American Marines are a proud, tough bunch. They expect to be sent into the most dangerous battles and expect enemy fighters to come at them with everything they have. But they also expect, and have every right to expect, the Pentagon to provide them with the most effective armor available to maximize their chances of staying alive and in one piece

regardless of your view of the war this should be regarded as a scandal. Rumsfeld and his delusions about how the war and the military should be run have a lot to answer for.

Marines without armor - Editorials & Commentary - International Herald Tribune

[ Some MacIntel lovin from PA. -k]

Penny Arcade! - Oh My Dear Sweet Lord

New Apple goodies today, y'all!

Apple

Oh, it's so hard to be young these days! Just crack open Generation Debt: Why Now Is a Terrible Time To Be Young, by Anya Kamenetz, or Strapped: Why America's 20-and-30-Somethings Can't Get Ahead, by Tamara Draut, and you're plunged into a world of darkness and sorrow.

This is, with apologies to the Broadway musical Avenue Q, the "It Sucks To Be Me" Generation. To hear these authors tell it, college graduates (and twentysomethings who haven't gone to college) are in a world of hurt. The deck is stacked against them: student loans and credit-card debt, budget deficits and McJobs, high housing prices and generational warfare waged by more-numerous baby-boomers.

The It-Sucks-To-Be-Me Generation - Twentysomethings who can't stop whining about how the economy is screwing them. By Daniel Gross

A mother in New York is suing an Applebee's restaurant after her 5-year-old son was allegedly served a Long Island Iced Tea instead of apple juice.

Cynthia Pereles said she took her son Seth to dinner at the franchised restaurant in Battery Park City and ordered him an apple juice.

Pereles said she did not realize her son was drinking a concoction of white rum, gin, vodka, triple sec, Coke and sweet-and-sour mix until it was too late. The boy's eyes became glazed and he began to laugh uncontrollably, according to a report.

Hm. Well, I'm not saying I don't believe it, but, wow.

local6.com - News - Mom Sues After 5-Year-Old Allegedly Served Long Island Iced Tea

How well do the services work? The Chicago Sun-Times paid $110 to Locatecell.com to purchase a one-month record of calls for this reporter's company cell phone. It was as simple as e-mailing the telephone number to the service along with a credit card number. The request was made Friday after the service was closed for the New Year's holiday.

On Tuesday, when it reopened, Locatecell.com e-mailed a list of 78 telephone numbers this reporter called on his cell phone between Nov. 19 and Dec. 17. The list included calls to law enforcement sources, story subjects and other Sun-Times reporters and editors.

Um, wow. If this is all it seems to be, I want to set some people on fire...

Your phone records are for sale

[ Jesus. I'd've hit his ass wit my car. -k]

YouTube - Crazy psycho attacks car

Intriguing.

The McKinsey Quarterly: IT remedies for US health care: An interview with WellPoint's Leonard Schaeffer

Some Thoughts for Howard Dean, Harry Reid, Bob Schrum, Donna Brazile, John Podesta, Nancy Pelosi, and the Rest of the Shit-for-Brains So-Called Leaders of the Democratic Party, at the Start of 2006, a Year Which Will Either Restore the Party to Political Relevance or Witness Its Ultimate Humiliation and Extinction

Pretty on point.

The Blog | Andrew Foster Altschul: | The Huffington Post

DAVID GELERNTER

What are people well-informed about in the Information Age?

Let's date the Information Age to 1982, when the Internet went intooperation & the PC had just been born. What if people have been growing less well-informed ever since? What if people have been growing steadily more ignorant ever since the so-called Information Age began?

Suppose an average US voter, college teacher, 5th-grade teacher, 5th-grade student are each less well-informed today than they were in '95, and were less well-informed then than in '85? Suppose, for that matter, they were less well-informed in '85 than in '65?

If this is indeed the "information age," what exactly are people well-informed about? Video games? Clearly history, literature, philosophy, scholarship in general are not our specialities. This is some sort of technology age — are people better informed about science? Not that I can tell. In previous technology ages, there was interest across the population in the era's leading technology.

This is a response that has gotten me to thinking, as it touches on areas in which I have a strong interest...

He's right, in part, I think. I believe that we're only just on the cusp of entering the "Information" age, and have recently been living in the "Data" age. The explosion of technology to sort, process and create vast quatities of data have really made us advanced tool users, but the utility has limits. The generation we're entering now is the one which will give us tools that are capable of transforming our data into information. Of taking the raw material and offering up something which can be acted upon and used. Without a doubt, this site, and it's brethren, are the initial steps in that direction.

Modern, connected individuals have access to vastly more data than any past generation, both secondarily (in computer memories) and primarily (in their own brains). What they don't necessarily have is the capacity to organize, correlate and recall those data. The perception expressed above derives from this very fact... we seem less informed because we've absorbed too much. Limited sources allowed for simpler analysis. The virtually unlimited sources available to us now make even tentative certainty a goal requiring more time and effort than in the past. Couple that with the known fact that those sources are of widely variable and often unknown quality, and the job becomes even harder. The tools don't exist yet to really alleviate this problem, but as they come into being, we'll become capable of astonishing things.

David Gelernter surely understands all these things better than I... his writings and his company are (were? the site www.scopeware.com appears to be a squatter) based on the solutions to data overloading.

THE WORLD QUESTION CENTER 2005