Pharyngula::If you doubt this is possible, how is it there are PYGMIES + DWARFS??

Pharyngula::If you doubt this is possible, how is it there are PYGMIES + DWARFS??: "Ever wonder how the hell a moron like George W. Bush got elected? 'If you doubt this is possible, how is it there are PYGMIES + DWARFS??'"

Coping with Finiteness.pdf (application/pdf Object)

Coping with Finiteness.pdf (application/pdf Object)
The three dots “ ... ” here suppress a lot of detail – maybe I should have used
four dots

Yahoo! GeoCities - Your Home On The Web®

Yahoo! GeoCities - Your Home On The Web®: "What distinguishes the Betriebsrat from its continental European cousins is an explicit set of codetermination rights on what are termed 'social matters'. Examples of those areas in which the works council has joint decision-making authority with management are the commencement and termination of working hours, principles of remuneration, the introduction of new payment methods, pay arrangements to include the fixing of job and bonus rates and other types of performance related pay, the regulation of overtime and reduced working hours, the introduction and operation of technical devices to monitor worker performance, and of course health and safety measures. In all such areas, failure to reach agreement leads to their adjudication through a conciliation board"

It's Time For Microsoft To Face Reality About Search And The Internet (MSFT)

It's Time For Microsoft To Face Reality About Search And The Internet (MSFT): "Microsoft still has an AWESOME business in enterprise software and services. This business continues to provide the vast majority of its revenue and all of its profit. By continuing to pour resources and attention into its mediocre consumer Internet business, Microsoft is failing to fully exploit an opportunity that it has a much better chance of dominating: Enterprise applications, including SAAS services such as those offered by Salesforce.com, et al.
Importantly, Oracle and IBM are still making major hay in enterprise software. While Microsoft fiddles with search and advertising, Larry Ellison has bought up most of his competitors. Every dollar of revenue and profit Oracle, IBM, SAP, Salesforce, et al, generate is a dollar that Microsoft is leaving on the table in a misguided attempt to make headway in a business it has no core competency in."

The Last Psychiatrist: The Difference Between An Amateur, A Scientist, And A Genius

The Last Psychiatrist: The Difference Between An Amateur, A Scientist, And A Genius: "A genius has three abilities, which are actually the union of amateur and scientist: 1. to know the state of the art, what is known and what is not known. 2. To be able to think 'out of the box'. 3. To be disciplined enough to concentrate on the tedium of a formal investigation of his wondrous speculations"

Researchers Hail Creation of Stem Cells Safe for Human Use - TIME

Researchers Hail Creation of Stem Cells Safe for Human Use - TIME: ". Just three years since a Japanese researcher first reprogrammed ordinary skin cells into stem cells without the use of embryos, scientists at a Massachusetts biotech company have repeated the feat, only this time with a new method that creates the first stem cells safe enough for human use. The achievement brings the potentially lifesaving technology one step closer to real treatments for disease."

A Human Language Gene Changes the Sound of Mouse Squeaks - NYTimes.com

A Human Language Gene Changes the Sound of Mouse Squeaks - NYTimes.com: "In a region of the brain called the basal ganglia, known in people to be involved in language, the humanized mice grew nerve cells that had a more complex structure. Baby mice utter ultrasonic whistles when removed from their mothers. The humanized baby mice, when isolated, made whistles that had a slightly lower pitch, among other differences, Dr. Enard says. Dr. Enard argues that putting significant human genes into mice is the only feasible way of exploring the essential differences between people and chimps, our closest living relatives."

Technology Review: Blogs: arXiv blog: First Evidence of Entanglement in Photosynthesis

Technology Review: Blogs: arXiv blog: First Evidence of Entanglement in Photosynthesis: "In the first rigorous quantification of entanglement in a biological system, an answer is beginning to emerge. Researchers from various institutions in Berkeley California have shown that molecules taking part in photosynthesis can remain entangled even at ordinary atmospheric temperatures."

CIOs Slow to Embrace Cloud Computing - BusinessWeek

CIOs Slow to Embrace Cloud Computing - BusinessWeek: "A 2009 survey on IT spending by Goldman Sachs ranked cloud services #33 on the list of spending priorities among CIOs, with about 50 percent saying that it was a low priority. Software as a service ranked even lower at #36, with more than 60 percent categorizing it as a low priority."

Landmark study: DRM truly does make pirates out of us all - Ars Technica

Landmark study: DRM truly does make pirates out of us all - Ars Technica: "The study confirms what anyone who has ever wanted to rip a DVD to their computer or iPod could have told you: DRM, coupled with anticircumvention laws, makes pirates of us all."

Jim Gray 2003

http://arxiv.org/ftp/cs/papers/0403/0403019.pdf
Computing economics are changing. Today there is rough price parity between (1) one database
access, (2) ten bytes of network traffic, (3) 100,000 instructions, (4) 10 bytes of disk storage, and (5) a
megabyte of disk bandwidth. This has implications for how one structures Internet-scale distributed
computing: one puts computing as close to the data as possible in order to avoid expensive network
traffic.

NIST.gov - Computer Security Division - Computer Security Resource Center

NIST.gov - Computer Security Division - Computer Security Resource Center: "NIST is posting its working definition of cloud computing that serves as a foundation for its upcoming publication on the topic (available below). Computer scientists at NIST developed this draft definition in collaboration with industry and government. It was developed as the foundation for a NIST special publication that will cover cloud architectures, security, and deployment strategies for the federal government"

An Unorthodox Approach to Database Design : The Coming of the Shard | High Scalability

An Unorthodox Approach to Database Design : The Coming of the Shard High Scalability: "Sharding is different than traditional database architecture in several important ways"

Sex Sells. Here's Why We Buy - TIME

Sex Sells. Here's Why We Buy - TIME: "Both depended on the same insight: individuals work hard mostly because they want to show off to others, not for the good of the group. This tendency holds true in both organic evolution and human economics ... We've known since Darwin that animals are basically machines for survival and reproduction; now we also know that animals achieve much of their survival and reproductive success through self-advertisement, self-marketing and self-promotion"

Meet Intel, Software Maker and Rival to Microsoft - NYTimes.com

Meet Intel, Software Maker and Rival to Microsoft - NYTimes.com: "The smartphone is certainly the end goal,” said Doug Fisher, a vice president in Intel’s software group. “It’s absolutely critical for the success of this product.”"

ScienceDirect - NeuroImage : When thoughts become action: An fMRI paradigm to study volitional brain activity in non-communicative brain injured patients

ScienceDirect - NeuroImage : When thoughts become action: An fMRI paradigm to study volitional brain activity in non-communicative brain injured patients: "this paradigm may provide a method for assessing the presence of volitional brain activity"

XL97: Data Not Returned from Query Using ORACLE Data Source

XL97: Data Not Returned from Query Using ORACLE Data Source: "Method 2: Move Your Mouse Pointer
If you move your mouse pointer continuously while the data is being returned to Microsoft Excel, the query may not fail. Do not stop moving the mouse until all the data has been returned to Microsoft Excel."

Who Has the Most Web Servers? « Data Center Knowledge

Who Has the Most Web Servers? « Data Center Knowledge: "Google: The search giant’s server count has long been the focus of speculation. There’s a widely circulated estimate of 450,000 servers"

Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive « alex.moskalyuk

Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive « alex.moskalyuk: "The authors take the position that persuasion is a science, not art, hence with the right approach anybody can become the master in the skill of persuasion"

Fictive Reward Signals in the Anterior Cingulate Cortex -- Hayden et al. 324 (5929): 948 -- Science

Fictive Reward Signals in the Anterior Cingulate Cortex -- Hayden et al. 324 (5929): 948 -- Science: "individual ACC neurons process both experienced and fictive rewards"

NeuroDojo

NeuroDojo: "the pious hope that by combining numerous little turds of variously tainted data, one can obtain a valuable result; but in fact, the outcome is merely a larger than average pile of shit."

10 Things You Don’t Need to Do In the Clouds « SmoothSpan Blog

10 Things You Don’t Need to Do In the Clouds « SmoothSpan Blog: "You aren’t choosing the servers in your Cloud. The good news is that any really large scale Cloud vendor like Amazon will be choosing servers with great performance per watt, because it lowers their cost basis."

Don't Feed the Animals

Don't Feed the Animals

Let Me Introduce You To Dan Ariely

Make sure you have about 35 minutes to spare before you begin watching the following videos:

Dan Ariely asks, Are we in control of our own decisions?
Dan Ariely on our buggy moral code

These links were posted by a friend of mine on Facebook and I took the time to watch the videos today. I found myself very pleased with the material covered in them.

The first video introduces the idea that the decisions we make can be influenced more by external factors than our own intuitions. I've long been a believer that situations often trump personal feelings in influencing a person's actions and decisions. This video articulates that point better than I could ever hope to.

The second video talks about morals and how, once again, situational variables are the most prominent influence in how "moral" we act. I personally don't give any moral argument much attention because of exactly this. Situations and environments can coax us to forgo any moral convictions we might have, all the while convincing us that we are still in the righ

My Way News - ALL BUSINESS: Investors still support CEO pay

My Way News - ALL BUSINESS: Investors still support CEO pay: "n the United States, this slow process is just beginning. It's true that investors at more companies are voting in support of putting a shareholder vote on executive pay on corporate ballots. But that's just the first step before a vote on the pay plan can take place.

The number of shareholder proposals asking for a nonbinding investor vote on executive pay has doubled since 2007 to more than 100 this year, according to data from the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, or AFSCME, a Washington-based labor group representing government workers."

Creationism and Nylon-Eating Bacteria « The Sensuous Curmudgeon

Creationism and Nylon-Eating Bacteria « The Sensuous Curmudgeon: "In 1975 a team of Japanese scientists discovered a strain of Flavobacterium living in ponds containing waste water from a factory producing nylon that was capable of digesting certain byproducts of nylon 6 manufacture, such as the linear dimer of 6-aminohexanoate, even though those substances are not known to have existed before the invention of nylon in 1935."

P.Z. Myers: Why is Charlotte Allen so mad at atheists? - Los Angeles Times

P.Z. Myers: Why is Charlotte Allen so mad at atheists? - Los Angeles Times: "We're pretty certain that if there were an all-powerful being pulling the strings and shaping history for the benefit of human beings, the universe would look rather different than it does. It wouldn't be a place almost entirely inimical to our existence, with a history that reveals our existence was a fortunate result of a long chain of accidents tuned by natural selection. Most of the arguments we've heard that try to reconcile god and science seem to make God a subtle, invisible, undetectable ghost who at best tickles the occasional subatomic particle when no one is looking. It seems rather obvious to us that if his works are undetectable, you have no grounds for telling us what he's been up to."

A systematic review of the quality of research on ...[Altern Ther Health Med. 2003 May-Jun] - PubMed Result

A systematic review of the quality of research on ...[Altern Ther Health Med. 2003 May-Jun] - PubMed Result: "RESULTS: A total of 45 laboratory and 45 clinical studies published between 1956 and 2001 met the inclusion criteria. Of the clinical studies, 31 (70.5%) reported positive outcomes as did 28 (62%) of the laboratory studies; 4 (9%) of the clinical studies reported negative outcomes as did 15 (33%) of the laboratory studies. The mean percent overall internal validity for clinical studies was 69% (65% for hands-on healing and 75% for distance healing) and for laboratory studies 82% (82% for hands-on healing and 81% for distance healing). Major methodological problems of these studies included adequacy of blinding, dropped data in laboratory studies, reliability of outcome measures, rare use of power estimations and confidence intervals, and lack of independent replication. CONCLUSIONS: When laboratory studies were compared to clinical studies in the areas of hands-on healing and distance healing across the quality criteria for internal validity, distance healing studies scored better than hands-on healing studies, and laboratory studies fared better than clinical studies. Many studies of healing contained major problems that must be addressed in any future research."

SkepticReport * Book Review: Dean Radin, "The Conscious Universe"

SkepticReport * Book Review: Dean Radin, "The Conscious Universe": "quote Susan Blackmore’s remark on ganzfeld research:
'These experiments, which looked so beautifully designed in print, were in fact open to fraud or error in several ways, and indeed I detected several errors and failures to follow the protocol while I was there. I concluded that the published papers gave an unfair impression of the experiments and that the results could not be relied upon as evidence for psi. Eventually the experimenters and I all published our different views of the affair'"

British Journal of Cancer - Abstract of article: The effect of spiritual healing on in vitro tumour cell proliferation and viability - an experimental study

British Journal of Cancer - Abstract of article: The effect of spiritual healing on in vitro tumour cell proliferation and viability - an experimental study: "The results do not support previous reports of beneficial effects of spiritual healing on malignant cell growth in vitro."

Consciousness: what can the paranormal teach us about it? (Skeptical Inquirer March 2001)

Consciousness: what can the paranormal teach us about it? (Skeptical Inquirer March 2001): "As philosopher Thomas Nagel (1974) put it when he asked his famous question 'What is it like to be a bat?' -- if there is something it is like for the bat then we can say that the bat is conscious. This is what we mean by consciousness -- consciousness is private and subjective and this is why it is so difficult to understand."

AWS Import/Export

AWS Import/Export: "AWS Import/Export accelerates moving large amounts of data into and out of AWS using portable storage devices for transport. AWS transfers your data directly onto and off of storage devices using Amazon’s high-speed internal network and bypassing the Internet. For significant data sets, AWS Import/Export is often faster than Internet transfer and more cost effective than upgrading your connectivity."

VMware foresees mobile virtualization in 2010 | Business Tech - CNET News

VMware foresees mobile virtualization in 2010 Business Tech - CNET News: "Virtualization of mobile phones means user data on phones will be a portable file that can be moved from handset to handset."

A nimbus rises in the world of cloud computing | Eureka! Science News

A nimbus rises in the world of cloud computing Eureka! Science News: "Nimbus is an example of such an adaptable system. Keahey and her team developed this open source cloud computing infrastructure to allow scientists working on data-intensive research projects to be able to use such virtual machines with a cloud provider. Nimbus also allows users to create multiple virtual machines to complete specific computational jobs that can be deployed throughout the cloud and still work in tandem with each other. This flexibility allows a user to configure a virtual machine and then connect it to resources on a cloud, regardless of who is providing the cloud"

Intel previews Atom 'Pineview' chip, Linux OS | Nanotech - The Circuits Blog - CNET News

Intel previews Atom 'Pineview' chip, Linux OS Nanotech - The Circuits Blog - CNET News: "'We have a processor, we have a chipset, and we have an I/O hub. What we've done is reduce that three-chip partition to a two-chip partition,' Al-Khaledy said"

God Talk, Part 2 - Stanley Fish Blog - NYTimes.com

God Talk, Part 2 - Stanley Fish Blog - NYTimes.com: "“To torpedo faith is to destroy the roots of . . . any system of knowledge . . . I challenge anyone to construct an argument proving reason’s legitimacy without presupposing it . . . Faith is the base, completely unavoidable. Get used to it. It’s the human condition.” (All of us, not just believers, see through a glass darkly.)"

Dr. Dobb's | Eliminate False Sharing | May 14, 2009

Dr. Dobb's | Eliminate False Sharing | May 14, 2009: "false sharing (aka cache line ping-ponging), where threads use different objects but those objects happen to be close enough in memory that they fall on the same cache line, and the cache system treats them as a single lump that is effectively protected by a hardware write lock that only one core can hold at a time."

Dr. Dobb's | IBM Announces 'Stream Computing' Software | May 15, 2009

Dr. Dobb's | IBM Announces 'Stream Computing' Software | May 15, 2009: "System S is built for perpetual analytics utilizing a new streaming architecture and mathematical algorithms to create a forward-looking analysis of data from any source, narrowing down precisely what people are looking for and continuously refining the answer as additional data is made available."

How the hell does Wolfram Alpha work? | News | TechRadar UK

How the hell does Wolfram Alpha work? News TechRadar UK: "Wolfram Alpha is starting with an impressive-sounding setup, reportedly 10,000 x86 CPUs configured in clusters and running queries in parallel. But will even this be enough?"

Amazon offers more cloud control | Business Tech - CNET News

Amazon offers more cloud control Business Tech - CNET News: "In an announcement Monday, Amazon Web Services unveiled a public beta of the three new features: the CloudWatch monitoring service, Auto Scaling for on-demand capacity adjustments, and Elastic Load Balancing for redistributing traffic."

Leo Apotheker will become SAP's lone CEO next week - May. 15, 2009

Leo Apotheker will become SAP's lone CEO next week - May. 15, 2009: "When asked about Business ByDesign, Apotheker removed his glasses and rubbed his palms together. The product has just 80 customers testing it out at the moment, according to Apotheker, and he was reluctant to say when it would be more widely available, explaining that SAP had to flesh out the most viable business model before it launched and it was worth waiting to get the model right."

Alva Noe, You are not your brain | Salon

Alva Noe, You are not your brain | Salon: "You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules."

AK's Rambling Thoughts: How Smart is the Cell: Part IV: Local Intelligence

AK's Rambling Thoughts: How Smart is the Cell: Part IV: Local Intelligence: "Bottom line, the neuron is potentially capable of incredible intelligence. Not only that, but the body contains literally thousands of different types of neurons, each of which can potentially perform a different calculation at each type of synapse it contains. And some nerve cells, such as purkinje cells can have hundreds of thousands of these synapses on a single cell."

Exploring cloud interoperability, part 3 | The Wisdom of Clouds - CNET News

Exploring cloud interoperability, part 3 | The Wisdom of Clouds - CNET News: "cloud operations opportunity--building a full-featured operations API and user interface for a cloud--is a daunting task, requiring tools for provisioning, management and monitoring, among others."

Deep Cravings | Harvard Magazine

Deep Cravings | Harvard Magazine: "'Humans are inconsistent. Their preferences change with the setting,' Heyman continues. 'To end an addiction, people need an alternative to drug use, something better to do."

The Security Development Lifecycle : Please Join me in welcoming memcpy() to the SDL Rogues Gallery

The Security Development Lifecycle : Please Join me in welcoming memcpy() to the SDL Rogues Gallery: "I am “proud” to announce that we intend to add memcpy() will to the SDL C and C++ banned API list later this year as we make further revisions to the SDL. Right now, memcpy() is on the SDL Recommended banned list, but will soon be added to the SDL banned API requirement list now that we have more feedback from Microsoft product groups"

Varieties of Uncertainty « Coggr: A Cognitive Science Blog

Varieties of Uncertainty « Coggr: A Cognitive Science Blog: "The first article (Vanni-Mercier et al., 2009) looks at the role of the hippocampus in computing (or representing) uncertainty. Different areas of the brain are known to process uncertainty, but this study gives evidence that the hippocampus is also involved in representing uncertainty. Vanni-Mercier et al. measured local field potentials in the hippocampi of three epileptic patients (who had electrodes implanted pre-surgically). They had the patients estimate the reward payoff probability for different simulated slot machines. They performed event-related potential (ERP) analysis of the local field potentials, and found a negative ERP which had an amplitude that had an “inverted U” shaped relationship with the probability of payoff - with the largest amplitude when the probability was 50% (the most uncertainty)."

Matasano Chargen » Blog Archive » The Security Implications Of Google Native Client

Matasano Chargen » Blog Archive » The Security Implications Of Google Native Client: "There is a very important difference between what NaCl is doing and what Java is doing. Java’s security measures are chaperones. They’re always there and always checking your actions. NaCl’s mechanisms are just rules. They’re checked once, and then the program is on its own. NaCl promises to be faster than Java"

The Atheist Missionary: Darwin's pitbull uses the simplicity of Twitter to explain the theory of natural selection

The Atheist Missionary: Darwin's pitbull uses the simplicity of Twitter to explain the theory of natural selection: "Three Principles of Natural Selection:


1. Organisms produce offspring with different traits, which can be inherited.


2. Organisms produce more offspring than can survive because the world has limited resources.

3. Offspring whose traits are best suited to their environment survive and pass on those variations to their offspring."

Brain's problem-solving function at work when we daydream

Brain's problem-solving function at work when we daydream: "The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, finds that activity in numerous brain regions increases when our minds wander. It also finds that brain areas associated with complex problem-solving - previously thought to go dormant when we daydream - are in fact highly active during these episodes."

SAP Boosts Business Data Search

SAP Boosts Business Data Search: "The product will be available in two iterations, a 'standard' edition and an accelerated version for sorting through enterprise data. One of SAP's partners on the project is Intel, which has co-engineered the in-memory processing capabilities of SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator to optimize it to work with the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series."

Microsoft Readies 'Madison' Data Warehouse Appliance CTP

Microsoft Readies 'Madison' Data Warehouse Appliance CTP: "Madison builds off technology Microsoft acquired when it purchased DATAllegro in 2008.
The goal of Madison is to use MPP (massively parallel processing) to deliver high performance and scalability on SQL Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 and industry-standard hardware. The appliance partitions large tables across multiple physical nodes, with each node having dedicated CPU, memory and storage and running its own instance of SQL Server."

Striking a Balance

Striking a Balance: "This week, AMD is making a couple of very important announcements for developers: support of Intel's Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX) instruction set in future AMD processors,"

Infrastructure 2.0

Infrastructure 2.0: "OVF is extensible and it certainly provides a robust mechanism for describing all the software-specific details necessary to move a VM from one physical location to another. But cloud is very much about infrastructure, and architecture, and unfortunately OVF does nothing (and to its credit is not designed to) to forward the cause of interoperability or portability or even collaboration with that infrastructure. There are no policies carried around with OVF – does the application have a specific SLA? Or require external security? Authentication systems? ID management? Aggregated logs? NMS? QoS? Rate shaping? SSL?

An application is not an island, and in the land of cloud computing it must collaborate with its infrastructure to provide feedback on performance and response time and utilization thresholds to the management systems which must, well, manage the application. These things are application specific, and as such these policies and information should be carried with the application as it roams around the Internet."

The “Open” Cloud is Coming | Cloudscaling

The “Open” Cloud is Coming | Cloudscaling: "You might score these differently, but for me VMware gets marks for widely adopted APIs, but demerits for dragging their feet on standards they helped create like OVF and being missing from conversations like the OCCI effort. GoGrid has an open license on our API, but doesn’t allow downloading or uploading virtual machine images [4]. Amazon has widely adopted APIs, but under ambiguous licenses and quite a few proprietary technologies (e.g. S3, SimpleDB, and SQS) that encourage lock-in.

The good news is that standards for cloud interoperability (OCCI) and virtual machine portability (OVF) are either here or imminent and many providers are planning to adopt them."

Why do we believe in electrons, but not in fairies?

Why do we believe in electrons, but not in fairies?: "The scientific method is an amazing procedure for incrementally improving certain kinds of theories: those that make testable predictions. A theory that doesn't make testable predictions could still be true, but it doesn't participate in the scientific method. (There are people who believe that the only truths are scientific truths, but this is essentially a religious faith on their part.)"

Listverse Top 50 Jokes - Listverse

Listverse Top 50 Jokes - Listverse: "1. A guy meets a hooker in a bar. She says, “This is your lucky night. I’ve got a special game for you. I’ll do absolutely anything you want for $300, as long as you can say it in three words.” The guy replies, “Hey, why not?” He pull his wallet out of his pocket, and one at a time lays three hundred-dollar bills on the bar, and says, slowly: “Paint…my…house.”
2. A man goes to a psychiatrist and says, “Doc, my brother’s crazy, he thinks he’s a chicken.” The doctor says, “Why don’t you turn him in?” The guy says, “We would. But we need the eggs.”
3. A guy enters bar carrying an alligator. Says to the patrons, “Here’s a deal. I’ll open this alligator’s mouth and place my genitals inside. The gator will close his mouth for one minute, then open it, and I’ll remove my unit unscathed. If it works, everyone buys me drinks.” The crowd agrees. The guy drops his pants and puts his privates in the gator’s mouth. Gator closes mouth. After a minute, the guy grabs a beer bottle and bangs the gator on the top of its head. The gator opens wide, and he removes his genitals unscathed. Everyone buys him drinks. Then he says: “I’ll pay anyone $100 who’s willing to give it a try.” After a while, a hand goes up in the back of the bar. It’s a woman. “I’ll give it a try,” she says, “but you have to promise not to hit me on the head with the beer bottle.”
4. Three kids come down to the kitchen and sit around the breakfast table. The mother asks the oldest boy what he’d like to eat. “I’ll have some fuckin’ FrFrench toast,” he says. The mother is outraged at his language, hits him, and sends him upstairs. She asks the middle child what he wants. “Well, I guess that leaves more fuckin’ French toast for me,” he says. She is livid, smacks him, and sends him away. Finally she asks the youngest son what he wants for breakfast. “I don’t know,” he says meekly, “but I definitely don’t want the fuckin’ French toast.”
5. A guy has a talking dog. He brings it to a talent scount. “This dog can speak English,” he claims to the unimpressed agent. “Okay, Sport,” the guys says to the dog, “what’s on the top of a house?” “Roof!” the dog replies. “Oh, come on…” the talent agent responds. “All dogs go ‘roof’.” “No, wait,” the guy says. He asks the dog “what does sandpaper feel like?” “Rough!” the dog answers. The talent agent gives a condescending blank stare. He is losing his patience. “No, hang on,” the guy says. “This one will amaze you. ” He turns and asks the dog: “Who, in your opinion, was the greatest baseball player of all time?” “Ruth!” goes the dog. And the talent scout, having seen enough, boots them out of his office onto the street. The dog turns to the guy and says “Maybe I shoulda said DiMaggio?”

DailyTech - Server roundup: Intel "Nehalem" Xeon versus AMD "Shanghai" Opteron

DailyTech - Server roundup: Intel "Nehalem" Xeon versus AMD "Shanghai" Opteron: "As we can see from the official SPECpower_ssj2008 results above, AMD's 'High Efficiency' (HE) products actually consume substantially more power than Intel's low power products despite the fact that AMD advertises the lowest power consumption."

Greatest Jazz Albums of All Time - The Top 100 | NoiseAddicts music and audio blog

Greatest Jazz Albums of All Time - The Top 100 | NoiseAddicts music and audio blog: "Here is the list below - check it out"