[Quote:]
One of the most amazing user-led projects out there, CHDK firmware turns cheap Canon cameras into photography powerhouses. You can take take time-lapse movies as in this stunning sunset example; automatically photograph lightening; easily make pretty HDR images and stereograms; have unlimited depth-of-field; and, perhaps most impressively, take photographs with shutter speeds of 1/60,000 of a second!
Dual Boot the iPhone. My inner nerd just had his jaw dropped….
[Quote:]
Retail sales in the U.S. unexpectedly fell in February, indicating that declines in payrolls and home values and a surge in energy costs have tipped the economy into a recession.
Purchases dropped 0.6 percent last month, led by declines at auto dealers and restaurants, after a 0.4 percent gain in January, the Commerce Department said. Purchases excluding autos declined 0.2 percent.
[..]
A Bloomberg survey of 79 economists forecast total retail sales would rise 0.2 percent, following an originally reported 0.3 percent gain the prior month. Sales excluding autos were also forecast to rise 0.2 percent.
The Euro is probably going to his $1.60 sooner rather than later. On november 20th, 2000, the rate was $0.8384, so we’re pretty close to the Euro doubling in value compared to the dollar, in less than eight years.
Woa.
[Quote:]
Het vriendje van Mehdi Kazemi is in Iran geëxecuteerd omdat hij homo was. Mehdi (19) vreest hetzelfde lot als hij ooit teruggaat naar zijn land, maar Engeland wil hem toch terugsturen. Mehdi heeft asiel aangevraagd in Nederland. Omdat hij dat in Engeland ook al had gedaan, is zijn verzoek hier afgewezen. Nu zit de Iraanse tiener vast in het uitzetcentrum in Zestienhoven.
Gek is dat toch… nu het PVDA de twee belangrijkste vreemdelingenposten in het kabinet heeft (hier en hier) is het doodstil bij de rooibostheedrinkers. Toen de andere partij aan de macht was en hetzelfde gebeurde, was het land te klein.
Hypocriete eikels zijn het.
In an interview with the Breeze, Ferraro said, “If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman (of any color), he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept.”
The comment was picked up by political blogs and cable news shows across the country. The Obama campaign held a conference call today to denounce the remark, and Obama surrogates urged Sen. Hillary Clinton to repudiate it.
[..]
Ferraro said the Clinton campaign cannot fire her because she is not an adviser.
“It’s impossible to fire somebody who’s not involved with it,” she said.
If it’s impossible to be fired because you don’t work for the campaign, how can you resign?
Dear Hillary –
I am stepping down from your finance committee so I can speak for myself and you can continue to speak for yourself about what is at stake in this campaign.
[Quote:]
On April 19, 1995, in Oklahoma City a terrorist detonated a bomb that killed my mother and 167 others. 19 children died that day. Had I not had the chicken pox that day, the body count would’ve likely have included one more. Over 800 other Oklahomans were injured that day and many of those still suffer through their permanent wounds.
That terrorist was neither a homosexual or was he involved in Islam. He was an extremist Christian forcing his views through a body count. He held his beliefs and made those who didn’t live up to them pay with their lives.
As you were not a resident of Oklahoma on that day, it could be explained why you so carelessly chose words saying that the homosexual agenda is worst than terrorism. I can most certainly tell you through my own experience that is not true. I am sure there are many people in your voting district that laid a loved one to death after the terrorist attack on Oklahoma City. I kind of doubt you’ll find one of them that will agree with you.
I was five years old when my mother died. I remember what a beautiful, wise, and remarkable woman she was. I miss her. Your harsh words and misguided beliefs brought me to tears, because you told me that my mother’s killer was a better person than a group of people that are seeking safety and tolerance for themselves.
[Quote:]
Last Friday, March 7, the Council on Foreign Relations hosted a discussion among top foreign policy advisors to Mr. Obama (Susan Rice), Ms. Clinton (Mara Rudman), and Mr. McCain (Randy Scheunemann). There’s audio of the whole event here. The event wasn’t insightful, but the tensions between the campaigns kept it from being boring. As you can imagine there were a few testy exchanges, including one where after Ms. Rudman told a rather large fib about Mr. Obama and NAFTA. More on that later.
The most revealing comment was not on foreign policy - a matter on which all of the advisors remained rather bland - but on the Democratic primaries. Mr. Scheunemann addressed Ms. Rudman:
Well, let me first address what Mara said about the experience and judgment. Can I just say, please keep running those 3 a.m. phone call ads about who you want to answer the phone - (laughter) - because we like those.
That’s right - a top McCain advisor was thanking a top Clinton advisor for softening up the likely Democratic nominee.
[Quote:]
Carlyle Capital Corp. said late Wednesday it expects its creditors to seize all of the fund’s remaining assets after unsuccessful negotiations to prevent its liquidation.
The London-based fund shook financial markets last week after missing margin calls from banks on its $21.7 billion portfolio of residential- mortgage-backed bonds. Carlyle’s troubles have amplified fears that billions of dollars of depressed mortgage-backed securities will flood the market, reducing their value even further.
More than $5 billion of Carlyle’s securities have already been sold, but the fund tried to negotiate with the banks to prevent the liquidation of the remaining $16 billion.
The good news is that the Bush family fortune is tied to the carlyle group
[Quote:]
Tehran’s police chief, Reza Zarei, has been arrested after he was found nude in a local brothel with six naked prostitutes, the Farda news website reported Wednesday.
Zarei stepped down from his post following the raid, the report said. According to another popular Iranian website, Gooya, the order to raid the brothel was given directly by Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi, chief of the judicial authorities.
Over the past year Zarei was in charge of enforcing the Islamic dress code on Iranian women with the purpose of “moralizing of the city.”
[Quote:]
The Bush Administration apparently does not want a U.S. military study that found no direct connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda to get any attention. This morning, the Pentagon cancelled plans to send out a press release announcing the report’s release and will no longer make the report available online.
The report was to be posted on the Joint Forces Command website this afternoon, followed by a background briefing with the authors. No more. The report will be made available only to those who ask for it, and it will be sent via U.S. mail from Joint Forces Command in Norfolk, Virginia.
It won’t be emailed to reporters and it won’t be posted online.
Or, you can download it from my site.
[Quote:]
“Those of us who have served, worn the cloth of our nation, and gone into harm’s way know that to be successful we must have the strongest sense of trust in our Commander in Chief. We must be confident that he or she has listened to the best possible advice, that he or she has garnered the best possible information from all possible sources, that he or she has analyzed and weighed all the possible consequences and outcomes, and that he or she has made the decision to exert military force as a last possible resort,” said Admiral (Ret.) Robert “William” Williamson (USN). “Of this I am certain: Senator Obama will do all of those things and much more to ensure the safety and freedom of our citizens, our allies, and coalition partners. He has all the great qualities and attributes required to carry out the most difficult duties of the Presidency.
I posted about her here.
[Quote:]
The Oklahoma lawmaker’s homophobic remarks have been the talk of the town recently, especially her assertion that gay folk are infiltrating schools to indoctrinate children. And, sensing a critical national spotlight, Kern made a very suspicious change to her official government homepage.
If you compare a March 4th cache and today’s version, you’ll notice that Kern and/or her staff deleted a biographical sentence mentioning her two adult sons, Jesse and Nathan. Obviously our warning bells went off, so we did a little digging and found something quite queer.
Consider comment seventeen on this Tulsa World article: “How come no-one asks this “supposed” christian woman..about her own GAY son? The one she basically has dis-owned…ahh so christian.”
The BBC released, a while ago, something called “iPlayer”. It lets you view their programming.
Except, it’s windows-only, and your shows go pop after 30 days because of the Windows Media timebombing that third-party TV production firms have negotiated as a condition of shows being downloadable via the official iPlayer desktop client.
Cue up lots of protests by linux owners. Response from the BBC: it’s going to take us two years to write a secure client for those platforms.
Then the iPhone is released…
[Quote:]
Last week, Auntie launched the streaming version of iPlayer for the Jesus Phone and iPod Touch. It’s meant transcoding shows to the H.264 format used by Apple’s QuickTime player - and a whole raft of other players on all platforms - because Steve Jobs doesn’t think Adobe Flash video is good enough to appear on his magnificent tool.
The BBC has “secured” this non-DRM’d stream using the awesome power of browser user agent strings, which are trivial to manipulate. Consequently, penguin fanciers have quickly cobbled together hacks that will grab the whole show as a 512Kb/s video download.
And now everybody gets their shows unprotected…
[Quote:]
Blu-ray Disc players from Samsung, Sony and Sharp are now the most expensive they have been all year, presumably because HD DVD’s exit from the high-def disc arena has removed some of Blu-ray’s pricing pressure.
Great! That means even more money I’m not spending on it!
[Quote:]
The Air Force has just changed their official motto to “Above all“.
Do they teach German history at the Air Force Academy?
