http://www.ted.com Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor had an opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: One morning, she realized she was having a massive stroke. As it happened -- as she felt...
It's a Class War, Stupid: Election season will be packed with distractions, but the real issue is a matter of life and death | The Smirking Chimp
Topic: Current Events
3:53 pm EDT, Jul 20, 2008
Some combination of all of these things is going to comprise the so-called "national debate" this fall. Now, we live in an age where our media deceptions are so far-reaching and comprehensive that they almost smother reality, at times seeming actually to replace reality — but even in the context of the inane TV-driven fantasyland we've grown used to inhabiting, this year's crude cobbling together of a phony "national conversation" by our political press is an outrageous, monstrously offensive deception. For if, as now seems likely, this fall's election is ultimately turned into a Swan-esque reality show where America is asked to decide if it can tolerate Michelle Obama's face longer than John McCain's diapers, it will be at the expense of an urgent dialogue about a serious nationwide emergency that any sane country would have started having some time ago. And unless you run a TV network or live in Washington, you probably already know what that emergency is.
...
Sanders got letters from working people who have been reduced to eating "cereal and toast" for dinner, from a 71-year-old man who has been forced to go back to work to pay for heating oil and property taxes, from a worker in an oncology department of a hospital who reports that clinically ill patients are foregoing cancer treatments because the cost of gas makes it too expensive to reach the hospital. The recurring theme is that employment, even dual employment, is no longer any kind of barrier against poverty. Not economic discomfort, mind you, but actual poverty. Meaning, having less than you need to eat and live in heated shelter — forgetting entirely about health care and dentistry, which has long ceased to be considered an automatic component of American middle-class life. The key factors in almost all of the Sanders letters are exploding gas and heating oil costs, reduced salaries and benefits, and sharply increased property taxes (a phenomenon I hear about all across the country at campaign trail stops, something that seems to me to be directly tied to the Bush tax cuts and the consequent reduced federal aid to states). And it all adds up to one thing.
------------- Hacker's Myth ------------- This is a statement on the fate of the modern underground. There will be none of the nostalgia, melodrama, black hat rhetoric or white hat over-analysis that normally accompanies such writing. Since the early sixties there has been just one continuous hacking scene. From phreaking to hacking, people came and went, explosions of activity, various geographical shifts of influence. But although the scene seemed to constantly redefine itself in the ebb and flow of technology, it always had a direct lineage to the past, with similar traditions, culture and spirit. In the past few years this connection has been completely severed. And so there's very little point in writing about what the underground used to be; leave that to the historians. Very little point writing about what should be done to make everything good again; leave that to the dreamers and idealists. Instead I'm going to lay down some cold hard facts about the way things are now, and more importantly, how they came to be this way. This is the story of how the underground died.
Bush's Banned Interview | Vidz King - King Of Videos
Topic: Current Events
2:00 pm EDT, Jul 17, 2008
interview conducted by the tenacious Carol Coleman of Radio Television Ireland was not aired on American television, and Bush's press officers apparently complained vociferously about the rigorous questioning.nullnull
It's All Decked Out. Give It Somewhere to Go. - washingtonpost.com
Topic: Science
1:10 am EDT, Jul 17, 2008
Send the ISS somewhere.
The ISS, you see, is already an interplanetary spacecraft -- at least potentially. It's missing a drive system and a steerage module, but those are technicalities. Although it's ungainly in appearance, it's designed to be boosted periodically to a higher altitude by a shuttle, a Russian Soyuz or one of the upcoming new Constellation program Orion spacecraft. It could fairly easily be retrofitted for operations beyond low-Earth orbit. In principle, we could fly it almost anywhere within the inner solar system -- to any place where it could still receive enough solar power to keep all its systems running. nullnull
Recently I had the change to speak with Frank Speiser, who is leading several Cloud Computing projects that should be of interest to the Perl Community and to Catalyst developers in particular. nullnullnull
