If Obama's the Answer...

Forwarded by my lovely wife:

Obamopoly...

From reader Simi L.  Click to enlarge:

Government Prosecutorial Abuse...

Scary stuff...

Huh?

I don't know if this is real or if it's parody, so I don't know whether to laugh or cry:

Stay away from the History Channel. Unlike most of the other networks, they don't even try to make their stuff believable.

Quotes on Programming...

Stack Overflow has a thread with a great collection of quotes about programming, like this one:

If debugging is the process of removing software bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in.

-- Edsger Dijkstra

Bumper Sticker of the Day...

Another from the collection my mom forwarded to me:

Hummingbirds...

Via reader Simi L.:


I gotta see this flick!

I Don't Care...

My mom forwarded me an email that was allegedly sent by “a housewife in Brunswick.”  A quick check on Snopes showed that it was actually an edited version of a column by Doug Patton of GOPUSA – and I think the original was even better.  It's short, so I've reproduced the whole thing:

First, Newsweek pulled a Dan Rather on us, running a fabricated story just because they wanted it to be true. They told the world that an American guard at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention center had ripped pages from a prisoner's Koran and flushed it down a toilet. As a result, innocent people died when practitioners of Islam rioted in protest in Afghanistan.

Oops, said Newsweek, it seems we can't back up our story. Oh well, it's probably true; we just can't prove it. (Isn't it convenient for Newsweek that the media now have "Deep Throat" to talk about so they can revel in their glory days and divert our attention from their criminal negligence.)

The lie heard round the world about the flushed Koran has caused convulsions in the Bush Administration and forced the Pentagon to launch an investigation of unfounded allegations contained in an unsubstantiated story. The results of said investigation are now in, and it seems there are at least five incidents of "mishandling" of the Koran at Gitmo.

Well, guess what? I don't care!

Are we fighting a war on terror or aren't we? Was it or was it not started by Islamic people who brought it to our shores on September 11, 2001? Were people from all over the world, mostly Americans, not brutally murdered that day, in downtown Manhattan, across the Potomac from our nation's capitol and in a field in Pennsylvania? Did nearly three thousand men, women and children die a horrible, burning death that day, or didn't they?

And I'm supposed to care that a copy of the Koran was "desecrated" when an overworked American soldier kicked it or got it wet? Well, I don't. I don't care at all.

I'll start caring when Osama bin Laden turns himself in and repents for incinerating all those innocent people on 9/11.

I'll care about the Koran when the fanatics in the Middle East start caring about the Holy Bible, the mere possession of which is a crime in Saudi Arabia.

I'll care when Abu Musab al-Zarqawi tells the world he is sorry for hacking off Nick Berg's head while Berg screamed through his gurgling, slashed throat.

I'll care when the cowardly so-called "insurgents" in Iraq come out and fight like men instead of disrespecting their own religion by hiding in mosques.

I'll care when the mindless zealots who blow themselves up in search of nirvana care about the innocent children within range of their suicide bombs.

I'll care when the American media stops pretending that their First Amendment liberties are somehow derived from international law instead of the United States Constitution's Bill of Rights.

I'll care when Clinton-appointed judges stop ordering my government to release photos of the abuses at Abu Ghraib, which are sure to set off the Islamic extremists just as Newsweek's lies did a few weeks ago.

In the meantime, when I hear a story about a brave marine roughing up an Iraqi terrorist to obtain information, know this: I don't care.

When I see a fuzzy photo of a pile of naked Iraqi prisoners who have been humiliated in what amounts to a college hazing incident, rest assured that I don't care.

When I see a wounded terrorist get shot in the head when he is told not to move because he might be booby-trapped, you can take it to the bank that I don't care.

When I hear that a prisoner, who was issued a Koran paid for by my tax dollars, is complaining that his holy book is being "mishandled," you can absolutely believe in your heart of hearts that I don't care.

And oh, by the way, I've noticed that sometimes it's spelled "Koran" and other times "Quran." Well, Jimmy Crack Corn and -- you guessed it -- I don't care!

Bumper Sticker of the Day...

From a collection forwarded by my mom:

The Climategate Whitewash Continues...

Environmental scientist Patrick Michaels has an interesting column up at the WSJ, in which he lambastes the recent Muir Russell report that essentially exonerated all the Climategate scientists and their organizations.  He also says this:

Climate Research and several other journals have stopped accepting anything that substantially challenges the received wisdom on global warming perpetuated by the CRU. I have had four perfectly good manuscripts rejected out of hand since the CRU shenanigans, and I'm hardly the only one. Roy Spencer of the University of Alabama, Huntsville, has noted that it's becoming nearly impossible to publish anything on global warming that's nonalarmist in peer-reviewed journals.

Read the whole thing.

Rosetta Does Lutetia...

Early indications are that the Rosetta robotic explorer's flyby of the asteroid Lutetia was a rip-roaring success.  An early photograph release of Lutetia at the closest point of the flyby is at right (click to enlarge).  More data will be forthcoming soon...

The Woman Marine Pilot...

Via my mom:

The teacher gave her fifth grade class an assignment: Get their parents to tell them a story with a moral at the end of it.

The next day, the kids came back and, one by one, began to tell their stories. There were all the regular types of stuff: spilled milk and pennies saved. But then the teacher realized, much to her dismay, that only Janie was left.

“Janie, do you have a story to share?”

“Yes ma'am. My daddy told me a story about my Mommy. She was a Marine pilot in Desert Storm, and her plane got hit. She had to bail out over enemy territory, and all she had was a flask of whiskey, a pistol, and a survival knife. She drank the whiskey on the way down so the bottle wouldn't break, and then her parachute landed her right in the middle of 20 Iraqi troops. She shot 15 of them with the pistol, until she ran out of bullets, killed four more with the knife, till the blade broke, and then she killed the last Iraqi with her bare hands.”

“Good Heavens!” said the horrified teacher. “What did your Daddy tell you was the moral to this horrible story?”

“Stay away from Mommy when she's been drinking.”

Har! And hooah!

Kindle DX, Latest Generation...

I've been thinking of buying a Kindle for quite some time now.  Earlier models all had some deficiency or other that stopped me, but when the new Kindle DX came out I knew the time had finally come.  I ordered it, and it arrived on Thursday afternoon.

Just 48 hours later, I am completely and totally addicted.

First thing I did was to find a few books I've been wanting and ordered them.  The most expensive one was 40% off of the printed book price; the cheapest was over 75% off.  Finding the books and ordering them was very easy to do right from the Kindle.  It has a built in 3G (cell phone) that it uses to contact Amazon for this purpose.  It worked perfectly the very first time, with no setup required.  Amazon has done a magnificent job making the Kindle's technology transparent to the user.  You don't have to know anything at all about how it works in order to use it – you just point and click, and stuff happens.

Then I started exploring a bit, and discovered that there are many free (or nearly so) works of literature available.  These are books on which the copyright has expired, and they're now in the public domain.  Most of these were typed in by volunteers (such as from the Gutenberg Project).  I downloaded some of these in just a few minutes, and now my Kindle has things like The Wizard of Oz, the complete works of Charles Dickens, and Pride and Prejudice.  Wow!

But it gets even better, I discovered.  You can directly download eBooks from Project Gutenberg and other such eBook libraries, all free.  About thirty seconds after I read this page, I had a copy of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea on my Kindle. 

This is just amazing – this little device, the size and weight of a modest book (though much, much thinner), holds about 3,500 books that I can take anywhere.  Never again will I run out of reading material on a flight!  Or anywhere else...

I Used to Love America More...

Oh, man, does this resonate with me...

Bumper Sticker of the Day...

Part of a collection forwarded by my mom:

Nice Article About Our Software...

My company's products are featured right now on the front page of InformationWeek, including a video demonstration of parts of the product.  Where the article is talking about discovering systems, mapping connections, and workflow...it's talking about the bits and pieces whose development I'm responsible for.  Woot!

10 Reasons...

Via my brother Mark:

When your friends can't explain why they voted for Democrats, give them this list. So they can then pick a reason.

10. I voted Democrat because I believe oil companies' profits of 4% on a gallon of gas are obscene but the government taxing the same gallon of gas at 15% isn't.

9. I voted Democrat because I believe the government will do a better job of spending the money I earn than I would.

8. I voted Democrat because Freedom of speech is fine as long as nobody is offended by it.

7. I voted Democrat because I'm way too irresponsible to own a gun, and I know that my local police are all I need to protect me from murderers and thieves.

6. I voted Democrat because I believe that people who can't tell us if it will rain on Friday can tell us that the polar ice caps will melt away in ten years if I don't start driving a Prius.

5. I voted Democrat because I'm not concerned about the loss of millions of babies through abortion so long as we keep all death row inmates alive.

4. I voted Democrat because I think illegal aliens have a right to free
health care, education, and Social Security benefits.

3. I voted Democrat because I believe that businesses should not be allowed to make profits for themselves. They need to break even and give the rest away to the government for redistribution as the government sees fit.

2. I voted Democrat because I believe liberal judges need to rewrite the Constitution every few days to suit some fringe kooks who would never get their agendas past the voters.

1. I voted Democrat because my head is so firmly planted up my rectum it is unlikely that I'll ever have another point of view.

Sign of the Day...

Judgment Day Cometh - in November!

A lot of Tea Partiers would identify with the message of this song...

Thousands of Roman Coins Found...

Near Frome, in Somerset, England, a guy named Dave Crisp, armed with a metal detector, found a large jar containing over 50,000 Roman coins buried about a foot deep.  Archaeologists believe the jar was buried somewhere around the year 300 A.D.

What a cool find!

I don't know exactly where Dave Crisp made his find, but I have visited the town of Frome a couple of times.  It's along the path of one of my favorite drives in England, between Salisbury (where Stonehenge is) and Exmoor National Park, on the way down to Cornwall...