Click here to view this media I’m not sure what’s worse in this clip: Rick Santorum’s answer or the audience booing the gay soldier. Santorum’s bottom line: No sex in the military. Celibacy, FTW! Also, he would reinstate DADT. I promise to add the transcript later.
Continue reading …
Click here to view this media Newt Gingrich just came right out and put his middle finger up at the Republican debate. Asked by Megyn Kelly if he would extend unemployment benefits in this economy, he came out with this gem: “I don’t think people should get paid for 99 weeks to do nothing. That’s why we reformed welfare.” Screw him with a hot poker. Hard. His utter lack of understanding of how INSURANCE works should just be something he has to go back to school and be retrained for. These people make me retch. Truly.
Continue reading …
Click here to view this media Tea party Rep. Joe Walsh (R-IL) thinks that the color of the president’s skin will play a big part in next year’s election. “[Y]ou see this administration playing class warfare and race warfare games,” Media Research Center’s Brent Bozell told Walsh during a recent interview . “Now, that’s their problem. But what does it say about the national media that they are aiding and abetting this by not exposing the dishonesty here?” “This guy pushed every one of the media’s buttons,” Walsh replied. “He was liberal, he was different, he was new, he was black. Oh my God, it was the potpourri of everything.” “They are so vested in our first black president not being a failure that it’s going to be amazing to watch the lengths they go to to protect him.” Earlier this year, Walsh claimed that Obama was elected because he was black . “Why was he elected? Again, it comes back to who he was. He was black, he was historic,” Walsh told Slate’s Dave Weigel in May. “They were in love with him because they thought he was a good liberal guy and they were in love with him because he pushed that magical button: a black man who was articulate, liberal, the whole white guilt, all of that.” (H/T: ThinkProgress )
Continue reading …
On Thursday's American Morning, CNN regarded Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry's newest web-ad as using “patriotism as a political tool.” Co-host Carol Costello lumped his ad in with the 2004 Swift Boat campaign, as an unfair accusation to make of his opponent's patriotism. Perry's newest web-ad attacks Obama's jobs record and his “apology tour” for America, and trumpets Perry's own patriotism. Costello then lumped that in with the Swift Boat campaign of 2004 which questioned the war heroism of candidate John Kerry. Although it was a legitimate story , it has been regarded by the liberal media as a smear. “It's a tactic that's been proved quite effective,” Costello said of Perry's remark that “We don't need a president who apologizes for America.” “Remember the infamous swift boat ads by a pro-Bush group questioning Vietnam veteran John Kerry's heroism?” Costello asked. “President Bush eventually denounced the ads, but the damage was done. Kerry lost the election.” The Swift Boat campaign included over 250 Vietnam veterans who questioned presidential candidate John Kerry's military accomplishments and post-bellum accounts of Vietnam where he accused his fellow soldiers of ghastly atrocities. The story was ignored by the media for a time and was eventually regarded as a smear. That CNN would sloppily link the two is quite odd, since Perry's claims are quite valid on the surface that no net jobs were added in the month of August. He emphasizes this in the ad, calling Obama “President Zero.” The media regarded the Swift Boat story as illegitimate, but Perry's ad includes no sloppy accusations or conspiracy theories against Obama, simply an argument that the President has failed to create jobs and has repeatedly apologized for America overseas. [Video below. Click here for audio.]
Continue reading …
On Thursday's American Morning, CNN regarded Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry's newest web-ad as using “patriotism as a political tool.” Co-host Carol Costello lumped his ad in with the 2004 Swift Boat campaign, as an unfair accusation to make of his opponent's patriotism. Perry's newest web-ad attacks Obama's jobs record and his “apology tour” for America, and trumpets Perry's own patriotism. Costello then lumped that in with the Swift Boat campaign of 2004 which questioned the war heroism of candidate John Kerry. Although it was a legitimate story , it has been regarded by the liberal media as a smear. “It's a tactic that's been proved quite effective,” Costello said of Perry's remark that “We don't need a president who apologizes for America.” “Remember the infamous swift boat ads by a pro-Bush group questioning Vietnam veteran John Kerry's heroism?” Costello asked. “President Bush eventually denounced the ads, but the damage was done. Kerry lost the election.” The Swift Boat campaign included over 250 Vietnam veterans who questioned presidential candidate John Kerry's military accomplishments and post-bellum accounts of Vietnam where he accused his fellow soldiers of ghastly atrocities. The story was ignored by the media for a time and was eventually regarded as a smear. That CNN would sloppily link the two is quite odd, since Perry's claims are quite valid on the surface that no net jobs were added in the month of August. He emphasizes this in the ad, calling Obama “President Zero.” The media regarded the Swift Boat story as illegitimate, but Perry's ad includes no sloppy accusations or conspiracy theories against Obama, simply an argument that the President has failed to create jobs and has repeatedly apologized for America overseas. [Video below. Click here for audio.]
Continue reading …
Particle physicists detect neutrinos travelling faster than light, a feat forbidden by Einstein’s theory of special relativity It is a concept that forms a cornerstone of our understanding of the universe and the concept of time – nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. But now it seems that researchers working in one of the world’s largest physics laboratories, under a mountain in central Italy, have recorded particles travelling at a speed that is supposedly forbidden by Einstein’s theory of special relativity. Scientists at the Gran Sasso facility will unveil evidence on Friday that raises the troubling possibility of a way to send information back in time, blurring the line between past and present and wreaking havoc with the fundamental principle of cause and effect. They will announce the result at a special seminar at Cern – the European particle physics laboratory – timed to coincide with the publication of a research paper describing the experiment. Researchers on the Opera (Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus) experiment recorded the arrival times of ghostly subatomic particles called neutrinos sent from Cern on a 730km journey through the Earth to the Gran Sasso lab. The trip would take a beam of light 2.4 milliseconds to complete, but after running the experiment for three years and timing the arrival of 15,000 neutrinos, the scientists discovered that the particles arrived at Gran Sasso sixty billionths of a second earlier, with an error margin of plus or minus 10 billionths of a second. The measurement amounts to the neutrinos travelling faster than the speed of light by a fraction of 20 parts per million. Since the speed of light is 299,792,458 metres per second, the neutrinos were evidently travelling at 299,798,454 metres per second. The result is so unlikely that even the research team is being cautious with its interpretation. Physicists said they would be sceptical of the finding until other laboratories confirmed the result. Antonio Ereditato, coordinator of the Opera collaboration, told the Guardian: “We are very much astonished by this result, but a result is never a discovery until other people confirm it. “When you get such a result you want to make sure you made no mistakes, that there are no nasty things going on you didn’t think of. We spent months and months doing checks and we have not been able to find any errors. “If there is a problem, it must be a tough, nasty effect, because trivial things we are clever enough to rule out.” The Opera group said it hoped the physics community would scrutinise the result and help uncover any flaws in the measurement, or verify it with their own experiments. Subir Sarkar, head of particle theory at Oxford University, said: “If this is proved to be true it would be a massive, massive event. It is something nobody was expecting. “The constancy of the speed of light essentially underpins our understanding of space and time and causality, which is the fact that cause comes before effect. “Cause cannot come after effect and that is absolutely fundamental to our construction of the physical universe. If we do not have causality, we are buggered.” The Opera experiment detects neutrinos as they strike 150,000 “bricks” of photographic emulsion films interleaved with lead plates. The detector weighs a total of 1300 tonnes. Despite the marginal increase on the speed of light observed by Ereditato’s team, the result is intriguing because its statistical significance, the measure by which particle physics discoveries stand and fall, is so strong. Physicists can claim a discovery if the chances of their result being a fluke of statistics are greater than five standard deviations, or less than one in a few million. The Gran Sasso team’s result is six standard deviations. Ereditato said the team would not claim a discovery because the result was so radical. “Whenever you touch something so fundamental, you have to be much more prudent,” he said. Alan Kostelecky, an expert in the possibility of faster-than-light processes at Indiana University, said that while physicists would await confirmation of the result, it was none the less exciting. “It’s such a dramatic result it would be difficult to accept without others replicating it, but there will be enormous interest in this,” he told the Guardian. One theory Kostelecky and his colleagues put forward in 1985 predicted that neutrinos could travel faster than the speed of light by interacting with an unknown field that lurks in the vacuum. “With this kind of background, it is not necessarily the case that the limiting speed in nature is the speed of light,” he said. “It might actually be the speed of neutrinos and light goes more slowly.” Neutrinos are mysterious particles. They have a minuscule mass, no electric charge, and pass through almost any material as though it was not there. Kostelecky said that if the result was verified – a big if – it might pave the way to a grand theory that marries gravity with quantum mechanics, a puzzle that has defied physicists for nearly a century. “If this is confirmed, this is the first evidence for a crack in the structure of physics as we know it that could provide a clue to constructing such a unified theory,” Kostelecky said. Heinrich Paes, a physicist at Dortmund University, has developed another theory that could explain the result. The neutrinos may be taking a shortcut through space-time, by travelling from Cern to Gran Sasso through extra dimensions. “That can make it look like a particle has gone faster than the speed of light when it hasn’t,” he said. But Susan Cartwright, senior lecturer in particle astrophysics at Sheffield University, said: “Neutrino experimental results are not historically all that reliable, so the words ‘don’t hold your breath’ do spring to mind when you hear very counter-intuitive results like this.” Teams at two experiments known as T2K in Japan and MINOS near Chicago in the US will now attempt to replicate the finding. The MINOS experiment saw hints of neutrinos moving at faster than the speed of light in 2007 but has yet to confirm them. Particle physics Cern Ian Sample guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …Particle physicists detect neutrinos travelling faster than light, a feat forbidden by Einstein’s theory of special relativity It is a concept that forms a cornerstone of our understanding of the universe and the concept of time – nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. But now it seems that researchers working in one of the world’s largest physics laboratories, under a mountain in central Italy, have recorded particles travelling at a speed that is supposedly forbidden by Einstein’s theory of special relativity. Scientists at the Gran Sasso facility will unveil evidence on Friday that raises the troubling possibility of a way to send information back in time, blurring the line between past and present and wreaking havoc with the fundamental principle of cause and effect. They will announce the result at a special seminar at Cern – the European particle physics laboratory – timed to coincide with the publication of a research paper describing the experiment. Researchers on the Opera (Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus) experiment recorded the arrival times of ghostly subatomic particles called neutrinos sent from Cern on a 730km journey through the Earth to the Gran Sasso lab. The trip would take a beam of light 2.4 milliseconds to complete, but after running the experiment for three years and timing the arrival of 15,000 neutrinos, the scientists discovered that the particles arrived at Gran Sasso sixty billionths of a second earlier, with an error margin of plus or minus 10 billionths of a second. The measurement amounts to the neutrinos travelling faster than the speed of light by a fraction of 20 parts per million. Since the speed of light is 299,792,458 metres per second, the neutrinos were evidently travelling at 299,798,454 metres per second. The result is so unlikely that even the research team is being cautious with its interpretation. Physicists said they would be sceptical of the finding until other laboratories confirmed the result. Antonio Ereditato, coordinator of the Opera collaboration, told the Guardian: “We are very much astonished by this result, but a result is never a discovery until other people confirm it. “When you get such a result you want to make sure you made no mistakes, that there are no nasty things going on you didn’t think of. We spent months and months doing checks and we have not been able to find any errors. “If there is a problem, it must be a tough, nasty effect, because trivial things we are clever enough to rule out.” The Opera group said it hoped the physics community would scrutinise the result and help uncover any flaws in the measurement, or verify it with their own experiments. Subir Sarkar, head of particle theory at Oxford University, said: “If this is proved to be true it would be a massive, massive event. It is something nobody was expecting. “The constancy of the speed of light essentially underpins our understanding of space and time and causality, which is the fact that cause comes before effect. “Cause cannot come after effect and that is absolutely fundamental to our construction of the physical universe. If we do not have causality, we are buggered.” The Opera experiment detects neutrinos as they strike 150,000 “bricks” of photographic emulsion films interleaved with lead plates. The detector weighs a total of 1300 tonnes. Despite the marginal increase on the speed of light observed by Ereditato’s team, the result is intriguing because its statistical significance, the measure by which particle physics discoveries stand and fall, is so strong. Physicists can claim a discovery if the chances of their result being a fluke of statistics are greater than five standard deviations, or less than one in a few million. The Gran Sasso team’s result is six standard deviations. Ereditato said the team would not claim a discovery because the result was so radical. “Whenever you touch something so fundamental, you have to be much more prudent,” he said. Alan Kostelecky, an expert in the possibility of faster-than-light processes at Indiana University, said that while physicists would await confirmation of the result, it was none the less exciting. “It’s such a dramatic result it would be difficult to accept without others replicating it, but there will be enormous interest in this,” he told the Guardian. One theory Kostelecky and his colleagues put forward in 1985 predicted that neutrinos could travel faster than the speed of light by interacting with an unknown field that lurks in the vacuum. “With this kind of background, it is not necessarily the case that the limiting speed in nature is the speed of light,” he said. “It might actually be the speed of neutrinos and light goes more slowly.” Neutrinos are mysterious particles. They have a minuscule mass, no electric charge, and pass through almost any material as though it was not there. Kostelecky said that if the result was verified – a big if – it might pave the way to a grand theory that marries gravity with quantum mechanics, a puzzle that has defied physicists for nearly a century. “If this is confirmed, this is the first evidence for a crack in the structure of physics as we know it that could provide a clue to constructing such a unified theory,” Kostelecky said. Heinrich Paes, a physicist at Dortmund University, has developed another theory that could explain the result. The neutrinos may be taking a shortcut through space-time, by travelling from Cern to Gran Sasso through extra dimensions. “That can make it look like a particle has gone faster than the speed of light when it hasn’t,” he said. But Susan Cartwright, senior lecturer in particle astrophysics at Sheffield University, said: “Neutrino experimental results are not historically all that reliable, so the words ‘don’t hold your breath’ do spring to mind when you hear very counter-intuitive results like this.” Teams at two experiments known as T2K in Japan and MINOS near Chicago in the US will now attempt to replicate the finding. The MINOS experiment saw hints of neutrinos moving at faster than the speed of light in 2007 but has yet to confirm them. Particle physics Cern Ian Sample guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …
• Former eBay boss chosen to replace Léo Apotheker at HP • Lawyers will be studying small print in Autonomy offer Léo Apotheker has been fired as chief executive of Hewlett-Packard and replaced with Meg Whitman, the giant technology company announced on Thursday evening. Whitman, 55, the former chief executive of eBay and candidate for California governor, and a member of the HP board since January, was confirmed as the replacement following a board meeting yesterday. Apothekerhad been at the helm at HP for only 11 months. Rumours about Apotheker’s replacement began swirling on Wednesday and came to a head in the meeting, the outcome of which was announced after stock markets had closed. The stock was down by about 1% in after-hours trading. Ray Lane, who has moved from non-executive chairman to executive chairman of HP’s board, said: “We are at a critical moment and we need renewed leadership to successfully implement our strategy and take advantage of the market opportunities ahead.” Lane said the board believes “the job of the HP CEO now requires additional attributes”. The board also plans to appoint an independent director. HP is one of the world’s biggest technology companies, with more than 320,000 staff, annual revenues of $120bn (£78bn) – mainly from large “enterprise” customers – and profits of about $5.5bn. The management shake-up represents yet another turnaround strategy at one of Silicon Valley’s oldest – but most publicly dysfunctional – firms. Since joining HP in November, Apotheker’s strategic decisions had been a drastic reversal of the company’s self-image as an inventor of hardware: he announced that it would spin off its PC business, the world’s biggest, closed down its TouchPad tablet and webOS division, and announced a move into services, including the purchase of the British company Autonomy for $11.7bn. It is unclear whether the latter purchase will go ahead under Whitman. HP has four main divisions: Services; Storage & Networking; Personal Systems Group; and Imaging & Printing. Of those, PSG, which is the world’s largest supplier of PCs, is the biggest by revenue – but its 6% profit margin is the lowest within the company by some way. The Guardian’s own analysis shows that if the PSG division could be spun off without harming other divisions, HP’s overall profitability would rise from 7.7% to 12%. But investors were not pleased by the prospect held out by Apotheker, who got terrible ratings from his own staff. The abrupt dismissal follows the revelation that some members of the board did not even meet Apotheker before approving his hiring in late November because they were “tired of all the infighting” that had led up to the dismissal of the previous incumbent, Mark Hurd, in August 2010. That in turn is almost certain to lead to lawsuits from disgruntled stockholders who have seen the value of their holdings fall by nearly 50% in Apotheker’s time in charge of the company. It already faces such a lawsuit filed earlier this week, over the closure of the webOS division, on the basis that it had previously suggested the $1.2bn acquisition of webOS with Palm in July 2010 would play a vital part in the company’s future. Instead Apotheker shut it within 48 days of the TouchPad going on sale. Whitman has been a member of the HP board since January, and so is not tainted by the decision last year to hire Apotheker. But members of the tech community were doubtful that she was the right person for the job. Charles House, a veteran HP engineer, told the New York Times that she would be “an unmitigated disaster”, while Roger McNamee, managing director of Elevation Partners – which sold an interest in Palm when it was acquired by HP in 2009 for more than $1bn – said that “the notion that HP can be fixed by adding a celebrity chief executive is laughable.” Wall Street should react favourably to a new leader, even if it would be HP’s third in six years, after Carly Fiorina (fired in 2005) and Mark Hurd (fired in 2010). But not all analysts were convinced. Although Whitman, 55, grew eBay from a 30-strong company with $86m revenues to one with 15,000 people and almost $8bn revenues, she also oversaw the ineffective $2.8bn purchase of Skype, and left in 2008. Her strengths are consumer-facing, not in the enterprise. Carter Lusher, chief analyst at Ovum, said: “Whitman would do little for the confidence of HP’s enterprise customers. Whitman’s expertise lies primarily in the consumer market, and an interim leader will just prolong the sense of uncertainty.” Apotheker, who joined from the customer management software company SAP in early November, was unable to even turn to his employees for support: his approval rating among them was just 25%, according to the recruitment site Glassdoor. Hewlett-Packard Autonomy Technology sector Charles Arthur guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …
Former eBay CEO and California governor candidate replaces Léo Apotheker, who lasted just 11 months in the job Léo Apotheker has been fired as chief executive of Hewlett-Packard and replaced with Meg Whitman, the technology firm has announced. Following a board meeting, Whitman, the former chief executive of eBay and candidate for California governor, was confirmed as the replacement for Apotheker, who has been at the helm at Hewlett-Packard for only 11 months. Ray Lane, who has moved from non-executive chairman to executive chairman of HP’s board, said: “We are at a critical moment and we need renewed leadership to successfully implement our strategy and take advantage of the market opportunities ahead.” Referring to Apotheker, Lane said the board believes “the job of the HP CEO now requires additional attributes”. The board also plans to appoint an independent director. The management shake-up represents yet another turnaround strategy at one of Silicon Valley’s oldest – but most publicly dysfunctional – firms. Since joining HP in November, Apotheker’s strategic decisions had been drastic, and did little to inspire confidence. HP’s stock fell nearly 50% during his time at the helm. It dropped about 5% on Thursday. Hewlett-Packard’s board said it would not change its strategy to focus more on services than making computers – a change of direction designed by Apotheker. Wall Street should react favourably to a new leader, even if it would be HP’s third in six years, after Carly Fiorina (fired February 2005) and Mark Hurd (fired August 2010). But not all analysts were convinced. Although Whitman, 55, grew eBay from a 30-strong company with $86m revenues to one with 15,000 people and almost $8bn revenues, she also oversaw the ineffective $2.8bn purchase of Skype, and left in 2008. Her strengths are consumer-facing, not in the enterprise. Carter Lusher, chief analyst at Ovum, said: “Whitman would do little for the confidence of HP’s enterprise customers. Whitman’s expertise lies primarily in the consumer market, and an interim leader will just prolong the sense of uncertainty.” Apotheker, who joined from the customer management software company SAP in early November, was unable to even turn to his employees for support: his approval rating among them was just 25%, according to the recruitment site Glassdoor . That figure is down from 58% a month ago; but a month ago Apotheker had not decided to shut down HP’s TouchPad tablet business at a cost of hundreds of millions, spin off its revenue-generating PC business into a separate company, and turn HP – revered in Silicon Valley for decades as a company that invented hardware such as the inkjet printer – into a services-based business to compete with IBM. The purchase of the UK search technology company Autonomy would be part of that transformation. Apotheker’s plan made financial sense. HP is a huge company, with more than 320,000 staff, annual revenues of $120bn (£78bn) – mainly from large “enterprise” customers – and profits of about $5.5bn. It has four main divisions: Services; Storage & Networking; Personal Systems Group; and Imaging & Printing. Of those, PSG, which is the world’s largest supplier of PCs, is the biggest by revenue – but its 6% profit margin is the lowest within the company by some way. The Guardian’s own analysis shows that if the PSG division could be spun off without harming other divisions, HP’s overall profitability would rise from 7.7% to 12%. That should delight investors. Yet it hasn’t. Partly it is the abrupt chopping and changing: the TouchPad was killed after just 48 days on sale , intended to ride the Apple iPad wave of interest, to widespread amazement, as the software had seemed promising. The 500-strong team behind the WebOS software are reportedly being laid off. And partly it’s that HP has messed things up, twice being forced to announce its quarterly results early after the data leaked out – an error that might be forgiven once but not twice by Wall Street traders. The recent changes left staff furious. One existing employee, a marketing director based in Boston, recently commented on Glassdoor: “The man[Apotheker] is flat-out incompetent. We’ve gone from [one] fiasco to the next under his reign.” Another was less blunt, but still excoriating: “The organisational structure is cobbled together, full of redundancies – everyone’s empowered to say no, no one is empowered to say yes. If Leo wanted to run SAP, he should have stayed at SAP.” Staff generally give the company only an “OK” rating – 2.5 out of 5. And there are murmurs too that the PSG spinoff is being reconsidered. But the PC business will not be more profitable in the future than it is now. IBM exited it smartly in 2004, selling it to Lenovo, and has become a services powerhouse since. HP owns EDS, the services company; its future would clearly lie in services. To Lusher, the damage to HP and Apotheker has already been done. “This only reinforces that HP is a company that is in severe disarray,” he said. “That the board would be considering a change in CEO less that 10 months after Apotheker took over is a damning indictment of not just the new CEO but the board itself. Having approved the recent strategy changes, it seems spineless just a month later to be potentially jettisoning that plan and its architect.” Brian White of Ticonderoga Securities said in a research note: “Leo was placed in the role on a short-term basis to take the fall for the company’s under-investment under the previous CEO … At the same time, we believe a new CEO could begin to build credibility for HP and join the company after quite a bit of damage has already been done.” Hewlett-Packard Software United States Charles Arthur guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …Joy Behar Asks McGinniss If He Has ‘Death Wish’ for Writing Book About Palins
September 22, 2011 No Comment
While CNN gave two tough interviews to Palin-bashing author Joe McGinniss, HLN's Joy Behar joked around with him on her Wednesday show. She referenced his newest tome on Sarah Palin and her family, full of nasty gossip and rumors, and jokingly asked “What, do you have a death wish, Joe?” In the previous segment, Behar had made fun of Rush Limbaugh's past drug abuse in her interview with Levi Johnston. “Your mother was selling Oxycontin?” she asked Johnston. “What's she – what's up with that? Does she know Rush Limbaugh?” Not finished with her fun, the HLN host had a laugh over McGinniss' creepy move into the house next door to the Palins. “Could you see Russia from that house?” Behar joked. In the interview, McGinniss charged Palin as a “blatant racist and a “religious extremist,” but Behar challenged only the latter accusation, remarking that Palin was barely a churchgoer – according to Levi Johnston, whom she used to fact-check McGinniss' book in the previous interview. Behar did press McGinniss over his radical stories against Palin and her family – but while treating him as a respectable reporter, not the author of a book filled with gossip and rumors. She also gave credence to the fringe conspiracy theory peddled by the Daily Beast, that prominent Republican figures are “Dominionists” and are pushing to end the separation of church and state in America. When McGinniss accused Palin of belonging to such a sect, Behar asked “how is she any different from, say, Rick Perry?” The “Rogue” author absurdly claimed that the media gave Palin a pass in 2008, saying that “the mainstream media paid no attention to her background, nobody did any homework on her in 2008, running for vice president.” Behar made no attempt to challenge his assumption, instead attempting to explain it. “Well, the media likes sort of a star. She's kind of a star.” [Video below. Click here for audio.]
Continue reading …