-427 margin. Your humble blogger spoke on the floor of the GA and voted against the study for reasons that I’ll cover in another post.

I think that the biggest news, however, wasn’t the study committee. For me, the most important news concerned an overture from Central Carolina Presbytery proposing changes to BCO 59.1 and 59.6 on marriage that would bring the BCO into line with WCF 24.1 in emphasizing that marriage is between a man and a woman. The Overtures Committee voted 51-21-3 to answer in the negative because they felt that WCF 24.1 was sufficient on its own, and that the WCF is a higher standard.

Many spoke against this recommendation on the floor of GA, saying that it left military chaplains and pastors in states that have made homosexual marriages legal open to legal challenges. I personally argued that in those states that allow homosexual marriages, the WCF actually conflicts with the BCO because the BCO required following civil law while the WCF would not allow that in those states. The majority of the GA voted to recommit the overture to the committee for reconsideration. The Overtures Committee then perfected the language and presented a recommendation to approve the overture as amended. GA easily approved this recommendation, providing cover for our brothers. A ruling of the moderator, backed up by a vote of the assembly, made the changes effective immediately. More on that later.

The last vote that I thought worthy of note came from my own presbytery and directly affected the debate over the proposed study committee. We put forth an overture to extend debate to an hour in cases involving a minority report. The Assembly approved that overture early in the proceedings, allowing that hour of debate on the study committee.

The evening worship service designs and preaching provided pause to many. To me, the worship and preaching seemed to be designed by the “denominational renewal” folks. I’ll write about this subject in much more detail. In chatting around the GA, I found no one else outside of those who actually participated in the denominational renewal discussions that even knew about this small movement. I’m not impressed with using worship to make political points. The last night’s “sermon” seemed more like a camp meeting speech than an exposition of the Word, the latter taking just a few minutes out of a long and rambling address.

Those are the main points that I found notable this year. More to follow…

A friend at Boeing made this for me. I think that it’s great. We truly have no peer in the air.

I’ve made it my wallpaper on Ubuntu 9.04:

Perfect. Kinda gives Linux that little extra kick. Air superiority on a kickin’ quad core…

I just returned from seeing UP (in 3D) by Disney Pixar. One word – Wow! What a great movie. It is a story of deep, life-long love, of friendship, of shared dreams, of promises, of duty, of finding new purpose in life. You’ll find tears running down your face at some points, and will be rolling with laughter at others. The compelling story and characters draw you in very quickly in the beginning and hold you tight throughout. The audience applauded at the end, something I rarely see.

The official story summary:

Carl Fredricksen spent his entire life dreaming of exploring the globe and experiencing life to its fullest. But at age 78, life seems to have passed him by, until a twist of fate (and a persistent 8-year old Junior Wilderness Explorer named Russell) gives him a new lease on life.

UP’s story has more depth than that description, but I don’t want to include any spoilers. Carl’s motivation, which isn’t related above, provides the heart of the story.

UP will entertain the whole family – with no caveats. There’s no language, sex, gore, or what are now known as “adult themes.” It’s a movie equally entertaining for adults and children, though kids will not fully comprehend some of the emotional depths. But the kids in the theater thoroughly enjoyed the movie. As testimony to its popularity, UP was released on May 29 but the theater was literally packed today on June 6th.

I saw UP in 3D, which was excellent. I’m sure the 2D version is good as well, but the 3D really fit well with the plot and action. I thought that the 3D version was worth the slightly higher price.

UP is definitely one of the must-see movies of 2009. It provides the kind of excellent, family entertainment of the type that I thought Hollywood forgot how to make. No politics or agendas here, just a great story well told.

Post Updated 6/7/2009.

I was tweaking my newly upgraded system and noticed that one of the quad cores was pegged at 100% usage. The rest were down in the weeds:

What was up with that? There’s two ways to find out. One is to go to the System Monitor and click on the Processes tab. Sort by %CPU Used and the offending process should pop to the top. Wow, was that process eating up some memory as well!

I wrote about my bumpy hardware upgrade in this post. To recap briefly, I’m now running a Gigabyte EP45-UD3L motherboard with an Intel Q9650 Core 2 Quad CPU and 8 GB OCZ Platinum DDR2 SDRAM. All this booted initially under 32-bit Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty, which only recognized 3.2 GB of RAM. It was plenty fast, but was not the final goal. I needed a 64-bit operating system to claim my 8 GB of memory. I originally started with 64-bit Ubuntu a few years ago, but encountered too many issues and switched to 32-bit. Now was the time to try again.

This falls under the heading of “it seemed like a good idea at the time” with a few subsidiary such moments. One of my computing themes is that you can never be fast enough. In that light, I sprang for an Intel Core 2 Quad Q9650 CPU (3.0 GHz rated) and 8 GB of OCZ Platinum DDR2 SDRAM, which is the most memory that my motherboard would handle. I bought from Newegg.com as usual, and the service was excellent as usual. Having made these upgrades many times over the years, this should have been a cake walk. Alas, not this time.

After I installed the new CPU using the excellent Arctic Silver 5 thermal compound, plus the 8 GB of SDRAM, using all appropriate safeguards to prevent damage by static electricity. I also reset the CMOS back to default. I then buttoned the computer up and hit the power switch. The computer started up, but produced no display. Hmmm.

I’ve been looking for a good backup program in Ubuntu Linux for a while. When I was using Kubuntu, I tried Keep, but it kept crashing. I’ve been using Krusader’s excellent Synchronize Directories function ever since. It works great, but required a lot of repeated actions each time. Then I found this post and a recommendation for Synkron. Looks like paydirt!

My backup setup is pretty simple. First line of defense is the RAID 1 setup. If one hard drive fails, the other keeps on truckin’ with identical contents. Second line of defense is a separate, identical hard drive to which the data from the RAID array is also backed up regularly. I essentially clone the RAID source directories on the backup disk, which is also boots to Ubuntu just in case. This cloning is the chore of Krusader now. Lastly, I have an external hard drive for the most critical data. But all this doesn’t mean much if I don’t mirror the backups regularly.

This is hilarious:

Funny, yet sadly true. Hey, it’s only your hard-earned money turned over to a host of those who didn’t earn it. You weren’t using it to supporty your own family anyway, right?

I just saw the new Star Trek movie. Two words: See it!

The story line is tight and compelling. It looks, sounds, and feels like Star Trek. The action is almost non-stop. The CGI effects fit the story and scenes appropriately and look superb.

The characters and their personalities fit with their future selves in both the old TV series and the later movies very well. The movie takes a few liberties, but they are few and don’t affect the primary story line. The actors did a super job with the action and dialog. Sylar as Spock worked very well, as did all the actors individually. They clearly studied their predecessors well to pick up even some of their mannerisms.

The dialog pays homage to the Classic Star Trek without trying to be the old Trek. It injects the kind of humor that fits the classic Trek characters and the scenes, but is also funny on its own. Everything feels…well, comfortable.

This movie is excellent science fiction, set in a not-terribly-distant future. It incorporates the timeless human elements of revenge, adventure-seeking, loyalty, courage, initiative, and innovation. If you’ve never seen a Star Trek show or movie before, you’ll still enjoy the movie. The only thing that you’ll miss are the homage lines that tie back to the TV series. In that respect, it takes a similar approach to what Get Smart did.

The musical score fits the scenes well, and is also excellent. I stayed through the credits just to listen to the rest of the music, which helps tie the past and future together.

Looking back, it seems incredible that an innovative TV series that only lasted 3 years – from 1966 to 1969 – has continued to spur interest and entertain us over 40 years later. Those 79 episodes spawned five more series and 11 movies – right up to today. Amazing!

In the end, this Star Trek is its own movie and stands on its own merits. It ties to the past series  without trying to be that past/future. It masterfully mixes adventure, humor, sci fi settings, and the human condition into a satisfying and entertaining story – with a few surprises. It should be seen on the big screen, so get out there and see it!

Well, I finally ditched Comcast cable for Verizon FIOS. The Comcast Internet was great, but the more High Definition channels that were added on the TV side, the worse the HD channels performed. I was getting screen freezes and heavy pixelation during peak viewing periods. Audio was also choppy on some HD channels. The former would normally be caused by bandwidth limits on a circuit, the latter by overcompression to squeeze more HD into the same limited bandwidth. I ended up watching my favorite shows like 24 in normal TV because the HD was unwatchable. I’ve had Comcast folks out a number of times as the situation deteriorated over time, but nothing worked. As if that wasn’t sufficient reason to pitch cable, Comcast had messed up my bill for the last five months in a row. Repeated calls every month didn’t produce any relief. Enough was enough.

I must pause to say that with only two exceptions, Comcast employees were courteous and professional. This isn’t about the people or even the company, just about poor performance.

Since switching to FIOS, HDTV  has been marvelous. So far, all the HD channels work perfectly, including the ones with the most problems on cable. No frozen screens, no pixelation, no choppy audio. HDTV is back to being a dream. Oh, and FIOS runs over the exact same coax cabling, in case anyone’s wondering if cheap cabling or connectors caused cable TV’s poor performance.

Well, I’ve been writing that without requiring a password to make system changes here and here, Windows 7’s User Account Control (UAC) can be bypassed. The situation is even worse than that. Rafael’s Within Windows documents 62 executables in Windows 7 that can autoelevate their security clearance by way of a Microsoft-generated white list without informing the user. Way not good.

Why should you care? Because Leo at pretentiousname documented a code-injection vulnerability that can use any of these 62 programs to bypass the Windows 7 UAC. He includes explicit examples/videos of the exploit, but won’t share the code with just anyone. He uses the term code injection but notes:

The technique is often called DLL injection in the Windows world, but that name isn’t accurate here because I am not injecting a DLL. I am copying, or injecting, the code directly from my in-memory exe to the target process.

This has been a banner week. First, Ubuntu 9.04 hit the streets, which I wrote about in this post. Then, Windows 7 Release Candidate hit Microsoft’s Developers’ Network and the torrents. A word of caution on the torrents – there are modified images around with malware embedded. If you are going to put the release candidate on a production system, be careful where you get it. Microsoft will make it available to the general public on May 5, 2009.

Note that that the product keys for the beta release will work for this release candidate.

As usual, I installed the Windows 7 Release Candidate in a VMWare Workstation virtual machine, although I’m debating installing it onto a spare hard drive to check out the Aero interface.

Upon cranking up the virtual CD, Windows 7 starts the installation:

Wesley Pruden has a great piece over at the Washington Times: A pandemic of panic — are we dead yet? Here’s how it starts:

We were all supposed to be in the graveyard by now, done in by AIDS, SARS, bird flu, poisoned peanut butter, Hong Kong flu, killer tomatoes, global warming and strangulation by kudzu. But here we are, proof that there really is life after death.

Don’t miss the rest of his piece. Yep, from the people who brought you global cooling in the 1970’s, global warming now, overpopulation, and the ever-popular “Alar on your apples” comes a new crisis to help sell worthless newspapers by panicking the uninformed. We’ve become a nation of wimps and whiners – all officially sanctioned by our new socialist government. No need to take personal responsibility for ourselves, Obamessiah will take care of us. He has a gift:

Just look at the panic in New York City over an aircraft photo opportunity. An airplane flies over the Statue of Liberty and a horde of folks abandon buildings in abject panic. The terrorists are probably celebrating in the wilds of Afghanistan – they have apparently defeated our once-legendary courageous spirit. Will we let fear rule our lives? Obama is certainly using fear and panic, skillfully stoking it to justify the nationalizing of U.S. banks, investment houses and auto companies. For the false promise that the Obamessiah will save us, we’re surrendering our liberty.

A little over 250 years ago, a handful of farmers, merchants, and a few professional soldiers challenged the greatest military power on the face of the earth and beat it at great sacrifice to win our independence. About 60 years ago, brave Americans fought and many died to defeat fascism in Europe and naked imperialism in the Orient. Today, we panic over a very few sick people and an airplane buzzing the Statue of Liberty. Sheesh.

How far the mighty have fallen.