http://money.cnn.com/2005/09/22/news/economy/rita_threat/ They’re once again talking about $5 per gallon gasoline. There’s more to the whole story though that isn’t getting told about why there are so few refineries that are stretched so thin that taking one or two of them out causes such a price spike. Right now, the majority of the time all of the active refineries in the country are running near full production just to keep up with the country’s gasoline needs.

Now read the following two excerpts from the article. Last December, Google struck a deal with libraries at three American universities - Harvard, Stanford and the University of Michigan, as well as Oxford University and the New York Public Library for Google to make copies of all of the works in those institutions that are no longer protected by copyright .and“By reproducing for itself a copy of those works that are not in the public domain, Google is engaging in massive copyright infringement.

More absurdity over Beef. From the Washington post, Link withheld due to mandatory subscription silliness.WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Senate voted twice on Tuesday to keep shipments of Japan’s Kobe beef out of the United States until Tokyo ends its ban on American beef, imposed 19 months ago as a precaution against mad cow disease.Senators said the votes were a signal of frustration with Japan, traditionally the No. 1 customer for U.

Kojima says Metal Gear Solid 4 will be his last MGS game… That’s what he said after MGS3 too. He also said it after MGS2. The story notes this about MGS3, but not that he said the same after 2 as well. I wonder if he’ll follow through this time?

There’s a web comic telethon going on. Some good stuff on it.http://www.webcomictelethon.com/d/1030.htmlhttp://www.webcomictelethon.com/d/1076.htmlTo name a few.There’s also some annoying ones.http://www.webcomictelethon.com/d/1027.html (Oh, that’s all we need, put them in debt. ;)http://www.webcomictelethon.com/d/1024.htmlI hope that more of them will be positive as I go through and finish reading them.

This is cool. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/09/05/uav_initiative/Instead of going and blaming everyone about the hurricane, and even though it wasn’t in his district, Rep. Curt Weldon skipped around all the bureaucracy and purchase heat-camera drone planes and brought them down to NOLA with other donated supplies from his district to help with the search and rescue effort.

http://tiadaily.com/php-bin/news/showArticle.php?id=1026 I’ve touched on the idea of a welfare city before from a standpoint of where the money for the levees went instead of to the levees, but had barely thought about how it increased the violence and disorder that happened in the area. This article sums it up nicely.

We’ve been talking about Natural disasters for quite awhile. Lets switch to some Man-made ones! http://www.physorg.com/news6243.htmlIt looks like Chernobyl, while being still a very large scale disaster, wasn’t nearly as bad as people had feared. To me this just shows that even with the worst reactor design in use today, there’s not nearly as much reason for people to worry about nuclear power as they seem to think there is. Any comments?

It looks like New Orleans has quite a problem on their hand. Similar to the people who built their house on Sand or Thixotropic Clay, they choose a poor spot to construct their city. Why? It’s below all of River level, Sea level, and nearby-Lake level. Well, I was watching a certain anime series with a rather interestingly theme song the other day and did some research on it. The song was named after a place near Tokyo called “Dream Island.

So, IBM has posted a good deal of information on programming the CELL chip. http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/power/cell/I’m sure only a handful of the people who have me on their watch list will be interested in this, but just looking at the main overview I’ve already found some encouraging information. They’re stating that as far as programming, it should appear just like 8-9 equivalently powerful processors. The only difference being that the main element is better at branching while the spes are better at pure linear calculations.