Of course our cold temps pale in comparison to Canada, and the northern New England states Maine, New Hampshire, etc.

Where I live in upstate New York, we've hit -15 F (-26 C) several days this year. Further upstate from me has gotten to -25 F (-32 C) below. Friends in Maine tell me they've seen -35 F (-37 C) this winter. These weren't just for a day, but for several, even more than a week at times, before returning to ever-so-slightly warmer temperatures.

Even if things were cold back in 1709, methinks they doth protest too much.

"It's been this way for Hinton for most of this decade." So now that he's earned almost a million bucks, plus retirement and benefits, he's coming forward. What a guy!

Wife: "So honey, how was work today?"

Hinton: "It was really tough. They kept playing lousy music on the radio, and the commercials were terrible! At least I finished learning French on tape."

You don't. The government didn't pay for abortions before, and it doesn't now, no matter how the media chooses to represent things.

I work with several international nonprofits, and I know a lot of people who write grant proposals, as well as folks in USAID and various foundations who review proposals. The U.S. government does not simply dump money into the general fund of any organization. Instead, it defines a very narrow destination for that money: you will work on Issue X (e.g. HIV), in Region Y (e.g. Uttar Pradesh in India), for Time Period Z (e.g. September 2009 through August 2011), using Methodology A (e.g. abstinence education). Furthermore, you will report on your efforts with weekly summary reports and quarterly detailed analysis, and we will drop by whenever we feel like it to inspect. A lot of folks in the nonprofit world complain about all the strings and boundaries placed on the money and the work, but hey, it is the government's money, and they have every right to ask this. But none of this is going into anybody's "general fund."

Now, you're probably referring to the Global Gag Rule that was recently overturned. To quote an earlier post:

U.S. funds did not pay for abortions overseas before the GGR, and they won't now. Check the 1973 Helms Amendment and subsequent clarifications by the government. The Global Gag Rule took it a step further, and said that if a health clinic accepted U.S. funding for any reason (obviously not abortions because that was prohibited), then it couldn't use any of its OTHER funding sources for abortions -- even if that funding was from its own government, or its own fundraising, and even if abortion was legal in its country. In fact, if it accepted U.S. funds but did not offer abortions in any way, its funding would be cut if staff merely told women of other clinics where abortions were available.

Furthermore, shutting down clinics due to the GGR has been enormously stupid: the rates of safe abortions have dropped, but they are offset dramatically by the rise in unsafe witch-doctor-style abortions. And since these clinics are generally one-stop health centers that provide a huge variety of services, cutting off all their US aid means cutting back on things we can all support, like malaria medicine for kids or prenatal checkups for pregnant women or HIV counseling for infected couples.

It's an enormous deal to me that my tax dollars are being used to fund overseas abortions.

You must be talking about the Global Gag Rule (a.k.a. Mexico City Policy to its supporters) which Obama recently overturned. You shouldn't believe everything you hear in the news. U.S. funds did not pay for abortions overseas before the GGR, and they won't now. Check the 1973 Helms Amendment and subsequent clarifications by the government. The Global Gag Rule took it a step further, and said that if a health clinic accepted U.S. funding for any reason (obviously not abortions because that was prohibited), then it couldn't use any of its OTHER funding sources for abortions -- even if that funding was from its own government, or its own fundraising, and even if abortion was legal in its country. In fact, if it accepted U.S. funds but did not offer abortions in any way, its funding would be cut if staff merely told women of other clinics where abortions were available.

I think abortion is wrong, but the Global Gag Rule has been a terrible piece of legislation, and dramatically misrepresented by most media sources.

Like you say, it's free, try it out for yourself.

However, from experience I can tell you that hiring a good expert in the CMS of your choice, can really save you lots of headaches. Whether it's Typo3, or Drupal, or Plone, or Joomla, a good expert can set up the templates, organize the pages, and give you advice/support on managing the site. I am not an expert in any of these CMSs, but have worked on projects involving them enough times that I recognize the value of a good expert. It can be like hiring a magician, and far better than trying to learn a programming and coding your own CMS. (I have coded my own CMS's for custom situations, but an off-the-shelf system generally does what most people need.)

(My current CMS of choice is Cascade, which is a commercial product and based almost entirely on XML/XSL to output just about any data you want: XML, XHTML, PHP, JSP, ASP, PDF, whatever. Really powerful, although XSL is a cruel lover if you aren't careful.)

Having said all that, I'll share this advice about Joomla:

• The built-in text editor is junk. Find and install JCE. The core JCE functionality is free, though the commercial add-ons for image management are worthwhile if you manage a lot of graphics in the site. Like a lot of things about Joomla, JCE adds features that should have been there in the first place.
• You need the Extended Menu plug-in if you want to do any useful CSS menuing like Suckerfish. Even though it doesn't handle SSL links right (they get menued as HTTP instead of HTTPS), it's still totally worthwhile. You can fix some of the HTTPS stuff via an htaccess file if necessary. As above, this adds a feature that should be already part of Joomla.
• I have never, ever, ever been able to get any of Joomla's community extensions working right. None of them. It's a good thing that I don't run any community sites and have only experimented with them for family or clubs I'm in.

I've written Typo3 extensions before (in PHP obviously), but must admit that I detest TypoScript. It always feels like a hack.

FTA:

There are no current plans to sell any advertising alongside Google's tracking service, although analysts believe knowing a person's location eventually will unleash new marketing opportunities.

C'mon, Google income is totally based on advertising. You know they're going to use the info somehow. Maybe they won't advertise alongside the tracking service, but their other services may offer more intelligent ad targeting based on your location.

The saddest part is that in both robberies, the clerk recognized the weapon as not just unusual, but specifically Klingon. Geeks fer sure. Hey guys, are you on Slashdot???

I've wondered if it is because they don't want to see real violence or skin shown on TV, but the violence can be more easily faked. If an American TV show actually showed real people truly killing each other, or shooting each other, or whatever, it would be shut down immediately. (Boxing and football are violent but don't count.) But scripted, special-effect violence is fine. You can't (or don't) fake the sex stuff, so it offends people.