news aggregator

May 14, 2008

05:00
Real Estate Doom
Your canoe is going over the falls, says Gary North. You can hear the roar of the water. Swim for it!
Source: LewRockwell.com
05:00
What, Those Magic Beans Called 'Ethanol'?
Never mind, says Vin Suprynowicz.
Source: LewRockwell.com
05:00
Playing the Race Card?
Or is it the intimidation card? Article by Patrick J. Buchanan.
Source: LewRockwell.com
05:00
How Can You Tell the Drug Czar Is Lying?
His lips are moving, says Paul Armentano.
Source: LewRockwell.com
05:00
<a href="http://haproxy.1wt.eu/10g.html
HAProxy L7 load balancing at 10Gbps. Now that's what I call performance.
Source: Wes Felter
04:40
NASA Phoenix Mission Ready For Mars Landing
Several readers relayed the press release from JPL about the upcoming landing of NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander on May 25. It's going to set down in the north polar regions and look for indications of whether conditions have even been favorable for microbial life. "Phoenix will enter the top of the Martian atmosphere at almost 21,000 kilometers per hour... In seven minutes, the spacecraft must complete a challenging sequence of events to slow to about 8 kilometers per hour... before its three legs reach the ground. Confirmation of the landing could come as early as 7:53 p.m. EDT. 'This is not a trip to grandma's house. Putting a spacecraft safely on Mars is hard and risky,' said Ed Weiler, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. 'Internationally, fewer than half the attempts have succeeded.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot
02:11
Youngsters Skip DVR Ads Less Than Seniors
Dekortage writes "Analyzing DVR viewing research, Ad Age has noted something unexpected: older DVR users are more likely to skip ads than younger DVR users. The skew is particularly apparent among men: 50% of seniors skipping all the ads, but only 20% of teens do so. Women of any age group tend to be around 35%. Ad Age hypothesizes that younger viewers 'just pay attention to other media when the ads are on TV or, worse yet, perhaps the TV is just "background music"...' I always thought that ad skipping was a major benefit of DVRs. Do you skip all the ads?"Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot

May 13, 2008

23:40
Videos and Report From Embedded Linux Conference
Thomas Petazzoni writes "The fourth edition of Embedded Linux Conference was held from April 15 to 17 in Mountain View, California. With more than fifty talks and tutorials around the use of Linux in embedded devices, this conference covered a wide range of topics: power management, debugging techniques, system size reduction, flash filesystems, embedded distributions, real-time, graphics and video, security, etc. For those who could not attend the conference, Free Electrons has published under a free license videos of nineteen talks and an extensive report of them. You can for example watch Andrew Morton's keynote, Klaas van Gend's talk about the real-time version of the Linux kernel, or Mike Anderson's tutorial on the use of JTAG probes for kernel debugging."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot
22:11
Photos/Videos from NY/Boston trip
I'm accumulating a photo log of my east coast trip on Flickr. There's a puzzle on one of the pics. Why are bus signs so high off the ground? Hint: It has nothing to do with snow.
Source: Scripting News
21:49
A View From Inside the OLPC Project
icknay writes "Here's an interesting rant on the OLPC from someone who worked there, including: 'The core mistake of the present Sugar approach is that it couples phenomenally powerful ideas about learning — that it should be shared, collaborative, peer to peer, and open — with the notion that these ideas must come presented in an entirely new graphical paradigm. We reject this coupling as untenable. Choosing to reinvent the desktop UI paradigm means we are spending our extremely over-constrained resources fighting graphical interfaces, not developing better tools for learning.' I have an OLPC, and the OS itself seems quite unfinished. I buy the argument that it would be better to focus on Sugar as educational software, and let it run on Linux, Windows, whatever."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot
21:26
Tuesday political notes
Tuesdays bring political news and today is no different. First, an op-ed in today's New York TImes from 1972 Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern. I worked for McGovern, he was the last candidate before Obama that I believed in, this was when there was a draft and a war, and I was draft age, but not old enough to vote. Something I didn't know -- Hubert Humphrey led a challenge to the California delegation that made McGovern and his staff fight for the nomination through the convention, and according to McG this led to his defeat in November. This was news to me. McGovern wrote: "After winning the California primary in June, I thought I had the nomination in hand. But a desperate slash-and-burn effort was pressed against me by the candidates I had defeated. California's delegates that year were allocated under a winner-take-all system, but my opponents -- led by Senator Hubert Humphrey, my lifelong friend -- began clamoring to change the rules and to assign the state's delegates proportionally." The whole story is good reading. Also division in the Democratic Party led to the election of Nixon in 1968 and Reagan in 1980. Key takeaway -- HRC is playing with fire when they hold out the possibility of fighting Obama's nomination all the way to the convention. She won as expected tonight in West Virginia. Her speech was not in any way a concession, she's not looking to land the plane. Her advocates are talking dangerous election-losing talk. Meanwhile, as Mickeleh says on Twitter, the really big news of the night -- the Dems won a special election in Mississippi, a district that the Republicans fought hard for. Mississippi is deep in the heart of Republican territory. Olbermann said it's as if the Dems lost a seat in Brooklyn. It's serious and very positive news for change. Poor Huckabee was on MSNBC when the news of the Childers win came in. He didn't spin, came right out and said the news was every bit as bad for Republicans as it appears. Russert gave him credit for saying openly what Republicans had been saying privately. Meanwhile President Bush predictably, desperately threw FUD at the process, warning that if Obama is elected there could be another major terrorist attack on US soil. Thanks for the terrorism, Mr. President.
Source: Scripting News
21:11
The firearms column
“While America awaits the decision from the Supreme Court of the United States about whether Washington, D.C.’s handgun ban violates the Second Amendment, we’ll take advantage of the legal cease-fire to have a closer look at this landmark case. By the time the Supreme Court heard District of Columbia v. Heller on March 18, the [...]
Source: 2am Commentary
21:06
Wal-Mart to videotape gun buyers
“Is America’s largest retailer getting out of the hunting and fishing business? If not, it certainly seems to be cutting back. Earlier this year, Wal-Mart told fishing tackle suppliers that their gear — like fabrics and other ‘rural products’ — might be removed from some stores altogether, or at least be stocked only seasonally. That [...]
Source: 2am News
21:03
IA: Homeowner corners burglar in garage
“A Des Moines homeowner fired a gun during a burglary this morning but it was only a warning shot. Randy Owens, 42, said he fired a shot into an old furnace so the burglar would know he wasn’t holding a BB gun. He said he did not shoot at the burglar. … Owens heard a [...]
Source: 2am News
20:35
About handguns
“As a veteran handgun and self defense instructor, I can tell you that there is no ‘best’ handgun, except perhaps for one criteria. Somebody once asked the inventor of modern combat handgunning Jeff Cooper what the best gun is for a gunfight. He said, ‘That’s simple. It’s the one you have with you.’ I agree, [...]
Source: 2am Commentary
19:59
Comparing 3G Networks
bsk_cw writes "Brian Nadel got hold of cellular network cards from AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon, and tried them out with a Lenovo ThinkPad X300 notebook. He watched videos on commuter trains, worked with e-mail at cafes, listened to Internet radio at the airport, and downloaded large files while in a moving car. AT&T came out on top in his tests in the New York area (summary here). Some of the reader comments report different conclusions, so a YMMV is in order."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot
18:08
Quantum Cryptography Broken, and Fixed
schliz writes in with research out of Sweden in which researchers showed that, looking at a quantum cryptographic system as a whole, it was possible for an eavesdropper to extract some information about the QC key, thus reducing the security of the overall system. The team then proposed a cheap and simple fix for the problem. "The advanced technology was thought to be unbreakable due to laws of quantum mechanics that state that quantum mechanical objects cannot be observed or manipulated without being disturbed. But a research team at Linköping University in Sweden claim that it is possible for an eavesdropper to [get around the limitations] without being discovered. In a research paper, published in the international engineering journal IEEE Transactions on Information Theory (abstract), the researchers propose a change in the quantum cryptography process that they expect will restore the security of the technology."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot
17:55
The age of political landslides
Samizdata has now been going for more than half a decade, and since what I am about to say has been becoming ever more true throughout that time, I may have said what follows before. So if you have already read, marked, learned and inwardly digested all of this, apologies, and on to the next posting. I want to make a point about the nature of voting in British general elections. It now looks as...
Source: Samizdata
17:40
Internet TV Will Let You be a Couch Potato in Traffic
USTelematics is using WiMax and IPTV technology to bring real-time television to your car without a satellite antenna. Soon you'll have 500 channels in traffic and nothing to watch.
Source: Wired News
17:37
Remembering the environmental doomsayers
History is riddled with fools. You can add Clinton, Obama and McCain to the list. Environmentalists’ Wild Predictions By Walter E. Williams Now that another Earth Day has come and gone, let’s look at some environmentalist predictions that they would prefer we forget. At the first Earth Day celebration, in 1969, environmentalist Nigel Calder warned, “The threat of a [...]SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "Remembering the environmental doomsayers", url: "http://thenewliberty.com/?p=541" });
Source: The New Liberty
Categories: Ron Paul