Mike the Usurper wrote:

So Judy is now going to share notes from the reporting she did on Wilson in June 2003. I suspect those notes already reflect information gleaned from the INR memo. And I suspect Judy will be forced to identify a tidy network of sources on Wilson, including Libby and Bolton, but maybe Hadley and others.

All I can say is, this is a brilliant analysis of what may be going on with the Fitzgerald probe.

These cats make it feel all... WhiteWaterish. And I don't mean in that they just slap a -gate on everything. It's 5:40AM, and I gotta tell ya that reading this felt like watching 'All the President's Men' on Fenergan. Cause... well, cause I'm on Fenergan. Anyway, good link!

RE: The Next Hurrah: Sweet Judy Blew Lies

Pop quiz: Which language boasts faster raw allocation performance, the Java language, or C/C ? The answer may surprise you -- allocation in modern JVMs is far faster than the best performing malloc implementations. The common code path for new Object() in HotSpot 1.4.2 and later is approximately 10 machine instructions (data provided by Sun; see Resources), whereas the best performing malloc implementations in C require on average between 60 and 100 instructions per call (Detlefs, et. al.; see Resources). And allocation performance is not a trivial component of overall performance -- benchmarks show that many real-world C and C programs, such as Perl and Ghostscript, spend 20 to 30 percent of their total execution time in malloc and free -- far more than the allocation and garbage collection overhead of a healthy Java application (Zorn; see Resources).

Java theory and practice: Urban performance legends, revisited

Ze ex-girlfriend went to Tiananmen square. Nobody there has a fucking clue what happened. Must be strange for them to see the tourists get all teary and have no idea why. I seem to remember that someone grabbed this guy and took him into the crowd, but the video doesn't show it.

tiananmen tank man.mov (video/quicktime Object)

Cisco� 1800 Series integrated services routers intelligently embed data, security, and wireless technology into a single, resilient system for fast, secure, delivery of mission-critical business applications to small-to-medium sized businesses and small branch offices.

Cisco 1800 Series Integrated Services Routers - Products & Services - Cisco Systems

FastAccess Business Speed 768 is engineered to maximize availability and preserve speeds of 768Kbps downstream x 512Kbps upstream to and from your router. This offering is well suited for server hosting, such as Web hosting or e-mail hosting. Additionally, this product can be used for applications requiring uploading of large files such as managing an e-commerce Web site.

This is apparently the best DSL offered to business, for streaming of the data.

BellSouth 768/512 DSL

Gmail is the bomb. Sometimes I wonder what they are doing with all my email, though.

Gmail - Inbox

Or: Why work 8 hours/day for someone else when you can
work 16 hours/day for yourself?

I've been a consultant of one form or another since 1985 when I started
my old company, V-Systems, with a friend from college, and actually did
bits and pieces of consulting as early as 1982. I have been asked often
about the business, and I decided to write this up.

Please note that I am providing observations from my own personal
experience, but I am not providing tax or legal advice. You need
to pay somebody for that, and I'm not qualified.

Furthermore, I am not even attempting to make this a comprehensive
guide for everything required by one in or contemplating the
consulting business. I am purposely omitting whole areas,
such as licensure, insurance, and negotiating — there are other
books for that, and this isn't trying to be one of them.

These sections (except the last) aren't in any particular order.

This is a pretty good introduction to consulting, from a guy with plenty of experience, and a low dork handicap.

So you want to be a consultant...?

This commercial is badass. I don't know much about Areva. But this commercial is just really fucking cool. Reminds me of something Edward Tufte would do.

I guess this is part of the campaign to build new nuclear reactors. You know what? It worked. I'm now pro-nuclear. That pretty cartoony happy-fun nuclear commercial has me sold. Also, I want to play sims now. And if I can get it that way I want my nucular in Blue. I think it would look good in blue.

Areva TV Ad: Super Cool

It is important to note that the absence of a two-way conversation in American television also means that there is no "meritocracy of ideas" on television. To the extent that there is a "marketplace" of any kind for ideas on television, it is a rigged market, an oligopoly, with imposing barriers to entry that exclude the average citizen. The German philosopher, Jurgen Habermas, describes what has happened as "the refeudalization of the public sphere." That may sound like gobbledygook, but it's a phrase that packs a lot of meaning. The feudal system which thrived before the printing press democratized knowledge and made the idea of America thinkable, was a system in which wealth and power were intimately intertwined, and where knowledge played no mediating role whatsoever. The great mass of the people were ignorant. And their powerlessness was born of their ignorance.

Good read. Only... I wish it could be packed into a 5 second blurb, so it might actually have some effect.

You know what Google Ads put up for this article? 'Pet Cremation Services.'

Pet Cremation Services.

Al Gore tells it like it is

NEW YORK (Reuters) -
A spike in gasoline prices is fueling what could be the biggest year for U.S. bicycle sales since the Arab oil embargoes more than three decades ago, a leading bike association says.

Carpe Diem!

Gasoline spike fuels surge in bicycle sales - Oct. 6, 2005