I also realized from the beginning that the real life hacks were about making your way from a place that’s chaotic and depressing toward someplace where you feel more competent, stable, and alive. A place where you eventually may not need the life hack any more.

Four Years | 43 Folders

Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin seems to have switched colleges at least six times in six years, including two stints at the University of Idaho before graduating from there in 1987.null

Well, it is a change from Skull and Bones...

Republican vice presidential nominee Palin changes colleges 6 times in 6 years - Los Angeles Times

Putin, taking a break from lambasting the West over Georgia, apparently saved the crew while on a trip to a national park to see how researchers monitor the tigers in the wild.

Just as Putin was arriving with a group of wildlife specialists to see a trapped Amur tiger, it escaped and ran towards a nearby camera crew, the country's main television station said. Putin quickly shot the beast and sedated it with a tranquilizer gun.

"Vladimir Putin not only managed to see the giant predator up close but also saved our television crew too," a presenter on Rossiya television said at the start of the main evening news.

Putin saves TV crew from Siberian tiger | Oddly Enough | Reuters

In the video, Savage says that a conference call was arranged between co-host Tory Belleci and Texas Instruments to talk about the RFID vulnerabilities. But when Bellici and a MythBusters producer got on the call at the appointed time, "Texas Instruments comes on along with chief legal counsel for American Express, Visa, Discover, and everybody else....(Bellici and the MythBusters producer) were way, way out-gunned and (the lawyers) absolutely made it really clear to Discovery that they were not going to air this episode talking about how hackable this stuff was, and Discovery backed way down, being a large corporation that depends upon the revenue of the advertisers. Now it's on Discovery's radar and they won't let us go near it."

Did corporate lawyers put kibosh on 'Mythbusters' RFID episode? - Yahoo! News

Q: All the other big players are going "on demand". Is cloud computing the next big thing?
Debes: This "on demand", SaaS phenomenon is something I've lived through three times in my career now. The first time, it was called "service bureaus". The second time, it was "application service providers", and now it's called SaaS.

But it's pretty much the same thing. And my prediction is that it'll go the same way as the other two have gone--nowhere. SaaS is not God's gift to the software industry or customer community. The hype is based on one company in the software industry having modest success. Salesforce.com just has average to below-average profitability.

People will realize the hype about SaaS companies has been overblown within the next two years.

SaaS market will 'collapse' in two years | Tech News on ZDNet

Within hours they were prisoners. As the two entered Tskhinvali about 1 a.m. on Aug. 9, they sang patriotic tunes to avoid being shot by the Georgian soldiers they expected to be lurking in the dark.

"We thought that when we arrived at the front, they would have to give us weapons," Monasalidze recalled, chain-smoking Lucky Strikes in the living room of the house of Kharadze's parents in Tbilisi.

Instead of Georgian troops, however, they attracted the attention of a group of South Ossetian soldiers.

"They asked what we wanted," Monasalidze said. "I said: 'I'm Georgian and this is our land. We want Tskhinvali.' "

Two Georgians went to war but never got to fight - International Herald Tribune

D.J. Bernstein proposes an almost zero-effort DNSSEC alternative (Presentation)

DNSCurve... interesting.

Hacker News | D.J. Bernstein proposes an almost zero-effort DNSSEC alternative (Presentation)

These are all important questions. But the larger question for voters really is: What would he bring to the job if their ticket is elected? As we’ve learned, particularly during the past eight years with Dick Cheney, a vice president who is smart, aggressive, experienced — and is respected by the president — can have a major impact on our lives.

Biden is clearly all of those things. So if the Democratic ticket wins, how would he approach the job?

I got a chance to see his approach up close one day in early September 1999, when I was U.S. ambassador to Romania. In the aftermath of NATO’s success in stopping ethnic cleaning in Kosovo, Cabinet members and Members of Congress stopped in Bucharest to thank the Romanians for their support of NATO and get a feel for where the Balkan region was going in its aftermath.

Biden in Action: In Romania, He Mixed Intuition and Smarts - Roll Call

Sikorsky flew its prototype counterrotating helicopter yesterday (press release). Typical helicopters, however expensive, are limited to about 165 knots of cruise speed. When the helicopter is moving faster than that, the “retreating blade” is not getting enough airflow, i.e., the blade is going backward about as fast as the helicopter is going forward. This results in a loss of lift on half of the disk.

Philip Greenspun’s Weblog » Sikorsky counterrotating helicopter takes flight

HORSEHEADS, N.Y., Aug. 27, 2008 – Sikorsky Aircraft Corporation today successfully completed the first flight of its X2 TECHNOLOGY™ Demonstrator, maneuvering the prototype aircraft through hover, forward flight, and a hover turn, in a test flight that lasted approximately 30 minutes.

The X2 TECHNOLOGY Demonstrator is designed to establish that a helicopter can cruise comfortably at 250 knots, while retaining such desirable helicopter attributes as excellent low speed handling, efficient hovering, and safe autorotation, combined with a seamless and simple transition to high speed.

Counter-rotating coaxial rotor helicopter... wow.

Sikorsky’s X2 TECHNOLOGY™ Demonstrator Achieves First Flight