A page for randomness

Republican presidential candidate John McCain cashes his monthly Social Security checks despite calling the federal program “a disgrace,” the Associated Press reports.

“I’m receiving benefits,” McCain told campaign reporters, but added, “the system is broken.”

In 2007, he received benefits of $23,157 from Social Security, approximately $1,930 a month. The maximum monthly benefit under Social Security is $2,185. Social Security benefits are determined by age at retirement.

McCain, who is 71, has received benefits since he was 65.

Last week, McCain told observers at a town-hall meeting in Portsmouth, Ohio, “Americans have got to understand that we are paying present-day retirees with the taxes paid by young workers … and that’s a disgrace.”

B.J. Jarrett from the Social Security Administration said that individuals can refuse retirement benefits.

In 2006, McCain’s wife Cindy earned $6 million, and has a net worth of approximately $100 million.

Source: McCain gets $1,930 a month from ‘broken’ Social Security system - San Francisco Business Times:

Of all the constitutionally threatening and extremist powers the Bush administration has asserted over the last seven years, the most radical — and the most dangerous — has been its claim that the President has the power to arrest U.S. citizens and legal residents inside the U.S., and imprison them indefinitely in a military prison, without charging them with any crime, based on his assertion that the imprisoned individual is an “enemy combatant.” Beginning with U.S. citizen Yasser Esam Hamdi (detained in Afghanistan), followed by U.S. citizen Jose Padilla (detained at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport), followed by Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri (in the U.S. on a student visa and detained at his home in Peoria, Illinois), the Bush administration has not only claimed that power in theory but has aggressively exercised and defended it in practice.

The Bush administration’s strategy of imprisoning these “enemy combatants” in a South Carolina military brig has (by design) ensured that subsequent legal challenges are heard by the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, the most right-wing judicial circuit in the country. In September, 2005, a three-judge panel from that circuit issued a ruling in the Jose Padilla case (.pdf) that actually upheld the President’s power to arrest and indefinitely detain even U.S. citizens arrested on U.S. soil without charging them with any crime — a decision which the U.S. Supreme Court refused to review (because the Bush administration, after 3 1/2 years of lawless imprisonment, avoided that review by finally charging Padilla with a crime), thus leaving that Padilla decision as still-valid law in this country.

Read more: Al-Marri and the power to imprison U.S. citizens without charges - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com

The series “Robocars” will be premiering tonight at 9pm (Central time) on the Discovery Science Channel.  The show follows ten teams of top engineers from around the U.S. compete for a $2 million grand prize, struggling to build the first vehicle to drive itself through an urban environment and features Team CajunBot.

Here is the schedule and episode descriptions:

July 14th 9-10pm - Episode 1 - follows Stanford Racing, Tartan Racing, Team Jefferson, Team Gray and The Golem Group as they prepare for the Urban Challenge and pass through the DARPA site visits.

July 21st 9-10pm - Episode 2 - follows Highlander Racing, Team Oshkosh, Team Cajunbot, Team MIT, and Team Case as they prepare for the Urban Challenge and pass through the DARPA site visits.  The show ends with DARPA announcing the teams who made it to the semi-finals.

July 28th 9-10pm - Episode 3 - covers the semi-finals.  Stanford Racing, Tartan Racing, Team Jefferson, Team Gray, The Golem Group, Team Oshkosh, Team Cajunbot, Team MIT and Team Case are all included.  The show ends with DARPA announcing the teams who made it to the finals.

August 4th 9-10pm - Epiosde 4 - covers the finals.  Stanford Racing, Tartan Racing, Team MIT, and Team Oshkosh are all included.

August 11th  8-10pm - Episodes 5 and 6 - The first hour is a summary of the last four episodes and the second hour focuses on futuristic car technology and contains excerpt from the DARPA Urban Challenge.

Read more: Welcome to the CajunBot Lab website.

Like most animal species, penguins tend to pair with the opposite sex, for the obvious reason. But researchers are finding that same-sex couplings are surprisingly widespread in the animal kingdom. Roy and Silo belong to one of as many as 1,500 species of wild and captive animals that have been observed engaging in homosexual activity. Researchers have seen such same-sex goings-on in both male and female, old and young, and social and solitary creatures and on branches of the evolutionary tree ranging from insects to mammals.

Unlike most humans, however, individual animals generally cannot be classified as gay or straight: an animal that engages in a same-sex flirtation or partnership does not necessarily shun heterosexual encounters. Rather many species seem to have ingrained homosexual tendencies that are a regular part of their society. That is, there are probably no strictly gay critters, just bisexual ones. “Animals don’t do sexual identity. They just do sex,” says sociologist Eric Anderson of the University of Bath in England.

Nevertheless, the study of homosexual activity in diverse species may elucidate the evolutionary origins of such behavior. Researchers are now revealing, for example, that animals may engage in same-sex couplings to diffuse social tensions, to better protect their young or to maintain fecundity when opposite-sex partners are unavailable—or simply because it is fun. These observations suggest to some that bisexuality is a natural state among animals, perhaps Homo sapiens included, despite the sexual-orientation boundaries most people take for granted. “[In humans] the categories of gay and straight are socially constructed,” Anderson says.

Read more: Bisexual Species: Unorthodox Sex in the Animal Kingdom: Scientific American

In the most detailed examination yet of Senator John McCain’s eligibility to be president, a law professor at the University of Arizona has concluded that neither Mr. McCain’s birth in 1936 in the Panama Canal Zone nor the fact that his parents were American citizens is enough to satisfy the constitutional requirement that the president must be a “natural-born citizen.”

The analysis, by Prof. Gabriel J. Chin, focused on a 1937 law that has been largely overlooked in the debate over Mr. McCain’s eligibility to be president. The law conferred citizenship on children of American parents born in the Canal Zone after 1904, and it made John McCain a citizen just before his first birthday. But the law came too late, Professor Chin argued, to make Mr. McCain a natural-born citizen.

“It’s preposterous that a technicality like this can make a difference in an advanced democracy,” Professor Chin said. “But this is the constitutional text that we have.”

Read more: A Citizen, but ‘Natural Born’? McCain’s Eligibility to Be President Is Disputed by Professor - NYTimes.com

President Bush’s signature had barely dried on the FISA Amendments Act, which the Senate approved Wednesday, when the American Civil Liberties Union announced that it would mount a constitutional challenge to the new law, claiming that it violates the First and Fourth Amendments. The group also filed a motion with the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, requesting that proceedings and rulings on the constitutionality of the FAA be made public.

On a conference call with reporters Thursday afternoon, ACLU lawyers said they had filed suit in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York on behalf of an array of plaintiffs. This included a panoply of human rights organizations, prominent defense attorneys, and journalists like Chris Hedges and Naomi Klein of The Nation.

One of the most difficult aspects of challenging secret surveillance law is proving standing to sue, as the National Security Agency does not make a habit of notifying targets that they are being wiretapped. The ACLU therefore hopes to demonstrate that its plaintiffs are harmed, and their First Amendment activities chilled, by the very existence of a law whose “effect and… main purpose,” in the words of attorney Jameel Jaffer, “is to give the government unfettered access to the international communications of US citizens and residents.”

Read more: ACLU, others greet Bush FISA bill signing with new lawsuit

Let’s say I received a subpoena from the Justice Department today telling me I had to testify about matters it considered vital to national security.

Let’s say I told them, “I could give a rat’s ass about your subpoena, blow me.”

What do you think would happen?

I would be in Guantanamo dining on that “cockmeat sandwich” that Harold and Kumar avoided.

So why is Karl Rove walking around free today? Because the Democrats talk a good game but when it comes to taking action, they fail time and time again.

It’s simple. Congress tells you that you have to testify? You testify. It’s the law. Period.

Read more: Tom D’Antoni: It’s Outrageous That Rove Is Walking Free - Politics on The Huffington Post

The Senate passed a revamped version of FISA legislation on Wednesday. But that conclusion was never in doubt. The real intrigue surrounded which Democrats would buck the compromise, which included immunity for telecommunications companies, and what side Sen. Hillary Clinton would come down on.

Late this afternoon, Clinton voted against the bill, putting her at odds with the party’s presumptive nominee, Barack Obama. In a statement put out by her Internet guru, Peter Daou, the New York Democrat struck a similar chord as her Illinois counterpart, describing the compromise as legislation that will “strengthen oversight of the administration’s surveillance activities over previous drafts.” She also, like Obama, pinpointed shortcomings in oversight, immunity, and other aspects of the compromise. But, in the end, she, unlike Obama, was persuaded to vote no.

Read more: Clinton: Why I Voted No On FISA - Politics on The Huffington Post

I’m sure y’all remember the expensive ice cream buckets on top of several DARPA Urban Challenge vehicles…

Radiohead, never ones to shy away from trying new things, has shot its new video for “House of Cards” without using cameras at all. Whaa? Yes, they’ve used two fancy new technologies called Geometric Informatics and Velodyne Lidar.

Read more: New Radiohead Video is Shot with Lasers, Not Cameras.

What an interesting week: I came back from vacation to find the two presumptive presidential nominees running away from their bases. Suddenly John McCain is evading, not embracing, the media, limiting access and getting testy with the very people whose formerly friendly coverage made him a popular “maverick.” Meanwhile, Barack Obama is complaining that his “friends on the left” just don’t understand him — he’s not moving to the center, he is “no doubt” a progressive, just one who now supports the scandalous FISA “compromise” and Antonin Scalia’s views on gun rights and the death penalty, no longer plans to accept public campaign funding, and wants to make sure women aren’t feigning mental distress to get a “partial-birth” abortion (the right’s despicable term of choice; the correct phrase is either late-term or third-trimester abortion).

I actually have some sympathy for Obama. He was never the great progressive savior that his fans either thought he was, or peddled to their readers. While Arianna Huffington and Markos Moulitsas and Tom Hayden were hyping him as the progressive alternative to Hillary Clinton, Obama was getting away with backing a healthcare bill less progressive than Clinton’s, adopting GOP talking points on the Social Security “crisis” and double-talking on NAFTA. So why shouldn’t he think his “friends on the left” will put up with his abandoning other progressive causes?

I’ve admired Obama, but I never confused him with a genuine progressive leader. Today I don’t admire him at all. His collapse on FISA is unforgivable. The only thing Obama has going for him this week is that McCain is matching him misstep for misstep. While we’re railing about Obama’s craven vote on FISA — rightfully; Glenn Greenwald is a hero for his work on this topic — McCain was outdoing Dick Cheney with neocon crazy talk, warning that Iran’s test of nine old missiles we already knew they had increases the chances of a “second Holocaust.” Every time I wonder whether I can ultimately vote for Obama in November, given all of his political cave-ins, McCain does something new to make sure I have to.

…

“This Administration has put forward a false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we demand. When I am president, there will be no more illegal wire-tapping of American citizens; no more national security letters to spy on citizens who are not suspected of a crime; no more tracking citizens who do nothing more than protest a misguided war. Our Constitution works, and so does the FISA court.”

Too bad Obama doesn’t believe that anymore.

Read more: Betrayed by Obama - Joan Walsh - Salon.com

As the Senate voted to endorse a Bush-administration backed plan to expand its surveillance authority and grant retroactive legal immunity to telecommunications companies that facilitated warrantless wiretapping, the American Civil Liberties Union unveiled plans to challenge the new law in court.

“This fight is not over. We intend to challenge this bill as soon as President Bush signs it into law,” said Jameel Jaffer, Director of the ACLU National Security Project, in a statement provided to RAW STORY as the Senate was voting. “The bill allows the warrantless and dragnet surveillance of Americans’ international telephone and email communications. It plainly violates the Fourth Amendment.”

Read more: The Raw Story | ACLU, EFF will challenge FISA update in court

Like many Christians, he said grace before dinner and read the Bible before bed. Four years ago when he was deployed to Iraq, he packed his Bible so he would feel closer to God.

He served two tours of duty in Iraq and has a near perfect record. But somewhere between the tours, something changed. Hall, now 23, said he no longer believes in God, fate, luck or anything supernatural.

Hall said he met some atheists who suggested he read the Bible again. After doing so, he said he had so many unanswered questions that he decided to become an atheist.

His sudden lack of faith, he said, cost him his military career and put his life at risk. Hall said his life was threatened by other troops and the military assigned a full-time bodyguard to protect him out of fear for his safety.

In March, Hall filed a federal lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Defense and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, among others. In the suit, Hall claims his rights to religious freedom under the First Amendment were violated and suggests that the United States military has become a Christian organization.

“I think it’s utterly and totally wrong. Unconstitutional,” Hall said.

Hall said there is a pattern of discrimination against non-Christians in the military.

Read more: Atheist soldier sues Army for ‘unconstitutional’ discrimination - CNN.com

Google’s open source’s “Protocol Buffers”. Here’s some examples:

You write a .proto file like this:

message Person {
  required int32 id = 1;
  required string name = 2;
  optional string email = 3;
}

Then you compile it with protoc, the protocol buffer compiler, to produce code in C++, Java, or Python.

Then, if you are using C++, you use that code like this:

Person person;
person.set_id(123);
person.set_name(”Bob”);
person.set_email(”bob@example.com”);

fstream out(”person.pb”, ios::out | ios::binary | ios::trunc);
person.SerializeToOstream(&out);
out.close();

Or like this:

Person person;
fstream in(”person.pb”, ios::in | ios::binary);
if (!person.ParseFromIstream(&in)) {
  cerr << “Failed to parse person.pb.” << endl;
  exit(1);
}

cout << “ID: ” << person.id() << endl;
cout << “name: ” << person.name() << endl;
if (person.has_email()) {
  cout << “e-mail: ” << person.email() << endl;
}

Read more about them: Google Open Source Blog: Protocol Buffers: Google’s Data Interchange Format

Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) is sticking to his drive to impeach President Bush.

Few in the House of Representatives have any intention of doing anything with the last 35 articles of impeachment Kucinich set before them last month, so the former presidential candidate appears to be lightening the load. Kucinich sent a letter to colleagues Tuesday asking them to support a single article of impeachment, to be introduced Thursday, which accuses President Bush of leading the country to war based on lies.

“There can be no greater offense of a Commander in Chief than to misrepresent a cause of war and to send our brave men and women into harm’s way based on those misrepresentations,” Kucinich wrote in the “Dear Colleague” letter.

Read more: The Raw Story | Kucinich to bring single article of impeachment for misleading US into war

Early next week the U.S. Senate will vote on an extension of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, with a few small amendments intended to immunize telecommunications corporations that assisted our government in the warrantless and illegal wiretapping it has grown to love.

That such a gutting of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution even made it out of committee is yet another stain on the gutless and seemingly powerless Democratic majority in both houses of Congress.

That a majority on both sides of the aisle — not least of them the presumptive nominees for president of both political parties — intend to vote for such a violation of Americans’ right to privacy and of the sanctity of their personal communications is a stunning surrender to those who want us to live in fear forever.

We are living in a time when the right of habeas corpus — which simply put is your right to be brought before a proper court of law where the government is made to prove that there is good and legal reason to detain you — recently survived by a margin of only one vote at the U.S. Supreme Court.

Now these bad actors are prepared to set aside your right to privacy — written into the Constitution as a key part of our Bill of Rights — with hardly a nod in the direction of the true patriots who rebelled against an English king and his army to guarantee those rights.

That they will do this while the last empty phrases of the political windbags at the Fourth of July celebrations are still echoing across a thousand city parks and the bright red, white and blue bunting and blizzard of American flags still flap in the breeze is little short of breath-taking.

How dare they?

Read more: Joe Galloway: How Dare They Rip The Fourth Amendment? - Politics on The Huffington Post

This weekend, Pixar’s latest film “WALL-E” debuted at No. 1, earning $65 million at the box office. The film has been hailed by critics, scoring a whopping 97 percent “Fresh” rating on RottenTomatoes.

The film portrays a lonely robot’s quest for love, as he is left to clean up a trashed earth. Meanwhile, the over-indulged humans wait it out aboard gigantic spaceships run by a monolithic corporation-turned-government that “resemble spas for the fat and lazy.”

Somehow, this touching love story has outraged the radical right.

Read more: Think Progress » Right-Wing Apoplectic Over Pixar’s WALL-E: ‘Malthusian Fear Mongering,’ ‘Fascistic Elements’

This was not an easy call for me. I know that the FISA bill that passed the House is far from perfect. I wouldn’t have drafted the legislation like this, and it does not resolve all of the concerns that we have about President Bush’s abuse of executive power. It grants retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies that may have violated the law by cooperating with the Bush administration’s program of warrantless wiretapping. This potentially weakens the deterrent effect of the law and removes an important tool for the American people to demand accountability for past abuses. That’s why I support striking Title II from the bill, and will work with Chris Dodd, Jeff Bingaman and others in an effort to remove this provision in the Senate.

But I also believe that the compromise bill is far better than the Protect America Act that I voted against last year. The exclusivity provision makes it clear to any president or telecommunications company that no law supersedes the authority of the FISA court. In a dangerous world, government must have the authority to collect the intelligence we need to protect the American people. But in a free society, that authority cannot be unlimited. As I’ve said many times, an independent monitor must watch the watchers to prevent abuses and to protect the civil liberties of the American people. This compromise law assures that the FISA court has that responsibility.

The Inspectors General report also provides a real mechanism for accountability and should not be discounted. It will allow a close look at past misconduct without hurdles that would exist in federal court because of classification issues.

Read more: Barack Obama: My Position On FISA - Politics on The Huffington Post

Google will have to turn over every record of every video watched by YouTube users, including users’ names and IP addresses, to Viacom, which is suing Google for allowing clips of its copyright videos to appear on YouTube, a judge ruled Wednesday.

Viacom wants the data to prove that infringing material is more popular than user-created videos, which could be used to increase Google’s liability if it is found guilty of contributory infringement.

Viacom filed suit against Google in March 2007, seeking more than $1 billion in damages for allowing users to upload clips of Viacom’s copyright material. Google argues that the law provides a safe harbor for online services so long as they comply with copyright takedown requests.

Although Google argued that turning over the data would invade its users’ privacy, the judge’s ruling (.pdf) described that argument as “speculative” and ordered Google to turn over the logs on a set of four tera-byte hard drives.

Read more: Judge Orders YouTube to Give All User Histories to Viacom | Threat Level from Wired.com

The twin STEREO spacecraft were launched in 2006 into Earth’s orbit about the sun to obtain stereo pictures of the sun’s surface and to measure magnetic fields and ion fluxes associated with solar explosions.

Between June and October 2007, however, the suprathermal electron sensor in the IMPACT (In-situ Measurements of Particles and CME Transients) suite of instruments on board each STEREO spacecraft detected neutral atoms originating from the same spot in the sky: the shock front and the heliosheath beyond, where the sun plunges through the interstellar medium.

“The suprathermal electron sensors were designed to detect charged electrons, which fluctuate in intensity depending on the magnetic field,” said lead author Linghua Wang, a graduate student in UC Berkeley’s Department of Physics. “We were surprised that these particle intensities didn’t depend on the magnetic field, which meant they must be neutral atoms.”

Read more: First images of solar system’s invisible frontier | Eureka! Science News

The co-host of a recent top-dollar fundraiser for Sen. John McCain oversaw the payment of roughly $1.7 million to a Colombian paramilitary group that is today designated a terrorist organization by the United States.

Carl H. Lindner Jr., the billionaire Cincinnati businessman, was CEO of Chiquita Brands International from 1984 to 2001, and remained on the company’s board of directors until May 2002. Beginning under his tenure, Chiquita executives paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (known by the Spanish acronym AUC), which is described by George Washington University’s National Security Archive as an “illegal right-wing anti-guerrilla group tied to many of the country’s most notorious civilian massacres.”

Following a Justice Department indictment last year, Chiquita admitted to illegally funding the paramilitaries and agreed to pay a $25 million fine. Chiquita’s payments to the AUC began in 1997 and lasted seven years; roughly half of the funds came after the group was designated a Foreign Terrorist Organization by the U.S. State Department in 2001.

Read more: McCain Backer’s Firm Pleaded Guilty To Funding Terrorist Group In Colombia - Politics on The Huffington Post

According to the research firm, the data is collected from a base of “approximately 160 million visitors per month.” The survey lists Apple’s Mac OS X operating system market share in June with a record 7.94%, which is a 0.11 point increase over the previous month. This figure makes OS X the best-selling UNIX variant ever with the largest overall share of the market. Linux currently stands at 0.80% market share in this survey, a slight improvement over the 0.68% recorded last month. Windows machines still dominate the market and came in at 90.89%, down from 91.13 percent in the month ago. Although the lead of Windows remains unquestioned, its share has been dropping slowly but steadily over the past two years.

Source: TG Daily - Study claims Windows usage market share could fall below 90% soon

From its Texas Rangers to its enthusiastic take on the death penalty, the Lone Star State has long been known for its aggressive stance on law enforcement. Thanks to a strange new law, it’s a sting that may soon be felt by a number of the state’s computer-repair people.

A recently passed law requires that Texas computer-repair technicians have a private-investigator license, according to a story posted by a Dallas-Fort Worth CW affiliate.

Read more: Texas PC Repair Now Requires PI License - News and Analysis by PC Magazine

The tareted offenses: if you are stolen, call the police at once. please omnivorously put the waste in garbage can. deformed man lavatory. For the past 18 months, teams of language police have been scouring Beijing on a mission to wipe out all such traces of bad English signage before the Olympics come to town in August. They’re the type of goofy transgressions that we in the English homelands love to poke fun at, devoting entire Web sites to so-called Chinglish. By the way, that last phrase means “handicapped bathroom.”

But what if these sentences aren’t really bad English? What if they are evidence that the English language is happily leading an alternative lifestyle without us?

Thanks to globalization, the Allied victories in World War II, and American leadership in science and technology, English has become so successful across the world that it’s escaping the boundaries of what we think it should be. In part, this is because there are fewer of us: By 2020, native speakers will make up only 15 percent of the estimated 2 billion people who will be using or learning the language. Already, most conversations in English are between nonnative speakers who use it as a lingua franca.

In China, this sort of free-form adoption of English is helped along by a shortage of native English-speaking teachers, who are hard to keep happy in rural areas for long stretches of time. An estimated 300 million Chinese — roughly equivalent to the total US population — read and write English but don’t get enough quality spoken practice. The likely consequence of all this? In the future, more and more spoken English will sound increasingly like Chinese.

It’s not merely that English will be salted with Chinese vocabulary for local cuisine, bon mots, and curses or that speakers will peel off words from local dialects. The Chinese and other Asians already pronounce English differently — in both subtle and not-so-subtle ways. For example, in various parts of the region they tend not to turn vowels in unstressed syllables into neutral vowels. Instead of “har-muh-nee,” it’s “har-moh-nee.” And the sounds that begin words like this and thing are often enunciated as the letters f, v, t, or d. In Singaporean English known as Singlish, think is pronounced “tink,” and theories is “tee-oh-rees.”

English will become more like Chinese in other ways, too. Some grammatical appendages unique to English such as adding do or did to questions will drop away, and our practice of not turning certain nouns into plurals will be ignored. Expect to be asked: “How many informations can your flash drive hold?” In Mandarin, Cantonese, and other tongues, sentences don’t require subjects, which leads to phrases like this: “Our goalie not here yet, so give chance, can or not?”

Read more: How English Is Evolving Into a Language We May Not Even Understand

Breaking months of acrimonious deadlock, House and Senate leaders from both parties have agreed to a bill that gives the nation’s spy agencies the power to turn a wide swath of domestic communication companies into intelligence-gathering operations, and that puts an end to court challenges to telecoms such as AT&T that aided the government’s secret, five-year warrantless wiretapping program.

Civil liberties proponents quickly blasted the deal.

“The proposed FISA deal is not a compromise; it is a capitulation,” said Wisconsin Democratic Senator Russ Feingold, the only senator who voted against the Patriot Act in 2001. “The House and Senate should not be taking up this bill, which effectively guarantees immunity for telecom companies alleged to have participated in the President’s illegal program, and which fails to protect the privacy of law-abiding Americans at home.”

The deal marks a huge, though belated, victory for a lame-duck White House, which fought a pitched, hyperbolic battle to expand its legal wiretapping powers after being busted targeting Americans without warrants.

Read more: Dems Agree to Expand Domestic Spying, Grant Telecoms Amnesty | Threat Level from Wired.com

One of the most important goals when designing a new chip is to keep the available processing units as busy as possible. One way to achieve this goal is to feed enough data into the cores as quickly as possible through improved inter-core communication. The progress from one processor generation to another is obvious: For example, while the 65 nm Kentsfield quad-core provided a bandwidth of about 8 to 9 GB/s, the 45 nm Harpertown chip offers 18-20 GB/s.

At last week’s Research@Intel Day event, we spotted a technology that holds the potential to multiply the available bandwidth within a processor. In our opinion, this technology is actually the most impressive research we saw on that day. The reason why you may not have heard about this technology is because Intel did not specifically promote it and did not even mention it on its “Demo Cheat-Sheets” given out to journalists and analysts.

A small research team inside Intel succeeded in reducing the size of DRAM cells to only two transistors and completely removing the capacitors. Conceivably, these two achievements could change the way how we will use DRAM in the future: For example, expensive and complex SRAM (static RAM) cells could be entirely removed from a CPU and replaced with DRAM.

Read more: TG Daily - How a forgotten Intel invention could revolutionize the CPU

In the year since Al Gore took steps to make his home more energy-efficient, the former Vice President’s home energy use surged more than 10%, according to the Tennessee Center for Policy Research.

“A man’s commitment to his beliefs is best measured by what he does behind the closed doors of his own home,” said Drew Johnson, President of the Tennessee Center for Policy Research. “Al Gore is a hypocrite and a fraud when it comes to his commitment to the environment, judging by his home energy consumption.”

In the past year, Gore’s home burned through 213,210 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity, enough to power 232 average American households for a month.

In February 2007, An Inconvenient Truth, a film based on a climate change speech developed by Gore, won an Academy Award for best documentary feature. The next day, the Tennessee Center for Policy Research uncovered that Gore’s Nashville home guzzled 20 times more electricity than the average American household.

After the Tennessee Center for Policy Research exposed Gore’s massive home energy use, the former Vice President scurried to make his home more energy-efficient. Despite adding solar panels, installing a geothermal system, replacing existing light bulbs with more efficient models, and overhauling the home’s windows and ductwork, Gore now consumes more electricity than before the “green” overhaul.

Since taking steps to make his home more environmentally-friendly last June, Gore devours an average of 17,768 kWh per month –1,638 kWh more energy per month than before the renovations – at a cost of $16,533. By comparison, the average American household consumes 11,040 kWh in an entire year, according to the Energy Information Administration.

Read more: Tennessee Center for Policy Research

Al Gore is a douche.

Tomorrow, Firefox 3.0 will be released, and everyone is encouraged to download it to help break a download record for one day. So tomorrow, don’t forget to download the new Firefox!

GetFirefox.com

Sun-Sentinel Editorial

Impeachment not worth another minute of anybody’s time
South Florida Sun-Sentinel Editorial Board

June 12, 2008

ISSUE: Some in Congress want an impeachment.

The nation does have a few pressing issues pending that could use some attention from our federal lawmakers.

Let’s see. There are a couple of wars going on, unemployment is on the rise as the value of a house continues to fall, millions of Americans have no health insurance, and did we mention that gas prices are expected to hit $5 a gallon? You get the idea. And still, some in Congress feel the nation is just itching for another presidential impeachment.

Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio, who has made a career out of eye-rolling  issues like these, said this week he wants the House to consider a resolution to impeach President Bush. Rep. Robert Wexler, D-Delray Beach, who is smarter than this, supported the Articles of Impeachment, which won’t go anywhere and thankfully have been buried in a committee not likely to hold hearings before Bush leaves office.

Last year, Kucinich led the misguided charge to impeach Vice President Dick Cheney, and Wexler supported that. In the case of Bush, Wexler called it a “sworn duty” of Congress to act.

Actually, it’s nobody’s sworn duty to take up any time to go after a badly battered president with only a few months left in office. This is a president so unpopular, presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain won’t make many public appearances with him. This is a president who is such a non-entity, peace activists didn’t even
bother to protest his appearance in Berlin this week.

Nor should Congress bother with the ridiculous idea of impeachment,  which Kucinich contends is warranted because Bush deceived the nation into war.

There’s plenty of evidence to fuel Kucinich’s ire, but not his choice of remedy. If Congress needs more things than impeachment to keep lawmakers busy, it has myriad options.

BOTTOM LINE: Get on with REAL issues.

Copyright (c) 2008, South Florida Sun-Sentinel

The Wexler Response:

The Sun-Sentinel recently ran an editorial criticizing my support for  the articles of impeachment against President Bush opining that Congress should instead “get on with REAL issues” such as the Iraq war.  In fact, it is this very war — entered into following an unprecedented campaign of lies and manipulated intelligence by the Bush Administration — that necessitates impeachment hearings.  This war has cost us the lives of 4,090 US soldiers, injuries to over 30,000, and more than a trillion taxpayer dollars when it is all said and done.

It is a dark day when the Sun-Sentinel has the gall to tell the parents of the soldiers who have died in Iraq that pursuing
consequences for those that prosecuted this war of choice based on outright deception is not a “REAL” issue that Congress should address.

Sadly, the war is only the beginning. We now know that this Administration illegally ordered the torture of prisoners, obstructed justice by lying about the outing of a covert CIA agent and authorizing warrantless spying on American citizens.

No one can deny that if proven these allegations amount to High Crimes. Our failure to act sets an awful precedent and enables future Presidents to break the law and violate our Constitution without sanctions from Congress.

The Sentinel says impeachment is the wrong “remedy” for this litany of crimes.  What then is the proper remedy? A harsh lecture? A strongly worded editorial? Or how about doing absolutely nothing in the face of these outrageous abuses of power?

Impeachment hearings need not distract us from other important priorities such as the economy, gas prices and bringing the troops home from Iraq.  Congress can and should address all important issues - including safeguarding our constitutional rights and obligations.

Source: Congressman Robert Wexler

“Ten years ago I could never have imagined I’d be doing this,” says Greg Pal, 33, a former software executive, as he squints into the late afternoon Californian sun. “I mean, this is essentially agriculture, right? But the people I talk to – especially the ones coming out of business school – this is the one hot area everyone wants to get into.”

He means bugs. To be more precise: the genetic alteration of bugs – very, very small ones – so that when they feed on agricultural waste such as woodchips or wheat straw, they do something extraordinary. They excrete crude oil.

Unbelievably, this is not science fiction. Mr Pal holds up a small beaker of bug excretion that could, theoretically, be poured into the tank of the giant Lexus SUV next to us. Not that Mr Pal is willing to risk it just yet. He gives it a month before the first vehicle is filled up on what he calls “renewable petroleum”. After that, he grins, “it’s a brave new world”.

Mr Pal is a senior director of LS9, one of several companies in or near Silicon Valley that have spurned traditional high-tech activities such as software and networking and embarked instead on an extraordinary race to make $140-a-barrel oil (£70) from Saudi Arabia obsolete. “All of us here – everyone in this company and in this industry, are aware of the urgency,” Mr Pal says.

What is most remarkable about what they are doing is that instead of trying to reengineer the global economy – as is required, for example, for the use of hydrogen fuel – they are trying to make a product that is interchangeable with oil. The company claims that this “Oil 2.0” will not only be renewable but also carbon negative – meaning that the carbon it emits will be less than that sucked from the atmosphere by the raw materials from which it is made.

Read more: Scientists find bugs that eat waste and excrete petrol - Times Online