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.

Coffee good for you? Well, going solely on Antioxidant levels, this study says yes. http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=1857962005 I wonder how this applies to my infrequently consumed mix of 33% non-dairy creamer to 67% coffee (no sugar.) Toshiba says they’re going to release HD-DVD players by the end of the year. The downside is that they’ll be $1000, while the PS3 with a Blu-ray player will be under $500. There goes their much touted “it’ll be cheaper!

Today I did a quick check using the dropdown on the Nightstar Forums to see if the political forum there was inhabitable, or still dominated by loonies. Second post I look at shows me that it’s still very much the way I left it, or even worse.“So I’d give the opinion that the situation described in the latter part of the article takes place in some parallel universe where states rights principles and libertarian ideas actually work.

I’m pretty sure they’ll work out in the end. I’m pretty sure the big complaints from democrats about gas prices are just politically motivated as well. Unless they’re stupid, they should realize that the higher gas prices are going to do their job regarding SUVs for them. They should also realize that adjusted for inflation, gas prices are actually just adjusting back up to the level they were years ago, and that they’ve been kept artificially low all this time, and that this is the reason their much hated SUVs and other similar automobiles have even been economically feasible for all this time.

Here’s some rather lengthy political observations combined with a good dose of history. :) First, the history. In 1992, voters voted in an amendment to the state constitution for Colorado. It wasn’t really a tax cut, but it mimics the effects of one. It was a state budget cap. It said that the budgets of the governments within the state could not increase faster than 6% per year. Any taxes collected above this prior year*1.

Sony licenses Ageia technology. All I can say is: Yesssss!The question is whether they’re planning on putting the entire chip in, or just simulate it with SPEs. Hopefully they’ll do the chip, but this will make the hardware a little more expensive. (perhaps $20-30 extra cost with the proper economies of scale. Sony will probably fab the chip themselves if they do, since Ageia is fabless.)Edit: Popedung (holy crap) Sony is grabbing up technologies for development left, right, and center.