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On a Monday night in late September, Paul Ryan sat on the edge of a couch in his suite at the Cincinnatian Hotel, his left fist clenched so tightly around the neck of his bottle of Miller Lite that I could see the veins bulging in his hands. It was the end of a long day that began at Ryan's home in Janesville, Wis., where he'd spent the weekend preparing for the vice-presidential debate. Early Monday morning, he flew to the first of two fund-raisers, on top of which he did three local TV interviews and a brief chat on Fox Business Network and also a town-hall meeting, plus a half-hour phone call with Mitt Romney, after which he finally settled in on the couch to watch his Green Bay Packers play the Seattle Seahawks on "Monday Night Football." A few minutes after kickoff, Ryan's traveling press secretary, Michael Steel, led me into the suite where Ryan was watching the game with his older brother Tobin, his campaign adviser Dan Senor, the Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus and Senator Rob Portman of Ohio.
"Is this the guy who's writing that hit piece on me?" Ryan said, rising to shake my hand. He's adept at wielding sarcasm in a way that can both disarm and manipulate — signaling a likable, faux-fatalistic awareness of How the Game Is Played. At 42, Ryan looks even younger and more angular in person than he does on television. He says he was teased as a child for looking like Eddie Munster, because of his black widow's peak, and in the course of reporting this article, I also heard people liken him to Greg Brady; Will Schuester, the music-club director in "Glee"; Kyle MacLachlan, who played Special Agent Dale Cooper on "Twin Peaks"; a bat; an owl; an eagle; and Boner, from "Growing Pains."
"Get yourself some ribs," Ryan said after shaking my hand. Everyone had plates balanced on their laps filled with ribs and chicken and coleslaw from a Cincinnati barbecue joint that Ryan frequented in his college days at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. The game on TV was the infamous contest — the crime, Ryan called it — that effectively forced a settlement of the referees' lockout, after Seattle won on a last-second touchdown pass that the replacement officials should have ruled an interception or offensive pass interference. At a rally the next morning, Ryan would parallel the incompetence of the replacement refs to President Obama's handling of the economy. But the calamity unfolding now involved the Packers offensive line being devoured by the Seattle pass rush, which was on its way to sacking quarterback Aaron Rodgers eight times in the first half. "And we drafted all these linemen too," Ryan said.
Ryan tries to plan his schedule around Packers games and also owns shares in the team, the only nonprofit, community-held professional sports franchise in the United States. "I am an owner," he said proudly. When I made a crack about how that would make him another of Mitt Romney's rich N.F.L.-owner pals — a reference to Romney's ill-fated attempt in March to score Everyman points by asserting his friendship with a couple of the league's chieftains — Ryan did not seem to know what I was talking about, or pretended not to.
Across from the couch where Ryan was sitting, Portman kept urging me to "get some sauce" for my ribs, motioning to a glass bowl next to the television. Portman, a former congressman and White House budget director, was a top runner-up to Ryan in the vice-presidential sweepstakes. One mark against the wealthy senator was that he might be perceived as too much of a Grey Poupon Republican in the stiff mold of Romney, an image Ryan helps to counter with his deer-hunting, football-loving, Rage Against the Machine-listening ways. As Seattle's quarterback unleashed a long pass from midfield — and as Portman looked up suggestively at me and said, again, "It's all about the sauce" — the Ryan brothers let out a simultaneous moan as the Seahawks went up 7-0. Ryan swigged from his beer and sniffled and made the first of several mentions of the bad head cold he was fighting. "I should not be drinking," he said. "But, c'mon, it's ribs, it's football, so I gotta have a beer." He then coughed a couple of times and announced that he would be watching the second half in bed.
Earlier this month, I traveled to Danville, Ky., for the debate in which Ryan would turn in a competent if somewhat innocuous performance that was largely overshadowed by Joe Biden's amped-up mannerisms. In the arc of the campaign, the evening would probably be recalled as a spirited and entertaining spectacle with minimal impact on the ultimate result. What was striking to me was the almost giddy mood that suddenly came over the Romney camp and Republicans in general — high-fives for Sean Hannity in the spin room, surrogates hailing the efforts of "the next vice president." It was as if they were just now getting their heads around the idea that they might actually win this thing, after a period in which they seemed so resigned to defeat that all that was left to do was engage in a kind of pre-emptive soul-searching over what — and who — came next.
When I first started trailing Ryan in late September, things were not looking good for Mitt Romney, and some of this soul-searching was focused on Ryan. Specifically on the question of why he was he not playing a bigger and more visible role in the campaign. The leading actor, Romney, did not seem to be cutting it, after all, and many conservatives were preparing to write him off as another object lesson in Why We Must Stop Nominating Moderates and move on. The campaign endured a snake-bitten stretch that ran from Romney's European tour in July to his bounce-free convention in August and on through a blunder-filled September, ending finally with Romney's strong performance (or Obama's horrific performance, depending on your perspective) in the first presidential debate on Oct. 3. For Ryan, the trick during that bedeviled stretch was to do no harm — to the campaign, yes, but also to himself. "There is absolutely no downside to being a good soldier in a presidential race, and Ryan is smart enough to realize this," Craig Robinson, the former political director of the Iowa Republican Party, told me on his way to a Ryan rally in Dubuque two days before the vice-presidential debate. "If Romney loses, I have no doubt the G.O.P. would move on quickly," Robinson added. "And Ryan would, too."
He was speaking to something that various Republicans were beginning to consider and express — that if Obama was re-elected, it would be bad, but there could also be an ushering in of the new face of the party. After the drubbing of four years ago and the freak-show primary season and the ill-fated summer, it was time to contemplate a younger, more dynamic and more purely conservative future. To many, Paul Ryan was a key figure — if not the key figure — in that future. In fact, his selection as running mate instantly mollified two basic insecurities that had been nagging at the conservative establishment for some time: one was that their standard-bearer, Romney, was a closet moderate who could not win over the hard-core "movement conservatives"; the other was that the fervor that animated the Tea Party movement had acquired a dangerously anti-intellectual strain, embodied by the likes of Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain. When I asked Ryan if today's Republican Party was more "idea based" than it was two years ago, he squinted his intense eyes, nodded hard and said yes. I then asked his opinion of the more, let's say, knowledge-averse bent of some conservative populism, mentioning Palin and Bachmann while understanding that he obviously couldn't outwardly offend them or their supporters. "I have my poker face on," Ryan said before letting slip with a tight grin.
In the midst of Romney's deliberations, Ryan was the clear running mate of choice among the right-wing commentariat. ("The Republican Party's intellectual leader," wrote The Weekly Standard's Stephen F. Hayes and William Kristol, who is partly credited with "discovering" Palin during a cruise to Alaska hosted by the magazine in 2007.) Ryan was considered a long shot among several contenders — he was too young, too conservative and too potentially offensive to older voters because of his plan to overhaul Medicare. Another knock was that he was too cerebral, or "wonkish," to win broad appeal in a general election. This is one of those backhanded criticisms that in fact flatter. He was "too smart," "too substantive," in other words, for the sound-bite shorthand of the campaign trail.
Ryan had worn the mantle of the "serious man" for some time in Washington. It was a reputation burnished by both sides (In 2010, President Obama called his budget plan "a serious proposal"), and when Ryan was selected, it led many D.C. Thought Leaders to praise Romney for his bold and substantive stroke. In the time I spent with him, everyone around Ryan was very invested in conveying that he is indeed a detail-obsessed man of great substance. Satisfied that I fully appreciated the barbecue sauce, Rob Portman asked me as he was leaving Ryan's suite if I attended the town-hall event that day in Lima. Yes, I had.
"Tell me how many politicians can do that?" Portman asked.
"Do what?"
"Go out in front of a crowd, with that level of detail and intellectual honesty. I'm impressed!"
"And with a bad head cold!" Ryan chimed in.
Ryan is gifted at shrouding a cutthroat ambition in sheepish nonchalance. It is a key political skill — trying constantly to impress without looking as if you're trying — and one that has eluded many politicians past and present. He is also deft at conveying precision and specificity without being the least bit precise or specific. He has honed his image carefully and promotes it relentlessly on the stump. In late September, Ryan introduced a slide-show demonstration to his appearances. "I'm sort of a PowerPoint guy, so bear with me," he said the first time he did this, in Orlando, Fla., by way of apologizing for his apparent inability to communicate without his security blanket. Though his PowerPoint presentation is an extremely basic four-slide tutorial that shows how much the national debt has risen since World War II — something that many fifth graders could grasp — his home crowds invariably nod and praise him for his faith in their ability to grasp hard truths. The PowerPoint shtick, combined with the headbanger energy of AC/DC ("It's a long way to the top if you wanna rock'n' roll" blares when Ryan arrives onstage), conveys a not-so-subtle message that Ryan is a distinctly un-Romney-like next-generation hybrid and that he's just ready to get out there and do some truth-telling.
But as with any national campaign, there have been strains: to his health (the head cold has lasted weeks), to his patience (a testy end to a local-news interview in Michigan in early October) and most important to his reputation as a purveyor of the power of reality-based conservatism (his convention speech was like Christmas morning for fact-checkers). Ryan was embarrassed in August after telling the radio host Hugh Hewitt that he once ran a marathon in "under three, high twos" (after a writer for Runner's World dug into the records for the Grandma's Marathon in Duluth, Minn., Ryan acknowledged that his actual time was 4:01.25). And more substantive, in an interview with Chris Wallace on "Fox News Sunday," he was asked repeatedly how he would offset the 20 percent rate cuts that the Romney tax plan called for — a move that the Obama campaign, citing independent groups, said would cost the government $5 trillion over 10 years. Ryan disputed that figure, but Wallace did not relent, asking how they would pay for the tax cuts, however much they amounted to. "It's revenue neutral," Ryan kept saying. They would eliminate some loopholes and deductions to make up for the rate cut. Which ones? He would not say, and when Wallace pressed, Ryan filibustered with talk about why it was best to give money to individuals rather than to governments. He recited his credentials ("I've been on the Ways and Means Committee for 12 years"), complained about the meaningless subjectivity of statistics and offered his standard "we can do this" reassurance. Finally, after Wallace asked Ryan yet again how the numbers would work, Ryan maintained, "It would take me too long to go through all of the math."
The Wallace interview fed a problematic narrative for the Romney campaign: that its numbers did not add up. It also slightly tipped the halo of the wonk for Ryan; or at the very least provided an object lesson in the limitations that a supposed seller of "bold ideas" and "hard truths" confronts when straitjacketed by the on-message demands of a presidential campaign.
Ryan figured on a friendlier audience two days later at a town-hall meeting in Clinton, Iowa. "I gotta call on her," Ryan said, pointing to a woman in a Packers jacket who was raising her hand. The woman, Linda Morrison, asked: "Where are the answers? I mean, why aren't you more specific? I heard you, was it Sunday, when you were on Fox, and you didn't answer his question about how we're going to — you know, what are your plans?"
Nodding slowly, Ryan then recited again their list of five priorities — energy, trade, deficit reduction, etc. — even though Wallace's question was about his tax plan, which he mentioned last. He noted closing loopholes, ending deductions, again not indicating which ones. He assured Morrison that he did have specifics on how the plan would add up, but it's complicated. "The problem is it just took me about five minutes to go into all of this with you," Ryan said. "When you are on a 30-second TV show," he added, "you can't do as much."
After the rally, I asked Ryan if he had any regrets about the Wallace interview. "I'm not the kind of guy who has a lot of regrets," he said, and again he explained his unwillingness to be specific with Wallace as a product of the medium — television — rather than any obfuscation on his part. If anything, Ryan said, his challenge is that he becomes too steeped in details, not that he is unwilling to reveal them. "I get too deep in the weeds too fast, and I start losing people," he told me. "I had about seven statistics running through my mind when Chris asked me that. And I'm like, If I go through a recitation of all this, it's going to burn three minutes, and they're going to change the channel." Ryan concluded his answer with his standard, "Trust me." He reassured me: "We can do what we say we're going to do, we're very clear about that. I've been running numbers on tax-reform proposals for years."
Skeptics say Ryan owes his superwonk standing as much to comparisons with his colleagues than to any great knowledge or depth. In a recent profile of Ryan by Alec MacGillis in The New Republic, Barney Frank dismissed his colleague's brainy reputation as being relative to that of other House Republicans, some of whom had just been implicated in a late-night escapade during a Congressional trip to Israel last summer. "He is being graded on a curve," Frank said of Ryan, "with a bunch of guys who jump into the Sea of Galilee because they want to be closer to God."
Jared Bernstein, who read Ryan's fiscal proposals when he worked as chief economist and economic adviser to Vice President Biden, was more pointed regarding Ryan's credibility. "He definitely talks the talk," Bernstein told me. "He has a great facility with a particular set of words, like 'baseline,' 'nondefense discretionary' and things like that." Bernstein said he eventually came to the view that while Ryan might understand basic concepts, "he does not actually understand what it takes to craft a budget." This became clear when Ryan was chairman of the House Budget Committee after 2010. "I would say at this point that his budgetary knowledge is a stalking horse for his ideology," Bernstein told me, meaning that what was important wasn't the actual balancing of the budget but the slashing of government spending and programs like Medicare and Social Security and the revenue-generating taxes that pay for them. By picking Ryan, Romney signaled that he too was all-in on Big Idea conservatism. And here was the guy, popular with the base and well liked in Congress, who was going to help him sell it to America.
While the notion that Washington operates like a high school has become a cliché, it is an apt one: "No one who ever passed through an American public high school could have watched William Jefferson Clinton running for office in 1992 and failed to recognize the familiar predatory sexuality of the provincial adolescent," Joan Didion wrote of the former president in "Political Fictions." In a Rolling Stone profile of John McCain during the 2000 presidential campaign, David Foster Wallace described the then-maverick Republican as a "varsity jock and a hell-raiser whose talents for partying and getting laid are still spoken of with awe by former classmates." When Ryan actually was in high school — Joseph A. Craig High School, in Janesville — he was the kind who joined a million clubs, befriended teachers and was recognized in his yearbook as his class's Biggest Brown-Noser. People in both parties described him to me as pleasant and thoughtful and one of the easier members of Congress to get along with. Others have found him arrogant, self-righteous and emblematic of the earnest striver types who populate so many Congressional and White House staffs (and think tanks, policy institutes and lobbying shops), no matter what party is in charge.
Like more or less every politician seeking to stay in the capital, Ryan is quick to express his anti-Washington sentiments. "Not a D.C. guy," is how he described himself to me in Cincinnati after a soliloquy on Hu-Dey, a Bengals-inspired beer he consumed back in his college days. He sleeps on a cot in his office (its own clichéd symbol of proof of a congressman's unrootedness), the better to work late, save rent and then return home on weekends to see his family in Janesville.
In fact, Ryan has spent half his life in Washington, arriving right out of college to work in a series of staff jobs before being elected to Congress in 1998, at 28. He met his wife, Janna — who is the first cousin of Representative Dan Boren, a moderate Democrat from Oklahoma — at a party near Washington, in the late '90s, when she was working as a lawyer and a lobbyist at PricewaterhouseCoopers. He worked closely with Rob Portman in Congress and again years later when Portman served as budget director in the George W. Bush administration; he met Dan Senor in the mid-'90s, when the two were Congressional staff members. A brief foray into the "do you know" game with Ryan quickly yields endless Capitol Hill associations. When the name of my New York Times colleague Carl Hulse, who was a longtime Congressional correspondent, came up, Ryan mentioned that he and Carl get their hair cut by the same stylist (Hanna) at a Capitol Hill salon called Bubbles.
Talking to Ryan, I was struck by the number of mentors he has collected at every rung of his career (and several more have taken to describing themselves as such). He attributes this tendency to having lost his father, a prominent lawyer, when he was 16. Ryan came to Washington at 21 and affixed himself to a procession of conservative luminaries, many of them his bosses. He worked for the Reagan-era education secretary William Bennett, with whom he has since taken several mountain-climbing trips to Colorado over the years, as well as the former congressman and supply-sider sage Jack Kemp, who died in 2009 and has been described as a father figure to Ryan. "He instinctively knew how to get you into the action," says Sam Brownback, the governor of Kansas and former member of Congress for whom Ryan worked as legislative director in the mid-'90s. By that, Brownback said, he meant that Ryan combined policy acumen with political instincts that allowed him to see which issues would become hot and which bills had a chance of passing.
One of Ryan's most formative influences has been Tom Coburn, the Republican senator from Oklahoma with whom he overlapped for one term in the House in the late 1990s. Coburn was a viscerally anti-Washington conservative long before that sentiment coalesced into the Tea Party. Known as Dr. No, Coburn, a recently retired physician, has built his political career on displeasing the constituencies that politicians spend most of their time trying to please — the activists, the donors, the party leadership and many of his colleagues. His contempt for them is genuine, bipartisan and in many cases mutual. He once prescribed a "spinal transplant" for 70 percent of the Senate and another time said his colleagues had "reproductive organs the size of BBs."
The central tenet of today's Congress is "careerism," Coburn says, mocking the politician's most basic self-preservation impulse. "Both parties today are ultimately controlled not by ideas but by the desire to be in control, a posture that creates little motivation for bold change," he wrote in his 2003 book "Breach of Trust." Ryan told me that he read Coburn's book closely and more than once. It resonated for him throughout the Bush years — a period in which, despite Republican majorities, he was often profoundly frustrated and unhappy over the continued growth of the government and his own complicity in it.
"I did a lot of defensive voting during that time," Ryan said, referring specifically to a 2003 bill that overhauled Medicare and gave seniors prescription-drug benefits at a cost first estimated at $400 billion over 10 years. ("Catholic guilt," Ryan joked, explaining his vote.) Gaining a permanent majority supplanted budget discipline as his party's governing imperative. "Earmark your way, ribbon-cut your way, and you'll keep your job," Ryan said. In 2006, House Democrats reclaimed the majority in the midterm elections, putting what Bush called a "thumpin' " on the Republican Party. It was well deserved, Ryan said. He thought seriously about quitting Congress, maybe joining a policy group. He did a lot of bowhunting, spending long contemplative days in his tree stand. He talked a lot to Coburn. "He taught me to do exactly what you believe and let the chips fall where they may," Ryan told me.
He introduced the first version of his signature budget plan, "Roadmap for America's Future," in May 2008. Only eight Republicans in the House signed it, wary of the retribution that might come from voters if they were seen supporting an overhaul of Medicare and Social Security. "People said, 'This is political suicide,' " Ryan told me. "I'm like: I don't care. First of all, I don't think that's right, but we'll find out." He considered running for Senate in 2010 but says the best possible outcome held no appeal: "It's 6 years, then 12 years," Ryan said. "And then, next thing you know it's 18 years, and you've spent your entire life in Congress." He says this with a tone of contempt and a full-faced smirk that is a bit striking given that it would describe the life choice of many of his colleagues.
"It set him free," Coburn told me, speaking of Ryan's vow to himself after 2006. "If you decide that you're just going to . . . not play the political game, all of a sudden you can have fun." I asked Coburn where Ryan fell on the spectrum of Washington careerism. He has been here half his life, after all, and is way too much of a pleaser to ever be a Coburn-style irritant. He would fit many people's definition of a Washington careerist.
"Paul Ryan is a rare exception in my mind, because he still takes bold positions," Coburn said. "My criticism of career politicians is that they always do what's expedient for their career. I don't think what he recommended on Medicare or Social Security was good for his career."
Early this month, after visiting the Clinton, Iowa, home where his mother-in-law grew up and posing for photos with the current owners, Ryan headed out on an hourlong drive along the Mississippi River to the town of Muscatine. Michael Steel led me onto the cushy campaign bus, appointed with deep vinyl seats emblazoned with the Romney-Ryan insignia, a wood-paneled kitchen, a living room in back and all manner of laptops, television and other communications gadgets. Sitting across from me, Ryan said he thought his party would continue its rightward bend rather than moving back to the moderate middle. "The Tea Party was a godsend," he said, because the movement forced new focus on fiscal issues. The election of 2010 brought a fresh wave of resolute conservatives to Congress, "but you need another cycle to finish the job, to bring in more cause-oriented people instead of career-oriented people," Ryan said. "That's what I've been trying to encourage."
Ryan's stump appearances include a standard line in which he says that "both parties got us into this mess." The line always receives big applause, and it seems designed to lend a veneer of bipartisanship to his deeply partisan policy arguments and a personal record that reflects no participation in major bipartisan legislation over 13 years in Congress. Ryan also says in his speeches that winning this election would endow him and Romney with the "moral authority" and the "mandate" to enact their agenda and move the country, implicitly, to the right. Yet since Romney's successful performance in his first debate, the campaign's message has tacked notably to the center, with more emphasis on Romney's bridge-building efforts with Democrats in Massachusetts (a state the former governor seemed terrified to even utter during the primaries). Romney even struck a softer tone on abortion, at least temporarily, when he told an Iowa newspaper that he saw "no legislation with regards to abortion that I'm familiar with that would become part of my agenda." The next day, Romney was compelled to reassert his anti-abortion legitimacy — assuring reporters that he would "remove funding for Planned Parenthood."
In the vice-presidential debate, Ryan emphasized that he would support the position of the Romney administration on abortion, even though it differed from his own. "I would call him a pragmatic conservative," Brownback says of Ryan. He recalls Ryan as a true conservative believer when he was on his staff — particularly disdainful of government subsidies for ethanol, which are popular in farm states like Kansas. But later, when Ryan was elected to Congress, Brownback teased him about his own support for dairy subsidies in Wisconsin. "I used to give him raspberries over that," Brownback says. "I would say, 'O.K., Mr. Purity, it's not so easy now, is it?' "
Ryan told me that he envisions a vice presidency in which he oversees a vast portfolio on fiscal and economic issues. He agreed fully with the suggestion — first mentioned to me by one of his advisers — that his assignment could be the fiscal version of the role Dick Cheney played on national security after Sept. 11. "It's a role where you take your expertise and your value-add and you apply it," Ryan said during a conversation in which he used the phrase "value-add" three times in a 60-second stretch. "My knowledge is how Congress works, how the budget works. Economic policy. That's my value-add."
It's hard not to consider what would happen if Romney continues to campaign as a moderate, wins and then tries to govern as one. In the spin room following the Ryan-Biden debate, I asked Jeb Hensarling, a Republican congressman from Texas and former chairman of the House Conservative Caucus, if he had any concerns about Romney's recent tack to the center. Hensarling immediately pushed back. "Any question any conservative ever had about Mitt Romney," he added, "was erased when he asked Paul Ryan to be his vice-presidential candidate." Hensarling's enthusiasm for Romney was not surprising here — this was a spin room, after all, not exactly a hothouse for the exchange of private doubts. But I was struck by the degree to which conservatives have taken to using the fact of Ryan's selection as an all-purpose, get-out-of-jail-free card for Romney, even as his campaign coordinators have begun speaking a somewhat different language.
Late on our drive to Muscatine, Michael Steel, the press secretary, asked me if I was sufficiently assured that Ryan was satisfied with his role on the campaign — that his rapport with Romney was good and he was happy with how he was being used. (I did ask him, and big surprise, the answer was yes.)
"Just noise," Ryan told me of the second-guessing about his deployment. The critics "don't see me on Dayton TV, Richmond TV, Dubuque TV," he said. "It's literally, if I'm not on Fox News every 36 hours, people think I'm fading into the woodwork."
As the Ryan bus approached Muscatine, the candidate described for me a personal e-mail that Romney sent him three weeks earlier. "He said, 'I basically picked you because I thought you could help me govern,' " Ryan said. " 'I never knew you'd be decent at campaigning, and you turned out to be pretty good at that, too. So, thanks.' "
I asked if he considered Romney a mentor, and he paused for a second. "I see him as an older partner," he said. "You have to understand, I was elected to Congress when I was 28, so I'm used to working with a lot of people who are much older. It's a relationship I'm very accustomed to."
Few if any alliances are as fraught as those between presidents and vice presidents — strategically, politically, psychologically. It's hard not to wonder how this one would evolve in the White House, what would happen if Ryan found himself wedged between the pragmatic governing demands of his "older partner" and the true-belief system of the movement — and the chamber — he came from.
If Romney loses, the recriminations play out in two predictable ways among Republicans. Some will say that the party must attract a broader base of support among independent and moderate and nonwhite voters, which would argue for the less severely conservative tone that Romney adopted right after his first debate. They might even point to the presence of Ryan on the ticket as, ultimately, a negative, that his selection did nothing to move national polls in favor of Romney and possibly even scared off potential voters.
But a far more vocal — and probably bigger — group on the right will maintain that the ticket was not conservative enough. They will insist that Republicans need to stop nominating the next establishment guy in line. They will say Mitt Romney ran a lousy general election campaign, except for his finest act, the elevation of Paul Ryan, who was a very good Boy Scout and who waited his turn.


text: Law In the Assessment Year, there are two strands in the Law curriculum that have to be distinguished: 'Law Compulsory Subject' and 'Law Core Elective'. We differentiate between Compulsory Subject Law I, which is mandatory for all students and Core Elective Law II, which students in the specialisation Law have to complete. In the context of the Independent Studies Law I, the university offers specific tutorials for foreign language students. Mentoring students' independent learning is a core principle of the independent study approach. The university offers independent study groups for foreign students (students who have obtained their Abitur / Matura or equivalent other than in German) as a support measure in case of language difficulties in working on the course content. In a pace comfortable for the students, the tutors work with them on the subject matter considering possible language difficulties. The students will also get the opportunity to discuss comprehension questions. The learning context of the study groups will be designed to help with corresponding course material so that foreign language students can achieve the set learning objectives of the course Law I. These groups are incorporated into the course registration (bidding) system.

subset: commoncrawl


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Holiday Inn & Suites Beaufort @ Highway 21
Holiday Inn & Suites Beaufort @ Highway 21
2225 Boundary St.
2225 Boundary St.
Beaufort, South Carolina
United States
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Welcome to Holiday Inn & Suites Beaufort @ Highway 21
Welcome to the Best Hotel in Beaufort, SC
You'll discover Southern hospitality and charm at the Holiday Inn Beaufort, nestled in the heart of South Carolina's Lowcountry. Our location is just off Highway 170 and Route 21 and overlooks the Beaufort River in Beaufort, SC, an antebellum seaside town that is steeped in history and beauty.
Our hotel in Beaufort, SC welcomes family and friends attending the year-round graduation ceremonies at the Parris Island Marine Recruitment Center, six miles from our hotel. Beaufort's downtown is rich in history and just one mile away. You can take a horse-drawn buggy tour with a guide to discover the secrets of historic Beaufort. And it's easy to spend a day on the inter-coastal waterway or island hop to Hilton Head, as it is just a half-hour away.
Corporate guests love that our Beaufort hotel is near Parris Island. The University of South Carolina - Beaufort is two miles & Beaufort Memorial Hospital is just minutes away
Guests can relax by the indoor pool and spa or enjoy a workout in the Fitness Center. A 24-hour Business Center allows you to catch up on work or check your email.Planning a wedding or event? We have over 5,400 sq. ft, of space, as well as full in house catering.Don't forget to stop by Albergotti's Grill inside the main lobby to enjoy a local, lowcountry menu.The Holiday Inn Beaufort welcomes you with top-notch service, Southern hospitality and an award-winning attitude.
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Kids ages 18 and under stay for free when sharing their parents' room. Up to four kids ages 11 and under eat free any time of the day in any Holiday Inn® on-site restaurant.
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Standard Wireless Internet service is included for all guests.
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- The Holiday Inn Beaufort has free parking for registered guests. Motor coach buses and RVs can be accommodated, however hook-ups are not available.
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- At the Holiday Inn Only Service Animals are allowed into the Hotel. We recommend all other animals be boarded at Beaufort Dog Located at 24 Market Street, Beaufort SC 29906. For more information about these services they can be reached at 843 379 9617.
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- Number of Floors: 4
- Total Number of Rooms: 97
- Number of Suites: 97
- Number of Non-Smoking Rooms: 97
- Number of Accessible Rooms: 5
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The Rio Conventions Pavilion at the Convention on Biological Diversity's COP 11 in Hyderabad, India was dedicated to protected areas and their contribution to conservation on October 10th during the first week of the conference. The theme of the day, "Natural Solutions: Protected Areas Meeting Biodiversity Targets and Adapting to Global Climate Change" had four panel sessions, including: working towards the Aichi Targets – how PAs contribute; PAs as natural solutions to climate change and other global challenges, PAs for marine conservation, blue carbon and sustainable fisheries; and opportunities for mainstreaming PAs into policies and programmes.
The well-attended daylong event was organized by IUCN WCPA and the Convention on Biological Diversity's Lifeweb Initiative, and was moderated by WCPA Deputy Chair Kathy Mackinnon. Speakers from a full range of protected areas stakeholders, including several active WCPA members, participated, as well as government representatives, protected area agencies, international organizations, the CBD Secretariat, development agencies and NGOs. The day concluded with a cocktail event to launch the second phase of the CBD LifeWeb Initiative, and was opened by CBD Executive Secretary Braulio Ferreira de Souza Dias.
Meeting the target pertaining to protected areas of the CBD's Aichi Biodiversity Targets – Target 11 – with its diversity of challenges, was discussed throughout the day. There was keen interest in a presentation on work being done by a joint IUCN WCPA-SSC (Species Survival Commission) task force to determine how well the current protected area system is capturing and maintaining biodiversity.
Making the case for an expanded protected area system will require conservationists to put much greater emphasis on the multiple social and economic benefits that protected areas can provide – benefits beyond biodiversity. This was a recurring theme in the three latter sessions during the day, which brought together case studies from around the world, including Botswana, Canada, Colombia, India, Madagascar and the Pacific. The key role of marine protected areas in storing and sequestering carbon and supporting sustainable fisheries was also emphasized. In the lead up to the World Parks Congress in Sydney in 2014, the livelihood and ecosystem benefits of protected areas is likely to continue to play an even larger role in conservation efforts, highlighting their relevance to all sectors of society.
One of the "hot" topics at the COP – the need to mobilize greater financial resources to implement the Strategic Plan for Biodiversity – was also discussed during the day. With the debate between developing countries needing greater resources and donor countries concerned about their international commitments and weakening economies at home gaining prominence, Kathy MacKinnon suggested that expansion of protected areas to meet Target 11 for a more representative and well-managed global terrestrial protected area system could be in the order of $47-65 billion annually. Given the substantial benefits that protected areas provide in supplying food, regular and clean water supplies, coastal protection and sustainable fisheries, and disaster risk reduction, it was suggested that the conservation community needs to get much better at valuing protected area systems and advertising their role in promoting human welfare.
"Protected Areas Day was another successful collaboration between IUCN WCPA and Lifeweb," said Kathy Mackinnon. "The day was extremely well-attended by country delegations and others, which shows again how important people believe protected areas are."


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The business may be called Coronado Brewing Company (CBC), but that 17-year-old operation's brewpub roots are now securely fastened to the mainland and spreading fast. It started with CBC brewing at the Mission Brewery Plaza in Five Points several years back before transferring the facility to Acoustic Ales Brewing Experiment. That was followed with the installation of a large-scale brewery complete with a tasting room, storage, and office space in the Knoxville Street cul-de-sac in the Tecolote Canyon area near Bay Park.
Now, CBC is preparing to open a new spot in Imperial Beach, a second brewpub at 875 Seacoast Drive, the site that previously housed Jersey Boys Diner. When asked what motivated an expansion to IB, the company's owners say they are always turning over rocks to find new places to lay down additional stakes, and made a bid on another property within the municipality awhile back, but lost out on it. Which makes it all the more interesting and fortuitous that this spot became available, a mere four blocks from CBC co-founder Ron Chapman's home.
The timetable for the brewpub's opening is set for spring of next year. Once open, it will be a brewery-affixed restaurant with a tasting room component for those who arrive strictly in search of suds. During build-out, the spot will undergo significant changes, including expansion of the patio area. On the brewing side, special beers will be produced specifically for the IB location.
Even as invested as they are in this project, the individuals behind CBC are still keeping an eye out for other places that appear to be a good fit for them to take over. One community president Rick Chapman is particularly interested in is his home neighborhood of Mission Hills. But for now, it's all about IB.
More from SDReader
- More stories by Brandon Hernández
- Coronado Brewing announces plans for new brewpub and distillery — March 3, 2017
- Coronado Brewing's Pier-Side I.B. resto — Nov. 17, 2014
- Coronado Brewing gains solid footing — Jan. 15, 2014
- Beer of the Week: Coronado 17th Anniversary Specialty Ale — Aug. 30, 2013
- Tusk and Grain nixed by 'Nado — April 23, 2013


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[PDF] Marketing In Less Than 1000 Words By Bear Burns. ** Over 50,000 downloads worldwide **
Finally. A book on marketing you can read in 15 minutes flat.
In less than 1000 words we explain the major principles of successful marketing - the most important things you must understand to market your business successfully and find more customers. This is a book so short that everybody can make the time to read i


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According to a recent article at Public Knowledge, cables companies are pushing the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to reconsider a rule regarding the encryption of the basic cable tier. During the early nineties, a rule was adopted by the FCC to make sure cable companies kept a portion of the broadcast stations completely unencrypted. Commonly known as "basic cable" by the public, these stations can be accessed without the need of a set-top box. This is useful for households that have multiple televisions and don't want to pay an addition $5 to $15 for each set-top box. It's also used by many public institutions, like schools, as well as consumers that receive poor over-the-air reception through an antenna.
Cable companies are arguing that costs will go down by removing the basic cable option, specifically due to the ability to remotely service digital boxes rather than sending out technical support and a reduction in piracy by encrypting the stations. However, this would also put cable companies in the position to vastly increase the amount of set-top boxes currently in American homes and increase revenue from set-top box rental fees each month. This also puts the cable companies in the position of providing exclusive access to these stations and can charge licensing fees to any third-party company that wants to develop a solution to watch cable channels within a separate software interface such as the Boxee Box.
Representatives from Boxee flew from New York City to Washington D.C. to meet with the FCC and offer up a presentation on why reversing the original ruling would be a poor decision. Boxee employees argued that changing the rule would eliminate the functionality of all existing computer TV tuners and put low-income families at a disadvantage. They also made the point that increasing the number of set-top boxes by millions would mean a sharp uptick in the power consumption withing an average American home. By adding two to three more set-top boxes at all televisions within the household, yearly power consumption could potentially double according to Boxee's research.
In a blog post created earlier today, Boxee Founder & CEO Avner Ronen made the argument that Charter, Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Cablevision lost a combined total of just over 375,000 subscribers in the third quarter of 2011 and are looking for a way to boost revenues. While subscribers peel away for cheaper entertainment options like Hulu Plus and Netflix, the cable companies want to roll out millions of set-top boxes to offset the loss.
According to Ronen, the cable companies have spent approximately $50 million dollars on lobbying efforts during 2011 and have been supported by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) in the past. Boxee is attempting to rally support from the public as well as organizations like the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA). Over 80 documents have been filed with the FCC regarding this issue and can be viewed by the public within the FCC's Electronic Comment Filing System.
During the hearing, Boxee representatives also declared support for Allvid, a CableCARD replacement proposed by the FCC that would allow consumers to connect to cable TV, satellite TV, Internet TV, VDSL and IPTV through a single adapter. In addition, a single adapter would allow up to six televisions to connect and receive video programming within the home over IP. Internet companies like Google and consumer electronic companies like Sony have come out in favor of the proposed solution, but the MPAA and cable companies have lobbied against it.
Editors' Recommendations
- ATSC 3.0: The next-gen TV update is coming in 2020
- Cable is dying. Can a $50 TiVo dongle save it from extinction?
- ESPN+: Everything you need to know
- What is YouTube TV? Here's everything you need to know
- HDMI 2.1 is going to be big in 2020. Here's everything you need to know


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Feminism and Abortion
Women who regard themselves as feminists, or as part of the "women's movement," do not necessarily all have the same set of convictions, and it is a crude mistake to treat them as if they did. There are serious divisions of opinion within feminism over the strategies for improving the political, economic, and social position of women—for example, over the ethics and the wisdom of censoring literature which some feminists find demeaning to women. Feminists also disagree about deeper questions: about the character and roots of sexual and gender discrimination, about whether women are genetically different from men in moral sensibility or perception, and whether the goal of feminism should be simply to erase formal and informal discrimination or to aim instead at a thoroughly genderless world in which roughly as many fathers as mothers are in primary charge of children, and roughly as many women as men hold top military positions. Feminists even disagree over whether abortion should be permitted: there are "pro-life" feminists. The feminist views I shall discuss here are only those concerned with the special connection between a pregnant woman and the fetus she carries.
In the United States, during the decades before Roe v. Wade, feminists were leaders in the campaigns to repeal anti-abortion laws in various states: they argued, with an urgency and power unmatched by any other group, for the rights that Roe finally recognized. They have since expressed deep disgust with Supreme Court decisions that have allowed states to restrict those rights in various ways, and they have demonstrated in support of their position, risking, in some cases, violent injury at the hands of anti-abortion protesters. Nevertheless, some feminists are among the most savage critics of the arguments Justice Blackmun used in his opinion justifying the Roe decision; they insist that the Court reached the right result but for very much the wrong reason. Some of them suggest that the decision may in the end have worked to the detriment rather than the benefit of women.
Blackmun's opinion argued that women have a general constitutional right to privacy and that it follows from that general right that they have the right to an abortion before the end of the second trimester of their pregnancy. Some feminists object that the so-called right to privacy is a dangerous illusion and that a woman's freedom of choice about abortion in contemporary societies, dominated by men, should be defended not by an appeal to privacy but instead as an essential aspect of any genuine attempt to improve sexual equality. It is not surprising that feminists should want to defend abortion rights in as many ways as possible, and certainly not surprising that some should call attention to sexual inequality as part of the reason why women need such rights. But why should they be eager not only to claim an additional argument from equality but actually to reject the right to privacy argument on which the Court had relied? Why shouldn't they urge both arguments, and…
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I just had the opportunity to spend some time with my four year old son at the doctor's office. It was a painful experience, for my son as well as myself – but for different reasons. He was playing on the monkey bars, lost his grip and fell. A natural reaction when falling is to put out your hands to catch yourself (which in many cases is not the best idea but we do it anyway), which he did. For him, his pain began there when he injured his wrist. He wasn't in writhing pain, and he was able to handle the pain without ibuprofen or Tylenol. Since he was still complaining about it after an hour or so, we called the doctor to get an appointment.
We arrived just before our appointed time (I left work to help out expecting the visit to be reasonable since we had an appointment) and took our place in the empty waiting room after signing the register. Forty minutes after our appointment time, I finally asked for an estimate. My pain had already begun, and my son's pain was becoming more evident through the wailing and whining. Finally we were called back and they finally believed that he was in pain. The family practitioner was nice and professional. She seemed quite knowledgeable and seemed to care that he was in pain. "Let's get some x-rays takens," she said. She then proceeded to instruct us to go to the hospital to get some x-rays taken. What? No x-ray machine at the office. Ok, so not all that unheard of, but I had become accustomed to being able to get x-rays at our previous doctors offices.
Down to the hospital we went. We had to fill out all the paperwork again, sit and wait again, and pay another co-pay (that is ridiculous). Once again the waiting room was empty and we had another forty minute wait. My son did great while getting the x-rays, but his patience was long expired by this point (mine was too but I hid it better). It took us all of two minutes to get the x-rays taken and be on our way back to the doctor's office.
Once again we were waiting. This time there was one person in the waiting area and we sat for another 30 minutes. When we finally get called back again, we were in the room for a total of 10 minutes before we were headed home for the day. We had an appointment at this time to see the orthopeadic specialist on the other side of town – today at 13H00. And then we were told we would need to get a copy of the digital x-rays that had been taken (why we had to get a copy of the films when they were digital – who knows). Thus another trip to the radiologist.
While waiting all this time, I pondered on what it would be like in the DBA world if we were like doctors. Imagine using cursors and loops that cause long time delays, and being specialized in what we do. The DBA department could have a stored procedure writer, an index creator, a schema creator, a performance tuning specialist, a report writer, a corruption specialist, etc. In the medical profession it is somewhat necessary. Is it necessary in the database world?
Envision the scenario where a business user comes to the department requesting that a report be written. The report writer couldn't do it by himself. He would need to spec out the requirements, submit them to the proc writer. The proc writer would write the stored procedure and then submit to the performance tuning specialist who would invoke the indexing specialist. Then the proc could be given back to the report writer who would work on producing the report based on the proc. If a problem were encountered, the report writer would iterate through the loop of the DBA department until the report was working as desired. Then finally get it back to the end-user. This is a bit how I felt with the doctor. I felt like I was stuck in loop that was deadly slow and consumed far too many resources.
That kind of system doesn't portray information sharing and teamwork to me. There are plenty of cases where having people who do different functions within the database team is necessary and efficient. In these types of systems there is knowledge sharing and cross-training in many cases. A report writer may write a stored procedure and performance tune it in some cases – thus making it somewhat efficient. I just hope that the DBA profession does not become hyper-specialized like the medical field such that huge delays and endless loops are forced upon the end-user.


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Centaurus's Emma Lazaroff became the single most prolific girls goal scorer in one season in the brief history of the sport in Colorado on Thursday against Golden.
Just 26 seconds into the game, Lazaroff scored goal No. 126 this season en route to scoring 10 more on the Demons in a 24-7 rout in the Jeffco League.
Also in the Jeffco: Ralston Valley got six goals from Jenny Adams in an 18-15 win over Wheat Ridge.
In the Mountain League: Eagle Valley's Haley Hutton scored three times in a 7-5 win over Steamboat Springs in Gypsum. … Game of the night might have been out in Grand Junction, where Fruita Monument, behind six goals from Lindsey Burenheide, beat Battle Mountain 11-10.


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Amazing Grace: The History and Theology of Calvinism
from Karisa Schlehr Jun 22, 2010 Category: Ligonier ResourcesAny mention of the word "Calvinism" provokes a number of questions, discussions, objections, and realizations. What is "Calvinism?" Does this teaching make man a deterministic robot and God the author of sin? What about free will? If the church accepts Calvinism, won't evangelism be stifled, perhaps even extinguished? How can we balance God's sovereignty and man's responsibility? Why did the Roman Catholic Church condemn the Reformed teaching of predestination and election and embrace free will theology? And why do so many Protestants, perhaps unwittingly, agree with Rome on this issue? Amazing Grace: The History and Theology of Calvinism, a DVD and study guide produced by The Apologetics Group, is the first video documentary that answers these and other related questions. Keep Reading
R.C. Sproul Explains the Important Doctrine of Election in "Chosen by God"
from Karisa Schlehr May 24, 2010 Category: Ligonier Resources"The doctrine of election isn't fair." "Doesn't God give us free will?" "What about John 3:16?" "Why would God save some and not all?" These are just some of the questions and arguments that surround the doctrine of election. But what does the Bible say about election? In his book and teaching series, Chosen by God, Dr. Sproul carefully explains the meaning of God's sovereignty in the work of redemption and shows how it relates to the will of man. He shows why all serious Christians cannot afford to ignore this important biblical doctrine, but instead should embrace God's initiative in Salvation. Keep Reading
R.C. Sproul & John MacArthur Debate Baptism
from Karisa Schlehr May 19, 2010 Category: Ligonier ResourcesInfant baptism or believer's only baptism? For the past two days on Renewing Your Mind, Drs. R.C. Sproul and John MacArthur have discussed their views on the Biblical meaning and mode of Christian baptism. Dr. MacArthur presents the credo-baptist position and Dr. Sproul presents the historic paedo (infant)-baptist position. Listen in as these two friends discuss a historic doctrinal divide. Keep Reading
My Cry Ascends: New Parish Psalms from Ligonier Music
from Deborah Finnamore May 10, 2010 Category: Ligonier ResourcesLigonier Music is pleased to present the newest addition to our music catalog, My Cry Ascends: New Parish Psalms by Gregory Wilbur. Keep Reading
Getting Sanctification Right: Resources to Assist Your May Tabletalk Study
from Karisa Schlehr May 07, 2010 Category: Ligonier ResourcesThe May 2010 issue of Tabletalk seeks to provide a clear articulation of the doctrine and practice of sanctification. Here is a list of helpful resources that will complement your study through Tabletalk this month. Keep Reading
$5 Friday Internet Specials
from Karisa Schlehr May 06, 2010 Category: Ligonier ResourcesStarting tomorrow morning, we are introducing $5 Fridays. Each Friday at 8 a.m. EST we will have a collection of selected resources on sale for $5 for 24 hours. A variety of items will be available each week including books, teaching series on DVD and CD, and music CDs. A preview of each week's sale items will be available on Thursdays here. Keep Reading
R.C. Sproul and Abdul Saleeb Discuss Islamic Theology in "The Cross and the Crescent"
from Karisa Schlehr May 06, 2010 Category: Ligonier ResourcesWhat are the differences between Christianity and Islam? For the past week and a half, R.C. Sproul and former Muslim Abdul Saleeb have been going through the teaching series The Cross and the Crescent on Renewing Your Mind. In this investigative series, Sproul and Saleeb demonstrate how Christianity stands in stark contrast to the claims of Islam. Keep Reading
Free Messages Explaining What the Gospel Is and What It Is Not
from Karisa Schlehr Apr 15, 2010 Category: Ligonier ResourcesWhat would happen if every time we spoke of the gospel we got it wrong? It is imperative that we know, believe, and proclaim no other Gospel than the one delivered by Jesus Himself. May these free streaming messages and resources help you as you study the biblical Gospel of salvation. Keep Reading
Free Messages on the Cross of Christ
from Karisa Schlehr Apr 02, 2010 Category: Ligonier ResourcesWhy was Christ's death necessary? For whom did Christ die? What is the meaning of the cross and why is it so important? These are some of the most important questions every Christian needs to address. Take some time to listen to these free streaming past conference and teaching series that will help answer these difficult questions. Keep Reading
R.C. Sproul's Recommended Resources
from Karisa Schlehr Mar 19, 2010 Category: Ligonier ResourcesR.C. Sproul has written more than seventy books and read countless more. Out of all of these books, which would he most recommend our students have on their shelves? Read his list of recommended resources along with a brief explanation of why he recommends them. Keep Reading


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Southern Colorado gets heavy snow and ice
DENVER – Up to 10 inches of snow fell from Colorado Springs south to the border in a winter storm that also forced the cancellation of a handful of flights and disrupted travel plans because of icy roads.
Most of the state got around 1 to 4 inches of fresh snow, National Weather Service forecaster Jim Kalina said Thursday. Forecasts had warned of widespread heavy snow across the state on Wednesday. A winter weather warning remained in effect Thursday afternoon for northeast Colorado as the storm moved out of the state.
Kalina said the last storm tracked farther south than expected, hitting Arizona and New Mexico.
"It definitely wasn't as heavy as we expected in some areas," Kalina said.
Five flights to Colorado Springs were diverted to Denver International Airport, but snow crews kept runways at DIA clear and there were only a handful of cancellations on Thursday.
As many as 100 cars were forced to turn around after they got stuck on roadways in Colorado Springs due to icy conditions Wednesday night.
The Colorado Department of Transportation dispatched hundreds of snow plows across the state.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Forest Service said it plans to take advantage of the snow to burn slash piles of dead trees on federal land that have been left standing because of a continuing drought.
Rangers said they will evaluate conditions day to day to determine if the controlled burns are safe.
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Staff and research students from the Centre for Social Informatics presented nine papers at Information: interactions and impact (i3) in June 2017.
26 June 2017
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Eric Holder, The American Library Association And Wikipedia Are America's Worst Porn Enablers
from the thinking-of-the-children-is-tough-when-your-brain's-shut-off dept
As has been pointed out before, the Internet is for porn (when not being used for bogus lawsuits). Unfortunately, the Internet was thoroughly dissed by Morality in Media's "Dirty Dozen" list, which names and shames the 12 filthiest "enablers" of our nation's "porn pandemic."
The top name on the list is a bit of a surprise: Eric Holder. Certainly, Holder is less than beloved here at Techdirt. (Here's a few dozen reasons why.) But to date, we've never really found him to be some sort of Bob Guccione Jr., wandering the Dept. of Justice spreading the Good News about porn.
Here's why Holder is public enemy no. 1, according to Morality in Media.
Mr. Holder refuses to enforce existing federal obscenity laws against hardcore adult pornography, despite the fact that these laws have been upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court and effectively enforced by previous attorneys general.Hmm. Maybe it's because he's got bigger fish to fry, what with Kim Dotcom still wandering around New Zealand shooting his mouth off (and opening new storage lockers), domestic spying and possible domestic drone attacks to keep under his hat, FOIA requests to ignore and the prosecution of Aaron Swartz to answer for.
Federal obscenity laws are randomly enforced. Previous attorneys general may have made an effort if enough noise surrounded the case, but by and large, porn continues unabated.
Here are the other 11 of the "Dirty Dozen:"
Comcast gets named out front, but the dropdown text names every major cable/DSL provider, each of which provides premium and PPV porn.
Considering Facebook won't even let you post a naked breast anywhere (even in breast cancer/breast feeding discussions), it's somewhat laughable to think Big Social is a porn fan's paradise. Morality in Media says:
The world's most popular social networking site has become a top place to trade pornography, which we have reported on numerous occasions. According to reports, even child pornography is regularly shared on Facebook and women and children are trafficked on the site.Oh, never mind. It's completely laughable. It's like Craiglist, only with a UI that won't make your eyes bleed! (Oddly enough, Human Traffic Central does not make the list.)
Google Play
Unlike Apple's walled garden of fully-clothed delights, Google's app store is rather laxly policed. As MiM points out, porn is everywhere ("in every category"). Android also enjoys a larger marketshare than IOS. COINCIDENCE?
Hilton Hotels
Porn pushers as well, apparently. Hooked up with
Twitter doesn't police tweets containing external links, so the service may as well just be the hype man outside an adult bookstore, pressing Tweets into the hands of every passerby.
Twitter has become the new 'micro-porn' service with tens of thousands of porn tweets an hour. Of course, there is no way to keep this from children.Of course. Children are unregulated entities who raise themselves by foraging for food and following porn-y Twitter feeds. If only they had parents...
American Library Association
Oh, look. Big Lend is hooking your innocent little children up to porn IVs disguised as publicly accessible computers. And when it's not doing it directly, it's allowing your children to peek over the shoulder of that skeevy-looking dude browsing porn in public. For shame. If only the ALA would shut up about this "First Amendment" and keep its computers locked up tighter than an AOL portal with NetNanny running over the top.
Useful tool or PORN LOCKER? You be the judge. (Or don't. It looks as though MiM has that position locked up...) Because Wikipedia won't proactively monitor content uploaded to Wikicommons, it is now awash in all kinds of pornography, ranging from the merely titillating to the hideously obscene to the kiddie. (Again, according to the "researchers" at Morality Central.)
Cosmo Magazine
I, for one, cannot be bothered to defend Cosmo's "good" name. It certainly can't be bothered to defend anyone outside its target demographic.
This staple of the supermarket checkout line may be as pornographic as Playboy magazine, but without the pictures.So... just like the Playboy app currently being sold at iTunes?
This publication has steadily declined from a somewhat inspirational women's magazine to a verbally pornographic "how-to" sex guide, further desensitizing young women and girls to the pornified culture around them.One thing's for sure: "pornified" is a way underused term. (Also: porntacular, pornstravaganza, porned up, pornundated.)
Barnes & Noble
Well, good thing it's on its way out, then. MiM found nearly "two dozen" porn mags for sale at one store it randomly checked. (Give it another month or two, MiM! You may not be able to find the store at all! Smooches, Amazon.)
Dept. of Defense
Servicemen "read" porn.
MiM says the DoD has a "porn problem" and acts like this is a new thing, instead of something that's been going for as long as young, warm-blooded males have been sent miles away from their loved ones for months at a time, often while being shot at frequently. Of course they had porn. And still do. Next, MiM will be adding the federal prison system to this list and acting shocked that incarcerated males would be in possession of pornography.
Morality in Media wants your help to "target, expose and shame" entities like the American Library Association, the Department of Defense and, um, Cosmo. It even gives you a pre-written petition to sign and, oddly enough, the opportunity to share this on Face[porn]book. But this whole list reeks of extrapolation and desperation, as if actual pornographers were nowhere to be found. Instead, we are given the opportunity to approach porn at an oblique angle and shame entities and services that have plenty of positive aspects. (Not included: Eric Holder, LodgeNet.) It takes a special sort of mindset to look at libraries and Wikipedia and see nothing but gaping pornholes.
Companies: american library association, morality in media, wikipedia


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text: I've seen multiple posts on people trying to go to puerto rico for surf trips and glanced over many options...i have about 5 to 6 people lined up for dec 25th-jan 2....and would like to know, what's the best place/ cheapest place to go...? any past experiences you'd like to bring up? any advice is good advice. Thanks


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Despite my opposition to his presidential candidacy in 2008, I've always liked Rudy Giuliani. Most of that stems from having grown up in New York and seeing the city's renaissance under Mayor Rudy. Also, despite his socially liberal views, Rudy generally refrained from head-on confrontations with social conservatives. He always struck me as the type of guy who understood that his positions were in the minority within the party and so, unlike other social liberals, Rudy focused his fire on the left and largely kept mum on social issues.
He may not agree with the vote in New York to legalize gay marriage, but former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani said the Republican Party should butt out of the bedroom and stick to fiscal policy.
"I think the Republican Party would be well advised to get the heck out of people's bedrooms and let these things get decided by states," Giuliani said Sunday on CNN's "State of the Union." "We'd be a much more successful political party if we stuck to our economic, conservative roots."
There are so many problems with this statement that I almost don't know where to begin. First of all, we need to retire the "stay out of people's bedroom" meme. It's a silly cliche and it is used to shut down debate. As is the case with abortion, I don't think too many marriages take place in the bedroom. The implication is that this is ultimately an issue that revolves around sexual morality, but that misses the point. Nobody is urging that gays be prohibited from doing what they want behind closed doors. Gay marriage opponents simply do not want the definition of marriage to be changed. In point of fact, the libertarian position on this issue would not necessarily be for marriage to be opened to gays, but rather for the state to get out of the marriage business altogether.* The people advocating government involvement in this area are gay marriage advocates, not opponents.
*The merits of this particular argument have been debated here and elsewhere, and I'm not particularly concerned with continuing that discussion here. I just bring it up as an example of what the libertarian position is, not what it ought to be.
Giuliani also seems confused as to which side is making all the noise. Conservatives aren't the ones who started this debate by advocating for a change. We've been the ones fighting a rearguard action to fend off those who would fundamentally alter the definition of marriage. Saying that we're the ones who need to be quiet about the issue is completely hypocritical.
Rudy then tries to have it both ways, later saying that he's personally opposed to gay marriage but that he supports the democratic process in New York. Well which is it, Rudy? If you think that it's a bad idea, why are you telling others who share your view to shut up about it? Do you think that you can play both sides by feigning opposition while ultimately taking the side of gay marriage advocates? More importantly, Giuliani reverts to another tired meme that is constantly trotted out during this debate. Just because one believes in the principle of federalism it does not mean that one should not inveigh against states making bad decisions. Curiously the same people now talking about the glories of federalism didn't seem to have the same opinion about remaining silent on state laws when it came to the Arizona immigration debate. Just because a state has the right to do such and such doesn't mean that you can't lobby the people and legislators of said state to reach a different conclusion. This is akin to the first amendment argument wherein people use the freedom of speech as a crutch when criticized for saying something stupid. Freedom is a two-way street, and we are allowed to criticize bad ideas and work for change within the states.
Finally, the political calculation is just off. Perhaps it's unsurprising that the man who waged one of the worst presidential campaigns in history is offering bad political advice, but time and again polls show that it's on social, not economic issues that conservatives are more in line with majority opinion. It's one of the great fallacies of our era that conservatives should concentrate on economic issues in the interests of electoral gain. There's a reason New York is the first state to enact gay marriage through the legislature. If being pro-gay marriage were a winning issue, then more states would have permitted it through the democratic process by now. And of course this ignores the more important issue about abandoning principles in the interests of political expediency.
Update: Semi-related, here is a story linked at Creative Minority Report about Vermont Inn Keepers being sued for refusing to host a gay marriage reception.
What now Rudy? Should gay marriage advocates stay out of Catholic innkeeper's bedrooms?


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We have previously discussed the fact that Mono is still built upon a conservative garbage collector (Boehm's GC). This means that Mono is not capable of identifying exactly what data is reachable and, consequently, has to resort to conservative guesses that can fail to deallocate garbage, i.e. leaking memory.
Boehm's own literature describes situations where the GC might be expected to leak (lazy lists and queues) but claims that no case has even been found in practice and they could not even construct a contrived example where memory was actually leaked. Readers of our previous posts have stated that our claims of memory leaks are "bogus". So we decided to put this issue to rest.
The following trivial F# program creates a cyclic list representing a queue, adds one element and then repeatedly adds one element and removes it again:
type 'a cell = { content: 'a; mutable next: 'a cell option }
let mutable tail = None
if tail = None then
let cell = { content = [||]; next = None }
cell.next <- Some cell
tail <- Some cell
while true do
let tail' = Option.get tail
let cell = Some { content = [|1.;2.;3.;4.|]; next = tail'.next }
tail'.next <- cell
tail <- cell
let tail' = Option.get tail
tail'.next <- (Option.get tail'.next).next
This obviously requires only enough memory for at most two queue items, so any memory leaks will be obvious. Running this program on .NET, its memory consumption is steady at 11Mb. Running this program on Mono 2.2, the entire memory of the computer is leaked away in 60 seconds, the OS goes to swap and everything grinds to a halt.
We have also described situations where Mono 2.2 leaks stack space until the stack overflows. These results may be of interest to anyone else trying to find a usable VM to build upon.


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From persimmon to peach, marmalade to mandarin…there's a color that is not normally seen in my craft space that is invading my studio. That color is orange! In many shades, in various forms, this color I usually don't play well with is not only invading the craft stores, it's also working really well on my pages too!
While this is the usual time of year for shades of orange to make a cameo in my fall seasonal projects, this year it's more than that. Paired with aqua, pink, grey, green, blue, and many more colors, I'm finding orange to be the perfect accent. Here are some of my favorite basics in orange:
Above: American Crafts "Nightfall" Thickers (Elm – Rust), Core'dinations Tim Holtz Distress cardstock (Wild Honey), Tim Holtz Distress Ink (Spiced Marmalade), Studio Calico Mr. Huey's mist (Custard), Ranger Perfect Pearls mist (Mandarin).
Where is orange showing up in hot new product lines? Here are a few noteable places it has popped up:
Orange makes a cameo in the debut release of the Amy Tangerine for American Crafts line.
A line featuring orange that is technically a themed (autumn) line, but still a very versatile product option, is Autumn Press by Studio Calico.
Stretching the concept to the more coral/peach tones as well as a more yellow-orange, we find this color paired well with aquas and a nautical theme in Pink Paislee's Nantucket line.
The Alla-Prima line from Prima features orange hues combined with aquas and creams. This is one of my favorite combinations, and the result is such a feminine line.
Farmhouse by Crate Paper is another strong release that features orange. The rustic look is unique, and somehow the line manages to incorporate a lot of colors well.
Looking for products that are just straight up orange? Nobody does beautiful vivid colors like Doodlebug! Their Tangerine color is a great orange hue, and available in so many of their products.
If you are a fan of using orange hues in your fall scrapbooking I strongly suggest you take a look at these products, as well as others that are not as heavily themed. While Halloween products are nice, I am finding myself more drawn to these items that can be used year-round, and with a variety of my favorite colors.
Do you have orange in your stash? Are you working with it or is it a color you avoid? These days, it seems you can't walk down the scrapbooking aisle without seeing quite a bit of it!
Want to stay up-to-date on all the latest scrapbook news?


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An urban flood advisory was cancelled for early east central Miami-Dade County.
The cities that had been under the advisory were South Miami, Kendall and Coral Gables.
After Tuesday's break in the rain, more wet weather was expected Wednesday as morning showers will likely give way to afternoon thunderstorms.
Download NBC 6 South Florida's Weather App
Locally heavy downpours will be the main threat with Wednesday's storms, as well as lightning and gusty winds with the strongest cells. Temperatures will reach 87 and it'll stay warm and muggy into the evening with lows around 75.
Showers and storms will remain possible Thursday before the wet weather tapers off late in the week. Expect partly sunny conditions with isolated thunderstorms and highs around 88.
The Memorial Day weekend forecast looks mainly dry with hot sunshine and highs in the upper 80s.
More Weather Content:


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I'm traveling to California with my boyfriend this july and I would like to spend 2 to 3 weeks for surfing. I'm an intermediate surfer and my boyfriend is more a beginnner. Do you recommend some good surfing spot (preferably outside the big cities and not crowded) with some cheap accomodation option near the beach (we will not have a car, so it would be perfect if the accomodation is within walkink distance from the beach) ?

Thaks for the answers and regards from Slovenia


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Is there some integral domain such that none of its irreducible elements is prime?
Recall that a nonzero, non invertible element $a$ of an integral domain $D$ is said to be
- Irreducible, if for all $b,c\in D$ such that $a=bc$, then either $b$ or $c$ is a unit in $D$.
- Prime, if for all $b,c\in D$ such that $a$ divides $bc$, then either $a$ divides $b$ or $a$ divides $c$.
Clearly prime implies irreducible. The converse is not true in general, but is valid when $D$ is a UFD. Obviously these notions are vacuously equivalent if $D$ has not irreducible elements (see here for examples).
Summarizing, I want to know if there is some integral domain with at least one irreducible element, but without prime elements.


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By Allah's leave, Hazrat Mahdi (as) will begin his work at the age of around 35-40. When he first appears, aged around 40, people will not initially realize he is Hazrat Mahdi (as), though this will be understood in time.
Hazrat Mahdi (as) is not, as some people have maintained, someone who will have ethereal characteristics that identify him as soon as he appears, someone invulnerable to the atom bomb, tanks or artillery shells, or with angels clearly seen on a cloud above his head. The appearance of angels takes place only in the world of the angels and is visible only to them. (Allah knows the truth.) And there is no such description of any such Mahdi in the completely reliable hadith of our Prophet (saas). Under the holy law of Allah, every human being created is subjected to testing. No prophet has ever had such ethereally attributes.
Hazrat Mahdi (as) will be recognized through his many successes brought about by Allah using him as a means. Allah will use him as a means in bringing the moral values of Islam to prevail across the world, and will introduce Hazrat Mahdi (as) to people. However, it will only truly be realized that he is Hazrat Mahdi (as) when the Prophet Jesus (as) prays behind him under his imamate. Then people will say, "Allah knows the truth, this person is Hazrat Mahdi (as)".
The Messenger of Allah (saas) said: "Hazrat Mahdi (as) will emerge from my ummah (nation), and HE WILL RULE FOR 5 OR 9 YEARS. A man will come to him and say: O Mahdi! Give me goods. And he will spread out his robe and fill it with as much as he can carry."
(Yusuf Ibn Abi baqr Ibn Ahmet Ibn Yusuf al-Maqdi'si "Feraidu Fawaidi'l Fiqr Fi'l Imam Al-Mahdi Al-Muntazar)
"...He will divide goods and behave according to the Sunna of our Prophet (saas), he will reveal Islam to neighboring countries and REMAIN FOR 7 YEARS, after which he will die and Muslims will perform his funeral prayer."
(Ali Ibn Sultan Muhammad al-Kari al-Hanefi "Risalet al-Mashrab alwardi fi mazhab al-Mahdi)
According to an account from Abu Abdullah Husayn Ibn Ali;
Hazrat Mahdi (as) will rule for 19 YEARS. Al-Uqayli, An-Najmu's-saqib fi Bayan Anna'l Mahdi min.
(Awladi Ali b. Abu Talib Ale't-Tamam ve'l Qamal)
According to al-Tabarani and Abu Nuaym's accounts from Abu Said Al-Khudri; The Messenger of Allah (saas) said: "A man will appear from my Ahl al-Bayt. He will speak of my Sunna. Allah will send rain from the sky to serve him. The earth will give forth its bounty (by Allah's command). He will fill a world that was previously full of oppression and injustice with truth and justice instead. HE WILL APPLY THAT SUNNA FOR 7 YEARS."
(Mer'iy Yusuf Ibn Abi baqr Ibn Ahmet Ibn Yusuf al-Maqdi'si "Feraidu Fawaidi'l Fiqr Fi'l Imam Al-Mahdi Al-Muntazar)
According to an account from Hazrat Ali; Hazrat Mahdi (as) will eliminate all subsequent accretions from the faith and restore all the Sunna. He will conquer Constantinople, China and Mount Daylam. HAZRAT MAHDI (AS) WILL REMAIN IN THIS STATE FOR 7 YEARS. Each year of his will be like 10 of yours.
(Al-Uqayli, An-Najmu's-saqib fi Bayan Anna'l Mahdi min. Awladi Ali b. Abu Talib Ale't-Tamam ve'l Qamal)
According to Al-Daraqutni and Tabarani's accounts from Abu Hurayra;
The Messenger of Allah (saas) said: "Hazrat Mahdi (as) will be in my community. EVEN IF FOR AS LITTLE AS 7 OR 8 OR 9 YEARS, everyone in my community, sinner or non-sinner, will be blessed in a way never seen before..."
(Mer'iy Yusuf Ibn Abi baqr Ibn Ahmet Ibn Yusuf al-Maqdi'si "Feraidu Fawaidi'l Fiqr Fi'l Imam Al-Mahdi Al-Muntazar)
According to Nuaym's account from Zuhri;
Hazrat Mahdi (as) will live for 14 YEARS, after which he will die normally.
(Mer'iy Yusuf Ibn Abi baqr Ibn Ahmet Ibn Yusuf al-Maqdi'si "Feraidu Fawaidi'l Fiqr Fi'l Imam Al-Mahdi Al-Muntazar)
According to Nuaym's account from Bukya Ibn Walid; Hazrat Mahdi's (as) LIFE IS 30 YEARS.
(Mer'iy b. Yusuf b. Ebi baqr b. Ahmet b. Yusuf al-Maqdi'si "Feraidu Fawaidi'l Fikr Fi'l Imam Al-Mahdi Al-Muntazar)
According to Nuaym's account from Dinar b. Dinar; Hazrat Mahdi (as) WILL REMAIN ON EARTH FOR 40 YEARS.
((Mer'iy b. Yusuf b. Ebi baqr b. Ahmet b. Yusuf al-Maqdi'si "Feraidu Fawaidi'l Fikr Fi'l Imam Al-Mahdi Al-Muntazar )
Muhammad Ibn Rasul Al-Husayn Al Barzanji makes the following important statements:
First, The Prophet (saas) says much about his community, the Ahl al-Bayt. He has described how they will be rescued from all kinds of oppression and persecution. This is solely dependent on a justice that will be applied over a long period. Short times such as seven or nine years are insufficient.
Second, Just like Dhu'lQarnayn and Sulayman (as), Hazrat Mahdi (as) will rule the whole world. He will establish mosques and buildings in other countries, and a short time such as nine years will be inadequate for his intellectual struggle and other activities.
Third, life spans will be extended in his time. The prolongation of life spans means that he will also be long-lived... otherwise, the extension of those spans would be meaningless.
Fourth, He will make a four-year peace treaty with the people of Rum. Under that he will live in Constantinople, for seven years. His going to and leaving there twice will of course take years. The same applies to his intellectual struggle against the Sufyan. Because as described above, the Sufyan will abrogate the treaty three years after swearing allegiance to him, after which he will have to struggle him on the level of ideas.
His conquest of India and other countries will naturally take many years. What I have described is also found in various accounts.
All these things show that the period of his sovereignty will last longer than nine years. That being the case, SEVEN YEARS ARE TOTALLY RESTRICTED TO HIS FULL RULE OVER ALL COUNTRIES, AND NINETEEN YEARS TO HIS INTELLECTUAL STRUGGLE AGAINST THE SUFYAN, HIS INTELLECTUAL DEFEAT OF HIM, HIS (FIGURATIVE AND SPIRITUAL) CONQUEST OF COUNTRIES AND ALL PEOPLE COMING UNDER HIS COMMAND... (in other words, the time involved in this is a period of nineteen years...)
I have stated above: He will make nine years of peace with the Rum, his intellectual struggle against and victory over them will take the following ten years. His entry into Sham, the Sufyan swearing allegiance to him, and then retracting that allegiance three years later, and his thus embarking on an intellectual struggle against him and the passage of a number of years thereafter will take up a total of twenty-four years... His entry into Mecca, his demolition of the intellectual system of the Amr of Mecca, and therefore his conquest of all the countries of the Hejaz WILL TAKE SOME FORTY YEARS... Then, his figurative and spiritual conquest of all countries and the appearance of Hasheem of Khorasan will take no little time! It is likely that he will then rule for nine years or less following the coming of the Prophet Jesus (as)... (Portents of Doomsday, Muhammad Ibn Rasul Al-Husayn Al Barzanji of Medina, Pamuk Publications, pp. 185-186)


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Got an image you'd like to see in here first thing in the morning? Send it to email@example.com. Subject: Morning crap
Sadly, the Tigers did not remain "undeated," as they fell to those pesky Longhorns 5-1 last night behind freshman pitcher Taylor Jungmann's 9-inning tossing clinic. Game 3 is tonight at 7:30 to determine which team will be crowned the kings of Omaha, Nebraska.
Regardless of what team wins, I think this guy should be invited to any post-game celebration.:
Good morning. It's Wednesday, which means there will be free bagels at Gawker HQ today. Hobo humpin'.