A page for randomness

Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean said Monday that either Hillary Rodham Clinton or Barack Obama must drop out of the Democratic presidential race after the June primaries in order to unify the party by the convention and win the election in November.

But Dean didn’t say which candidate should drop out, only that it should happen after primary voters have been to the polls.

“We want the voters to have their say. That’s over on June 3,” Dean said in an interview on ABC’s “Good Morning America.”

Dean also said that while the party rules say Democratic superdelegates can wait until the party’s August 25 convention to make up their minds, that would be too late to unify the party and defeat the presumptive Republican nominee, John McCain.

“We really can’t have a divided convention. If we do it’s going to be very hard to heal the party afterwards,” Dean said. “So we’ll know who the nominee is and that’ll give us an extra 2 1/2 months to get our party together, heal the wounds of having a very closely divided race and take on Senator McCain.”

Dean said he won’t have to tell either Clinton or Obama when it’s time to leave the race.

Read more: Howard Dean: Obama Or Clinton Must Drop Out In June - Politics on The Huffington Post

Yesterday, the Open Source community took an emotional hit when veteran Linux programmer Hans Reiser was convicted of first degree murder in the suspicious disappearing of his wife, Nina. While I won’t go into the details of the case, as this has been covered extensively in the press, I would like to talk a little bit about how this verdict will impact the technology in play for file system dominance in our favorite Open Source operating system, Linux.

Read more: http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=8647

Many people are switching from Internet Explorer to alternative browsers such as Firefox and Safari. Though that might make them feel more secure, the shift has also opened new doors for bad guys.

Case in point: We have no IE bugs to report this month, but both Firefox and Safari have been hit hard.

So forget the idea that just because you’ve switched to a new browser, you’re magically safer. You may be for a time, but to stay safe with any software, you need to keep current with fixes.

In a somewhat dubious recognition of Firefox’s growing popularity, hackers have focused their attention on it, leading to a rash of newly discovered holes. The folks at Mozilla recently released two Firefox updates in less than six weeks, fixing a total of five critical security vulnerabilities. All five can be exploited by planting a poisoned JavaScript file in a Web site and waiting for you to stumble across it.

In an actual attack–neither the Safari nor the Firefox bugs have elicited one so far–a bad guy could take over your PC or steal your navigation history.

Read more: Hackers Focus Efforts on Firefox, Safari - washingtonpost.com

It was a few weeks ago that Hillary Clinton really started losing it. Piece by piece, bit by bit, Barack Obama had pulled out every bit of electoral victory ground upon which Hillary Clinton stands. First it was the pledged delegate total. Then it was superdelegates. By that point, the popular vote was long gone.

So when she needed a reason to continue her campaign, an alternate ruler by which to measure her flailing bid, it was one of her own superdelegates, Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana who gave it to her. “Who carried the states with the most electoral votes is an important factor to consider,” Bayh told Wolf Blitzer in a CNN interview, “because ultimately that’s how we choose the President of the United States.”

In other words, when the statistics don’t suit you, make your own numbers with your own parameters.

Now, Clinton supporters love to point to that number, the last little bit of hope that she has to convince her party that she’s the better equipped candidate to take on John McCain come November. And it’s true! When you add up the electoral votes (which have no official meaning in a primary election), the states Clinton won constitute a higher aggregate total than those won by Obama. But when you take a closer look at it, even the electoral vote justification doesn’t quite hold water for the former First Lady.

In fact, the very premise of Bayh’s offering is preposterous, because it factors in states that are essentially no-contest battles. True, electoral votes are the ultimate quantifiable basis by which we elect a president. But in tabulating the most competitive Democratic candidate, can you really attribute the electoral votes of Texas to a Democrat, a state neither Clinton nor Obama stands a chance of winning? Or California, a state that neither candidate has the slightest chance of losing?

Bayh’s assertion is misleading by his inclusion of factors that deceivingly (and intentionally, of course) skew the numbers in favor of Clinton.

Read more: Even When She’s Winning, She’s Losing - Eyes On Obama

Programs teaching U.S. schoolchildren to abstain from sex have not cut teen pregnancies or sexually transmitted diseases or delayed the age at which sex begins, health groups told Congress on Wednesday.

The Bush administration, however, voiced continuing support for such programs during a hearing before a House of Representatives panel even as many Democrats called for cutting off federal money for so-called abstinence-only instruction.

Read more: Experts say US sex abstinence program doesn’t work | Reuters

Talk show host Rush Limbaugh is sparking controversy again after he made comments that appear to call for riots in Denver during the Democratic National Convention this summer.

He said the riots would ensure a Democrat is not elected as president, and his listeners have a responsibility to make sure it happens.

“Riots in Denver, the Democrat Convention would see to it that we don’t elect Democrats,” Limbaugh said during Wednesday’s radio broadcast. He then went on to say that’s the best thing that could happen to the country.

Limbaugh cited Al Sharpton, saying the Barack Obama supporter threatened to superdelegates that “there’s going to be trouble” if the presidency is taken from Obama.

Several callers called in to the radio show to denounce Limbaugh’s comments, when he later stated, “I am not inspiring or inciting riots, I am dreaming of riots in Denver.”

Limbaugh said with massive riots in Denver, which he called part of “Operation Chaos,” the people on the far left would look bad.

“There won’t be riots at our convention,” Limbaugh said of the Republican National Convention. “We don’t riot. We don’t burn our cars. We don’t burn down our houses. We don’t kill our children. We don’t do half the things the American left does.”

He believes electing Democrats will hurt America’s security and economy and appeared to call on his listeners to make sure that doesn’t happen.

Read more: Rush Limbaugh ‘Dreaming’ Of Riots In Denver - Denver News Story - KMGH Denver

Sen. Hillary Clinton is arguing that she is ahead of rival Sen. Barack Obama when it comes to the popular vote.

“I’m very proud that as of today, I have received more votes by the people who have voted than anyone else,” Clinton said Wednesday, one day after her decisive win in Pennsylvania.

Not so fast, says Obama’s campaign. Clinton’s count includes her wins in Michigan and Florida, but the Democratic presidential candidates agreed not to campaign in those states because they violated party rules by scheduling their contests too early.

Obama didn’t even have his name on the Michigan ballot, so he received no votes from that contest.

“We think that, in the end, if we end up having won twice as many states and having the most votes, then we should be the nominee,” Obama said.

If Michigan and Florida are counted, Clinton is ahead by 100,000 votes — 15.1 million to Obama’s 15 million. Without those states, Obama has a 500,000 vote lead, 14.4 million to 13.9 million.

Clinton says she has received more votes than any Democratic candidate in history.

“It’s a very close race, but if you count, as I count, the 2.3 million people who voted in Michigan and Florida, then we are going to build on that,” the New York senator said.

Obama’s campaign manager said he doesn’t expect the Illinois senator to lose his lead by June 3, the date of the last contest.

Read more: Clinton says she leads in popular vote - CNN.com

On April 9, ABC News reported that in 2002, President Bush’s most senior advisers approved the use of harsh interrogation tactics. Days later, Bush confirmed to ABC he “approved” of the tactics. Sadly, the media have largely ignored the story since it was first reported. Moreover, not one White House press corps reporter has raised the issue with the Bush administration…until today.

During this afternoon’s White House press briefing, reporter Helen Thomas noted that Bush “has admitted that he did sign off on torture” saying it damages “the credibility of this country.”

Read more: Think Progress

The sex of new babies is influenced by the mother’s diet before she conceives, a new study suggests. According to a survey of 740 British mums to be, a high-calorie diet is more likely to lead to a baby boy in nine months’ time.

Researchers led by Fiona Mathews of the University of Exeter collected data on the pre-conception dietary habits of pregnant women, and found that 56% of women in the highest one-third of calorie intake had male fetuses. In the lowest third, only 45% bore boys.

The women, who were attending maternity clinics, were asked to compile a ‘retrospective diary’ of their food intake in the weeks before they fell pregnant. Mathews and her colleagues then analysed the results to look for a relationship between food intake and the sex of their offspring.

Read more: An appetite for sex : Nature News

President Bush has set a record he’d presumably prefer to avoid: the highest disapproval rating of any president in the 70-year history of the Gallup Poll.

In a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll taken Friday through Sunday, 28% of Americans approve of the job Bush is doing; 69% disapprove. The approval rating matches the low point of his presidency, and the disapproval sets a new high for any president since Franklin Roosevelt.

The previous record of 67% was reached by Harry Truman in January 1952, when the United States was enmeshed in the Korean War.

Bush’s rating has worsened amid “collapsing optimism about the economy,” says Charles Franklin, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies presidential approval. Record gas prices and a wave of home foreclosures have fueled voter angst.

Bush also holds the record for the other extreme: the highest approval rating of any president in Gallup’s history. In September 2001, in the days after the 9/11 attacks, Bush’s approval spiked to 90%. In another record, the percentage of Americans who say the invasion of Iraq was a mistake reached a new high, 63%, in the latest poll.

Read more: Disapproval of Bush breaks record - USATODAY.com

The following comes from humaneventsonline.com, a “conservative news” source. The page has the following to convince you to get a free book:

Dear Reader,

Thank you for signing up to receive HUMAN EVENTS’ new special report, Barack Obama: Exposed! If you are looking forward to getting the ugly facts about the Left’s new favorite poster boy, you’ve got to check out my bestseller Godless (which you can get absolutely FREE just for trying HUMAN EVENTS).

Though liberalism rejects the idea of God and reviles people of faith, this liberal hostility to traditional religion stems from the fact that liberalism is itself a religion — a godless one.

In Godless, I reveal (with the help of the liberals who dominate our courts, government bureaucracies, schools, and media) that liberalism is now the established religion of our country. I throw open the doors of the Church of Liberalism and show you:

• Its sacraments (abortion)
• Its holy writ (Roe v. Wade)
• Its martyrs (like Soviet spy Alger Hiss)
• Its clergy (public school teachers)
• Its churches (government schools, where prayer is prohibited but condoms are free)
• Its doctrine of infallibility (as manifest in the “absolute moral authority” of spokesmen from Cindy Sheehan to Max Cleland)
• Its cosmology (in which mankind is an inconsequential accident)
• And, of course, the liberal creation myth (Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution)

For liberals, evolution is the touchstone that separates the enlightened from the benighted. But I debunk the myth of the “rational” liberal guided by the ideals of free inquiry and the scientific method and expose the truth about Darwinian evolution that liberals refuse to confront: It is bogus science.

In Godless, you will see how liberals’ absolute devotion to Darwinism has nothing to do with evolution’s scientific validity and everything to do with their refusal to admit the possibility of God as a guiding force.

The tolerant liberal suddenly becomes very intolerant when their official religion is challenged.

So, call me intolerant! But, when have I ever cared about what a liberal thought?

You can get my new book Godless — absolutely FREE — when you start a risk-free trial to the conservative flagship publication HUMAN EVENTS.

HUMAN EVENTS is my editorial home and the only publication that I make sure to read every week. Why? Because, HUMAN EVENTS has helped bust the conspiracy of furious spin the liberals use to keep Americans misinformed, since 1944 — longer than any other weekly publication — and is the one paper to have published my columns through thick and thin.

Order today and you can get a free copy of my book, Godless, plus my weekly column delivered to your home with the unvarnished truth contained in HUMAN EVENTS.

My liberal critics won’t enjoy my book (the truth hurts), but I’m sure you will.

Smells like a heaping pile of bullshit to me.

The sign in front of a small church in a small town is causing a big controversy in Jonesville, S.C.

Pastor Roger Byrd said that he just wanted to get people thinking. So last Thursday, he put a new message on the sign at the Jonesville Church of God.

It reads: “Obama, Osama, hmm, are they brothers?”

Byrd said that the message wasn’t meant to be racial or political.

“It’s simply to cause people to realize and to see what possibly could happen if we were to get someone in there that does not believe in Jesus Christ,” he said.

When asked if he believes that Barack Obama is Muslim, Byrd said, “I don’t know. See it asks a question: Are they brothers? In other words, is he Muslim ? I don’t know. He says he’s not. I hope he’s not. But I don’t know. And it’s just something to try to stir people’s minds. It was never intended to hurt feelings or to offend anybody.”

Obama has said repeatedly during his campaign that he is a Christian and attends Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago.

Despite some criticism, Byrd says that the message will stay on the sign. He took the issue before his congregation Sunday night, and they decided unanimously to keep it.

Byrd also said he doesn’t want it to look like controversy forced him to take the sign down.

Source: Small Church’s Obama Sign Causes Big Controversy - Greenville News Story - WYFF Greenville

Friends,

I don’t get to vote for President this primary season. I live in Michigan. The party leaders (both here and in D.C.) couldn’t get their act together, and thus our votes will not be counted.

So, if you live in Pennsylvania, can you do me a favor? Will you please cast my vote — and yours — on Tuesday for Senator Barack Obama?

I haven’t spoken publicly ’til now as to who I would vote for, primarily for two reasons: 1) Who cares?; and 2) I (and most people I know) don’t give a rat’s ass whose name is on the ballot in November, as long as there’s a picture of JFK and FDR riding a donkey at the top of the ballot, and the word “Democratic” next to the candidate’s name.

Seriously, I know so many people who don’t care if the name under the Big “D” is Dancer, Prancer, Clinton or Blitzen. It can be Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Barry Obama or the Dalai Lama.

Well, that sounded good last year, but over the past two months, the actions and words of Hillary Clinton have gone from being merely disappointing to downright disgusting. I guess the debate last week was the final straw. I’ve watched Senator Clinton and her husband play this game of appealing to the worst side of white people, but last Wednesday, when she hurled the name “Farrakhan” out of nowhere, well that’s when the silly season came to an early end for me. She said the “F” word to scare white people, pure and simple. Of course, Obama has no connection to Farrakhan. But, according to Senator Clinton, Obama’s pastor does — AND the “church bulletin” once included a Los Angeles Times op-ed from some guy with Hamas! No, not the church bulletin!

This sleazy attempt to smear Obama was brilliantly explained the following night by Stephen Colbert. He pointed out that if Obama is supported by Ted Kennedy, who is Catholic, and the Catholic Church is led by a Pope who was in the Hitler Youth, that can mean only one thing: OBAMA LOVES HITLER!

Yes, Senator Clinton, that’s how you sounded. Like you were nuts. Like you were a bigot stoking the fires of stupidity. How sad that I would ever have to write those words about you. You have devoted your life to good causes and good deeds. And now to throw it all away for an office you can’t win unless you smear the black man so much that the superdelegates cry “Uncle (Tom)” and give it all to you.

But that can’t happen. You cast your die when you voted to start this bloody war. When you did that you were like Moses who lost it for a moment and, because of that, was prohibited from entering the Promised Land.

Read more: MichaelMoore.com : My Vote’s for Obama (if I could vote) …by Michael Moore

After a recent upgrade to the newest freedesktop.org specification, you might be wondering where your ~/.Trash folder went. Well you can check out http://www.ramendik.ru/docs/trashspec.html or know that it is now located in

~/.local/share/Trash

between the folders ‘files’ and ‘info’.

While Beltway pundits and others in the national press have alleged that Barack Obama is clearly and obviously out of touch with most not-so-bitter Pennsylvanians, leading newspapers in the state, who ought to know better, seem to disagree.

In recent days Obama has picked up the endorsements of every major paper in the state and many smaller ones.

Papers endorsing Obama include: The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Philadelphia Daily News, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Allentown Morning Call, The Patriot News of Harrisburg, the Scranton Times-Tribune and Bucks County Courier.

Hillary Clinton’s endorsements have been far fewer, such as the Daily Pennsylvanian — the University of Pennsylvania paper, which drew a lot of coverage yesterday. The daily in Wilkes-Barre said it is not endorsing at all.

My mom was born and raised in Lock Haven, Pa., and I spent a lot of time growing up in that central part of the state — even going hunting with the relatives when I was about ten. So I have followed the race there closely.

Imagine Clinton’s chagrin when her “hometown” Scranton paper wrote: “In a nomination campaign that has defied convention, Mr. Obama has energized an entire generation of voters that, for the most part, otherwise had checked out of political participation. That, at least, portends a new approach to governance that can help to dissipate the political miasma that has engulfed Washington at least since the impeachment of former President Bill Clinton.”

Read more: Greg Mitchell: Obama Out of Touch With Pennsylvania? Every Major Paper There Backs Him - Politics on The Huffington Post

The following options need to be added to your xorg.conf file under the synaptics input device:

Option “TapButton1″ “1″

Option “TapButton2″ “3″

Option “TapButton3″ “2″

See: MacBook - Community Ubuntu Documentation

Dash as /bin/sh

In Ubuntu 6.10, the default system shell, /bin/sh, was changed to dash (the Debian Almquist Shell); previously it had been bash (the GNU Bourne-Again Shell). The same change will affect users of Ubuntu 6.06 LTS upgrading directly to Ubuntu 8.04 LTS. This document explains this change and what you should do if you encounter problems.

Why was this change made?

The major reason to switch the default shell was efficiency. bash is an excellent full-featured shell appropriate for interactive use; indeed, it is still the default login shell. However, it is rather large and slow to start up and operate by comparison with dash. A large number of shell instances are started as part of the Ubuntu boot process. Rather than change each of them individually to run explicitly under /bin/dash, a change which would require significant ongoing maintenance and which would be liable to regress if not paid close attention, the Ubuntu core development team felt that it was best simply to change the default shell. The boot speed improvements in Ubuntu 6.10 were often incorrectly attributed to [WWW] Upstart, which is a fine platform for future development of the init system but in Ubuntu 6.10 was primarily running in System V compatibility mode with only small behavioural changes. These improvements were in fact largely due to the changed /bin/sh.

The Debian policy manual has long mandated that “shell scripts specifying ‘/bin/sh’ as interpreter must only use POSIX features”; in fact, this requirement has been in place since well before the inception of the Ubuntu project. Furthermore, any shell scripts that expected to be portable to other Unix systems, such as the BSDs or Solaris, already honoured this requirement. Thus, we felt that the compatibility impact of this change would be minimal.

Of course, there have been a certain number of shell scripts written specifically for Linux systems, some of which incorrectly stated that they could run with /bin/sh when in fact they required /bin/bash, and these scripts will have broken due to this change. We regret this breakage, but feel that the proper way to address it is to make the small changes required to those scripts, discussed later in this document. In the longer term, this will promote a cleaner and more efficient system.

(This applies the same philosophy as in C and C . Programs should be written to the standard, and if they use extensions they should declare them; that way it is clear what extensions are in use and they will at least fail with a much better error message if those extensions are not available.)

Read more: DashAsBinSh - Ubuntu Wiki

Any TV you buy will work with any cable or satellite TV service you have. Any PC you buy, even a Mac, will work with any Internet service provider you use. Any landline phone, wired or cordless, will work any phone company’s landline service.

Duh, duh and duh, right? So can you buy any cellphone you want regardless of who your carrier is? Of course. Unless you live in the United States of America. Why? Because the FCC is a wuss and a monopoly enabler and can’t even follow its own rules.

Earlier this month in Las Vegas, FCC chairwuss Kevin Martin announced his intention to dismiss a year-old Skype petition, which called upon cellphone carriers to completely open their networks and allow us to buy and use any handset we want, approved by the carriers or not.

The carriers have announced their intention to open up their networks, thanks in large part to pressure from Google’s Linux-based open operating system, Android, and the resulting Open Handset Alliance. So Martin figures no additional government action is necessary.

Not surprisingly, the carriers haven’t taken even a baby step to follow through on their announced open-network intentions. Without FCC jabbing, why should they? The only ones who agree with Martin’s active non-action are the carriers. Everyone else in the industry from handset makers to retailers, along with Democratic FCC commissioner Michael Copp, think Martin’s laissez-faire lethargy is loopy.

Read more: DVICE: SHIFT: Why the U.S. cellphone system is un-American

Science does not reject religious or “design-based” explanations because of dogmatic atheism.
Expelled frequently repeats that design-based explanations (not to mention religious ones) are “forbidden” by “big science.” It never explains why, however. Evolution and the rest of “big science” are just described as having an atheistic preference.

Actually, science avoids design explanations for natural phenomena out of logical necessity. The scientific method involves rigorously observing and experimenting on the material world. It accepts as evidence only what can be measured or otherwise empirically validated (a requirement called methodological naturalism). That requirement prevents scientific theories from becoming untestable and overcomplicated.

By those standards, design-based explanations rapidly lose their rigor without independent scientific proof that validates and defines the nature of the designer. Without it, design-based explanations rapidly become unhelpful and tautological: “This looks like it was designed, so there must be a designer; we know there is a designer because this looks designed.”

A major scientific problem with proposed ID explanations for life is that their proponents cannot suggest any good way to disprove them. ID “theories” are so vague that even if specific explanations are disproved, believers can simply search for new signs of design. Consequently, investigators do not generally consider ID to be a productive or useful approach to science.

Read more: Six Things in Expelled That Ben Stein Doesn’t Want You to Know…: Scientific American

Local Nashvillian and host of The Remix, a popular Christian youth show, Azariah Southworth, announced today that he has come out.

“This has been a long time coming. I’m in a place where I’m at peace with my faith, friends, family and more importantly myself. I know this will end my career in Christian television, but I must now live my life openly and honestly with everyone. This is my reason for doing this,” Southworth says.

Southworth has been hosting and producing the popular Christian TV show, The Remix for a year and a half. It is in syndication and can be seen in more than 128 million homes worldwide. It averages more than 200,000 viewers weekly on one of three networks. It has featured major Christian acts such as Jars of Clay, Avalon, Superchick, Building 429 and Rachael Lampa.
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Southworth has been featured in national publications such as Charisma Magazine and many other national Christian media outlets. “I know I will be cut off from many within the Christian community, and if so, then they didn’t get the point of the life of Christ. I believe by me living my life honestly and authentically now, I am able to be a better person and a better Christian. We all know there are so many other gay people in the Christian industry; they’re just all scared. I was scared, but now I’m no longer afraid,” notes Southworth.

Southworth is scheduled to appear on a May episode of Out & About Today on NewsChannel 5 to talk about his coming out experience.

Source: Out & About - Religion: Popular Christian TV host comes out

Reflecting what seemed to be the main consensus of the night - that ABC botched this debate, big time - Charlie Gibson tells the crowd there will be one more, superfluous commercial break of the night and is subsequently jeered.

“OH…” he declares, hands raised in defense. “The crowd is turning on me, the crowd is turning on me.”

Off camera, observers let out their frustrations.

Read more: ABC Hosts Heckled After Debate: “The Crowd Is Turning On Me” - Media on The Huffington Post

Premise Media is a film production company based in British Columbia, Canada. According to its website, Premise Media “develops, finances, and produces independent films, books, and DVD’s [sic] for the domestic and international marketplace.” Its motto is “Producing world class media that stirs the heart and inspires the minds to truth, purpose, and hope.”

Premise Media’s top management consists of two men. A. Logan Craft is Chairman of the Board of Directors and an Episcopal minister from Santa Fe, New Mexico. He also produced a television show called “Church and State TV.” Walt Ruloff is Premise Media’s CEO. Prior to joining Premise Media, Ruloff was a salesman and entrepreneur who founded the software company ILTS in 1991, later selling it to Microsoft. Craft and Ruloff also appear to be the source of much of the funding for Premise Media and for Expelled.

Additional staff listed on Premise Media’s website included several that are associated with Rampant Films, including Mark Mathis. Also of interest is Paul Lauer, who is listed as the “Grassroots Marketing Director.” Lauer is the founder of Motive Marketing, an entertainment marketing firm that specializes in promoting entertainment geared towards the faith and family markets. Motive Marketing was behind such grassroots marketing campaigns as Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, and Walden Media/Disney’s The Chronicles of Narnia. Lauer himself is described on the Motive Marketing website as “one of the most well connected entrepreneurs in the faith and family market.”

The connections between Premise Media and Motive Marketing, as well as the strong religious background of Craft, all point to a religiously motivated film. It is not surprising, then, to find that Expelled is not an unbiased documentary, but rather a movie with a clear religious agenda: to attack mainstream science, falsely presenting it as being anti-religious.

Of course, Premise Media has a free speech right to promote its views, religious or otherwise, and nobody is objecting to its exercise of that right. But its critics have a right to correct the record. And part of that record is the attempt to pass off to the public as a “documentary” a film that is clear propaganda.

Source: Expelled Exposed » What is Premise Media?

While Intel’s Nehalem demo had 50,000-60,000 particles and ran at 15-20 fps (without a GPU), the particle demo on a GeForce 9800 card resulted in 300 fps. If the very likely event that Nvidia’s next-gen parts (G100: GT100/200) will double their shader units, this number could top 600 fps, meaning that Nehalem at 2.53 GHz is lagging 20-40x behind 2006/2007/2008 high-end GPU hardware. However, you can’t ignore the fact that Nehalem in fact can run physics.

There was also a demonstration of cloth: A quad-core Intel Core 2 Extreme processor was working in 12 fps, while a GeForce 8800 GTS board resulted came in at 200 fps. Former Ageia employees did not compare it to Ageia’s own PhysX card, but if we remember correctly, that demo ran at 150-180 fps on an Ageia card.

Read more: Nvidia GPU Physics Engine Up And Running, Almost | Tom’s Hardware

The Clinton and Obama campaigns clearly have one thing in common in the wake of Barack Obama’s “bitter” remarks: both sides believe the incident provides their candidates with the means to go on the offensive, with Clinton working to paint Obama as “elitist” and Obama seeking to demonstrate that he is “in touch” with the needs of working-class America. It is, of course, too early to assess what lasting impact this story is going to have on the race, but the way the audience at the Alliance For American Manufacturing forum in Pittsburgh received the candidates, and reacted to the issue, will be heartening for the Obama camp. Obama, who greeted the crowd at 8:45am, raised the issue and received applause. Clinton, addressing the same crowd later in the morning, brought up the remarks and received mostly silence, with a few audible impatient jeers.

Source: Clinton Heckled, Obama Cheered Over ‘Bitter’ Remarks - Politics on The Huffington Post

“I understand my opponent came this morning and spent a lot of his time attacking me,” Hillary Clinton suggested to a union gathering of steelworkers in Pittsburgh on Monday.

As she went on to say, “Well, you know, I know that many of you, like me, were disappointed by recent remarks that he made,” scattered boos and calls of “No” could clearly be heard from the audience.

“I think it’s important that, you know, we give people the chance to really compare and contrast us,” Clinton concluded.

Source: The Raw Story | Union audience boos as Clinton criticizes Obama

John A. Wheeler, a visionary physicist and teacher who helped invent the theory of nuclear fission, gave black holes their name and argued about the nature of reality with Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr, died Sunday morning at his home in Hightstown, N.J. He was 96.
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The cause was pneumonia, said his daughter Alison Wheeler Lahnston.

Dr. Wheeler was a young, impressionable professor in 1939 when Bohr, the Danish physicist and his mentor, arrived in the United States aboard a ship from Denmark and confided to him that German scientists had succeeded in splitting uranium atoms. Within a few weeks, he and Bohr had sketched out a theory of how nuclear fission worked. Bohr had intended to spend the time arguing with Einstein about quantum theory, but “he spent more time talking to me than to Einstein,” Dr. Wheeler later recalled.

Read more: John A. Wheeler, Physicist Who Coined the Term ‘Black Hole,’ Is Dead at 96 - New York Times

Wikinews has obtained Operating Thetan (OT) documents of the Church of Scientology which were leaked via Wikileaks. Although some portions of the manual have been leaked previously, this is believed to be the first time the full unedited version has become publicly available.

The 612-page manual for Scientologists written by L. Ron Hubbard contains instructions for the eight different Operating Thetan levels including ‘clear’ and OT8.

Most of the manual is typed from a computer, while the packet contains some hand written notes by Hubbard himself who also signed them. The manual also contains letters by Hubbard to individuals who have passed the according levels.

“A great many phenomena (strange things) can happen while doing these drills, if they are done honestly,” Hubbard writes in regards to ‘OT1.’ Hubbard then goes on to explain in hand written notes, the ‘drills’ one must do in order to become ‘OT1′:

“One: Walk around and counts bodies until you have a cognition. Make a report saying how many you counted and your cognition. Two: Note several large and small female bodies until you have a cognition. Note it down. Three: Note several large and several small male bodies until you have a cognition. Note it down. Four: Final a tight packed crowd of people. Write it as a crowd and then as individuals until you have a cognition. Note it down. Do step over until you do.”

Hubbard then goes on to explain OT2, but before he does so, he tells the Churches how to keep Scientology working. One way is to not divulge information on their “technology.” Doing so, says Hubbard, would result in “the complete destruction of all our work.”

“On the other hand there have been thousands and thousands of suggestions and writings which, if accepted and acted upon, would have resulted in the complete destruction of all our work. Our technology has not been discovered by a group. True, if the group had not supported me in many ways, I could not have discovered it either. But it remains that if in its formative stages it was not discovered by a group, then group efforts, one can safely assume, will not add to it or successfully alter it in the future,” states Hubbard in a confidential letter dated February 7, 1965.

Read more: Church of Scientology’s ‘Operating Thetan’ documents leaked online - Wikileaks

Pennsylvania’s Democratic voters on April 22 will choose between two candidates in the presidential primary. Both are qualified to become the nation’s chief executive. They have more similarities than differences. But, The Morning Call recommends that Sen. Barack Obama be nominated, and we offer three reasons.

The first is the quality of his campaign. It has surprised the experts by moving him close to the finish line against bigger, more established political machines and it has communicated his basic ideas well.

The second is his message of hope and change. It conveys a vision of the nation’s future that is in tune with the tenor and consensus of most Americans.

And third, and most important for the Democratic Party at this moment in history, there is Sen. Obama’s ability to inspire.

Read more: Obama’s vision is reason to nominate him — themorningcall.com

As a former resident of Pennsylvania (though not a small town), it’s true that there is bitterness there. And it’s true that much of that bitterness is due to economics– the massive closing of steel plants in Pittsburgh, for example. But it’s not true that that economic bitterness completely explains people’s faith or their feelings on the second amendment (though it does largely cover the anti-immigrant and anti-trade sentiments). It was a poorly-worded statement, as Obama has acknowledged, but to call it offensive is a reach.

The irony about all the “outrage” that’s being manufactured over this statement is that it’s coming exclusively from out-of-touch rich people who are making the assumption that this is something small-town Pennsylvanians should be offended by. I have yet to see a single quote from an actual small-town Pennsylvanian who has taken offense to Obama’s statement.

Yesterday, Hillary Clinton called the comments “elitist” and “out of touch,” and claimed that Pennsylvanians who face hard times aren’t bitter (which in itself is a wildly out of touch sentiment). John McCain’s campaign said Obama’s statement “shows an elitism and condescension towards hardworking Americans that is nothing short of breathtaking.”

But let’s take a step back here for a moment.

Hillary Clinton’s tax returns show that she and Bill have amassed $109 million in the last eight years– mostly from speaking fees, book royalties, and overseas investments. But long before that, at the age of 31, she moved into the Arkansas governor’s mansion with Bill, and has lived there or in the White House or in their million-dollar Chappaqua estate ever since.

John McCain is married to the heiress of a $100 million fortune, a woman whose family trust fund has helped finance his congressional and senate campaigns for decades. He owns $4 million in real estate and $25 million in various trust funds.

Five years ago, before his speech at the 2004 national convention and his subsequent bestselling book, Barack Obama was a state senator and constitutional law lecturer earning $92,000 a year. He and his wife Michelle were raising two young daughters and still paying off their student loan debt.

A quick glance at the estimated net worth of each candidate pretty much tells you all you need to know about who is closest to the average American. I’ll go out on a limb and guess that neither Hillary Clinton nor John McCain have driven a vehicle for themselves, folded their own laundry, or gone into a grocery store and purchased a carton of milk in decades.

Yet over the next week or so, and certainly again in the fall, we can expect to hear many lectures from two super-rich, Washington lifers about what they think small-town America should take offense to.

Source: Two hundred-millionaires attack Obama for being “out of touch” | Train Wreck Politics

Democrat grandees Jimmy Carter and Al Gore are being lined-up to deliver the coup de grâce to Hillary Clinton and end her campaign to become president.
Falling poll numbers and a string of high-profile blunders have convinced party elders that she must now bow out of the primary race.

Former president Carter and former vice-president Gore have already held high-level discussions about delivering the message that she must stand down for the good of the Democrats.

“They’re in discussions,” a source close to Carter told Scotland on Sunday. “Carter has been talking to Gore. They will act, possibly together, or in sequence.”

An appeal by both men for Democrats to unite behind Clinton’s rival, Barack Obama, would have a powerful effect, and insiders say it is a question of when, rather than if, they act.

Obama has an almost unassailable lead in the battle for nomination delegates, and is closing the gap with Clinton in her last stronghold, Pennsylvania, which votes on April 22.

Clinton remains publicly defiant, insisting she will continue the battle with Obama all the way to the Democratic convention in August – when superdelegates, or party top brass, will have the chance to add their weight to primary votes.

Read more: It’s Obama, stupid: Carter and Gore to end Clinton bid - Scotsman.com News