“On the social side, however, the conservative trope about theirs being the ideology of freedom is a total joke and an ugly lie. These are the people who want the government in your underpants, who want the government reading your mail without a warrant, who want to control who you sleep with and who you marry, and who even want to force you to live in agony when you just want to crawl off and die. These are the people who stood in the doorways blocking the movements for racial and sexual equality.”
—Big Bad Government Is Coming to Get You | CommonDreams.org
October 2009
“The ABC data estimate that 30.4 million Americans now pay to buy a newspaper Monday through Saturday, on average, and about 40 million do so on Sunday. These figures come from 379 of the nation’s largest newspapers. In 1940, 41.1 million Americans bought a daily newspaper, according to the Newspaper Association of America.”
—The accelerating decline of newspapers - washingtonpost.com
Play
“Astronomers said Wednesday that a race halfway across the universe had ended in a virtual tie. And so the champion is still Albert Einstein — for now.”
—7.3 Billion Years Later, Einstein’s Theory Prevails - NYTimes.com
About Chrome OS (Chrome OS) →
sites.google.com
Haven’t tried it, but still interesting.
“So the venerable boarding school west of Boston — the first in the USA to admit both boys and girls — last summer undertook another first: It began getting rid of most of the library’s books. In their place: a fully digital collection.”
—School chooses Kindle; are libraries for the history ‘books’? - USATODAY.com
Play
“But what happens when a similarly taxpayer-endowed contractor attempts to cover up employee-on-employee gang rape by locking up the victim in a shipping container without food and water and threatening her with reprisals if she report the incident? Somehow, it doesn’t engender the same level of anger! Credit new Senator Al Franken however, for introducing an amendment to the Defense Appropriations bill that would punish contractors if they “restrict their employees from taking workplace sexual assault, battery and discrimination cases to court.”
—Meet The Senators Who Voted Against The Franken Amendment
“For places in the country that don’t have smoking bans,” Dr. Benowitz added, “smoking bans need to be put in place as quickly as possible. The longer we wait, the more disease we are accepting.”
—U.S. Report Links Smoking Bans and Heart Health - NYTimes.com
“Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future. His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world’s population.”
—“The USA is now playing a more constructive role” | Salon News
“While humans would clearly be killed and conventional satellites crushed by the gun’s huge g-forces, it could lift robust payloads such as rocket fuel. Finding cheap ways to transport fuel into space will lower the cost of keeping the International Space Station in orbit, and in future it may be needed to supply a crewed mission to Mars. The gun would cost $500 million to build, says Hunter, but individual launch costs would be lower than current methods. “We think it’s at least a factor of 10 cheaper than anything else,” he says.”
—Blasted into space from a giant air gun - space - 07 October 2009 - New Scientist
“Note that the policy, as well as the battery life, default language and common uses for icon-based buttons are subject to change at any time. Also note that any use of the term “Orwellian” as a comparison to the Company and user-rights holder will result in your bedroom door being kicked down by former black ops professionals in the middle of the night so that you may later participate in one of our show trials at a Tehran soccer arena.”
—McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: Introducing the Kindle Gutenberg Bookreader.
“But while not having another depression is a good thing, all indications are that unless the government does much more than is currently planned to help the economy recover, the job market — a market in which there are currently six times as many people seeking work as there are jobs on offer — will remain terrible for years to come.”
—Mission Not Accomplished | CommonDreams.org
