IF General Motors, Ford and Chrysler get the bailout that their chief executives asked for yesterday, you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye. It won’t go overnight, but its demise will be virtually guaranteed.

Without that bailout, Detroit will need to drastically restructure itself. With it, the automakers will stay the course — the suicidal course of declining market shares, insurmountable labor and retiree burdens, technology atrophy, product inferiority and never-ending job losses. Detroit needs a turnaround, not a check.

I agree with a lot of this. And its Mitt Romney. Bail out detroit - but help with financing the bankruptcy, not with a check to keep a broken companies going. And cap executive payment under the reorganization to get people that GIVE A SHIT in there turning things around, a la the Delta bankruptcy and turnaround.

Op-Ed Contributor - Let Detroit Go Bankrupt - NYTimes.com

Now you can be the protagonist of the petroleum era: explore and drill around the world, corrupt politicians, stop alternative energies and increase the oil addiction. Be sure to have fun before the resources begin to deplete.

Oiligarchy

Amazon CloudFront is a web service for content delivery. It integrates with other Amazon Web Services to give developers and businesses an easy way to distribute content to end users with low latency, high data transfer speeds, and no commitments.

Amazon CloudFront delivers your content using a global network of edge locations. Requests for your objects are automatically routed to the nearest edge location, so content is delivered with the best possible performance. Amazon CloudFront works seamlessly with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) which durably stores the original, definitive versions of your files. Like other Amazon Web Services, there are no contracts or monthly commitments for using Amazon CloudFront – you pay only for as much or as little content as you actually deliver through the service.

Amazon CloudFront

Chinese Hacker Methodology Flowchart

Vegas Launch of MechanixLoop

On November 5th I flew out of Atlanta on my way to Vegas to attend CARS ( Congress of Automotive, Repair, and Service ) which is an ASA sponsored convention that is held along with NACE and SEMA. My mission was to assist Mathew Sweezey in the official US launch of MechanixLoop.com.

The event held much promise for us since we were not only going to have thousands of people walk by our booth but we would get to meet numerous industry experts, companies, and press. This three day adventure into the automotive industry would force us to rapidly adapt pitches, approaches, and goals.

First lets paint a picture of the convention and our location. Imagine a massive convention center holding hundreds of booths similar to any large trade show that you have ever been to. But, instead of being one big square it was more like an L shape with two rows straggling off to the side. At the very end of one of these two rows was our booth on an island. No booths directly on either side and only one behind. This was not the original plan but a few other exhibitors backed out which left us in this predicament.

For MechanixLoop, the plan had not changed. We would still draw people in to tell them our pitch. The only difference now was that we would have to work twice as hard since people would walk near the end or the row but not always down as far as our booth.

Atlanta startup Mechanixloop launches in Vegas.

Vegas Launch of MechanixLoop | JoshSweeney

Recently I needed to implement a CAPTCHA (means: “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart” - on wikipedia) functionality to a sign-up form in flex.

So here is the class:

FLEX{er} » Blog Archive » CAPTCHA in Flex - Main Class

The report identifies two Gulf War "neurotoxic" exposures that "are causally associated with Gulf War illness." The first is the ingestion of pyridostigmine bromide (PB) pills, given to protect troops from effects of nerve agents. The second is exposure to dangerous pesticides used during the conflict.

Gulf War illness is real, new federal report says - CNN.com

The following example shows how you can prevent a user from pressing Enter in a Flex TextArea control by listening for the textInput event and checking the TextEvent object’s text property for a newline character (”\n”).

Full code after the jump.

Its dumb you have to code this, but ok.

Preventing line feeds in a TextArea control in Flex at Flex Examples

Got Pandora. Cancelled Rhapsody. All the music from the Music Genome Project at your fingertips, and it learns what you like on each song/artist themed station as you rate songs thumbs up or thumbs down.

The Bomb.

Pandora Radio - Listen to Free Internet Radio, Find New Music

Update: YouTube: The Platform. YouTube adds a new rich set of APIs in order to become your video platform leader--all for free. Upload, edit, watch, search, and comment on video from your own site without visiting YouTube. Compose your site internally from APIs because you'll need to expose them later anyway.

YouTube grew incredibly fast, to over 100 million video views per day, with only a handful of people responsible for scaling the site. How did they manage to deliver all that video to all those users? And how have they evolved since being acquired by Google?

Information Sources

# Google Video

Platform

# Apache
# Python
# Linux (SuSe)
# MySQL
# psyco, a dynamic python->C compiler
# lighttpd for video instead of Apache

What's Inside?

YouTube Architecture | High Scalability