If you’re like me, George W. Bush’s justification for the war that aired the other night made you a tad miffed or a smidge tweaked. Maybe even some of your “ill humors” were engaged. When he said he would listen to his Generals’ advice concerning the number of troops deployed, you might have, if you’re at all like me, thrown a ceramic T-Bird decanter at the TV and yelled “Why didn’t you listen before you beady-eyed spoiled oil brat!” Or perhaps when he trotted out his paper-thin compassion for those who have suffered from the war you bit a TV Guide in half and shrieked “If you cared so much why didn’t you spend ten honest minutes trying to avoid this frickin war rather than stroking yourself off to GI Joe Action figures with Rummy, Cheney, Wolfy and the rest of your mummified chicken hawk cronies!!!”

Only when pushed, and then prodded and then finally pinned, will Richard Friedman explain why he’s running as an independent candidate for Texas governor. Initially, he will offer only the glib, catchy one-liners that befit the songwriter nicknamed Kinky who once proclaimed, “They ain’t makin’ Jews like Jesus anymore.” He will say things like “I’m for the little fellers, not the Rockefellers.” He will inform you that people are tired “of the choice between paper and plastic.” He will explain that the Capitol building in Austin is seven feet taller than our nation’s Capitol, but that ours “was built for giants, and instead it’s inhabited by midgets.” He has a million of them, and by the time November 2006 comes around–hell, by the time you finish reading this story–no doubt you will have heard many of them several times.

Federal agents are in a familiar position as they probe the computer-security breach at an Arizona firm that left credit-card data for some 40 million people open to theft: Once again, they’re playing catch-up.

A shadowy group of pedestrian hackers called Cross Anytime announced their discovery of several back doors or “cheats” using crosswalk buttons at many intersections. The 3658-item list has been released on their website www.crosswalkbuttonhacks.com.

With just two days to go before the expiration of mainstream support for Microsoft’s Windows 2000 operating system, the software giant has provided an update rollup with more than 50 security patches and system reliability fixes.

Organic transistors, which are made from semiconducting plastics, are cheap to manufacture. Although they enable thin, bendable electronics, so far they can’t implement the fastest, most efficient circuit designs, because the plastics can’t transport electrons. Instead, they rely on a flow of positive charges, or electron “holes,” to pass current, which limits their use. Now, in a surprising discovery, Lay-Lay Chua at the University of Cambridge and Peter Ho at the National University of Singapore have shown that the transistors’ inability to move electrons is due not to the plastic itself but to an interaction with other materials in the transistor.

You hit the nail on the head.

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Talk about things coming full circle

It wasn’t all that long ago when a young conservative congressman from Illinois named Donald Rumsfeld spoke eloquently on the floor of the House of Representatives during the Vietnam War about the need for the Johnson administration to speak more truthfully about that conflict.

A 1966 article in the Chicago Tribune quoted Rumsfeld as saying the following: “The administration should clarify its intent in Viet Nam,’ he said. ‘People lack confidence in the credibility of our government.’ Even our allies are beginning to suspect what we say, he charged.‘It’s a difficult thing today to be informed about our government even without all the secrecy,’ he said. ‘With the secrecy, it’s impossible. The American people will do what’s right when they have the information they need.” [Chicago Tribune, 4/13/66]

Check out the demo, this is way cool!

New Scientist Breaking News – New calculator makes solving tricky sums easy
A novel calculator interface makes solving tricky sums easy, as users can simply write them onto a screen and then watch the answer appear.