Delta-Northwest deal could mean fewer cheap seats
If a big airline combination is approved, frugal fliers could feel the pinch.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- It may be time to wave goodbye to some of those discount fares. If Delta Air Lines and Northwest Airlines complete a merger to form the largest U.S. airline, travelers can expect fewer deals and higher fares on some remote routes.

A combination has been rumored for weeks and reports Tuesday indicated that a deal was close.

Airlines generally try to keep flights as full as possible, and the proposed new carrier would continue that trend. "If all the planes are full," said Rick Seaney, founder of fare search site FareCompare, "they can increase prices and have them stick."

With fewer available seats, airlines cut back on the supply of cheapest seats first.

Well duh, that was the stated goal of a merger from the start: reduce the number of flights overall to make a combined airline (and industry) profitable. Delta eats NorthWest. And then American or United eats Continental. And then they all start charging enough to cover their costs, and I get to keep my silverware in business class.

Delta-Northwest deal could mean fewer cheap seats - Feb. 19, 2008

Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear wants 12 casinos in his state that he says will generate $600 million in taxes a year to help pay for education and other key services. This is a game of chance, but it's one the voters of Kentucky should get to decide.

For Kentucky casinos to become a reality, Beshear's proposal must first be passed in the General Assembly, which is expected to take up the measure almost immediately. If it passes there, a constitutional amendment will be placed on the state ballot this fall, allowing Kentuckians to decide if they want casinos. The proposal calls for seven casinos at the state's horse tracks, including Northern Kentucky's Turfway. The other five would be free-standing gambling palaces in various regions of the state, including one in Campbell or Kenton counties. Just where the free-standing casinos would go would require voter approval in the host communities.

Let voters decide on Ky. casinos - The Enquirer

Hating the war, loving the war, hating himself for loving it. For Babchenko, war is like an abusive lover he can't let go of. It's a relationship, he argues, that can be fully understood only by those who have been in battle. "In war a person [becomes] some other kind of creature," he writes. "We don't have just five senses; there is a sixth, seventh, tenth even, growing from our bodies like tentacles and grafting themselves onto the war. And through them we feel the war. You can't talk about war with someone who has never been there, not because they are stupid or dimwitted, but because they don't have the senses to feel it with."

Unfortunately, there are half a million Americans and counting returning from Iraq and Afghanistan today who know exactly what he's talking about. *

'One Soldier's War,' a memoir by Arkady Babchenko - Los Angeles Times

“Chasing the Flame” argues, as Vieira de Mello himself once did, that the United Nations is often unfairly blamed for failures to protect the vulnerable or deter aggression, when the real failure is that of the great powers standing behind it. Those powers are seldom willing to give it sufficient resources, attention and boots on the ground to accomplish the ambitious mandates they set for it. At present, the United Nations is involved in eight separate peacekeeping operations in Africa alone; failure in a high-profile case like Darfur (which seems likely) will once again discredit the organization. Power (who has been a foreign policy adviser to Barack Obama) makes the case for powerful countries like the United States putting much greater effort into making the institution work.

In the end, the book does not make a persuasive case that the United Nations will ever be able to evolve into an organization that can deploy adequate amounts of hard power or take sides in contentious political disputes. Its weaknesses as a bureaucracy and its political constraints make it very unlikely that the United States and other powerful countries will ever delegate to it direct control over their soldiers or trust it with large sums of money. But surely the life and death of Sergio Vieira de Mello is a good place to begin a serious debate about the proper way to manage world order in the future.

Chasing the Flame - Samantha Power - Book Review - New York Times

Orange is a component-based data mining software. It includes a range of preprocessing, modelling and data exploration techniques. It is based on C components, that are accessed either directly (not very common), through Python scripts (easier and better), or through GUI objects called Orange Widgets.
Orange is distributed free under GPL and can be downloaded from the download page.

Orange

The director, Seth Gordon, is hard at work at a screenplay for The King of Kong, which he will then sell to have a fictional movie made. Or, as I am saying, a second fictional movie, but one where he can see 100% of the profits of the picture without having to cut in any of the people whose lives he just took a galactic dump on. Let me be clear: he fucked these people. He couldn't have fucked them worse than if he strapped them across a air-hockey table and sodomized them with a Wico Command Control Joystick. He interviewed them, had them retrieve archival footage and materials going back decades, recorded them at their homes, their places of work, and at events that they put up at their own expense and time, and then he painted them in clown makeup and threw pies at them for an hour and 19 minutes.

lol, haven't seen it but what a lambasting

ASCII by Jason Scott: The King of Wrong

SASS:CMS is a lite weight open source content management system in development with non-profits in mind. SASS::CMS comes complete with a web based backend management application where administrators can grant various levels of access and control to various members of your organization.

A friend at the Sopo Bike Coop ( http://sopobikes.org ) made this CMS for non-profits. Simple, neat and effective. Uses Catalyst.

SASS::CMS - Non-Profit Content Management System

Air France-KLM to invest in Delta-Northwest: report
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Air France-KLM Group , Europe's biggest airline, plans to invest in a combined Delta Air Lines Inc and Northwest Airlines Corp carrier in exchange for a board seat, Bloomberg said on its Website on Wednesday.

The size of Air France's potential stake has not been set yet, Bloomberg said, citing people familiar with the matter.

Industry experts have been expecting Air France-KLM, which already has a marketing partnership with Delta and Northwest as part of SkyTeam global alliance, to provide strategic or financial help to the two U.S. airlines.

Delta/NW + Air France/KLM + Alitalia = Mega Airline

Air France-KLM to invest in Delta-Northwest: report

A sort of steampunk emporium, it contained, among other items, innumerable sextants, globes, ship captain’s spy glasses, the brass weighted boots from an ancient diver’s outfit, and a bowl of “tiger tooths”. We now present, with great excitement, pictures from the Grand Bazaar, and the steampunk delight we found within.

Curious Expeditions » Blog Archive » Bazaarly Wonderful

Romeo Dev, the world's smallest bodybuilder

At 2'9" and a mere one and a half stone, Aditya "Romeo" Dev is the world's smallest bodybuilder.

Romeo Dev, the world's smallest bodybuilder - Telegraph