gotta love the pettiness

Asked if the state department wished [Castro] a speedy recovery, spokesman Richard Boucher simply replied: "No". (link)

choice headline of the day

BBC News: 08:44 - Russia to vote on climate change

Wait, we get to vote on it? Can I have a tropical climate?

code snippet

#if we_naively_assume_that_things_will_work
unsigned char status;
#endif

I have no joke here, I just like my code.

it's not a conspiracy, it's just poor design

problems with touchscreen voting machines. Yep, I recognise this. I have four touchscreens around my desk at the moment; one resistive screen and three capacitative. The resistive is the most accurate of them, and it's still rough, even when you go to the trouble of a full 25-point calibration. The capacitative touchscreens are a joke; one of them won't work properly if the machine is fully assembled for reasons that aren't clear to me, and the other two have pretty bad drift toward the screen edges. Also, all three of the capacitative screens will point to the wrong place if you happen to be touching (i.e. leaning on) the metal casing at the same time as you're touching the screen.

Now, why the pieces of crap being used for the elections were approved for use may be open to your choice of conspiracy theory, but since it seems that it's aribtrary about which way your vote goes it seems like it should just throw errors more-or-less equally on both sides of the line.

how Bono got his groove back

Wow. October was a weak album, particularly after the very impressive debut that was Boy, but some portion of the weakness was attributed to the briefcase full of stolen lyrics which left Bono making up lyrics as he stood at the mike in the studio. At least, assuming that bit of Dunphy's contentious biography of the band is accurate. Mind you, for a weak album, it still produced the rather excellent songs Gloria and 40, both of which became firm favourites at gigs.