What if the federal government were about to give away more than $400 billion in grants, but only people whose computers ran on Microsoft software could apply?

That is the predicament that many scientists, scholars and others say they are in as the government enters the final phase of its five-year effort to streamline its grant-application process.

Nice!

New Grant System Excludes Mac Users

While touch sensing is commonplace for single points of contact, multi-touch sensing enables a user to interact with a
system with more than one finger at a time, as in chording and bi-manual operations.
Such sensing devices are inherently also able to accommodate multiple users simultaneously,
which is especially useful for larger interaction scenarios such as interactive walls and tabletops.

So fucking cool.

Multi-Touch Interaction Research

Deutsche: It was known that I, uh, was an undergrad when I was with the Bush campaign. It was known that I was an undergrad when I worked for the inaugural committee. When NASA hired me, they knew that I was an undergrad. The only real, uh, the only room here for misinterpretation could be my resume. And I, you know, if there, if my resume is misleading, I take responsibility for that, no question, I do. Um, and I didn't never mean for that to happen. But I have never ever lied about my status, I have never tried to misrepresent that to anyone. If my resume was misleading, I take, I take responsibility, but that's not it, it's not about my resume. It's about this larger issue, it's about the agenda of global warming, and how these people are willing to resort to smearing a 24 year old junior appointee in an effort to just get one step ahead in their agenda, to get a little bit more face time in the media.

"I take responsibility, only, it was really the fault of these loonies who think that we're harming the environment... they're out to get me because I dared to tell the truth about the fact that there's no such thing as global warming. The fact that I totally lied on my resume is irrelevant."

Gimme a break, you lying sack of shit. Just because 75% of your bosses get away with lies doesn't make it guaranteed. If that shit happened to me, I'd have gotten fired. Fuck resignation... FIRED. And I'd be working at some monkey tech support job, more than likely, because no one wants to hire an uneducated liar. Or maybe I'm wrong... I guess Deutsche's situation proves that some people actually do hire uneducated liars.

And, while I'm at it, why is it that we allow people to use the word "agenda" and immediately discount the promoters of said agenda? Fuck yeah, they have an agenda... establishing the primacy of scientific logic over political bullshit is an agenda, and it's one that I have no problem getting behind. Fucking infuriating punkass kid.

Dispatches from the Culture Wars

1) Profits are up, but the wages and the incomes of average Americans are down.
2) More and more people are deeper and deeper in debt.
3) Job creation has not kept up with population growth, and the employment rate has fallen sharply.
4) Poverty is on the rise.
5) Rising health care costs are eroding families' already declining income.

Short and to the point.

via the Economic Policy Institute.

What's wrong with the economy?

FOUR decades after being censored by The Ed Sullivan Show, the Rolling Stones — average age 62 — once again were told that their lyrics were too sexually explicit, when they performed three songs at the Super Bowl in Detroit

ugh.

Stones are still too blue for Americans

Holy Fuck I want one.

YouTube - Model Fighter Jet

Someone has re-cut Fight Club as a romantic comedy. It turns out that practically any weighty or horrific film can be re-cut as a romantic comedy with enough jaunty "Meet so-and-so!" voice-over and uptempo brass-band background music.

Boing Boing: Fight Club trailer as a romantic comedy

Ha! "Not Yours."

Funny Picture of the Day

ne day after President Bush vowed to reduce America's dependence on Middle East oil by cutting imports from there 75 percent by 2025, his energy secretary and national economic adviser said Wednesday that the president didn't mean it literally.
What the president meant, they said in a conference call with reporters, was that alternative fuels could displace an amount of oil imports equivalent to most of what America is expected to import from the Middle East in 2025

Of course it was. I mean, he certainly wouldn't want to prevent Exxon from having another record breaking year.

Or maybe that's not it, but it hardly matters.

Anyone who still thinks describing this administration as "Orwellian" is hyperbole isn't paying attention. Any of these guys can say literally whatever the hell they want and have a whole army of direct and indirect underlings twist, distort and recast it in whatever way (or, even better, in different and variously contradictory ways) they want. It's pure disinformation.

Of course, the SOTU is, and always has been in my memory, nothing but a PR event to restate strong points for your base and rally the troops. The fact that "journalists" still treat it as if anyone's saying anything fucking useful is another sign of their ongoing irrelevance. And the fact that lately you can't even take the rally cries at face value only exacerbates the problem..

KR Washington Bureau | 02/01/2006 | Administration backs off Bush's vow to reduce Mideast oil imports

Hell yeah! The King *and* the Queen!

Brooke Burke is the Burger Queen - The Superficial - www.thesuperficial.com