And away we go - 21 August 2008
Aug. 22nd, 2008 12:22 amMeetings, meetings. Today had a lot of data thrown at me, most of it interesting and useful, so all in all, a good day. My professional self also gets a laugh at a Wisconsim woman who was jailed for ignoring a court summons when the library tried to collect its fines. At that point, a $30 fine had a $172 cost applied with it.
Julius Carry, renowned for his role as Lord Bowler in The Adventures of Brisco County Junior, has died at 56, of pancreatic cancer. I haven’t made it through the box set yet, though...
In addition to this, there’s a lot of news happening elsewhere in the world. In Georgia, despite promising to withdraw, Russian troops appear to be digging in, instead. Beyond that, the Norwegian Defense Ministry says Russia called them and said they'll be cutting their ties with NATO. All this fans the flames of those claiming this is a repetition of the past, and that America should be ready to back itself up if it talks like it's going to attack. There’s also a "you must choose between Russia and Georgia" letter from the foreign minister of Russia.
A plane crash in Spain leaves the unenviable task of confirming the identity of the victims.
If one is feeling a little chilled or otherwise lacking passion in life, a tour of what white supremacists are looking for in their women should be able to get the blood appropriately heated to the point where the cold dissipates.
On a much better note, proving that a wedding doesn't have to cost a fortune to be good.
Domestically, more life out of the Warre/McCain/Obama sequence - Liberal Seagull thinks that Obama's biggest mistake was showing up, after having red the transcript and noticing how many questions posed were conservative issues, and conservative/religious issues, too. So McCain can look good with short, decisive-looking answers and Senator Obama has to explain his more complex positions. Kathleen Parker puts it more succinctly, calling the entire matter "religious interrogation" and "un-American" based on the questions that the pastor asked of the candidates, many of which had strong Christian elements to them, like defining evil and saying how one would fight it. Rob Boston of Americans United for Separation of Church and State notes that even if we went by Presidential tradition, an event like Pastor Warren's would be unlikely to garner early Presidential candidates.
After the draft comment, McCain sticks his foot-in-mouth again, claiming his wife met Mother Teresa and then took babies from her to the United States. The false event disappeared, of course, once inquired about. Also, it looks like a new line of attack is to rightly point out that Senator McCain is no ordinary man, when it comes to wealth. Not that Barack Obama is necessarily a middle-class person, either.
Perhaps more importantly, the current administration still can't find those e-mails that were deleted back in 2003, having not even hired a contractor to go and try and completely del- errr, recover them. Shakespeare's Sister's Paul the Spud is not happy, knowing that the next administration is probably not going to do a whole lot against the current one when it takes over. The current administration isn’t sitting on their laurels, either - despite the objection and request to squash it, the new HHS rule that can make birth control abortion, and then shield the people who believe that from being fired for dereliction of duty is proceeding as planned.
Furthermore raising the blood pressure again, a high school principal was told in confidence by a student that she was being taunted for being a lesbian. Rather than trying to stop the teasing, however, the principal told her that homosexuality is wrong, outed her to her parents, and suspended several of her friends when they wore gay pride clothing in support. Beyond that, he inquired after several other students as to whether they were homosexuals or hung out with them. What’s probably worst of this? There’s a lot of people in the community, apparently, who think the principal did nothing wrong. That’s pretty well on par with the officer that called student MySpace pages "slutty", telling one student a sexual predator masturbated to her photo, and then called her cell phone number based on the information she had on her profile. All of this intending to scare the students into keeping better track of their private data. Instead, the message was lost in the tactics used.
The TSA apparently damaged plane sensors, using them to climb on the plane for an "inspection" for which they didn't have the authority, according to a rant on Aero-News Network.
Ford Motor Company hopes to generate interest in their new offerings by having Ford employees drive them, thinking that the employees will then buy and try to convince their friends to buy Ford. The problem with that? Unemployment rates are going up in Michigan, not down.
After proposing to put adverts on the border wall, PETA is apparently interested in purchasing a Sea World.
In the opinion realms, Duncan Hunter thinks that establishing persistent unmanned surveillance will help in clearing Afghanistan of terror and Taliban forces in the zones near the Pakistan border, by providing positions and movements that can then be intercepted with attacks, most likely unmanned, as troops moving from one place to another may not happen for a while.
James Kirchick opines that even though he's making motions about a power-sharing agreement, Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe has no intention of sharing power with anyone. If nothing else, this reminds us that there’s a lot more going on in the world than our newsmedia will say.
Yellow Pages Goes Green, an organization that requests consumers in the United States request that the government not send the Yellow Pages and White Pages directories to residents, businesses, and organizations, so as to save trees, paper, petroleum, and other resources.
Wynton Hall sugests that a Democratic loss this year would set the party back several years, having fielded the best candidate in years and still losing . It might inspire quite the apathy for the country, too, if after all of that effort and potential hope for change, the candidate from the same party as the last ended up winning. Of course, the Democratic candidate might get spurned more by his supporters if the Democratic Party really is starting to warm to the idea of offshore domestic drilling. David Freddoso thinks the Obama we see now is a sham, and the real Obama is the kind of politician that challenges all his opponents off the ballot and support Chicago political machines.
In science and technology, pictures from what will be the tallest skyscraper in the world, the continued importance of trying for an interstellar mission, even if it doesn't look like one will happen any time soon, turning lots of 2-D images into a 3-D panorama, a possible new protocol for peer-to-peer sharing that makes things faster and cuts down on the badnwidth requirement, tooling the genome to provide drugs that work best on your specific genome, and beaming power wirelessly from outlet to appliance.
Deserving of special mention, though, FEMA's phone system got hacked and used to make several expensive and international calls. Most likely using techniques perfected in earlier decades... and someone might have just left the default passwords on.
Last for tonight, a look inside the studio that creates some very Bent Objects.
Julius Carry, renowned for his role as Lord Bowler in The Adventures of Brisco County Junior, has died at 56, of pancreatic cancer. I haven’t made it through the box set yet, though...
In addition to this, there’s a lot of news happening elsewhere in the world. In Georgia, despite promising to withdraw, Russian troops appear to be digging in, instead. Beyond that, the Norwegian Defense Ministry says Russia called them and said they'll be cutting their ties with NATO. All this fans the flames of those claiming this is a repetition of the past, and that America should be ready to back itself up if it talks like it's going to attack. There’s also a "you must choose between Russia and Georgia" letter from the foreign minister of Russia.
A plane crash in Spain leaves the unenviable task of confirming the identity of the victims.
If one is feeling a little chilled or otherwise lacking passion in life, a tour of what white supremacists are looking for in their women should be able to get the blood appropriately heated to the point where the cold dissipates.
On a much better note, proving that a wedding doesn't have to cost a fortune to be good.
Domestically, more life out of the Warre/McCain/Obama sequence - Liberal Seagull thinks that Obama's biggest mistake was showing up, after having red the transcript and noticing how many questions posed were conservative issues, and conservative/religious issues, too. So McCain can look good with short, decisive-looking answers and Senator Obama has to explain his more complex positions. Kathleen Parker puts it more succinctly, calling the entire matter "religious interrogation" and "un-American" based on the questions that the pastor asked of the candidates, many of which had strong Christian elements to them, like defining evil and saying how one would fight it. Rob Boston of Americans United for Separation of Church and State notes that even if we went by Presidential tradition, an event like Pastor Warren's would be unlikely to garner early Presidential candidates.
After the draft comment, McCain sticks his foot-in-mouth again, claiming his wife met Mother Teresa and then took babies from her to the United States. The false event disappeared, of course, once inquired about. Also, it looks like a new line of attack is to rightly point out that Senator McCain is no ordinary man, when it comes to wealth. Not that Barack Obama is necessarily a middle-class person, either.
Perhaps more importantly, the current administration still can't find those e-mails that were deleted back in 2003, having not even hired a contractor to go and try and completely del- errr, recover them. Shakespeare's Sister's Paul the Spud is not happy, knowing that the next administration is probably not going to do a whole lot against the current one when it takes over. The current administration isn’t sitting on their laurels, either - despite the objection and request to squash it, the new HHS rule that can make birth control abortion, and then shield the people who believe that from being fired for dereliction of duty is proceeding as planned.
Furthermore raising the blood pressure again, a high school principal was told in confidence by a student that she was being taunted for being a lesbian. Rather than trying to stop the teasing, however, the principal told her that homosexuality is wrong, outed her to her parents, and suspended several of her friends when they wore gay pride clothing in support. Beyond that, he inquired after several other students as to whether they were homosexuals or hung out with them. What’s probably worst of this? There’s a lot of people in the community, apparently, who think the principal did nothing wrong. That’s pretty well on par with the officer that called student MySpace pages "slutty", telling one student a sexual predator masturbated to her photo, and then called her cell phone number based on the information she had on her profile. All of this intending to scare the students into keeping better track of their private data. Instead, the message was lost in the tactics used.
The TSA apparently damaged plane sensors, using them to climb on the plane for an "inspection" for which they didn't have the authority, according to a rant on Aero-News Network.
Ford Motor Company hopes to generate interest in their new offerings by having Ford employees drive them, thinking that the employees will then buy and try to convince their friends to buy Ford. The problem with that? Unemployment rates are going up in Michigan, not down.
After proposing to put adverts on the border wall, PETA is apparently interested in purchasing a Sea World.
In the opinion realms, Duncan Hunter thinks that establishing persistent unmanned surveillance will help in clearing Afghanistan of terror and Taliban forces in the zones near the Pakistan border, by providing positions and movements that can then be intercepted with attacks, most likely unmanned, as troops moving from one place to another may not happen for a while.
James Kirchick opines that even though he's making motions about a power-sharing agreement, Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe has no intention of sharing power with anyone. If nothing else, this reminds us that there’s a lot more going on in the world than our newsmedia will say.
Yellow Pages Goes Green, an organization that requests consumers in the United States request that the government not send the Yellow Pages and White Pages directories to residents, businesses, and organizations, so as to save trees, paper, petroleum, and other resources.
Wynton Hall sugests that a Democratic loss this year would set the party back several years, having fielded the best candidate in years and still losing . It might inspire quite the apathy for the country, too, if after all of that effort and potential hope for change, the candidate from the same party as the last ended up winning. Of course, the Democratic candidate might get spurned more by his supporters if the Democratic Party really is starting to warm to the idea of offshore domestic drilling. David Freddoso thinks the Obama we see now is a sham, and the real Obama is the kind of politician that challenges all his opponents off the ballot and support Chicago political machines.
In science and technology, pictures from what will be the tallest skyscraper in the world, the continued importance of trying for an interstellar mission, even if it doesn't look like one will happen any time soon, turning lots of 2-D images into a 3-D panorama, a possible new protocol for peer-to-peer sharing that makes things faster and cuts down on the badnwidth requirement, tooling the genome to provide drugs that work best on your specific genome, and beaming power wirelessly from outlet to appliance.
Deserving of special mention, though, FEMA's phone system got hacked and used to make several expensive and international calls. Most likely using techniques perfected in earlier decades... and someone might have just left the default passwords on.
Last for tonight, a look inside the studio that creates some very Bent Objects.