Nothing sets the mood like a Star Trek voice operated dimmer featuring Majel Roddenberry, the voice of the computer in the Star Trek series.
Today is the start of the Chinese New Year (or Lunar New Year) with this being the Year of the Pig according to Chinese Zodiac.Fire sitting on water is a symbol of conflict and skirmish. We'll also see more fire disasters and bombings.The Russian AK-47 rifle, a weapon of choice among insurgents, was invented during a pig year, therefore we will see more gun battles, murder with guns and bombing attacks in 2007. Lillian Too, a Malaysian feng shui master expects the possibility of epidemics especially the bird flu. Peter So, a Chinese fortune teller, stated
Because of the water element in the Year of the Pig, the economy will continue to grow, which also paves the way for another round of interest rate hikesAlion Yeo, a Hong Kong soothsayer, predicts changes in North Korean leadership around May, and John Lok, a Singaporean fortune teller, expects a bad situation in Iraq and that President Bush will have a bad year.
At noon today, James Sherley, the African-American biomedical engineering professor who had begun a hunger strike to protest being denied tenure at MIT ended his strike. MIT and James Sherley issued the following statements:MIT deeply regrets that Professor Sherley's experiences at the Institute have resulted in his fast to express his concerns about racism. MIT bears responsibility for ensuring an environment in which all members of our diverse community feel welcome and respected. Professor Sherley's protest has focused attention on the effects that race may play in the hiring, advancement and experience of under-represented minority faculty, and on ensuring that our grievance processes are comprehensive, fair and timely. MIT is fully committed to addressing these issues and will continue to work toward resolution of our differences with Professor Sherley.James Sherley Statement
Dear colleagues:
As MIT observes its Martin Luther King, Jr. Day celebration today, I want to thank my supporters and other sympathizers of my hunger strike outside of the offices of the President and Provost. I am ending this part of my struggle. Starting today, I will in fact break my fast, in celebration of the attention that has been brought to bear on issues of equity, diversity, and justice at MIT and in higher education. Carefully modified from the original, my demands are still on the table. I urge the administration to act in good faith, to openly acknowledge and respond to the lines of communication and negotiation that have been in place for two weeks and to find its way to meet these demands.
Sincerely yours,
James L. Sherley
TVU Player is a free P2PTV program that allows users to watch TV channels on their computers. It is possible to record the video using VideoLAN Client (or VLC) as an ASF file.
While TVU Player is running and streaming video, open VLC and go to File -> Open Network Stream. At the open dialog, select HTTP/HTTPS/FTP/MMS and enter 127.0.0.1:8901 in the URL. Click the Stream/Save checkbox, and click Settings next to it.
On the Stream Output dialog, click File in the Outputs section. In Filename, choose a location and file name for the output. In the Encapsulation Method section, choose ASF. Click OK on the two open dialogs of VLC, and the current TVU Player stream will start recording.
On Tuesday, Barack Obama apologized for using the word "wasted" to refer to the lives of soldiers in a speech in Ames, Iowa. "We ended up launching a war that should have never been authorized, and should never been waged, and on which we have now spent $400 billion, and have seen over 3,000 lives of the bravest young Americans wasted."This faux pas is struck a similar cord as John Kerry's poor joke last November at Pasadena City College in which he said,
"You know education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don't, you get stuck in Iraq."This statement was unfounded according to a report by the Heritage Foundation, which shows that 98% of military enlistees have a high school diploma compared to 75% of the general population.
EPIC is a Perl IDE plugin for the Eclipse platform. It has an unresolved bug where Perl files saved with a syntax error cannot be opened again and Eclipse will produce the following ambiguous error when opened:Unable to create this part due to an internal error. Reason for the failure: Argument not validFor instance, the following code would cause an error due to a missing curly brace and a syntax error with the regular expression:
} elsif($test =~ /) #Statement }If the code is too complex to edit readily using the Open With -> Text Editor option, then copying the code to a new Perl document will highlight the syntax error normally.
Individuals aged 50 and older tend to have a higher rate of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) use, but tend not to discuss CAM use with their physicians. NCCAM conducted a phone survey of 1,559 people aged 50 and older showed that 30% did not discuss CAM use because they did not they should. Women more than men tended to discuss CAM use, and individuals making $75,000 or more were 6% more likely to talk to their physicians about CAM use than people with lower incomes.
Some students at Macalester College in St. Paul Minnesota threw a "politically incorrect" party, which has prompted an investigation due to one student being dressed as a Ku Klux Klan member and another wearing blackface with a noose around his neck. The party was supposed to be a satiric comment on "things that would be considered taboo in most situations."
Orthodox Jewish ritual law requires a husband to give a woman a bill of divorce known in Hebrew as a a "Get" to be considered single. Maliciously a husband can refuse to sign the bill leaving their wives "agunah" or literally a "chained" wife.
In a celebration opening a new Microsoft global technical center in Bucharest, Romania, President Traian Basescu said in a speech with the software giant's chairman, Bill Gates, present:Piracy helped the young generation discover computers. It set off the development of the IT industry in Romania. It helped Romanians improve their creative capacity in the IT industry, which has become famous around the world ... Ten years ago, it was an investment in Romania's friendship with Microsoft and with Bill Gates.About 70% of software in Romania is pirated and salesmen still sell pirated CDs and DVDs of software at office buildings. Some argue that this behavior in nations with low incomes actually has benefits for large vendors because there are no sales losses if the people would not have been able to purchase the software, there is pressure for individuals to "go legit" when entering the workforce, and the vendor gains increased mindshare.
True to his word, James Sherley, a African-American biomedical engineering professor begun a hunger strike today to protest being denied tenure at MIT. Twenty faculty from the department signed a statement stating that race did not play a part in the decision. Sherley will protest outside the office of the president and provost for three hours each morning. Out of 740 tenured professors, 27 or about 4 percent are ethnic minorities. MIT stated that Sherley's case has been reviewed three separate times.
The theory of a Just War is the underpinning set of criteria which aids to determine if going to war is morally permissible, and specifies the circumstances in which the sixth commandment, "Thou Shall Not Kill", can be ignored. In 1993, the US Catholic Conference stated "Force may be used only to correct a grave, public evil, i.e., aggression or massive violation of the basic human rights of whole populations"NEW YORK - Responding to recent events on Earth, God, the omniscient creator-deity worshipped by billions of followers of various faiths for more than 6,000 years, angrily clarified His longtime stance against humans killing each other Monday.
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"I don't care how holy somebody claims to be," God said. "If a person tells you it's My will that they kill someone, they're wrong. Got it? I don't care what religion you are, or who you think your enemy is, here it is one more time: No killing, in My name or anyone else's, ever again."
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"I tried to put it in the simplest possible terms for you people, so you'd get it straight, because I thought it was pretty important," said God, called Yahweh and Allah respectively in the Judaic and Muslim traditions. "I guess I figured I'd left no real room for confusion after putting it in a four-word sentence with one-syllable words, on the tablets I gave to Moses. How much more clear can I get?"
What happens when Americans want cheaper gas? Poor Mexicans starve. The price of tortillas has risen to 45 cents per pound in some areas of Mexico where the minimum wage is still less than US$5 dollars a day. A bushel (56 pounds) of corn has risen on the Chicago Board of Trade by over US$2 dollars since the end of 2005 to US$4 dollars; the US supplies about a quarter of Mexico's corn imports. This has been caused by the surge of interest in ethanol as an alternative fuel.
