SNL - The Chronic of Narnia Rap

'So bad yet so.. HaHa...'

SNL - The Chronic of Narnia Rap

Google is rebuffing the Bush administration's demand for a peek at what millions of people have been looking up on the internet's leading search engine — a request that underscores the potential for online databases to become tools for government surveillance.

Google has refused to comply with a White House subpoena first issued last summer, prompting U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales this week to ask a federal judge in San Jose, California for an order to hand over the requested records.

The government wants a list of all requests entered into Google's search engine during an unspecified single week — a breakdown that could conceivably span tens of millions of queries. In addition, it seeks 1 million randomly selected web addresses from various Google databases.

In court papers that the San Jose Mercury News reported on after seeing them Wednesday, the Bush administration depicts the information as vital in its effort to restore online child protection laws that have been struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Yahoo, which runs the internet's second-most used search engine, confirmed Thursday that it had complied with a similar government subpoena.

Google Won't Hand Over Files

India's and China's educational systems — known for producing vast numbers of engineers — are commonly thought to be slowly and steadily overtaking the U.S. in technological leadership. But that may not be the case.

A controversial Duke University study contradicts that perception, pointing out that engineers are defined differently in different places. Those differences give the impression that foreign colleges are graduating more engineers, as measured by U.S. standards, than they really are. In addition to blurring the definition of the term, schools in India and China may not be graduating engineers of the same caliber as those in the United States. And their graduates may not be competitive in a global sense for a variety of reasons, including language issues and job locations.

While the study may augur well for the United States and do much to deflate the "sky is falling" hyperbole about the alarmingly low numbers of qualified engineers here (see Opinion, Dec. 12, page 4), it's not a black-and-white analysis. Some in the field predict a continued drop in the number of U.S. engineering graduates and increased salary pressure from other countries. They point out that current failings of the K-12 educational system in the United States create future risks to U.S. technological dominance.

The 2004 engineering school graduate figures often cited are 352,000 for India and 600,000 for China, according to the Dec. 12 study.

U.S. engineer education not in dire straits: study

Calling all fans of Spam, dead parrots, upper-class twits and lumberjacks! MONTY PYTHON'S PERSONAL BEST, six one-hour specials airing on PBS February 22-March 8, 2006, 9:00-11:00 p.m. ET., showcases the all-time favorites of the groundbreaking masters of sketch comedy: Monty Python.

Each episode will include members of the original Monty Python troupe performing in favorite clips from their unorthodox television series, "Monty Python's Flying Circus," repurposed with exclusive new material. Each of the five living Pythons - John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones and Michael Palin - produced and wrote his own episode, and collaborated to create the sixth special in honor of deceased member Graham Chapman. The episodes will air over a three week period in two-hour blocks on PBS on February 22, March 1 and March 8.

"As the network that originally introduced the fresh and unconventional comedy of Monty Python to America, PBS is proud to present these new specials," said John F. Wilson, PBS senior vice president and co-chief programming executive. "These specials will allow Monty Python fans to learn more about the men who have made them laugh for decades, while introducing a whole new generation to these world-renowned comedians."

Viewers familiar with the Pythons or new to their zany brand of chaos will be treated to the troupe's favorites, including:

* "Michael Palin's Personal Best"--Michael Palin takes a look at one of Britain's most popular leisure pursuits: fish slapping. In possibly the first in-depth documentary on this piscine subject, he examines method, technique and equipment. In between are some of his favorite sketches from "Monty Python's Flying Circus," including the Cheese Shop, Blackmail and, appropriately, the Piranha Brothers.

* "Eric Idle's Personal Best"--Eric Idle returns to the Hollywood Bowl to introduce his favorite skits from "Monty Python's Flying Circus." Idle has been described by some as the third-tallest member of the Monty Python team and this is reflected in his selections, which include the Silly Olympics, Bruces, Lumberjacks and the Hairdressers' Expedition to Mount Everest.

* "Terry Jones' Personal Best"--Terry Jones reveals for the first time that he was the true creative genius behind Monty Python and in fact wrote all the shows himself. This makes the job of selecting his favorites all the harder, but he manages to produce an hour that features The Bishop, News for Parrots, Bicycle Repair Man and the Spanish Inquisition.

* "John Cleese's Personal Best"--John Cleese chooses instructive selections as his favorite sketches from "Monty Python's Flying Circus." Viewers learn how to defend themselves against fresh fruit, perform brain surgery Gumby-style and fly. For music lovers, there's the exploding version of the Blue Danube.

* "Terry Gilliam's Personal Best"--Terry Gilliam is animated about animation as he presents his cartoon favorites f... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

Monty Python's Personal Best

Commentator David Brown offers this appreciation of the campy television show Batman, which premiered on ABC on this day 40 years ago. Brown says for people his age, who were little kids at the time, the Dynamic Duo were larger-than-life superheroes. And, 40 years later, he still appreciates the show's absurdist brillianc

The Campy, Absurdist Brilliance of TV's 'Batman'

We're hearing tales of two scenarios--one pessimistic, one optimistic--for the future of the Net. If the paranoids are right, the Net's toast. If they're not, it will be because we fought to save it, perhaps in a new way we haven't talked about before. Davids, meet your Goliaths.

This is a long essay. There is, however, no limit to how long I could have made it. The subjects covered here are no less enormous than the Net and its future. Even optimists agree that the Net's future as a free and open environment for business and culture is facing many threats. We can't begin to cover them all or cover all the ways we can fight them. I believe, however, that there is one sure way to fight all of these threats at once, and without doing it the bad guys will win. That's what this essay is about.

Here's a brief outline of the article. If you want to go straight to the solution, skip to the third section:

*

Scenario I: The Carriers Win
*

Scenario II: The Public Workaround
*

Scenario III: Fight with Words and Not Just Deeds

Saving the Net: How to Keep the Carriers from Flushing the Net Down the Tubes | Linux Journal

Imagine a large group of small unmanned autonomous aerial vehicles that can fly with the agility of a flock of starlings in a city square at dusk. Imagine linking their onboard computers together across a short-range, high-bandwidth wireless network and configuring them to form an enormous distributed parallel computer. Imagine using this huge computational resource to process the sensory data gathered by the swarm, and to direct its collective actions. You have now grasped the idea of a flying gridswarm. Here at Essex, we are working to bring this vision to reality.

Interesting factoid: a typical flock of starlings (about 2,000 birds) contains as much brain tissue as a single human.

As well as working on airborne gridswarms using UAVs, we are interested in heterogeneous swarms that employ a combination of airborne and terrestrial robots. This allows, for example, the UAVs to direct a ground vehicle to a particular location, or for sensed data from the ground vehicle to be processed on the airborne swarm and its results relayed to a central point for archival.

Gridswarms

Common sense dictates that submerging your high-end PC in cooking oil is not a good idea. But, of course, engineering feats and science breakthroughs were made possible by those who dared to explore the realms of the non-conventional. Members of the Munich-based THG lab are only too happy to confirm this fact. And not only did we find that our AMD Athlon FX-55 and GeForce 6800 Ultra equipped system didn't short out when we filled the sealed shut PC case with cooking oil--but the non-conductive properties of the liquid coupled created a totally cool and quiet high-end PC, devoid of the noise pollution of fans. The PC case - or should we say tank - also offered a new and novel way to display and show off your PC components.

Bad ass! Anyone want to try that?

Strip Out The Fans, Add 8 Gallons of Cooking Oil...

Yesterday's New York Times had an article about Facebook.com discussing the usual stuff about too-much-information, stalking, privacy, etc. But the prank described in the lede of the article was new to me and really funny:

AS far as Kyle Stoneman is concerned, the campus police were the ones who started the Facebook wars. "We were just being, well, college students, and they used it against us," says Mr. Stoneman, a senior at George Washington University in Washington. He is convinced that the campus security force got wind of a party he and some buddies were planning last year by monitoring Facebook.com, the phenomenally popular college networking site. The officers waited till the shindig was in full swing, Mr. Stoneman grouses, then shut it down on discovering under-age drinking.

Mr. Stoneman and his friends decided to fight back. Their weapon of choice? Facebook, of course.

Once again they used the site, which is visited by more than 80 percent of the student body, to chat up a beer blast. But this time, when the campus police showed up, they found 40 students and a table of cake and cookies, all decorated with the word "beer." "We even set up a cake-pong table," a twist on the beer-pong drinking game, he says. "The look on the faces of the cops was priceless." As the coup de gr�ce, he posted photographs of the party on Facebook, including a portrait of one nonplussed officer.

Hahaha!

Facebook prank on police..................

High-integrity software systems are often so large that conventional development processes cannot get anywhere near achieving tolerable defect rates. This article presents an approach that has delivered software with very low defect rates cost-effectively. We describe the technical details of the approach and the results achieved, and discuss how to overcome barriers to adopting such best practice approaches. We conclude by observing that where such approaches are compatible and can be deployed in combination, we have the opportunity to realize the extremely low defect rates needed for high integrity software composed of many million lines of code.

Good read... poor software costs about $60B a year Sheesh..!!!!

Correctness by Construction: A Manifesto for High-Integrity Software