[Quote]:

“If it were you or I doing it, we’d be sitting in jail right now,” Danforth said. “Why isn’t JPMorgan in jail?”

[Quote]:

Jack Conkling, a Prairie Hills Middle School social studies teacher and Buhler High School assistant women’s basketball coach in Buhler, Kan., is under fire after equating being gay to being a murderer on his Facebook profile, the Hutchinson News reports.

In his post, Conkling comments on gay marriage, writing that homosexuality “ranks in God’s eyes the same as murder, lying, stealing, or cheating.”

That’s interesting, I notice he has his hair cut. And I can’t really make out what his shirt is made of, but I would bet a beer it’s made from two different kinds of thread.

source

Given what this code does when you scan it, it’s obviously best you NEVER put any Guinness in it, so it eludes me what Guinness marketing is trying to do here. Then again, I assume Guinness knows that, because the domain the code points to is parked by GoDaddy and contains nothing at all.

[Quote]:

This is my personal site. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

Barack and Michelle are at the White Sox game. Sitting in the first row with the Secret Service people directly behind them, one of the Secret Service guys leans forward and says something to the president. Barack stares at the guy, looks at Michelle, looks back at the agent, and shakes his head violently.

The agent then says “Mr President, it was a unanimous request, from the owner of the team down to the bat boy. And… the fans would love it!” So, Barack shrugs his shoulders and says “If that’s what the people want”.

He gets up, grabs Michelle by her collar and the seat of her pants, and drops her right over the wall into the field. She gets up kicking, swearing, and screaming – and the crowd goes wild, cheering, applauding, and high-fiving.

Barack is bowing and smiling, and leans over to the agent and says “You were right, I would have never believed that!” Then noticing the agent has gone totally pale, Barack asks what is wrong. The agent replies “Sir, I said, they want you to throw out the first PITCH…”

[Quote]:

Let’s follow the money. The OEMs are paid by a variety of software makers to install crapware onto systems. The OEMs don’t disclose how much money they receive from this, but sources tell me that it works out at a few dollars per PC. That doesn’t sound like much, but multiply that across millions of PCs and it becomes a significant number.

Then the customer pays the OEM — or a middleman — for the PC, a PC which Microsoft itself admits is “slower-than-should-be” because of all the stuff loaded onto the system unnecessarily. Consumers are expected to take their new PC to a Microsoft Store — though there are currently only 16 of them in the United States — and pay Microsoft $99 to remove the crapware that the OEMs were paid to install.

It could only be worse if the OEMs wanted payment to remove crapware. Think that wouldn’t happen? It’s already been tried. Back in 2008, Sony announced plans to charge customers $50 for what it called “Fresh Start” systems that were free of crapware. The plans were dropped following a barrage of negative feedback.

The OEMs make money from installing crapware onto PCs, and now Microsoft is making money removing it. Makes you realize why more and more people are buying Apple hardware.

Most of you probably already know that you can remove a lot of the preinstalled crapware from PCs using PC Decrapifier. It won’t give you the nice Signature edition desktop wallpaper, and won’t install pretty much every piece of Windows Live software ever made onto your PC — like Microsoft seems to do on Signature editions PCs — but it will remove most of the crapware that you find on new PCs. And the best part is it won’t cost you $99. In fact, it won’t cost you anything, because it’s free for personal use.

[Quote]:

The 100,000 jobs is back! The presumptive GOP nominee all but stopped mentioning he created 100,000 in the private sector after we declared in January that claim was untenable and unproven. The biggest problem is that Romney is counting all the jobs added by companies long after he had left the leadership of Bain Capital — and even after Bain’s investment in the companies had ended.

 In the Hot Air interview, Romney even made this claim while at the same time arguing that a recent Obama campaign commercial slamming the job losses at a particular Bain investment was unfair because “the steel factory closed down two years after I left Bain Capital. I was no longer there, so that’s hardly something which is on my watch.”  (Technically, Romney had not completely extricated himself from Bain but that’s another story.)

 The logic there escapes us. Romney appears to be saying it is okay to count jobs created after he left Bain, but it’s not okay to count jobs lost after he left Bain.

[Quote]:

The court-ordered ISP blockade of The Pirate Bay immediately backfired earlier this month when it massively raised awareness and caused the site to receive millions of extra visitors. Now, and as a direct result of the Pirate Bay ban, the website of the UK Pirate Party is benefiting hugely too. In just over three weeks it has jumped more than 100,000 places in the UK rankings and any moment now will become the 1,500th most-visited website in the country.

[Quote]:

United States Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano has warned the New Zealand Government about the latest terrorist threat known as “body bombers”.

US media reports have suggested the Al Qaeda affiliate in Yemen, and its master bomb-maker Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri, have been designing body bombs with no metal parts to get past airport security.

Napolitano said the US is monitoring the possibility of terrorists implanting explosives in the human body.

“Do we have specific credible evidence of a threat today? I would not say that we do, however, the importance is that we all lean forward,” she said.

So, Janet, you admit that the story is utter bullshit, but you’re still warning New Zealand about it? Why? Does somebody you know have some body scanners for sale perhaps?

And ‘Lean forward’?

Isn’t that just a different way of saying ‘bend over’?

[Quote]:

The quick version of this terrible story is that Norman and Oriane Rousseau of Newbury Park, California were scammed into a predatory mortgage. But they made their payments anyway, always paying with a cashier’s check in person at the same branch. Then one day the bank misapplied their payment and said they still owed the money. This started a long, nasty process that led to the bank evicting the Rousseaus from their home.

Here’s the shocker: right at the start the Rousseaus came up with proof that the bank had received the payment and had cashed the check. But the bank continued to claim it had missed the payment, gave the Rousseaus the runaround, started applying fees, and used it as an excuse to foreclose on the house anyway.

The Rousseaus fought back, the bank dragged it out for so long and pulled so many tricks, getting its way every step of the process, until this last Sunday Norman Rousseau finally gave up and shot himself in despair – two days before the scheduled eviction, Tuesday, May 15. (The Rousseau’s lawyer just said he was able to win a 2-week delay.)

It is a tragic story, but when you dig into the details it becomes much worse.

[Quote]:

Disco legend Donna Summer died this morning in Florida at the age of 63, family sources have told the Associated Press. The singer had been battling cancer for some time.

[Quote]:

“I was absolutely horrified,” said Gagnon, of Camp Verde, Arizona. “I never gave them permission to drill into my son’s mouth. They did it for profit.”

Isaac’s case and others like it are under scrutiny by federal lawmakers and state regulators trying to determine whether a popular business model fueled by Wall Street money is soaking taxpayers and having a malign influence on dentistry.

Munchausen by profit.

[Quote]:

The Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment doesn’t have very many words, but if those words are to retain their meaning, the Ninth Circuit will have to put a check on the government’s ability to blacklist its citizens without recourse.

In much the same way as Karl Rove, the campaign is trying to turn Romney’s strength—his private-sector experience—into a weakness. “Yes, Governor Romney was a skilled generator of wealth, but he did so at the cost of families like yours. Just imagine what he’ll do in the White House.” The Romney campaign has been trying to do the same to the president—and may well succeed—but for now, it’s a half-step when compared to this effort.

[Quote]:

Dr. Jody Corey-Bloom, director of the Multiple Sclerosis Center at UC San Diego, recently helped run a study that provided multiple sclerosis patients with either a marijuana joint or a placebo that looked, smelled, and tasted like marijuana. After smoking whichever substance they were given, patients were tested to see if it reduced their muscle spasticity — an affliction, common to MS patients, that causes painful, uncontrollable spasms of the extremities. Spasticity was unaffected among the placebo patients but dropped 30 percent on average among the patients given real marijuana. The side effects? “Smoking caused fatigue and dizziness in some users,” says Reuters, “and slowed down people’s mental skills soon after they used marijuana.”

The UC San Diego study is just the latest to suggest that marijuana has some medical benefits. Sixteen states, thousands of doctors, and tens of thousands of sick people concur in that judgment. It is dramatized by the personal testimony of sick people who are offered much more powerful drugs, but nevertheless insistthat consuming marijuana was most effective at helping them. (Don’t miss the video at the top of this post, as powerful a testimonial for medical marijuana as you’ll find.)

Marijuana is nevertheless classified under the Controlled Substances Act as a Schedule One drug. Under the law, drugs placed in that category must meet all of the following criteria (emphasis added):

• The drug or other substance has a high potential for abuse.
• The drug or other substance has no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States.
• There is a lack of accepted safety for use of the drug or other substance under medical supervision

[Quote]:

Our plane got delayed 20 minutes so we got out the instruments and played a 4 song impromptu set for the packed plane.

Romania here we come!

Quote

Stung by a UN official’s criticism of the country for allowing some of its people to go hungry, Canada has dismissed him as a “patronizing academic” and said there are more pressing food concerns in other countries.

“Canada has long been seen as a land of plenty. Yet today one in 10 families with a child under six is unable to meet their daily food needs,” Olivier De Schutter, the UN special rapporteur on the right to food, said in a statement on Wednesday.

The Conservative government of Canada has reacted like a scalded cat. Uncharacteristically, at least three ministers have been trotted to the microphones to abhor this “ill-informed, patronising academic”. And don’t mention the facts; that obesity and diabetes rates are rocketing especially in remote communities where fresh food is expensive or unobtainable. Canada’s First Nations citizens are often poor; have high levels of violence, substance abuse and crime; have poor diets and poor health.

Quote

The US army has said a combat brigade will be assigned to the Pentagon’s Africa Command next year in a pilot programme that will send small teams of soldiers to countries around the continent to do training and participate in military exercises.

General Ray Odierno, the army’s chief of staff, says the plan is part of a new effort to provide US commanders around the globe with troops on a rotational basis to meet the military needs of their regions.

…

Military advisers are also in Uganda to draw lessons learned from Iraq and Afghanistan to help train African Union soldiers to fight Somalia’s al-Shabab group.

Lessons like not to fund insurgents on the principle of my-enemy’s-enemy-is-my-friend, perhaps?

[Quote]:

This is what I see when i think about higher education in this country today:Remember the housing meltdown ? Tough to forget isn’t it. The formula for the housing boom and bust was simple. A lot of easy money being lent to buyers who couldn’t afford the money they were borrowing. That money was then spent on homes with the expectation that the price of the home would go up and it could easily be flipped or refinanced at a profit. Who cares if you couldn’t afford the loan. As long as prices kept on going up, everyone was happy. And prices kept on going up. And as long as pricing kept on going up real estate agents kept on selling homes and finding money for buyers.Until the easy money stopped. When easy money stopped, buyers couldn’t sell. They couldn’t refinance. First sales slowed, then prices started falling and then the housing bubble burst. Housing prices crashed. We know the rest of the story. We are still mired in the consequences.Can someone please explain to me how what is happening in higher education is any different ?

The Story of Send.

You’d think that Google would make sure this children’s book worked on an Android tablet, instead of looking like a dog’s breakfast.

[Quote]:

Companies should help reduce income inequality and focus more on long-term goals, a new group of supporters of capitalism said on Monday.

[..]

It also includes Carly Fiorina, former chief executive of Hewlett-Packard, and Adam Posen, a member of the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee.

Irony just died, came back to life, died, came back to life, hemorrhaged, shat twice and died.

[Quote]:

The center of your application is not the database. Nor is it one or more of the frameworks you may be using. The center of your application are the use cases of your application.

Paul Cameron reveals he is a pedophile that likes to rape boys.

That is what I hear him saying. That is the only reason I can think of that would make him assume that all gay people would wish to do that. That, or he was raped when he was young and blames all gay people.

OK, draw yourself up to your full height, purse your lips, wrinkle your nose and in your best Edith Evans imitation say, “A Rand-bag?”

Original link if you want one.

The original: