KLB

60 mpg diesel? I'm jealous You obviously don't live in the United States. Without buying a Toyota Prius, which I couldn't afford (and has a dubious "cradle to grave" environmental benefit) the best I could buy last spring in a small (not sub-compact) car was the Huyndi Elantra, which was rated for 34mpg highway. Based on all the research I did, it was the most fuel efficient car sold in the U.S. in its class other than the Prius. With careful non-interstate driving I can get 40mpg with my Elantra.

I work from home; I live in town in a small apartment; I bought the most fuel efficient car I could that suited my needs and am conscious of how much I drive; I have swapped out all of the most used incandescent lights in my apartment for compact florescent lights; I've reduced my electric usages as much as I can (including plugging electronic devices like DVD and VCR into switches so that they can be really turned off); I am in the process of acquiring carbon offset credits for the webserver that runs my website; I will also be getting carbon offset credits for my car in the near future; In the next month or so I will be switching my electric supplier to one that generate 100% renewable energy locally (certified low impact hydroelectric); I'm careful with how I use water/hot water; I try to buy durable products that will last (for instance I buy cars on a ten year cycle); I use reusable shopping bags; I use cloth napkins (to save on paper napkins); I try to be conscious of the packaging waste from the things I buy; and I try to reduce the waste we throw away. I know there is a lot more I could do, and I am always striving to do more to reduce my impact. My long term goal is to get my carbon footprint to as close to zero as I can.

Great article. I like the following definition it gave for "geek" it really sums up the term well:

Someone brought to my attention an article at Telegraph.co.uk that tried to put the blame for global warming onto changes in the sun and was suggesting that as the sun was a significant culprit we didn't need to do anything about global warming. When one actually read into the article, it admits that humans are partially responsible for global warming, but down plays our role. My general contention is that who cares how responsible we are, we are at least partially responsible AND we can do something about our part of global warming. Forget all the warm and fuzzy save the polar bear stuff; there is a much bigger reason why we should be concerned about slowing global warming regardless of the cause. Our own self preservation depends upon it. Humans society depends upon a stable climate. Global warming means changes in weather patterns, which in turn means a redistribution of life sustaining precipitation. This will result in droughts in traditionally arable places and excessive rains in other areas. Furthermore, raising global temperatures will cause the disappearance of glaciers that provide critical fresh water supplies to river systems that humans depend upon. Melting polar caps will raise ocean levels flooding low laying lands where millions of people live. In short hundreds of millions of people will be displaced because of the loss of land, a lack of water and the failure of crops that can not grown in the changed climates. Even IF humans aren't the primary cause of global warming, we need to stop it for our own self preservation. If we do not do everything we can to slow or stop global warming, planet earth could become a less hospitable place for humans way too fast for human society to adapt.

Dr Hawkings looked like he was just about the happiest person on or off this planet in the video and photos. I think this was just great for him. I don't think there is a person more deserving of an opportunity to go into space and this was a step in that direction. In regards to Grifter's lecture, that would have been one lecture I would have liked to seen, although I'd probably opt out of the flight after words.

I'd have to agree, this is very appalling. Part of the purpose of writing reports is to learn critical thinking skills. Going to Wikipedia (or any site for that matter) and simply summarizing or rewriting what was posted is not learning critical thinking, it is learning to parrot what others have to say. What I find really appalling is that the powers to be in universities are giving a wink and a nod to this issue. My mother teaches at a community college and would (and has) fail a student in a heartbeat if she caught them plagiarizing in this manner. In fact, she along with other faculty have banned the use of Wikipedia as a resource point. In part because it is an encyclopedia and encyclopedias should not be used to research a college level paper and in part because they want students to learn critical thinking. I run a website that publishes original articles is heavily used by students. On several different occasions using various plagiarism detection tools I have found instances of all or part of my articles that had been submitted by a student as their own paper and then subsequently published on a college/university website. In one instance one of my articles was heavily lifted into a graduate student's paper without so much as a citation in the bibliography. Needless to say I routinely report said plagiarism to the institution in question. At the very least this results in said papers disappearing from the Internet. Given how easy it has become to plagiarize and how seductive easy Google and sites like Wikipedia make doing papers, teachers of all forms, owe it to their students to take a very unforgiving stance towards plagiarism. There are some great tools on the Internet that can help track down the origin of plagiarized passages. The Internet can be a very powerful research tool if students just learn how to use it properly and resist the temptation to take the easy way out by relying on sites like Wikipedia.

This cartoon perfectly depicts my point about the LED signs. The moment we start instantly thinking any anomaly or unusual package is a terrorist bomb is the moment that the terrorists have won. The terrorists no longer need to do anything but threaten terrorist acts because a paranoid society will cripple itself by freaking out about every little anomaly.

Yes of course I understand you were exaggerating a little for effect. My point was simply that sometimes taking a particular position is very easy when one doesn't have to face the reality of different perspectives. Back to the original video, I don't personally know if it raised to the level of child abuse, but it certainly wasn't healthy and it certainly didn't show a mature and healthy way to discuss troubling issues. Her children are bound to learn some of her more troublesome behaviors and this won't help them have healthy happy relationships with others. There were so many better (but less entertaining) ways that she could have dealt with this issue in front of her children.

So perspective is everything.

This is my point. We are way more likely to be killed in a car accident, but we never give this a second thought when we get into a car. It should be the same way with terrorism. Yes there are some prudent things that can be done to make terrorism harder (e.g. armored cockpit doors on airplanes, scanning of passengers/luggage, etc.). There must be; however, some sort of logic to our responses and there must be a balanced restrained response. The Boston incident showed no restraint and no balance the powers to be panicked and didn't stop to look at the situation as a whole. Would a bomb really be put in such a thin package? Would a terrorist put bright LEDs on their bomb and then place it in plain view for everyone to see? The answer to both questions is probably not. In other words the "packages" didn't pass the straight face test for being a likely terrorist act. Terrorism is about putting fear into people for a political purpose and causing them to change the way they live their lives because of this fear. The Boston incident shows that the terrorists have succeeded in their primary objective. They don't even need to conduct terrorists acts here on our soil because the simple threat of terrorism can completely disrupt the day to day activities of a major U.S. city.

Pangloss, John Kerry would have either bored us all into a passive trance with his speeches or made us beg for a reprieve from his bad jokes. He must be the most uncharismatic presidential wannabe in the last thirty years. Here are some stats that should help bring the threat of terrorism into perspective: Each year around 17,000 people die in the Untied States from accidents involving drunk drivers (http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/pdf/nrd-30/NCSA/RNotes/2005/809904.pdf, http://www.dot.gov/affairs/nhtsa3203.htm). While it is hard to find any stats on how many people are killed by terrorists each year, it is probably save to say that even considering 2001, more people die on U.S. roads because of drunk drivers than die world wide from terrorism. According to a 1999 report in the British Medical Journal 34,000 people die each year in the United States because of gun violence or gun accidents (http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/318/7192/1160). A more conservative figure from an ABC News article (http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/WhosCounting/story?id=1560771) states that last year 12,000 people were killed in the United States "by hot-headed people with guns" not terrorists. According to the U.S Department of Justice (http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/pdf/fidc9397.pdf) between 1993 and 1997 there were a total of 78,620 homicides committed with a firearm. It would certainly appear to any reasonable person that firearms pose a much bigger threat to one's life than terrorists I mean even by the most conservative figure I just quoted, 12,000 people a year are killed by a gun owner. I'm not promoting or discounting gun control, I'm simply using the gun violence stats to help put things in perspective. Simply put I'm more likely to be killed by an idiot with a gun (I won't use the term hunter) trying to shoot a deer in my back yard then I am to be blown up by a terrorist.

And you shouldn't have taken my post as blaming Bush for everything. Just that he is not helping improve the situation. People are acting like irrational paranoid idiots as the Boston incident proves. What ever happened to rational judgment. How many people are killed each year world wide by terrorism? How many people die each year in the U.S. because of drunk drivers? Guess what, drunk drivers are a much bigger threat to our safety. People need to put the whole terrorism thing into some sort of healthy perspective and it is the responsibility of the President to provide leadership on this issue instead of constantly fanning the flames of paranoia with his fear mongering to justify his long drawn out war.

Who has pushed forth the Patriot Act? Who pushes forward the no fly lists? Who approved secret spying on Americans on American soil? Who resisted due process or court approval of said secret spying? Who keeps telling us that terrorists are an imminent threat to our security? Who keeps pushing for laws that erode our civil liberties? The illogical fear of terrorism is a bigger threat to our country than the terrorism itself. Ever since 9-11 the threat of terrorism has been a center piece of Bush's policies. We are running in circles chasing phantom threats and innocent people are having their lives disrupted because the end up on secret no fly lists (that they can't get off of) and other similar encroachments on their civil liberties. This President has help breed a climate where questioning his actions is unpatriotic as is questioning the war on terrorism. We have now been at war in Iraq for longer than we were in WWII. The key terrorist leaders are still at large, we have a completely destabilized situation in Iraq. People are so panic stricken that a stupid marketing stunt consisting of cardboard LEDs and batteries caused a massive overreaction and crippling of a major U.S. city for a day. The President has the ability to lead the emotions and mind set of this nation and he has used the threat of terrorism to push forward his agenda. If instead of making everyone suspicious of everything and convincing this nation that everything is a potential terrorist threat, he calmed fears and presented a calming, reasoned and reassuring voice people wouldn't be so panic stricken that they overreact to really stupid stuff. If we put even a fraction of the energy into preventing traffic fatalities caused by drunk drivers as we do into fighting terrorism here in the U.S. we would have saved thousands of more lives each year than we do fighting this "war on terror". Follow the money, who is benefiting financially from this war on terror?

Whoa!!! That was freaky! I imagine that the children and father were totally embarrassed by her actions. Either she was grandstanding for the TV cameras or she is completely unstable.

I completely agree and to add my own political comment to this, the terrorists have won in no small part because of a certain "leader" who lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave and his side kick who spends most of his time at an undisclosed location. Some how, our nation has forgotten FDR's words at his first inaugural address: "We have nothing to fear but fear itself." Let's get over this paranoia folks and start living life. I'm not going to hide in a cave for the rest of my life out of fear of getting blown up. Heck, the way I look at it I'm like 1,000 times more likely to get killed by a drunk driver than to become a victim of terrorism. Actually in any place but Iraq and Afghanistan one is probably WAY more likely to get killed by a drunk/bad driver than killed by a terrorist act.

Funny enough there is an article on Yahoo news (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070106/ap_on_bi_ge/obit_ando) about the inventor of ramen noodles having just died at the age of 96.

I saw that on the news the other evening. That was really cool.

What amazes me is that Kerry ended his presidential campaign with $16,000,000 left over. Why the heck wasn't this money used in the final weeks of his campaign to drive home his message and to help get out the vote? During the last two months of the election, I got the distinct feeling that Kerry was trying to throw the race. There is no way someone could be as politically stupid has he was at the end of his campaign. In regards to personality, I've come to the conclusion that Kerry is about as funny as a broken leg. Like you said he has no personality or charisma.

You can date old timers by the fact if they have used or still use Pegasus Mail by David Harris. I'm one of those old timers and have been using Pmail as it is called for short for around a dozen years now. I went to the official website today and much to my dismay, I discovered financial difficulties have finally killed off Pegasus Mail. This is such a sad day. I now have a dozen years of email built up that needs to be migrated to something else and never have I seen an email client that handled spam any better than Pmail. Deep down I knew this day would eventually come, but this is like the death of an old friend. I wonder if there are any migration tools to help one migrate from Pmail to Thunderbird? For those who do not know what Pegasus Mail is, it was one of the early trailblazing email clients. In fact many of the features people take for granted today (e.g. spam filtering) were pioneered by Pegasus Mail. All good things must come to an end. RIP Pegasus Mail, you were ahead of your time. People can read the official announcement on Pegasus Mail's official website: http://pmail.com/

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070105/ap_on_en_ot/democrats_mcauliffe_book Former Democratic Party boss and Clinton friend Terry McAuliffe is lambasting John Kerry's unsuccessful presidential campaign, calling his effort to unseat President Bush "one of the biggest acts of political malpractice in the history of American politics." This should be a book that everyone loves, well except for Kerry.

Then there would be nobody to pay the bills.

Basically I don't get the DNS entry so my browser keeps saying looking up or connecting, but never gets a response. It seems to be getting better. Sounds like it is time for auto payments.

For the bast two or three days I have been unable to connect to SFN (not getting DNS entry) and today I'm only able to connect intermittently. Is anyone else having this problem and what is the cause?

That was one of the things about him, he really didn't mince words like so many politicians do. He simply allowed us to see the many dimensions of his decision. I don't like the fact that Nixon may have escaped conviction on his crimes, but I do realize that the cost to our nation and the paralysis it would have caused to the business of the country. It simply was a case where the greater good of the country outweighed bringing one man to justice.

I would challenge anyone to try to play Ford's raw hand any better. All things considered he did very well with the hand he was dealt. Exactly.