FINISH HIM!

The HD format wars are finally over

THE NEXT GENERATION disk format has been settled once and for all. Thanks to the due diligence, hard work and unprecedented cooperation between the media companies, the hardware vendors and the OS vendor, we finally have a solution. It is quite easy, Piracy, the better choice(TM).

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See, I'm not lazy!

It's the MICROBES, man...

US scientists have discovered that "gut microbes" - bacteria that live in our digestive tract - could be powerful clues to the cause and treatment of obesity.

This remarkable news was published in Nature this week and conducted at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

The clue lies in the relative abundance of two major families of intestinal bacteria: Firmicutes and Bacteroidetes. These make up 90 per cent of the bacteria in the gut of humans, and, coincidentally, white mice.

Researchers in the first of two parallel studies found that as obese people lose weight, the balance between the Firmicutes and the Bacteroidetes changes - the latter increasing in abundance as an overweight person gets slimmer. (It would seem that the microbes ending in "cute" are perhaps not as lovable as their name implies!).

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All she wants for Christmas...

Bad-ass jew takes on the evangelicals in the military

Your youngest son is at the Air Force Academy, which has been the focus of a lot of the allegations about evangelical proselytizing. With you being so out-front on this, has he been the target of any reprisals?

No. I think that they realize if they touch a hair on his head, I will open up the skies and bring down a hammer and tongs like they've never seen before. There have been some snide remarks, but in the main it's steady cruising.

Now, my older son and his wife have had a few things. They're both first lieutenants. In the military, you wear a name tag, and their name is Weinstein. My daughter-in-law has had senior officers walk up to her and say, "I know who you are, and I know what you're family is all about." She's a junior officer, so she just looks at them. In the main, it's been fairly calm, because they're not that stupid to think that my kids wouldn't make a phone call, and then I'm going to do what I have to do.

But I can tell you that I get -- I don't think I'm in double digits, but it started at about 10 o'clock last night; after the press conference in the morning, I've had nine death threats since about 10 o'clock last night. I usually get about two or three a week. They're very grotesque, everything from wanting to gas all the Jews in America and send the corpses back to Israel to threatening to blow me up, threatening my house will be blown up, raping my wife, blowing up my house. We've had our tires slashed, we've had feces and beer bottles thrown at the house, we've had dead animals placed on the front door of the house.

I was in Topeka, on a book tour, and the local Episcopal priest came out to support me and five hours later his church was burned down. And the local synagogue in Topeka, where I was to speak that night, was desecrated with spray paint saying, "Fuck you, Jews" and "KKK," all that stuff.

So if this is a nice, Christian response, my response is take a number, pack a picnic lunch and stand in line, because we're not going to stop, we're not going to ever stop, we're going to lay down a withering field of fire and leave sucking chest wounds on these people that are trying to destroy our Constitution.

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And here is the fucked-up video he talks about in the interview.

Embarrassed yet?

Having entered Iraq without any semblance of an occupation plan, our blockheaded leader is belatedly acting like a man concerned with his legacy as a nation-builder, a Dr. Frankenstein who cannot bring himself to kill his monstrous dream of Iraqi democracy. And it's this fatal weakness that is producing perhaps the very worst consequence of this war, the stunning international political victory of Ahmadinejad, the Holocaust-denying Iranian reptile.

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Damn! I wish I'd gone to this...

I'm not a huge Imogen Heap fan, but I love Kid Beyond, and I would have liked to hear him play something other than the 4-5 songs that he has on his EP. The small clip of the show looks great. Anyone else have more?

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New solar power efficiency record

U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Assistant Secretary for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Alexander Karsner today announced that with DOE funding, a concentrator solar cell produced by Boeing-Spectrolab has recently achieved a world-record conversion efficiency of 40.7 percent, establishing a new milestone in sunlight-to-electricity performance. This breakthrough may lead to systems with an installation cost of only $3 per watt, producing electricity at a cost of 8-10 cents per kilowatt/hour, making solar electricity a more cost-competitive and integral part of our nation’s energy mix.

But it wouldn't be a governmental report from 2006 without a bit of nauseating pro-Bush pablum:

Reaching 40 percent efficiency helps further President Bush’s Solar America Initiative (SAI) goals, which aims to win nationwide acceptance of clean solar energy technologies by 2015. By then, it is intended that America will have enough solar energy systems installed to provide power to one to two million homes, at a cost of 5 to 10 cents per kilowatt/hour. The SAI is also key component of President Bush’s Advanced Energy Initiative, which provides a 22 percent increase in research and development funding at DOE and seeks to reduce our dependence on foreign sources of oil by changing the way we power our cars, homes and businesses.

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Bye bye Bolton

President Bush today ended his efforts to have John R. Bolton confirmed by the Senate as United Nations ambassador and said Mr. Bolton will leave the position, which he has held for the past year after being chosen between Congressional terms, this month.

Mr. Bolton became the ambassador under a recess appointment made by President Bush, bypassing the usual requirement of Senate confirmation after Democrats blocked a floor vote on the nomination. Because it was a recess appointment, Mr. Bolton’s term expires when the current Congress ends its term later this month.

Mr. Bush had planned to push for confirmation during the current lame-duck session of the Republican Congress, which would have allowed him to continue as ambassador. But today’s announcement suggests that the White House realized it was not going to receive the necessary votes.

President Bush said that he accepted “with deep regret” Mr. Bolton’s decision to end his service.

“I am deeply disappointed that a handful of United States Senators prevented Ambassador Bolton from receiving the up or down vote he deserved in the Senate,” Mr. Bush said. “They chose to obstruct his confirmation, even though he enjoys majority support in the Senate, and even though their tactics will disrupt our diplomatic work at a sensitive and important time.”

Disrupt? Bolton was the one who advocated blowing up the U.N! If anything, this will make any negotiations easier, now that that jackass is out of the picture.

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How to create a pop star

There's no trick - it's just a simple trick.