ZOMG!!!

Drawing Mona Lisa in 80 milliseconds!

Stephanie writes:

From Muppet Wikki:

Sesamestreet.org is an official Sesame Street website, featuring video clips, games, playlists, and more. Although the site was scheduled for debut on August 11, 2008, it was on the web as early as August 5, 2008. Clips can be found by grouping by character, theme, educational topic, classic clips, or songs.

This is great! This new site has just about every muppet sketch I can remember from childhood. Most of the muppets are listed, but for whatever reason, they chose not to list Lefty (a.k.a. The Salesman) in the character search list, but he's pretty easy to find. Sure, you can find most of these on YouTube, but the quality is hit-and-miss.

"The Air Salesman" (click image) featuring Ernie and Lefty was always one of my favorites. Ernie finally gets the better of Lefty in "The Ice Cream Salesman," though.

Also, Johnny Cash sings "Nasty Dan" for Oscar and "Five Feet High And Rising" for Biff. Classic stuff!

Sesame Street Videos

Microsoft adds privacy tools to IE8
So-called porn mode tools to debut in IE8 Beta 2 this month
By Gregg Keizer, Computerworld
August 25, 2008

Microsoft Corp. today spelled out new privacy tools in Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) that some have dubbed "porn mode" in a nod to the most obvious use of a browser privacy mode.

A privacy advocate applauded the move, calling it a "great step forward," while rival browser builder Mozilla Corp. said it is working to add similar features to a future Firefox.

Slated to appear in IE8 Beta 2, which Microsoft former chairman Bill Gates promised will release this month, the three new tools share the "InPrivate" name, which Microsoft filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office several weeks ago.

The most intriguing tool, and the one that has prompted the porn mode label, was called InPrivate Browsing by Microsoft. When enabled, IE8 will not save browsing and searching history, cookies, form data and passwords; it also will automatically clear the browser cache at the end of the session.

Other new tools will include InPrivate Blocking and InPrivate Subscription, which notifies users of third-party content that can track browsing history and subscribe to lists of sites to block, respectively. Microsoft will also tweak its existing "Delete Browsing History" by adding an option to preserve bookmarked sites' cookies even when all others are erased.

Microsoft adds privacy tools to IE8

The HBO series The Wire, a panoramic view of Baltimore through its drug world, schools, government, seaport, and newspaper, has been widely acknowledged as one of the greatest television dramas ever produced. To mark the release of the final season on DVD, the Museum of the Moving Image presented a panel, Making "The Wire", with David Simon, the series creator and co-producer; novelist and screenwriter Richard Price, who wrote several episodes; and four of the show's stars: Seth Gilliam (who played Ellis Carver), Clark Johnson (city editor Gus Haynes), Clarke Peters (Lester Freemon), and Wendell Pierce ("Bunk"), moderated by David Schwartz, Chief Curator.

Making 'The Wire'

Shibboleth®

The Shibboleth System is a standards based, open source software package for web single sign-on across or within organizational boundaries. It allows sites to make informed authorization decisions for individual access of protected online resources in a privacy-preserving manner.

Shibboleth®

Joel Spolsky, in Inc.:

Frankly, people here seem to be happier with a little bit of middle management. Not middle management that's going to overrule the decisions they make on their own. Not symbolic middle management that only makes people feel important. But middle management that creates useful channels of communication. If my job is getting obstacles out of the way so my employees can get their work done, these managers exist so that, when an employee has a local problem, there's someone there, in the office next door, whom they can talk to.

From the archive:

The spread of ES has resulted in a declining emphasis on creativity and ingenuity of workers, and the destruction of a sense of community in the workplace by the ceaseless reengineering of the way businesses operate. The concept of a career has become increasingly meaningless in a setting in which employees have neither skills of which they might be proud nor an audience of independently minded fellow workers that might recognize their value.

...

The evidence suggests that from an executive perspective, the most desirable employees may no longer necessarily be those with proven ability and judgment, but those who can be counted on to follow orders and be good "team players."

How I Learned to Love Middle Managers

City Councilman and mayor of Wasilla, Alaska (pop. 5,000), before serving less than two years as governor of Alaska. You gotta be kidding me!

McCain's decision to select a woman for VP is a transparent attempt to court some of Hillary's supporters, many of whom are not liberal, and being sore about their candidate's loss, are attracted to McCain as a perceived moderate. However, the VP may become the President, and Palin, having absolutely no foreign policy experience, is totally unqualified to be the President of the United States. This will be quickly apparent to everybody and it will blow up in McCain's face. It will destroy his candidacy, and unfortunately it will be a serious pock mark on Palin's here-to-fore admirable political career.

Obama and Biden are your new President and VP.

This election is over.

The election is basically over.

ohn McCain had only met Sarah Palin once or twice before selecting her to be a heartbeat away from the presidency. Also, earlier today McCain's campaign chairman Sen. Lindsay Graham admitted that he had never met Palin, and GOP Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison also said that she didn't know much about Palin.

He knew she had a vagina, and thats all that mattered to McCain.

Digg - McCain Didn't Even Know Palin Before Picking Her (VIDEO)

Someone should actually make this movie, which is a demo for our calling technology.

Star Caller - Vinnie The One and Only - Demo

When the builders of the Maple Ridge Wind farm spent $320 million to put nearly 200 wind turbines in upstate New York, the idea was to get paid for producing electricity. But at times, regional electric lines have been so congested that Maple Ridge has been forced to shut down even with a brisk wind blowing.

That is a symptom of a broad national problem. Expansive dreams about renewable energy, like Al Gore’s hope of replacing all fossil fuels in a decade, are bumping up against the reality of a power grid that cannot handle the new demands.

The dirty secret of clean energy is that while generating it is getting easier, moving it to market is not.

Good article, and something I wasn't actually aware of before reading.

The Energy Challenge - Wind Energy Bumps Into Power Grid’s Limits - Series - NYTimes.com