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tjstork writes "If the price of oil hits $125 a barrel and stays there for 5 days, then ANWR would be opened up for additional drilling under legislation sponsored by Sens Ted Stevens and Diane Murkowski. With a total estimated value of well over a trillion dollars, drilling ANWR, under various proposals floated, would bring in nearly 250 billion dollars of tax revenue to a cash strapped government and would create a powerful shot in the arm with the addition of almost 100,000 jobs. Tax revenues from ANWR leases would be used to fund heating assistance programs and develop alternative energy technologies needed to help the United States be more fuel efficient.

So, the country is broke and teetering on financial collapse, and we have a trillion dollars in the "Bank of Alaska". Let's go get it!"
http://www.anwr.org/Politics/ANWR-to-be-opened-by-$125-per-barrel.php

For the longest time, I've been questioning whether or not the USA should remain in NATO. The whole war on terror has really soured me on the idea of an internationalist America altogether. With Europeans, Latin Americans, Russians all condemning the USA, it seemed pretty reasonable to me to just mine the shale oil in Colorado for our own fuel, build nuclear power plants, and just let the rest of the world go to hell.

But I've been softening on this a bit. Of all things, food was the crack in my "screw the world armor". I love british comedy, italian wines, german and belgium beers, and of course, french deserts and pastries. I cast a sneaking bit of jealousy at the Airbus A380... yeah, its a hopelessly impractical plane for today and Boeing did get it right with the 787 Dreamliner, but, no red blooded American should really take the idea of the French building the world's biggest jet entirely lying down.

And then, finally, I've noticed that over the last few years, Europeans have definitely been making a huge contribution in Afghanistan. I'm genuinely grateful for the help of the Charles DeGualle flying sorties in support of our ground troops. I'm genuinely grateful for all of those German soldiers and soldiers of all our alliance nations lending ground support, even if supportive, to us in Afghanistan.

Sarkozy came to America today and he thanked the American people for their help in a past war in Europe. I would just like to say, that, this American is grateful for the help Europe is giving the United States in the war we are fighting now.

I think that, despite our differences, the cultural and ideological imperitives in the West demand that NATO continue forward, not only as a military alliance, but also as the basis for greater economic cooperation. To cement this in stone, and make NATO more real to citizens throughout the alliance, I think we ought to have a NATO day, a holiday throughout the European Union, Canada and the United States, where citizens of all the member states celebrate what's best about other nations within it. Such a day could be used to promote trans-alliance tourism, travel, and trade, be used to mark the succesful completion of or launch of cross-alliance enterprises, and would strengthen the alliance in the eyes of the rest of the world.

Leading up to NATO day, there would be a huge opportunity for commercial exploitations and tie ins. Imagine fast food chains giving out trans-atlantic themed cups and wrappers and toys as they do with movies. Imagine people selling t-shirts and bumper stickers emblazoned with the NATO star and other NATO symbols. Imagine ceremonies like Lord of the Rings, where fire pits are lit to mark the alliance. It would be a great August holiday, in the USA, where everyone could get into the act - conservative media could retell some of the great stories of the cold war and celebrate free trade throughout the alliance and its economic successes, and the liberal media could tout the greater cultural awareness of the world.

And somewhere along the way, we could all get really drunk!

NATO day has something in it for everyone.

tjstork writes "What has increased in power 10,000 times within the lifetime of its inventor. Today, you might be talking about CPUs, but, 100 years ago, one of the technological revolutions in place was the use of steam turbines! The Parson's steam turbine was invented in 1888, but, the steam turbine transformed the world. On land, increased power output and efficiency would lead to more electrical generating stations. At sea, ships were not only more efficient and faster, but, more reliable as well...militaries in pursuit of speed, were quick to adopt the new technology. Suddenly, a steamer could make 20+ knots. Parson's 1911 article is thus an interesting glimpse into a technical revolution that mirrors some of our own, from a leader of it. As the article points out, steam turbines gained rapidly in power in Parson's own lifetime, as much as CPUS gained in power in ours. But what's also different is an overall transformation to a science based industry. Its evident that calculus based engineering really took root with the steam turbine. Parsons, in his paper, isn't just describing the design of a steam turbine with rote examples, he's discussing the viscosity of water as steam or water, includes, early pictures of screw cavitation, and more. Of special note is the plug about how his new steam turbine will be fitted out into a new monster ships, the Titanic."
http://www.history.rochester.edu/steam/parsons/

tjstork writes "Take that you Democrats that talk about Bush being some tight fisted demon! Take that you, Republicans that bash the supposed free spending ways of the Democrats! Bush is the biggest spender since LBJ! And, depending on how you look at it, no one has expanded the government MORE THAN GEORGE W BUSH. Let's talk about THAT! The only stereotype that remains, it seems, is, if you want fiscally responsible government, don't elect anyone from Texas!"
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/227/story/20767.html

tjstork writes "A few days ago, there was a story about Microsoft making a driver for IIS for FastCGI. They did it to get php rolling, but, I took a look at this and fell in love with the technology immediately. I really like C++, but, didn't like that there wasn't a good universal API for server side stuff that was simple and common to both IIS and Apache. FastCGI fits the bill perfectly. So, now, with FastCGI, I could amuse myself with the heady though of writing my own kinds of database servers, game servers, map servers, whatever will keep me writing code until my hands rot off. I had to do something in FastCGI in C++. Now, what to do? C++ for Windows has been abandoned by Microsoft for the most part and I do want to ultimately have my servers ported to Linux. I went and grabbed a copy of the FastCGI API, and a copy of the CGICC. I found though, that from a Windows perspective, getting both together is a bit of a pain, and so, I went and grabbed both, stripped out a bunch of stuff, and put it into a Windows Visual Studio 2005 project. All of the porting work had already been done. The one thing I did was to put fastcgi and cgicc into the same project, making it easy to build off, and also, change it from producing a DLL to producing a static library. I tend to like to avoid introducing new DLLs on Windows... You can get it from my blog. http://www.storkyak.com./ Or, if I'm slashdotted, I'd be happy to email it to you."
http://www.storkyak.com/

Drudge is reporting that a German scientist has analyzed the Viking findings and determined that Mars actually may harbor a "weird" form of life.

http://www.drudgereport.com/flash.htm

WASHINGTON (AP) - President Bush will undergo a routine colonoscopy Saturday, his spokesman said, revealing that Bush will hand over presidential powers to Vice President Dick Cheney while he is under under anesthesia.

Read More...

Now, who wants to bet $5 that:

a) nothing happens
b) Bush awakes in chains to find that Emperor Cheney has won the war on terror by reducing the middle east to post nuclear glass and is asking Congress for a supplemental to replace the American nuclear weapons stock.
c) b, plus an additional $20 billion for Halliburton to equip US soldiers with space suits to claim our free oil.
d) c, plus, the National Anthem has been replaced by Vader's March from Star Wars.
e) d, plus, Emperor Cheney is ruthlessly hunting down Bush's children to ensure that they do not turn to the dark side.
f) e, plus, Liberals rise up and start raising anything that looks like an Ewok, before this stupid thread gets out of hand.