Lil J lays one down for sincerity and loving interactions between friends.

YouTube - LIL J SPEAK DA TRUTH TO ALL YALL (NWS)

I'm sorry, I just can't stop. Just the language they're using on the news accounts--like, when it's some Special Olympics star who wins a gold medal for finishing the 100-yard dash in under six minutes, nobody'd ever say "retarded." He's "special." But interfere with all the upbeat "surge working" stories and you're just a dead retard.

Then there's the matter of like, how do they know? I mean, "retarded" compared to who--the average suicide bomber? If this proves that Al Q. is "scraping the bottom of the barrel" for recruits, does that mean they had aptitude tests till now? "We are sorry, Rashid, but your SAT scores do not qualify you to wear a vest and pull a string."

...

fast-forward to the grimmest war at all for a frontline soldier: 1914, the Western Front. Now that was a suicide mission, going over the top. After a few months they all knew it was totally pointless, too--machine guns beat charging infantry every single time, but the gung-ho officers refused to admit it.

Take a machine gun bullet in the belly out there and you were going to die all right. But not by nice quick beheading. You were going to (a) die of peritonitis if you were lucky enough to be dragged back to your lines; (b) be forgotten in No-Man's land and bleed out, which means freezing to death as your circulatory system loses the power to keep your body warm; (c) be eaten alive, or half-alive, by the rats that swarmed between the trenches; or (d) lie there until the next bombardment sent a shell--just as likely your own side's as the enemy's--to plow up the blood/mud mush one more time and just by accident blow your infected mess of a body into vapor.

When you compare that death to the one the average Iraqi suicide bomber gets, well my God, even a retard could figure out which is better.

THE EXILE - Not Your Usual High-IQ Suicide Bombers, Huh? - By Gary Brecher - The War Nerd

Heading down to the beach or up the coast but not far enough to load up the car? Racks make it a snap to sling your board on your bike and go. Now this is a great idea!

SurfDogz.com

Introducing Komodo IDE 4.2

New! ActiveState's Komodo IDE 4.2 helps developers create great applications using dynamic languages and open technologies.

Award-winning tools for debugging, code intelligence, visual code navigation and the regular expression toolkit help developers write cleaner code faster, while source code control integration, a project manager and multi-user support assist in team development.
With improved performance for all supported languages (including Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby & Tcl, HTML, CSS, JavaScript and XML), simple Firefox-style extensibility, and flexible multi-platform licensing for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, Komodo IDE has developed smart tools with developer freedom and choice in mind.

Goodbye Eclipse, goodby out of memory, goodby clobbered working copy, goodbye stalls, goodbye pinwheel, goodbye broken projects, goodbye disappearing java nature, goodbye horrible JSEclipse.

Hello simple IDE that works.

ActiveState - Komodo IDE Overview - Dynamic Tools for Dynamic Languages

Karl Rove Joins FOX News Channel

NEW YORK, February 5: Karl Rove, the senior advisor and former deputy chief of staff to U.S. President George W. Bush, has joined FOX News Channel (FNC) as a contributor, making his debut on the 24-hour cable news network during today’s live prime-time coverage of Super Tuesday.

During his time at the White House, Rove oversaw the Office of Political Affairs, Office of Public Liaison, Office of Strategic Initiatives and Intergovernmental Affairs Office. Rove also previously served as the chief strategist for the Bush-Cheney 2000 Presidential campaign, and was also the president of Karl Rove & Company, a public-affairs firm based in Austin, Texas.

Karl Rove Joins FOX News Channel

Sheldon Brown: 1944 - 2008

02/03/08:

Dear Harris Cyclery friends and customers,
It is with heavy hearts that we convey to you the news that Sheldon Brown has passed away. Our thoughts go out to his family at this time. The cycling community has lost one of its most passionate members.

02/05/08:

Thank you all for your condolences and remembrances of Sheldon.
There will be a memorial service in early March. Details will be posted as available.

Sheldon Brown was a super cool cat.

Harris Cyclery-West Newton, Massachusetts Bicycle Shop

$72 billion isn't what it used to be.

Kerviel received a base pay for 2007 of $87,000 before tax and a $435,000 bonus, or half what he was asking for. In his testimony, he says he had actually made an $80 million profit for the bank last year, but couldn't tell anyone because that would have led to his unmasking.

His testimony is self-serving, of course, but what's striking is the disparity between the sums he was earning and the amounts he was allowed to play with in his job. He told prosecutors that his first big career win came early on as a trader, in 2005, when he shorted stock of German insurer Allianz (AZ) and earned the bank $720,000. Under such circumstances, it's easy to see how numbers become so abstract that they bear no relationship to reality.

The $72 billion position he amassed in the end is the equivalent to the gross domestic product of Tunisia. But to Kerviel the whole thing appears to have seemed more like a game. Proponents of financial market globalization like to talk about the huge advances that have been made by innovative financial engineering, such as the advent of exotic financial derivatives of the type SocGen packages, sells and trades.

But taken together with the U.S. subprime crisis - in which U.S. banks packaged thousands of deadbeat mortgage loans into leveraged securities that they then sold on to often unwitting investors - one of the big questions raised by the Kerviel affair is whether the world of finance has lost touch with the real world it's supposed to be financing, and what's needed to bring it back into line.

The total volume of financial derivatives of one sort or another floating around the world greatly exceeds the world's GDP. A scandal of this nature may be just what the doctor ordered to make regulators and the banks themselves ponder whether that's so smart.

4 things I learned from the Soci�t� G�n�rale scandal - Feb. 1, 2008

In this article, I’m going to demonstrate how we can use Microsoft Excel to build a simple report from data stored on a MySQL database.

Interfacing with MySQL via Excel - HTNet

There's just one problem: there isn't going to be a non-white majority in the US in the 21st century. And probably not in the 22nd or 23rd, either. The "coming non-white majority" myth is based on a misuse of the arbitrary racial classification system adopted in the 1970s, which assigns all Americans to the categories of white, black, Asian, native American or "Hispanic." According to the government, "Hispanics" may be of any race as long as they are of Latin American ancestry. So, a blond, blue-eyed Argentinian-American whose grandparents showed up from Germany in Argentina mysteriously in 1946 is a "Hispanic" while an Arab-American Muslim is a "non-Hispanic white."

The myth of the non-white majority is based on treating "Hispanic" as the name of a race. Adding all Hispanics to all blacks and Asians makes it possible to claim that California and Texas already have "non-white" majorities, and that the US as a whole will follow in the second half of this century. But if you don't treat Hispanics as members of a single race, then the picture looks quite different. According to the census bureau, the US population in 2050 will look like this: non-Hispanic white, 50.1 per cent; Hispanic, 24.4 per cent; Asian, 8 per cent; black, 14.6 per cent, with a small residuum in other categories. The non-Hispanic white share of the population will drop from 69.4 per cent in 2000 to a bare majority in 2050.

...

Nor is there any long-term danger of the US becoming permanently polarised between anglophones and Spanish speakers. Among second-generation Hispanics, roughly half speak no Spanish at all, while fewer than 10 per cent speak only Spanish. By the third and fourth generations, Hispanics in the US are almost completely anglophone. In their rate of linguistic assimilation, they resemble the European immigrants of earlier generations. The claim that in a globalised, wired world the incentives for linguistic assimilation are weakened appears to be false, at least in the case of American Hispanics. And they are the only group that count, in this respect, because all other linguistic minorities in the US are negligible, as a percentage of the total population.

If you put these trends together, you get a mega-trend that is the opposite of the conventional wisdom: when the most recent, yet-to-be-assimilated immigrants are factored out, the long-term trend in the US is towards less racial, cultural and linguistic diversity. There are some causes for concern, notably the possibility that the bipolar white/non-white system will give way to a black/non-black system, with blacks excluded from an informal social definition of "whiteness" that includes Hispanics and Asians. Nonetheless, the melting pot, which blends previously disparate groups into a single group, is still working in the US. In the 20th century, the melting pot turned once-distinct Anglo-Americans, Germans, Irish, Poles, Greeks, Jews, Italians and Lebanese into boringly similar "non-Hispanic whites." In this century, the American melting pot will blend most of today's old and new racial groups into a single English-speaking American cultural majority of mixed, mostly European ancestry.

America still works

The Right To Travel

As the Supreme Court notes in Saenz v Roe, 98-97 (1999), the Constitution does not contain the word "travel" in any context, let alone an explicit right to travel (except for members of Congress, who are guaranteed the right to travel to and from Congress). The presumed right to travel, however, is firmly established in U.S. law and precedent. In U.S. v Guest, 383 U.S. 745 (1966), the Court noted, "It is a right that has been firmly established and repeatedly recognized." In fact, in Shapiro v Thompson, 394 U.S. 618 (1969), Justice Stewart noted in a concurring opinion that "it is a right broadly assertable against private interference as well as governmental action. Like the right of association, ... it is a virtually unconditional personal right, guaranteed by the Constitution to us all." It is interesting to note that the Articles of Confederation had an explicit right to travel; it is now thought that the right is so fundamental that the Framers may have thought it unnecessary to include it in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights.
Thanks to Marko Liias for the idea. Thanks to W.H. van Atteveldt for the note about Congressional travel.

Things That Are Not In the U.S. Constitution - The U.S. Constitution Online - USConstitution.net