[Quote:]

What is the fastest a dolphin can swim? Near the surface, no more than 54 kilometres per hour. Why? Because it hurts it to swim faster.

[Quote:]

It looked harmless enough, but the words on a billboard un-nerved so many people that a popular restaurant nearby actually lost business.

The billboard was on Colonial Drive near the Old Cheney Highway. Although the popular Straub’s Seafood restaurant often advertises on it, this wasn’t their billboard. The sign was taken down after Channel 9 started asking questions.

The billboard came down around 4:00 Friday afternoon and nearby business owners are relieved. Straub’s restaurant can replace the sign with the night’s specials.

Why are people so amazingly insecure in their religion that they feel “insulted” when somebody questions it?

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[Quote:]

Ongeveer 5000 mensen ondertekenden de afgelopen weken de petitie ‘Holland Loves Muslims’. Woensdag eindigde de campagne, waarbij deelnemers via internet een statement tegen islamofobie in Nederland konden maken.

De organisatoren hoopten bij de start van hun campagne in februari op 50.000 handtekeningen, die ze aan wilden bieden aan de fractievoorzitters van alle politieke partijen in de Tweede Kamer. Op de afsluitende avond, woensdag in debatcentrum De Balie in Amsterdam, lieten alle uitgenodigde Haagse politici het echter afweten.

[..]

Naast de 5000 handtekeningen ontvingen de organisatoren circa 2000 hatemails, waardoor de internetsite www.hollandlovesmuslims.com tijdens de campagne een tijd onbereikbaar was.

Een server die van 2000 mailtjes plat gaat? Wat gebruiken ze, een Commodore 64?

[Quote:]

But to arm the Afghan forces that it hopes will lead this fight, the American military has relied since early last year on a fledgling company led by a 22-year-old man whose vice president was a licensed masseur.

With the award last January of a federal contract worth as much as nearly $300 million, the company, AEY Inc., which operates out of an unmarked office in Miami Beach, became the main supplier of munitions to Afghanistan’s army and police forces.

Since then, the company has provided ammunition that is more than 40 years old and in decomposing packaging, according to an examination of the munitions by The New York Times and interviews with American and Afghan officials. Much of the ammunition comes from the aging stockpiles of the old Communist bloc, including stockpiles that the State Department and NATO have determined to be unreliable and obsolete, and have spent millions of dollars to have destroyed.

[..]

AEY is one of many previously unknown defense companies to have thrived since 2003, when the Pentagon began dispensing billions of dollars to train and equip indigenous forces in Afghanistan and Iraq. Its rise from obscurity once seemed to make it a successful example of the Bush administration’s promotion of private contractors as integral elements of war-fighting strategy.

[Quote:]

Spain’s once-booming property market is in freefall, official statistics have revealed for the first time.

The announcement that house sales had plunged has dashed government hopes for a “soft landing” in the sector that has driven the Spanish economy for more than a decade.

The buying and selling of homes fell by 27 per cent in January compared with the same period last year, Spain’s National Statistical Institute (INE) announced yesterday. The collapse coincided with a 25 per cent fall in the granting of mortgages, the biggest drop since 2004. The size of individual mortgages has also fallen, by nearly 4 per cent, as providers fear for the security of their loans.

[Quote:]

Las Vegas’ Project CityCenter, the largest private development in the Unites States, was to be 8 acres of shops, casinos, hotels, condos, and theaters. But now it looks like big portions of the project may remain in a state of half-built rubble piles for years to come, due to the current credit crisis in the United States.

[..]

Last week, Deutsche Bank AG, the lender on the Cosmopolitan Project (the piece of this structure that’s on the far right), started foreclosure proceedings after developer Ian Bruce Eichner was unable to get more financing for the world’s biggest mega-mall.

[Quote:]

Howard Burditt of Reuters took this photo today of opposition supporters displaying worthless bank notes at an election rally near Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe.

Once dubbed the “bread basket” of Africa, Zimbabwe has been struggling with the world’s highest rate of inflation — 100,000% — and years of economic mismanagement under President Robert Mugabe.

A loaf of bread now costs $25 million, the equivalent of 62 cents in the United States, according to AP.

[Quote:]

There is little evidence that the recent news about Obama’s affiliation with the United Church of Christ has dispelled the impression that he is Muslim. While voters who heard “a lot” about Rev. Wright’s controversial sermons are more likely than those who have not to correctly identify Obama as a Christian, they are not substantially less likely to still believe that he is Muslim. Nearly one in 10 (9 percent) of those who heard a lot about Wright still believe that Obama is Muslim.

And they let these morons vote? Wow.

[Quote:]

A newly surfaced memo from banking giant JPMorgan Chase provides a rare glimpse into the mentality that fueled the mortgage crisis.

The memo’s title says it all: “Zippy Cheats & Tricks.”

It is a primer on how to get risky mortgage loans approved by Zippy, Chase’s in-house automated loan underwriting system. The secret to approval? Inflate the borrowers’ income or otherwise falsify their loan application.

The document, a copy of which was obtained by The Oregonian, bears a Chase corporate logo. But it’s unclear how widely it was circulated or used within Chase.

Bank spokesman Tom Kelly confirmed that the “Cheats & Tricks” memo was e-mailed from Chase but added that it does not reflect Chase corporate policy.

“This is not how we do things,” he said. “We continue to investigate” the memo, Kelly said. “That kind of document would neither be condoned or tolerated.”

[Quote:]

If you’re in the business of selling enterprise software, you kind of have to go read the article, because it is a priceless account of how to really fuck up a major deal like this.

[Quote:]

A Texas woman who claims she was forced to remove a nipple ring with pliers in order to board an airplane called Thursday for an apology by federal security agents and a civil rights investigation.

Feel safer yet?

[Quote:]

Like my Grandpa always said, there were no naked human pyramids in Starcraft.

There were no whiny anti-war Hollywood types or questionable war motives or granola-munching protesters. I’m starting to think that even World in Conflict, a real time strategy game so “realistic” it takes a NASA-built Quantum supercomputer to run it, has left me woefully unprepared to fight an actual war.

Well, below is my open letter to the real time strategy gaming cartel. I want a war simulation. A real one. I don’t want little cartoon tanks jostling around in a video sandbox chewing down each other’s health meters, while a preteen opponent insults my sexuality using every key on his keyboard except the ones with letters. I want an RTS game that will give me a stress headache after an hour and an ulcer after a week. I want to identify experienced players on the street by their 1,000-yard stares.

(click to read the whole thing!)

[Quote:]

Asked negotiating with certain foreign leaders such as Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Obama said:

“I think people understand the notion of talking to our enemies,” Obama said. “If FDR can meet with Stalin and Nixon can meet with Mao and Kennedy can meet with Khrushchev and Reagan can meet with Gorbechav, then the notion that we can’t meet with some half-baked dictator is ridiculous.”

“I’m not worried about losing a propaganda war with Ahmadinejad,” he said, “That guy opens his mouth and I think people see there are problems there.”

Odd, that’s exactly how I feel about W.

[Quote:]

Since unveiling the Microsoft Surface product last year, the company has gotten plenty of feedback from businesses and enthusiasts who want to get their hands on the technology, said Tom Gibbons, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s
Specialized Devices and Applications business. And Gibbons said he feels confident that the touch-based computer could be affordable enough for consumers in three years or less. “In the three-year time window, we absolutely see how to get there,” Gibbons said. “If we can beat that, we’ll try to beat that.”

[Quote:]

Headline says that means 2011 but the dudes at Fortune forgot to use Microsoft math. See, in Microsoft math, “three years from now” is 2018. That’s for the fucked-up beta version. RTM happens in 2020, still with loads of bugs. SP1 for Surface ships in 2025 and by then Microsoft is owned by Google so the table comes pre-loaded with Google’s useless productivity apps that nobody wants and tiny little text ads all around the edges. Or something.

[Quote:]

The researchers surveyed 160 parents in the Boston area, evenly divided between males and females. Participants were binned into three groups according to their education and income;

[..]

Those who searched at Yahoo and MSN were evenly distributed across income groups. Over half the high-income parents, however, used Google, while only 8 percent of low-income parents did—they apparently preferred AOL search. The authors suggested that this difference arose from the fact that high-status parents were over four times more sensitive to search engines returning irrelevant results (the authors consider Google the gold standard for search engines).

Other aspects of the divide extended beyond choice of search engine. 70 percent of high-status parents went back to the original list of search results after hitting an irrelevant site; less than half of low-status parents did the same. They were also twice as likely to tweak search terms when they ran into a set of results they were unhappy with. Finally, those higher up the socioeconomic ladder were more likely (43 percent) to trust information from universities and research organizations than those at the bottom (16 percent).

[Quote:]

Show organizers offered a Sony Vaio, Fujitsu U810 and the MacBook as prizes, saying that they could be won by anybody at the show who could find a way to hack into each of them and read the contents of a file on the system, using a previously undisclosed “0day” attack.

Nobody was able to hack into the systems on the first day of the contest when contestants were only allowed to attack the computers over the network, but on Thursday the rules were relaxed so that attackers could direct contest organizers using the computers to do things like visit Web sites or open e-mail messages.

Miller, best known as one of the researchers who first hacked Apple’s iPhone last year, didn’t take much time. Within 2 minutes, he directed the contest’s organizers to visit a Web site that contained his exploit code, which then allowed him to seize control of the computer, as about 20 onlookers cheered him on.

I disagree with quite a lot Wilders has to say, but he’s been in the news so often, I might as well show you what all the ruckus is about:

[Quote:]

Government sources in The Hague have yet to respond. The first to address the assembled press was Mr Wilders himself, who said the film was not intended as a “provocation”, but as a “final warning” and an invitation to Muslims to join the debate about Islam. Fitna, he said, “depicted the hard realities” of modern life and “now we have to draw the political conclusions”.

Speaking on prime time news, Islam expert Maurits Berger agreed that the film should not be seen as a provocation. “It presents a succession of images which we have all seen in recent years.” The anticipated widespread demonstrations in the Muslim world, Mr Berger said, “would be an exaggerated response”.

Muslim organisations in the Netherlands were quoted as expressing relief: “The film is not as shocking as expected” and “represented a caricature of Islam”. National alert levels, which recently went up, have not been raised any further.

[Quote:]

Geert Wilders, Dutch politician and leader of the Party for Freedom (PVV), has called his just-released Fitna a ‘respectable film’. He admitted that Muslims may not be happy with it, but emphasised that he had always stuck to the facts. He said he believes that the film is also ‘one thousand kilometres within the framework of the law’.

While noting that he hoped that Fitna’s release would cause no disturbances, Mr Wilders stressed that the maker of the film could not be held responsible for any riots or boycotts that might result, and that it was not meant to provoke disruption. Rather, he said, the images in Fitna were intended to make clear the dangers contained in the Qur’an and Islam.

He also said that he hoped it would lead to discussions of the disadvantages of the faith, both in the Netherlands and abroad, and explicitly invited Muslims to engage in such discussions.

[Quote:]

Scarcity, as that term is used in social psychology, is when things become more desirable as they appear less obtainable.

• If you put a two-year-old boy in a room with two toys, one toy in the open and the other behind a Plexiglas wall, the two-year-old will ignore the easily accessible toy and go after the apparently forbidden one.  If the wall is low enough to be easily climbable, the toddler is no more likely to go after one toy than the other.  (Brehm and Weintraub 1977.)
   
• When Dade County forbade use or possession of phosphate detergents, many Dade residents drove to nearby counties and bought huge amounts of phosphate laundry detergents.  Compared to Tampa residents not affected by the regulation, Dade residents rated phosphate detergents as gentler, more effective, more powerful on stains, and even believed that phosphate detergents poured more easily.  (Mazis 1975, Mazis et. al. 1973.)

  [..]

  The conventional theory for explaining this is “psychological reactance”, social-psychology-speak for “When you tell people they can’t do something, they’ll just try even harder.” The fundamental instincts involved appear to be preservation of status and preservation of options. We resist dominance, when any human agency tries to restrict our freedom. And when options seem to be in danger of disappearing, even from natural causes, we try to leap on the option before it’s gone.

On a similar note, how’s the War on Drugs doing lately?

[Quote:]

I sometimes hear it said that formats like OOXML, or ODF for that matter, are simply XML serializations of a particular application’s native data representation. This is said, seemingly, in an attempt to justify quirky or outright infelicitous representations. “We had no choice. Office 95 represents line widths in units of 1/5th of a barleycorn, so OOXML must as well”. This technological determinism indicates poor engineering judgment, laziness, or both.

An easy counter-example is HTML. Does HTML reflect the internals of NCSA Mosaic? Does it represent the internals of Netscape Navigator? Firefox? Opera? Safari? Are any faults in HTML properly justified by what a single browser does internally? Applications should follow standards, not the other way around.

[..]

With this in mind, let’s take a look at how OOXML and ODF represent a staple of document formats: text color and alignment. I created six documents: word processor, spreadsheet and presentation graphics, in OOXML and ODF formats. In each case I entered one simple string “This is red text”. In each case I made the word “red” red, and right aligned the entire string. The following table shows the representation of this formatting instruction in OOXML and ODF, for each of the three application types:

Format	Text Color	Text Alignment
OOXML Text	<w:color w:val=”FF0000″/>	<w:jc w:val=”right”/>
OOXML Sheet	<color rgb=”FFFF0000″/>	<alignment horizontal=”right”/>
OOXML Presentation	<a:srgbClr val=”FF0000″/>	<a:pPr algn=”r”/>
ODF Text	<style:text-properties fo:color=”#FF0000″/>	<style:paragraph-properties fo:text-align=”end” />
ODF Sheet	<style:text-properties fo:color=”#FF0000″/>	<style:paragraph-properties fo:text-align=”end”/>
ODF Presentation	<style:text-properties fo:color=”#FF0000″/>	<style:paragraph-properties fo:text-align=”end”/>

The results speak for themselves.

What is the engineering justification for this horror? I have no doubt that this accurately reflects the internals of Microsoft Office, and shows how these three applications have been developed by three different, isolated teams. But is this a suitable foundation for an International Standard?

[Quote:]

At a time when Sen. Hillary Clinton is increasingly relying on superdelegates to vault her to the Democratic Party’s nomination, a handful of undecided and pledged superdelegates are coming forward to say her campaign’s tactics in recent weeks are doing more harm than good.

[..]

“Periodically, over the last couple of weeks, you will see a news story or get something from the campaign, and you’ll go, ‘How stupid do you think I am?” one uncommitted superdelegate said. “All of us watch television all the time, read the newspapers. We all play with the little charts online too. We know it is virtually impossible.”

[Quote:]

The US likes to call out other countries for not being tough enough with intellectual property rules, and it tosses countries like Russia, China, and even Israel onto “watch lists” and “priority watch lists” in an attempt to force changes. But the US comes in for its share of IP-related criticism from other countries both small and large, too. When it happens, though, we’re not nearly so quick to change our ways.

[..]

Apparently, it’s easy to get hot and bothered when it’s industries from your country that claim to be badly affected by rules elsewhere. When it comes to the claims of other countries, though, even claims that have been validated by the WTO, it’s much easier to see the complexity of the situation, to spend years arguing those complexities before judges, and to do nothing even when compelled by rulings.

This sort of behavior makes it that much harder to assert some kind of moral high ground when China, Russia, and others pick and choose which of their WTO obligations they are going to comply with.

If the WTO wants American politicians to listen them, then they need to pony up with the ‘campaign funding’ like everyone else.

[Quote:]

I love Microsoft for their sheer willingness to piss off every human being on this planet in their quest for approval of OOXML.

[Quote:]

Iraqi doctors in al-Anbar province warn of a new disease they call “Blackwater” that threatens the lives of thousands. The disease is named after Blackwater Worldwide, the U.S. mercenary company operating in Iraq.

“This disease is a severe form of malarial infection caused by the parasite plasmodium falciparum, which is considered the worst type of malarial infection,” Dr. Ali Hakki from Fallujah told IPS. “It is one of the complications of that infection, and not the ordinary picture of the disease. Because of its frequent and severe complications, such as Blackwater fever, and its resistance to treatment, P. falciparum can cause death within 24 hours.”

[Quote:]

Even as exonerated file-sharing defendant Tanya Andersen pursues her malicious prosecution case against the music industry, there is some unattended business left over from the RIAA’s original copyright infringement lawsuit. After the RIAA threw in the towel on its lawsuit against Andersen, she sought and won an award of attorneys’ fees. The two parties are now trying to settle the bill, and the RIAA is only willing to pay one tenth of what Andersen’s attorney is seeking.