Since 6/2/2000 Now in Our Ninth Year!
A Former Congressman’s New Clothes:
I hardly recognized Jim Leach without his sweater.
And, oh, yes, there’s this: His speech at the Democratic convention, and his support of the Democratic nominee, will make his new life at Harvard much, much easier. Much.
East Coast Broadband Fastest In USA:
Death Metal Maniac writes
“The study, which was conducted by affordable-broadband advocacy group Speed Matters, found that the nine states with the fastest median download connections are all located on the East Coast. Rhode Island (6.8Mbps) and Delaware (6.7Mbps) have the fastest, and nearly triple the national median download speed of 2.3Mbps. Rounding out the Top 5 states are New Jersey (5.8Mbps), Virginia (5Mbps) and Massachusetts (4.6Mbps).”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Russians get chicks out for the Vlads | The Sun |News:
NO wonder the Russians have been slow to leave Georgia.
The 1-petabyte Barrier Is Crumbling:
CurtMonash writes
“I had been a database industry analyst for a decade before I found 1-gigabyte databases to write about. Now it is 15 years later, and the 1-petabyte barrier is crumbling. Specifically, we are about to see data warehouses — running on commercial database management systems — that contain over 1 petabyte of actual user data. For example, Greenplum is slated to have two of them within 60 days. Given how close it was a year ago, Teradata may have crossed the 1-petabyte mark by now too. And by the way, Yahoo already has a petabyte+ database running on a home-grown system. Meanwhile, the 100-terabyte mark is almost old hat. Besides the vendors already mentioned above, others with 100+ terabyte databases deployed include Netezza, DATAllegro, Dataupia, and even SAS.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
With that much data and more coming some of it is bound to spill out in larger and larger quantities. Your private information is doomed to be exposed sooner or later. Better get used to living in a house with no curtains.
Twisters touch down near Parker, Castle Rock :
Local News : The Rocky Mountain News:
I guess Hillary came to town…
The Year of the Political Blogger:
The New York Times is running a story about how political blogging has arrived as a widely-accepted form of reporting during this election year. In addition to the nationwide TV and radio audiences, the candidates are making efforts to get their message onto the increasingly popular blog network. In doing so, they’ve elevated bloggers to the level of traditional media reporters at the national conventions. “The major political parties first gave credentials to bloggers in 2004. The Republicans allowed a dozen bloggers to attend their convention in New York, while the Democrats gave bloggers 35 seats in the nosebleed section of the Fleet Center in Boston. This year, the R.N.C. gave credentials to 200 bloggers as a means to ‘get Senator McCain’s message out to more people,’ said Joanna Burgos, the press secretary of the convention. For bloggers attending the Democratic convention at the Pepsi Center in Denver, two types of credentials are offered. The first is a national credential, which offers the same access granted to members of traditional news media organizations. The second, more coveted credential is the state blogger credential. It allows one blogger per state to cover the convention alongside its state delegation, with unlimited floor access.” Of course, political blogs are abuzz today with the news of Obama’s selection of Senator Joe Biden as a running mate.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The Case Against Joe Biden - The Fix:
This will give you a heads up of what to expect from the Biden pick.
Biden speaks _ and speaks _ his own mind:
Barack Obama told everyone he wanted a running mate who will challenge his thinking, and now he’s got one. Joe Biden’s tendency to speak his own mind—and speak and speak—is entwined in his DNA. …
I’m surprised he picked Biden because he is such a windbag and he has that pesky plagiarism thing in his past. You’ll hear a lot about that as time goes by.
… He reluctantly quit the race three months later after he was caught lifting lines from a speech by a British Labour Party leader. …
and then there is this famous gaffe:
… The question was rooted in Biden’s occasional gaffes. He had apologized earlier for describing Obama as “articulate” and “clean” in one unguarded episode that was taken by some to have a racial overtone. And he’d had to defend his remark that “you cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent.” …
Biden talks a lot and is bound to make more gaffes as time goes by. But he can be funny.
… When he was asked in one debate whether he’s much too wordy, he drew laughs with a one-word answer, “No.” …
The scrutiny the press will now put on him might uncover previous gaffes he’s made. It’s going to be fun watching this unfold.
Diebold Admits Ohio Machines May Lose Votes:
I Don’t Believe in Imaginary Property writes “Premier Election Solutions (a subsidiary of Diebold) has acknowledged a flaw that causes the systems to lose votes. It cannot be patched before the election and the machines are used in half of Ohio’s counties, but they are issuing guidelines for avoiding the problem that presumably contain a work-around. While Diebold initially blamed anti-virus software for the glitch, they have now discovered that the bug was their own fault for not recording votes to memory when the cards are uploaded in ‘certain circumstances’ — something their initial analysis missed. It would be nice to hope that Ohio poll workers would be tech-savvy enough to make this a non-issue, but they had poll worker shortages last year and might need tech-savvy people to volunteer.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Wait till you hear the squawking when BO loses Ohio.
DNA Bar Coding Finds Mislabeled Sushi:
Hugh Pickens writes “The NY Times reports that Kate Stoeckle and Louisa Strauss, who graduated this year from the Trinity School in Manhattan, took on a freelance science project to check 60 samples of seafood using a simplified genetic fingerprinting technique called DNA Bar Coding to see whether the fish New Yorkers buy is what they think they are getting, and found that one-fourth of the fish samples with identifiable DNA were mislabeled: A piece of sushi sold as the luxury treat white tuna turned out to be Mozambique tilapia, a much cheaper fish that is often raised by farming. Roe supposedly from flying fish was actually from smelt.” …
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
YouTube - I Invented the Internet (Ep. 4: Kill and Destroy):
This is an anti BO video that is very difficult to watch.
We think you’ll really enjoy Off the Air, Pizza Box, Throne, and Calming Teas, the four latest TV ads now playing on the Get a Mac site. While you’re visiting, you may also want to watch the long version of Sad Song. It’s a classic. Maybe your friends would like to see them, too.
2008 Is the Coldest Year of The 21st Century:
dtjohnson writes
“Data from the United Kingdom Metereological Office suggests that 2008 will be an unusually cold year due to the La Nina effect in the western Pacific ocean. Not to worry, though, as the La Nina effect has faded recently so its effect on next years temperatures will be reduced. However, another natural cycle, the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, is predicted to hold global temperatures steady for the next decade before global warming takes our planet into new warmth. If these predictions are correct, there must be a lot of planetary heat being stored away somewhere … unless the heat output from the sun is decreasing rather than increasing or the heat being absorbed by the earth is decreasing due to changes in the earth’s albedo.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Well, now that that’s all cleared up…
Solar Cells - Made In a Pizza Oven:
stylemessiah writes
“The winner of several Eureka Science Awards in Australia is a crafty chick who devised a way to create solar cells cheaply using a pizza oven, nail polish and an inkjet printer. This was developed to address the high cost of cells and in particular for the worlds poorest regions. She wanted to give the @2 billion people around the world who dont have electricity the gift of light and cheap energy. This could have profound (and a good profound) implications for education and health in those in the poorest regions in the world. And it all started with her parents giving her a solar energy kit when she was 10…”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
wcbstv.com - Blowin’ In The Wind: Bloomberg’s Green Energy Plan:
Windmills On City Bridges & Skyscrapers; Turbines On Rivers’ Shores; Solar Panels On Buildings …
All these windmills are slowing down the wind and causing global warming.
Hacker Uncovers Chinese Olympic Fraud:
SkeptOlympics writes“A new chapter in the ongoing controversy surrounding China’s women’s gymnastics team opened today, as search engine hacker stryde.hax found surviving copies of official registration documents issued by China’s General Administration of Sport of China. The incriminating documents, expunged by censors from the official site and from Google’s document cache, still appear in the document translation cache of Chinese search giant Baidu, here (1) and here (2), showing the age of one of China’s gold medal winning gymnasts to be 14 instead of 16, the minimum age for competition presented on her government-issued passport. Now that official government documentation is available, how long will the IOC be able to keep a lid on this scandal?”
I imagine the answer is “Forever.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Research Suggests Polygamous Men Live Longer:
Calopteryx writes “Want to live a little longer? Get a second wife. A study reported in New Scientist suggests that men from polygamous cultures outlive those from monogamous ones. After accounting for socioeconomic differences, men aged over 60 from 140 countries that practice polygamy to varying degrees lived on average 12% longer than men from 49 mostly monogamous nations.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
I wonder how much of this can be attributed to not getting caught cheating.
Teens Arrested For Motorized Office Chair:
German police have confiscated the world’s fastest office chair and arrested its 17-year-old inventors. The duo added a lawnmower engine, brakes and a metal frame to the office chair and were reported to be driving it all over the streets of Gross-Zimmern. Police did not comment on the chair’s handling or acceleration but I look forward to it being profiled on Top Gear.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
This is what happens when kids watch too many old, “Tool Time” episodes.
Email I sent to Staples headquarters today.
I was in your Cortland NY store and every employee insisted that none of the VGA monitors would work with a Mac. This has been untrue for more than a DECADE! Get with it and at least instruct your employees to say they don’t know rather than lie about the Mac just because you don’t sell it. Oh, and in case you wondered, I took my business elsewhere and bought a VGA monitor which, as I’ve said, worked perfectly with my Mac. Oh and in the future I’ll continue to take my business to places that hire intelligent people and train them well. Something that appears to be lacking at Staples, unless I wanted, oh, say, a staple. I hope I’m not going out on a limb in thinking you know how they work?
Update #1: A quick look on the Staples website shows monitors that are Mac compatible so it may be just the Cortland store that is clueless.
Give the man credit… He knows his limitations… And being President is one of them. He isn’t up to it.
The Obama campaign is looking more and more like the Kerry/Gore campaign. Unfortunately the McCain campaign is looking like the Dole campaign.
YouTube Stands Up To IOC Over Free Tibet Video:
Ian Lamont writes “The International Olympic Committee has withdrawn a DCMA takedown notice that targeted a two-minute long YouTube video of a Students for a Free Tibet protest at the Chinese consulate in New York. The video shows protesters gathering outside the building at night and projecting images of the Olympic symbol, ‘tank man,’ Tibetan riot footage and clips of victims of the Chinese police crackdown in Tibet. After receiving the request, YouTube contacted the IOC and asked if it really planned to pursue a claim. The IOC retracted the notice and the video was reposted within hours. Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society praised YouTube for ‘going out of its way to do more than it’s required to do under the law to protect free expression.’”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Not sure which video they are talking about but here is a link to 20 of them. And you’ll find thousands more if you search on just Free Tibet.
My take on the Clinton comeback.
For months now people have been saying to me, “Do you really think they’re gone?” “Is it finally over?” “Is the coast clear?”
The questions have been in response to Barack Obama’s supposedly yeoman service in putting an end to the Clintons in public life.
My response to those who believe our long national nightmare is over has always been: “Have you seen no monster movies?”
Lopez Lomong competes Friday in 1,500-meter race:
The former Tully track star is one of 12 men competing in Friday’s race.