5 Thoughts for August 14, 2015

1. Kam Chancellor's holdout has been a blessing in disguise. (2013 UDFA) Dion Bailey's been able to show off his athleticism during training camp, and will get to play a significant amount of time during the preseason -- nothing wrong with getting your team's depth ready for the regular season, right? Today's game will be fun to watch, especially since it's Denver.
2. Kaspersky Lab may have been caught trying to induce false positives within rival antivirus software, going back a decade. According to Reuters, Microsoft, AVG and Avast were targeted by Kaspersky Lab, which, given the atmosphere against Russia, could lead to bigger troubles for Kaspersky. I recall on a few occasions Microsoft's Defender returned a couple of false positives to me, about 6~8 years ago -- I wonder if that was the cause?
3. There's an Indiegogo campaign, called Touchjet WAVE, which turns your TV into a touch-enabled screen. Definitely cool, and I thought about it for a moment, but having to constantly clean off smudge marks is a big disincentive for me, and I decided against it. Your TV probably doesn't have Gorilla Glass as a face, and without it, you're looking at scratches.
4. I was going to mention this earlier, but forgot about it. Those fire fighters and people in and around the massive explosion in Tianjin China, might not have a clue to the dangers they're in. A lot of those chemicals reportedly at the site, turn into acid when it makes contact with water vapor. Those simple N95 particulate masks do not protect you. You need a respirator specifically designed to block SO2 and other acid gases. Breathing in SO2 results in sulfuric acid forming in your lungs and damaging you from the inside. Of course, there's a lot more dangerous stuff in that air, which I cannot believe that any news organization would send a reporter within a mile of that zone. It's on the level of sending reporters into Fukushima, a day after the nuclear meltdown.
5. When I was in college, I took this course which presented hot topics by offering multiple viewpoints with unique circumstances; by this approach, one could understand that, contrary to how dogmatists present the world, life is rarely black and white. I give you one such contemporaneous issue: An 11 year old girl who was raped by her step-father, was denied an abortion because her country outlaws abortions except when the mother's life was in danger. This country -- Paraguay -- had 684 births from girls between ages 10 and 14, mostly from rape, out of a population of 354,000 10-14 year old girls -- or roughly 1 in every 5,000 girls age 10-14. Do you make an exception for rape and incest, or do you hold true to conservative dogma and force children who were raped, to have babies?