BOSTON (AP) -- Dunkin' Donuts has pulled an online advertisement featuring Rachael Ray after complaints that a fringed black-and-white scarf that the celebrity chef wore in the ad offers symbolic support for Muslim extremism and terrorism.

You see how evil and insidious the terrorists are? That sweet, cute lady Rachael Ray was recruited - probably unknowingly - into being a hell spawn of Satan!

'Paisley' or 'jihad?' Dunkin' Donuts yanks Rachael Ray ad - May. 29, 2008

Ah, birth rate -- funny how it’s become such a taboo subject for both Left and Right. The Lefties wouldn’t dream of telling third-world people to limit their baby-making, and most right wingers can’t bring themselves to endorse birth control even if it could slow the destruction of their own countries.

So birth rate is a weapon without a counter-weapon right now. So it tends to win. The Moroccans made it clear that the Green March was all about birth rate. The number of “volunteers” they sent to the border was 350,000, exactly the number of births per year in Morocco. So this was basically a ”Lebensraum” argument like the one the Germans tried earlier in the century. You might have heard about that one, a little dust-up called the Eastern Front. And you might be saying right now that if any policy ever failed decisively, it was the Nazis’ attempt to elbow themselves a little living space from Stalin. Which is totally true. But the Nazis tried it the old-fashioned way, with armed conquest.

...

That’s what’s funny about the debate right now: the diehards in the U.S. and Europe wish we had the old ruthless will to seal the borders, but the “weakness” of the advanced countries generally works pretty well to turn the immigrants into immigrant-hating locals in a generation or two. The old model, bayonets on the border, isn’t even in the running. Time to face that fact. So the faces will change.

If you can handle these new faces, you’re likely to be surprised to see your “weak” American or European culture win out, slowly, un-gloriously but surely, and you may live long enough to see a whole new crop of pols who look like they just came from Karachi or Kinshasa until you turn the sound on and hear them ranting about how we need to get rid of all these damn immigrants.

THE EXILE - War Nerd: War of the Babies in Taki's Magazine

I nodded, glancing at his hand, which was still on my shoulder. He waved me into the bus.

I had been attending the Cornerstone Church for weeks, but this was really my first day of school. I had joined Cornerstone — a megachurch in the Texas Hill Country — to get a look inside the evangelical mind-set that gave the country eight years of George W. Bush. The church's pastor, John Hagee, is one of the most influential evangelical preachers in the country — not because his ministry is so very large (although he claims up to 4.5 million viewers a week for his Sunday sermons) but because of his near-absolute conquest of a very trendy niche in the market: Christian Zionism.

The whole idea behind Christian Zionism is to align America with the nation of Israel so as to "hurry God up" in his efforts to bring about Armageddon. As Hagee tells it, only after Israel is involved in a final showdown involving a satanic army (in most interpretations, a force of Arabs led by Russians) will Christ reappear. On that happy day, Hagee and his True Believers will be whisked up to Heaven by God, while the rest of us nonbelievers are left behind on Earth to suck eggs and generally suffer various tortures.

Jesus Made Me Puke : Rolling Stone

Of the 564 members of the assembly present for the vote, only four voted to keep the monarchy.

The group met all day in a convention center to reach the agreement and even continued to work after the facility was bombed.

Two apparent bombs damaged the building about 8:20 p.m. local time, said a CNN journalist covering the meetings.

There were no reports of injuries, and the group was back working within 10 minutes of the blasts.

Even though the meeting went late into the evening, a small procession of people could be seen celebrating outside the convention center when the news of political transition was announced.

There was no immediate reaction from the palace, which has rarely commented on political developments in Nepal since King Gyanendra was forced to end his royal dictatorship and restore democracy after widespread protests two years ago.

The country's former rebels, the Maoists, then ended their 10-year communist insurgency and in April won the most seats in the assembly, setting the stage for the end of Nepal's monarchy.

Wow. Three years ago I thought of crossing over into Nepal from India, and the Maoists and the King were killing people. Now the Maoists are elected to run the government. Democracy in action.

Nepal abolishes monarchy - CNN.com

The Internet Layer

If transmission has seen dramatic changes in the past decade then what has happened at the IP layer over the same period?

The glib answer is "absolutely nothing"! But that answer would be gliding over a large amount of activity in this area. We've tried to change many parts of IP in the past decade, but, interestingly, none of the proposed changes have managed to gain any significant traction out there in the network, and IP today is largely no different from IP of a decade ago. Mobility [1], Multicast [2] and IP Security (IPSec) [3] remain poised in the wings, still awaiting adoption by the mainstream of the Internet.

ISP Column - June 2008

Not all forms of internet access were based on dial-up in 1998. ISDN was on use in some places, but it was never cheap enough as a retail service to take over as the ubiquitous access method for the Internet. There were also access services based on Frame Relay, X.25 and various forms of digital data services. At the high end of the speed spectrum there were T-1 access circuits with 1.5Mbps clocking, and T-3 circuits clocked at 45Mbps.

If you were an ISP you leased circuits from a telco. In 1998 the ISP industry was undergoing a general transition of their trunk IP infrastructure from T-1 circuits to T-3 circuits. While it was not going to stop here, squeezing even more capacity from the network was now proving to be a challenge. 622Mbps IP circuits were being deployed, although many of these were constructed using 155Mbps ATM circuits using router load balancing to share the IP load over four of these circuits in parallel. Gigabit circuits were just around the corner, and the initial exercises of running IP over 2.5Gbps SDH circuits were being undertaken in 1998.

ISP Column - June 2008

Glitch Watch - Bingo cashier jailed for exploiting glitch
May 16th, 2008 by Nigel Cheshire. Posted in Glitch Watch

BanburyThe quiet market town of Banbury, Oxfordshire in England is not a place you would expect to see in the news very often. But, according to the Banbury Guardian, a bingo cashier in the town’s Gala bingo hall was jailed this week for stealing approximately $32,000 from her employer.

Apparently, the bingo hall uses a swipe card system, called Buzzcard, that allows patrons to load money onto the card and use it to store winnings. When Emma Meechan, the cashier in question, discovered a misfeature in the system that caused about $335,000 to be mistakenly loaded onto some of the cards, she took advantage of the glitch and pocketed some of the money. Meechan was sentenced to serve 8 months behind bars.

Software Integrity » Blog Archive » Glitch Watch - Bingo cashier jailed for exploiting glitch

Persecutions of Christians

Seeing it as a disruptive force, early in 250 Decius issued the edict for the suppression of Christianity. Exploiting popular hostility as a means of unifying the Empire, the "Decian persecution" famous to Christians began. Another motive for this persecution may have been Decius' religious views and pride in his Empire. He was a Roman of the old style who wished to restore Rome to its ancient glory. However, there were several factors eclipsing this glory: barbarian incursions into the Empire were becoming more and more daring, the ancient traditions were being forgotten, and the Empire was facing a serious economic crisis. To a traditionalist such as Decius, it would seem obvious that these problems were partly caused by the people neglecting the ancient gods. For Rome's ancient glory to return, she would need to return to her ancient religion. Therefore, Decius may have tried to stamp out the Christians because they were daily turning more and more people away from the traditional practices of worship and therefore, according to Decius' religious views, daily turning the gods away from Rome.

Decius (emperor) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Next month, Representative John B. Larson, a Connecticut Democrat, plans to go even further, proposing legislation that would essentially ban over-the-counter trading of energy futures by traders who don’t plan to take physical delivery of the commodity. While Nymex trading would be largely unaffected, billions of other trades could potentially be brought to a halt.

The idea for the bill, Mr. Larson says, came from local suppliers of heating oil, gasoline and diesel in Connecticut, who say the price spike can’t be explained by simple supply and demand. While advocates defend the futures market as a way of hedging against higher prices, Mr. Larson doesn’t buy it. “We see this as nothing short of greed on the part of speculators,” he says.

Perhaps the middle ground is to only let companies that have a reason to hedge to trade futures?

Market Maker - Energy Speculators Draw the Heat - NYTimes.com

Enlightened Perl is an organization which is built around a movement within the Perl community. Its goals are complementary to the Perl Foundation. Specifically, we support certain Perl development efforts that ensure perl's future as an enterprise-grade development platform. Its aims are:

* To encourage the usage of the Perl programming language as a modern, high-level development platform.
* To promote, sponsor and enable the development of Perl modules, add-ons and restorative code that further such use of Perl.
* To collect and distribute appropriate funding and support that encourages this development.
* To provide general encouragement to the wider Perl community. To provide resources for the community in the manner of, but not restricted to or defined by, internet based sites, articles and code.
* To emphasize the concept of a Perl Enlightenment in the continuing development of the Perl community.

Used poorly, Perl is the worst language in widespread usage.

Enlightened Perl Organisation