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Apple trounced all competition in a recent Forrester Research customer-satisfaction survey. And in other news, dog bites man.

[..]

Forrester also discovered that the entire personal-computer industry isn’t highly regarded by the American consumer. Apple’s 80 per cent rating placed them only in the “good” category, while Gateway’s 66 placed them a mere one point into the “okay” category. All PC companies taken together managed to only squeak ahead of such consumer pariahs as ISPs, cable-TV services, and health-insurance cabals.

Even airlines scored better than personal-computer companies. Ponder that one for a moment.

[..]

It can’t just be cute ads and Jonathan Ive’s design smarts that keep Apple’s customers happy. Maybe Macs really are more intuitive and pleasurable to use for the average Joe and Jane.

Or maybe it’s Vista. ®

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NASA’s Cassini spacecraft is now a nearly a year into its extended mission, called Cassini Equinox (after its initial 4-year mission ended in June, 2008). The spacecraft continues to operate in good health, returning amazing images of Saturn, its ring system and moons, and providing new information and science on a regular basis. The mission’s name, “Equinox” comes from the upcoming Saturnian equinox in August, 2009, when its equator (and rings) will point directly toward the Sun. The Equinox mission runs through September of 2010, with the possibility of further extensions beyond that. Collected here are 24 more intriguing images from our ringed neighbor. (previously: 1, 2) (24 photos total)

2
Pan, a small ring-embedded moon (28 km/17 mi wide) coasts into view from behind Saturn. The view of the rings is distorted near Saturn by the planet’s upper atmosphere. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 1.8 million km (1.1 million mi) from Pan. Image scale is 11 km (7 mi) per pixel on Pan. (NASA/JPL/SSI) #

15
Small, battered Epimetheus before Saturn’s A and F rings, and and smog-enshrouded Titan (5,150 km/3,200 mi wide) beyond. The color information in the colorized view is artificial: it is derived from red, green and blue images taken at nearly the same time and phase angle as the clear filter image. This color information was overlaid onto a previously released clear filter view in order to approximate the scene as it might appear to human eyes. The view was acquired on April 28, 2006, at a distance of approximately 667,000 km (415,000 mi) from Epimetheus and 1.8 million km (1.1 million mi) from Titan. The image scale is 4 km (2 mi) per pixel on Epimetheus and 11 km (7 mi) per pixel on Titan. (NASA/JPL/SSI) #

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Over the past four years I’ve asked police officers throughout the U.S. (and in Canada) two questions. When’s the last time you had to fight someone under the influence of marijuana? (I’m talking marijuana only, not pot plus a six-pack or a fifth of tequila.) My colleagues pause, they reflect. Their eyes widen as they realize that in their five or fifteen or thirty years on the job they have never had to fight a marijuana user. I then ask: When’s the last time you had to fight a drunk? They look at their watches.

All of which begs the question. If one of these two drugs is implicated in dire health effects, high mortality rates, and physical violence–and the other is not–what are we to make of our nation’s marijuana laws? Or alcohol laws, for that matter.

Anybody out there want to launch a campaign for the re-prohibition of alcohol? Didn’t think so. The answer, of course, is responsible drinking. Marijuana smokers, for their part, have already shown (apart from that little matter known as the law) greater responsibility in their choice of drugs than those of us who choose alcohol.

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C.I.A. interrogators used waterboarding, the near-drowning technique that top Obama administration officials have described as illegal torture, 266 times on two key prisoners from Al Qaeda, far more than had been previously reported.

The C.I.A. officers used waterboarding at least 83 times in August 2002 against Abu Zubaydah, according to a 2005 Justice Department legal memorandum. Abu Zubaydah has been described as a Qaeda operative.

A former C.I.A. officer, John Kiriakou, told ABC News and other news media organizations in 2007 that Abu Zubaydah had undergone waterboarding for only 35 seconds before agreeing to tell everything he knew.

The 2005 memo also says that the C.I.A. used waterboarding 183 times in March 2003 against Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the self-described planner of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

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We do not allow any of our children to be vaccinated. This decision was not based on emotion, but on studying the issue in depth over the course of several months.

How much depth? Well, judge for yourself:

For example, one way to be able to identify all humans beings for life would be to inject them with a harmless virus that is unique to each individual. The body would then develop antibodies to that specific virus, and for the rest of his/her life, this person could now be identified after a simple blood test. I agree that this is a crazy notion, but sadly, governments are wicked and often pursue wicked ideals at the expense of human population.

As a sidenote, I read an interesting statistic this week. It said that the number 1 cause of unnatural death worldwide is being murdered by one’s government.