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Here the recently assassinated President extends his hand in peace toward Jefferson Davis, while pointing toward a small temple where Liberty sits enthroned. Davis also extends his hand, but palm downward, seeming to spurn Lincoln's grasp.
Liberty takes the form of a maiden holding a shield and staff with Phrygian cap and wears a crown toward which she gestures proudly. Her temple is set upon a raised platform. On five of its six columns appear the names of the American states. Union general William T. Sherman, assisted by Ulysses S. Grant (on horseback, at left), nails a ribbon with the names of the seceded states onto the sixth column.
Attending Lincoln are (from left to right) two bearded Union soldiers, secretary of war Gideon Welles, and secretary of state William H. Seward. In the left distance a fortress flying an American flag overlooks a bucolic scene--with a small cottage, a farmer ploughing his field, and sailboats on the water.
On the right, with Jefferson Davis, are (left to right) a mustachioed gentleman (possibly John Wilkes Booth), Confederate general Robert E. Lee, a slave in chains, and a young man holding his hat in his hands. Behind them are crowds of civilians and, in the distance, violent scenes: an army in battle and a house in flaming ruins.
The picture is framed with an ornamental border that reinforces the contrast between the right and left portions of the scene. On the left (Lincoln's side) branches of fruit grow in the picture's borders, but on the right are only thorns. In the upper border are olive branches and on the bottom sprigs of oak.
Small vignettes also appear in the borders. At top a slave is flogged in an interior; at right a soldier attacks a fallen enemy; at bottom farmers harvest grain; and at left a man sits on a riverbank fishing.
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1. We are here at QCon London 2014, we are with Dave Farley. Hi, Dave, what have you been up to lately?
Hi. I'm here speaking at the conference and meeting a lot of old friends. Workwise I am working for a trading company and trying to help them improve their software development processes. We are looking to implement continuous delivery in an organization, which is an interesting challenge, dealing with the culture changes around the technology.
2. Do you think that continuous delivery can be done outside a DevOps enabled organization?
I guess a lot depends on what you mean by DevOps enabled, I think fundamentally the answer is probably no. Continuous delivery is a lot about being a holistic process and breaking down barriers and silos in organizations and fundamentally what I believe is at the root of continuous delivery and other Agile practices, really, is the establishment of feedback loops to evaluate change and react to it. That means that the person that causes a breakage needs to see the breakage and have the freedom to fix the problem, so DevOps allows that. If you've got a silo operating between development and operations, then the developer is going to write code that breaks things, the operations are the people that are going to feel the pain, so I think there is a degree to which the DevOps is probably a prerequisite to really do this well.
3. And the other way around, is it possible to be a DevOps shop without doing continuous delivery?
I think it is, I think it's less good, I guess I would say that. For me DevOps really means this thing that the developers being close enough to the operations to see the pain, there is much more to it than that, there is infrastructure, there is code and certainly as you get to the more sophisticated end it starts not to make an awful lot of sense stand-alone without the more upstream practices that continuous delivery talks about. The DevOps operations is just one of those interfaces within an organization that you need to get right. I think that certainly if it's small teams and smaller, simpler projects certainly you can operate in a DevOps mode without necessarily having the high levels of automation that continuous delivery implies. I think the output is probably not going to be as good if you do that, but certainly you can gain benefit from those sorts of practices without going all out.
First, one of the key principles of continuous delivery, which I admit is a conscious lift from Lean thinking is that you build quality in, so that implies writing code that is going to be maintainable and operable and fulfills those non-functional requirements, it's my strong belief that if you do that, over time it pays back in spades, it's a much more efficient way of working. It doesn't feel like that, so it's one of the real tensions that tends to happen in teams, even capable teams where the business wants feature and the technologies want to address some technical debt, there's tension between those things. I think an awful lot of it is about building a trust on both sides that the business will trust the technologists that if they say they have to do this, they really have and so the technologists get to focus on delivering more elegant solutions. Honestly, I don't really have any silver bullets that make that an easy decision, it's an awful lot down to the experience, the skills of the people involved and the relationships that you build.
Certainly in the organizations that I've worked in where the continuous delivery process was mature, what happens over time is that we build up that trust and we build up that trust by sometimes compromising either way, so sometimes the business doesn't get what they want, when they want it, sometimes the technologists don't get to do the features that they want, when they want to, but we have an open conversation and we recognize that each of them are compromising when we are compromising. That's the human things that help to build the trust and it worked quite well; certainly for my last company, LMAX, where we did that over time it got to the stage where, I was part of the technology team, if we wanted to concentrate on something and we said we did, the business would just say "ok, do it". Occasionally, if it was a really big thing, they might want some justification, they might just want a conversation about where is the value in this, why are we doing this, but they quickly learnt that when we did those sorts of things, we usually got good result afterwards.
I think that depends on where the operations are, there are some fairly formal methods for operations in some organizations, but I think a lot of it is just the nature of the situation that people find themselves in, in organizations that aren't working very well. So developers, it's a creative discipline, they are looking to try and find ways and explore, developers are problem solvers, in bad organizations or dysfunctional organizations, the operations team are often in a fairly unpleasant place, they are getting substandard quality pushed over the wall to them and they are in crisis of firefighting all of the time. There is a degree to which they don't have much opportunity to lift their heads over the parapet and think more strategically, work more strategically, they are too busy trying to limit the amount of change, so they defend the stability they have. So, I think there is a degree of that. What I can say is the people who work in those environments are generally pretty smart, they are technologists too, and when they start seeing new ways of working that work, they are keen on adopting them, so I don't think they are anti-methodology or anything like that, I think very often they are busy stuck in these already unpleasant situations where they are just fighting fires all day.
I think either works. Fundamentally, I believe that Agile methods, in general, work because they are the application of the scientific method to software development, and what I mean by that is that we consciously establish feedback loops at different resolutions so that we can learn. Very tight resolution at writing test and seeing the results and iterating on that and in the course of resolution we are having ideas and getting those in the hands of our users and seeing the effect of that and iterating on that and that process of feedback, which to my mind is a kind of pop science nerd, is fundamental to the way effective processes work, is really at the root of what needs to happen. Now, the way in which you establish those feedback loops matters less, so you can either do it by having fixed points in time, an iterative structure every couple of weeks or something like that and that has some benefits, particularly when people are learning these sorts of skills and these sorts of approaches, not some benefits in terms of setting up a regular cycle, you can say we are going to have a kick off meeting and have showcases, and people understand that. As you get more advanced at these sorts of things, the flow is what's really important, but the iteration is fundamental.
Most of the teams I've worked on, not all, but most of the teams I've worked on, we generally started off with iterations and kept them, but we kept them for human reasons, they give a nice cycle. The danger with a full-on flow model from my own perspective, I've worked on one of the relatively early Lean teams when I worked at ThoughtWorks, it worked brilliantly, but I believe that the team suffered from fatigue more, sooner. With an iterative structure you tend to get a cycle and you're pushing for a deadline to make sure you got your work done by the end of the iteration and it's kind of a dynamic, and you relax and everybody is feeling good about their success of that iteration, we can pat ourselves on the back because we did well and we can move on and have our retrospectives, and that kind of cycle works nicely. When you are full-on Lean where the iteration is story-centered, which they should be, but they tend not to line up, so one pair might be working on one story and they finish and they can celebrate, but the other team didn't finish and they fail, there is a danger that you have to find other ways to get the team done. My favorite method is that I have an iterative structure, but we work closely, we can release it anytime, you are always working, practicing to release, you can release your features throughout the iteration, but we keep the iterative structure just for the human thing, so we can have cake at the kick off meeting as a team and all of those sorts of things.
I absolutely think it's possible to do it in this scenario, but it has its extra challenges. I think software development is a human creative activity and it's a technically difficult human creative activity that we get together and do in teams and so an awful lot about doing that well is about the team dynamics and managing that, so making sure that at the human level people can interact effectively and so technology can help a lot with that. So, I work very closely with some guys at my company who are based in Chicago for example and we have on our desks video conference systems so we can overhear what they are talking about and interrupt one another. So that sort of things help, but fundamentally what really is absolutely essential is that periodically we'll fly and go and stay with them for a bit and eat and have cake together and do all those human things, we make a bond so that we trust one another more. I think that is absolutely fundamental whatever the nature of the team, but it's doubly important when you are talking about places where there is a room for tension. So, if you're outsourcing and there is another company or as you say, there is developments in one place and ops in another, I think it's risky, all of this stuff is much more easy if everybody is sitting together and they are all doing it in one place, but practically that doesn't always happen. But you can absolutely do it; you just need to be a bit thoughtful about making sure the communication at the human level works. The technology is the easy part, the technology is rarely an issue in my experience.
Yes, I think you are right, I think that's challenging, in part it's establishing a healthy relationship with your regulator. So, I work in the finance industry and in my current company, we are dealing with software that was written before continuous delivery, so we are looking to migrate that stuff. The last company I worked was a company called LMAX, that was a startup, we built a financial exchange from scratch and went through the process of getting regulated by the regulator here in the UK, and so heavily regulated industry, important to get right all that sort of thing. I think a lot of this is about just being open and honest about where the problems are, so the Chinese wall thing, the segregation between production and development is difficult, it's a difficult barrier. What we did at LMAX to manage that problem was… first, there was absolutely no nomad, no transfer of live data from production into the development environment, except when it went through a process that anonymized it. So there was no access to information that the development team shouldn't have, but we could have the structure of the data, so we could test it. We wrote scripts to do these transfers when we needed that kind of thing.
In terms of the individuals and the access, parts of this is aligned with continuous delivery, if you get this perfectly right, even LMAX which was a very CD-focused organization doing it from the ground up, we didn't always get it perfectly right. But in the perfect world, ideally, nobody touches production systems, no person needs to go tinker with them, so nobody has access to them because that's the job of automation. So, if you're in that world, if all of your changes flow through an automated deployment pipeline, get tested and so on, it doesn't really matter very much because the only things that have access to production are the robots that deploy the software. Of course, occasionally, there are problems, at LMAX we tried to straddle the problem, so we ended up, and I am not suggesting this is the perfect solution, but it worked for us for a while, was we ended up having a nominated DevOps team which people would rotate through and while they were doing that they didn't have access to some of the resources and they did have access to the production and developers would rotate through that team. It's not at all perfect, but at least it makes sure developers have the experience or see the kinds of problems, the classes of problems that are happening live even if they don't see their problems, that they create. So it's not true DevOps and many people that talk about DevOps will say that having a DevOps team is an anti-pattern and I would probably agree with them. But it kind of worked for us in terms of regulating this environment, give that slight barrier between, so they had more access than the development team when they were on the DevOps team and then they lost it when they rotated back into the development team.
The simple answer to that is yes. It's not always worth the effort tough to back fill the level of automation you would ideally like, in my opinion. If you're coming into a legacy system, for somebody that is as test-obsessed as me, the lure is to say "we're not going to do any work for six months or twelve months, we are just going to write tests to protect this piece of software". That doesn't make sense, it doesn't make commercial sense. A strategy that I've use many times in dealing with legacy systems in that kind of mode is just talk to the business, identify where the valuable use cases are through the system and just write tests that defend those, arms-length, functional tests, blackbox tests of the system that will just assert the principal use cases. From then on, all new work is done full-on, test driven development, acceptance test driven development, all of those good things and so we quickly grow a suite of tests to get a good coverage in the areas where we do new work and we've got these defensive tests that will assert that we haven't broken the principal behaviors of the system by interacting with it. Even that is an investment, but that level of investment is certainly worthwhile.
I think this is a big topic, that probably isn't covered well enough. My own leanings and what I have done for projects in the last few years, I believe very strongly that in expressing the tests themselves, the test cases should be expressed in the language of the problem domain. That implies some kind of domain specific language that you create to isolate, to be able to separate the concerns of expressing the test, which is in business terminology, from the way in which the test system interacts with the code and the tests. Way too often, and most commercial test frameworks that I've seen do this, they conflate those ideas so you express the tests and you express how you interact with the system at the same time, so you do neither very well, business users can't really read what the test is. The test is going to brake all the time because you conflated these concerns, they are fragile, and so I think it's really important to invest some good design principles into design the test cases. We had some wonderful experiences with this strategy at LMAX.
Things like at one point, early in the life, we went from text based typical trading blotter style user interface to pointing click graph game for ordering and all of our tests kept running as we made that transition because the tests where expressed in terms of place and order, what's the state of an order book, those sorts of things. Those concepts still made perfect sense when you typed a number into a spreadsheet like thing or clicking on a graph. The concepts are still right, and that's where the level of abstraction is important. I am a big fan of whole system, blackbox automated tests using a DSL that are kind of glued into the requirements process. So you have stories that describe acceptance criteria and it's our definition of done from a development point of view that every acceptance criteria in the story has to have at least one automated test associated with it and we'll review that is part of the showcase and the story and the process that quickly builds up a very thorough test case which is exercising every behavior of your system, because every behavior of your system has a story that tells you to implement it.
There are other strategies for micro services and so on. I think that often there are efficient ways of doing that and integration and test, I tend to be a little wary of it myself, because as I said before, it's trying to get to the scientific method and trying to make sure that my software is very viable and how do I know other than guessing that the dependency between this service and this other service isn't something that is going to mess me up if I get it wrong. If I just make an assumption, I can't really know, if I exercise it that may tell me something different. However, I am ever the pragmatist, so if I came across a project where it made sense to test this small thing, maybe a trade-off between a whole system deployment and the feedback cycle being too long or you've got too many cases of testing where you've got variants in the different numbers of components, I'd probably compromise, but I would feel uneasy about it.
I can't honestly say that I do, part of my difficulty I guess is that I have been doing this for a long time and so there were no tools that were targeted at this sort of thing. There are some now, but often the projects that I've worked on have predate the existence of these tools and once you're working and you've got something that works, it doesn't matter. In general, I think that the mindset and the approaches and the process are much more important than tools, the tools are fairly easy. For example, talking about DSL I was describing at LMAX, we just wrote our own from scratch, it wasn't as complicated as it sounds, it was a very simple DSL, but it's more about the design thinking, it's more about the design philosophy that matters rather than the tools themselves. I've heard good things of things like Cucumber, Twist and SpecFlow, tools like that. I confess I haven't used them myself on real projects, I can't profess their value personally.
No, I'm afraid they haven't changed, I am a hard lined continuous integration guy. Fundamentally continuous integration is about trying to expose integration risks, we want to evaluate our changes alongside everybody else's changes as early as we can, we want to see what things your colleagues introduce that screws up the work you are doing or you introduce that screws up the work they are doing. We want to surface that so that we can react to those quickly and fix those problems quickly. Any branching strategy of any kind, even feature branching which I use and branching by abstraction, even those things are designed to hide change and so they are absolutely antithetical to continuous integration. So, I guess I am saying they are a bad thing, I was going to say they aren't wholly evil or anything and occasionally I would use branching and so on, but it makes me uneasy if my code isn't regularly being evaluated and in the context of other people's, I'm at risk. It's not about the tooling, no matter how good the tooling of merging things together are. If you and I are writing on separate branches, the tools can be wonderful at merging things together, but functionally we could write code that interacts in bad ways and not spot it, it's nothing to do with the branching, with the merging tools. It's just to do with design, it's just to do with surfacing, your head is going in this direction, my head is going in that direction and that stuff doesn't work together anymore. Continuous integration is the only way that I know to get over that problem, it's not perfect, it has its drawbacks, but for me as a strong CI guy, it's worth not doing feature branching to gain that benefit.
João: About feature toggles, I got the impression you are not too keen on them, also.
Not really. I use feature toggles, I think they are an important tool, an important technique, but again, it's a problem. If you write some code and you've got a feature toggle for that code, what do you do when you run in test, you run the test with the feature toggle turned on and so you're testing your new features or are you working with the feature toggle turned off, so you're testing what's going to go into production? Or do you really want both of those answers because you want to see how your features are evolving and whether they are passing the test and you want to test what is going into production, you might screw something up and might break things in production, so which do you do? What most people do, few people run both, but then you've got problems to evaluate the results, the right conditions, it's more expensive, writing lots of acceptance tests certainly is very expensive. If you want to get your cycle time down to minutes, you invest heavily in hardware, now you've got to double up how much hardware you've got to run all these stuff, it can get really expensive, really quickly if you've got multiple paths to do, some people do, but if you don't do that, you've got to make a choice, one or the other, because do you want to see what's effectively changed or you want to see what production is going to happen. There is no ideal answer because it's a form of branching, because it's a form of isolating change and continuous integration is all about not isolating change. So, in the ideal world you want to write your software in a way that evolves in public, live, all of the time and there is no need for feature toggles, but sometimes that's not practical.
The artifact repository is a central idea because the core idea of continuous delivery is every change that you submit to go into production is giving birth to a release candidate and you want to evaluate that release candidate through its lifecycle, sorry, through its release cycle and see whether it can prove that it's not fit to make it into production. If we're doing that, what we want is that the thing that is going to end up in production to be the thing that we are evaluating and so we want to make sure that the thing that we are creating is the thing that we are going to test. So the artifact repository comes central, so the first stage in our pipeline is generally called the commit stage, it's going to build the deployment artifacts that we are going to release into production.
The rest of the system, the rest of the evaluations that follow on whether automated or manual, decorate that release candidate with metadata that describes how it's done, whether it's passed these tests and so on. So, fundamentally what we are looking for in artifact repository are probably three behaviors. One of them is that we can version any binary artifacts, pretty basic stuff, we can have different versions of the same stuff because we are going to be creating lots of these, because we are running tests and generating artifacts all the time. Secondly we want to be able to decorate those versions with metadata that describe the results of our testing so we can capture the results and make decisions on an automated basis based on this metadata that we collected: yes, it's passed the acceptance test, yes, it's passed commit test, yes, it's passed the performance test and so on. And lastly, because this stuff tends to get expensive, it's quite handy to have purge policies, so one of the things with continuous delivery is that if anything fails we, the Lean talk is stop the line.
What this means in release terms is if something fails the test it's useless, we can throw it away, we can discard that release candidate from the artifact repository, so we can manage the disk set. The first time that we built with continuous delivery pipeline, on any projects that I am aware of, we were naïve and we just used subversion, which was our version control system of choice, and we kind of blew up the disk in about seven days because we generate a lot of stuff when we check in for and so on, but I think that's all you need. Again, in the past we've written our own, you can do this kind of thing simply by writing a few scripts around an area of disk and naming directories and little xml files maybe to capture your metadata or something like that, that works fine. I wrote some stuff like that and built some Ant targets and you can just drive it from Ant, a few years ago. These days, on my current project we use Artifactory, the open source artifact repository, which has a nice property of also being a YUM repository, an RPM repository so you can integrate into other things.
14. Before closing, do you have any final thoughts to our audience?
Every time I talk to anybody about this stuff, the thing I try to bang on about is I think there is a step change happening. We spent decades writing software not very well, from a process point of view, if you look at the data for that, it's hard to fault. I think we know how to do it now, I think our industry is learning, I think continuous delivery, amongst other practices, are a better way, and there are lots of companies that are seeing this and are making money out of doing things better. Etsy and Netflix and Google and people like that, they know about these stuff, they use this to significant advantage. It's my very strong belief, because this is based on fundamentally, on scientific method and trying to get for this and establish feedback loops and so on. I think software development in ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred years' time will be more the shape of a continuous delivery process than it will the form of a waterfall process. It will be iterative because science works better than anything else at solving hard problems and that's how you do science, you iterate. So, it will be iterative, it will be experimental, it probably won't be called continuous delivery, it may look a little bit different, but you will have those core ideas fundamental to the way it works because that's a better way of building software.
João: Thank you so much, Dave.
Thank you.

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Part 1: Implement a class which can be used to measure how long each invocation of the increment and decrement method takes (inpublic interface IncDec { void increment(); void decrement(); } public class MyIncDec implements IncDec { private int x; public MyIncDec(int x) { this.x = x; } public void increment() { this.x++; } public void decrement() { this.x--; } }
milliseconds) and prints out this information. The class should fit in more or less transparently with existing clients of the IncDec interface.
Part 2: Imagine you need to do something similar (timing of method calls) for many places in an application. What other ideas come to mind, e.
My Solution:
My Solution gives me the time diff as 0. When I display the long values before n after calling 'increment', They are the same. Why so?


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Home | Reviews | Extras | Forums |
Outlaw StarSynopsisGene Starwind and Jim Hawking are in trouble. They've been bequeathed one of the galaxy's most advanced starships from a now-dead acquaintance. Problem is, everybody else they run into seems to want a piece of their action. This is a universe where three forces are at work. There's the Federation, the supposed upholders of law and order, an organization to which most of the empires and planetary governments belong. There are the various clans of Pirates, who run most of the illegal business operations throughout the galaxy. And then there are those who profess to take sides with neither of these, who grab what they can, whenever they can, and are proud to live on the edge of Galactic society. This last group, of which Gene and Jim are self-proclaimed members, are the Outlaws. And so, Gene, Jim, and the rest of their ship's ragtag skeleton crew - the most unique band of misfits to sail the skies since Red Dwarf - have set out from their home planets in search of the mysterious Galactic Leyline, which will lead them to the greatest treasure in the universe ... ReviewThis series has a little of everything. Among the crew of the Outlaw Star are a handsome but occasionally dorky hero; his teenage-genius sidekick; a cute but painfully shy android girl; a tradition-loving female ronin; the ship's cantankerous computer, with the personality of a depressive who's resigned to his fate; and a predictably spazzy catgirl. This should give you some idea of how well it sticks to all the cliches of 90s-era sci-fi anime. And yet it transcends those cliches at the same time. There are those who say this series does everything and does nothing very well, but personally I'm inclined to disagree. Maybe it doesn't go anywhere that other series haven't already been, but boy, does it have a damn good time getting there. It's wildly funny at times, more than worthy in the action department, and there are quite a few mysteries along the way that make the whole series worth watching. The animation quality of the show is consistently high, but then again it seems the standards have increased in Japan. Much like the art of Trigun or Cowboy Bebop, the show's visual style is breathtaking and entertaining in its own way. The quality of the sound is also admirable; the DVDs have no noticeable glitches whatsoever, in sound OR video. And I haven't watched it with the dubbed dialogue much, but from what I've heard so far the dub's not as embarrassing as one might think. I've not been able to get my hands on a copy of the second DVD set; at this writing, two packages are available, and the whole series is, I think, already available on VHS--but that makes for a very bulky package. But they've managed to cram two discs and seven to nine episodes into every DVD set, which I'm not aware of anyone having done before ... it may cost a little more, but I think it's worth it. This show doesn't necessarily cover any new ground, but damn it, you've got to give them credit for trying. All in all, a very entertaining series. — Jacob Churosh Recommended Audience: Some violence, language, and adult situations lead us to recommend this for teens and over. Of course, the TV edit is okay for kids, as most of the potentially offensive material has been cut out. Version(s) Viewed: VHS, Japanese with English subtitles; broadcast airing, English dub; R1 DVD Review Status: Partial (24/26) Outlaw Star © 1998 Morning Star / Sunrise / Shueisha / Sotsu Agency |
© 1996-2015 THEM Anime Reviews. All rights reserved. |


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PRESS RELEASE: Boss is pleased to announce the addition of the ME-25 Guitar Multiple Effects to its popular line of floor-based multi-effects. The compact and durable ME-25 inherits high-quality sounds from the flagship ME-70, and packs a ton of Boss tone tools into one amazingly affordable package.
Sporting a quick and easy user interface for professionals and newcomers alike, the ME-25 features a full complement of COSM amplifier models. The onboard Sound Library comes loaded with 60 effects combinations suitable for a wide range of playing styles.
The ME-25 runs on six AA batteries or AC power, and its portable size ensures it's ready to rock anywhere.
The ME-25 Guitar Multiple Effects is stocked full of the best Boss effects - distortions, overdrives, modulation effects, delay, reverb, harmonist, and many more. The built-in expression pedal controls a number of pedal effects, including wah, octave up/down, and a unique freeze effect. Three heavy-duty footswitches allow the user to select sounds and perform other functions, such as accessing the built-in tuner, tapping in delay times, and enabling the SOLO feature.
The ME-25 is the first multiple effect processor at this price point to include renowned Boss COSM amp-modelling technology. There's a range of classic amps from clean combos to raging stacks, along with a Super Stack function that gets big amp tone from a small practice amp. A 38-second looper is also included for real-time sound-on-sound recording.
The ME-25 Guitar Multiple Effects also includes USB connectivity, allowing users to stream audio and other data back and forth with their computer. A powerful librarian is available as a free download to manage sounds, and the ME-25 is bundled with Cakewalk SONAR 8.5 LE for multi-track audio and MIDI recording.
The ME-25 will be shipping in January.
For more information, visit Roland's official site
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County gets £9m to spend on cycle schemes
Blackpool Council is to share £7.5m and Lancashire County Council to share £1.9m as part of £64m of Government investment across 28 projects in England from 2017 to 2020.
Transport Minister Andrew Jones announced the funding will form part of a wider government package of more than £300 million to boost walking and cycling during the current parliament.
Hide AdAdvertisement
Hide AdThe money will provide more safety and awareness training for cyclists: extra secure cycle storage; bike repair and maintenance courses; road safety measures; mapping information for pedestrians; real time bus information through smart phone apps or information at bus stops; and increased focus on car sharing clubs.
The funding will also target those looking to get back into work because access to transport often restricts where people can look for work.
Residents will also benefit from discount bus travel and bike loans.
Rosslyn Colderley, England North Director for Sustrans said: "This investment is extremely welcome in Lancashire to help improve access to jobs, skills, education and training.
Hide AdAdvertisement
Hide Ad"It is a clear sign that the local government recognises the benefits of cycling and walking to help create healthier, cleaner places in which to live and work.
"We look forward to working in partnership with Blackpool Council and Lancashire County Council."
Lancashire County Council placed a joint bid with Blackburn with Darwen Borough Council. Blackpool Council placed a consortium bid with Buckinghamshire CC, Hertfordshire CC, North East CA, Stoke on Trent CC, West Sussex CC, Hampshire CC, Leicester CC, North Lincolnshire Council and Surrey CC.


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REUTERS Thursday, 18 October 2012 04:39 PM EDT
The U.S. military voiced concern on Thursday over mounting student loan debt owed by American troops, saying loan companies appeared to be taking advantage of U.S. forces - guiding them away from special protections they earned through service.
Some 41 percent of America's armed forces are holding student debt, according to one recent survey, and Pentagon officials say financial troubles are among the top sources of anxiety among troops -- sometimes even topping war itself.
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told reporters that the No. 1 reason troops lose security clearances was financial troubles, which include things like overwhelming debt for mortgages, credit cards and student loans.
"And that's something that we absolutely now have to address," Panetta said at a Pentagon press conference detailing a new report on student loan debt.
"Because of their sacrifice, it should be easier, not tougher for service members to be able to pay off their college debt," he said.
The growing student loan burden in the military appears to partly reflect a trend in America generally. Two-thirds of U.S. college seniors who graduated in 2011 had student loan debt, with an average of $26,600 per borrower, according to a study released on Thursday by the California-based Institute for College Access and Success.
The Pentagon report cited a figure from 2008 showing that the amount of student debt for active-duty service members graduating from college in 2008 was $25,566.
But troops, unlike the general population, should benefit from laws meant to help them manage their student debt, including the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act (SCRA), which cuts interest rates to 6 percent during active duty service on debt incurred prior to service.
Instead, the report warned that troops confused by the complexities of their benefits through acts like SCRA were being guided into unfavorable debt repayment plans or refused their legal benefits.
"I'm concerned that the report that is being issued today warns of student loan companies that not only may confuse service members, but even violate the law in the approach that they take," Panetta said.
Holly Petraeus, a top official with the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau who advocates for troops, noted documented cases of abusive mortgage lending practices against troops, resulting in more than 300 improper foreclosures.
"I think the problem may be greater with student loans than it was with mortgages," Petraeus, wife of CIA Director David Petraeus, said, explaining that "many more young servicemembers enter active duty with student loans than with a mortgage."
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Desperately Dissing Avida
Writing for the Discovery Institute, Casey Luskin has dissed evolutionary research performed using the Avida research platform. (Luskin is a new "program officer" for the DI.) As I wrote last year, computer models employing evolutionary mechanisms are a thorn (or maybe a dagger?) in the side of ID creationists. The models allow testing evolutionary hypotheses that in "real" life would take decades to accomplish or are impractical to run in wet lab or field. They also allow close control of relevant variables – mutation rates, kinds of mutations, the topography of the fitness landscape, and a number of others, enabling parametric studies of the effects of those variables on evolutionary dynamics. A number of publications using Avida (see also here) have established that it is a valuable complement to wet lab and field studies in doing research on evolutionary processes.
In his testimony at the Dover trial on September 28, Rob Pennock described a study that has particularly irritated ID creationsts, The evolutionary origin of complex features, published in Nature in 2003. In that paper Lenski, Ofria, Pennock and Adami showed that there are circumstances under which structures that meet Behe's operational criterion for irreducible complexity (IC) – loss of function due to knockout – can evolve by random mutations and selection. Since IC is the core negative argument of ID – IC structures and processes allegedly cannot evolve by incremental "Darwinian" processes – the demonstration that they can evolve by Darwinian processes knocks out IC as a marker of intelligent design. And since IC is a special case of Dembski's Specified Complexity, it also weakens Dembski's core argument.
Various ID creationists have criticized the Lenski, et al., study on a variety of specious grounds, and I've discussed those critiques in several places, including an extended discussion here. Luskin's critique is shallower and less informed than some I've read. I'll hit a few low points in his critique.
Luskin wrote
Pennock and his other co-authors claim the paper "demonstrate[s] the validity of the hypothesis, first articulated by Darwin and supported today by comparative and experimental evidence, that complex features generally evolve by modifying existing structures and functions" (internal citations removed). Today in court, Pennock discussed the paper today asserting that it was a "direct refutation" of irreducible complexity and a "general test" of Darwinian theory.
I do not have access to Pennock's testimony at the moment, but that's about what I'd have said. Co-option and modification of existing structures is a ubiquitous phenomenon in evolution at levels ranging from molecular mechanisms to high-level structures like wings. And in the Lenski, et al., study, sure enough, those same phenomena were observed occurring under the Darwinian mechanisms – reproduction, heritable variation, competition, and mutation.
Luskin spent a good deal of space exploring the conjecture that Pennock's co-authorship of the Lenski, et al., paper was a conspiracy to get an expert on Behe's irreducible complexity involved without directly citing Behe. He wrote
I can think of no reason why a philosopher, who otherwise never authors technical papers in scientific journals, whose career specializes in rebutting ID, should be a co-author a [sic] technical research paper in a top technical science journal on the evolutionary origin of biological complexity, a claim which ID challenges, unless that paper somehow required some expertise on ID. Indeed, this paper now appears strategically arranged: is it mere coincidence that this paper appeared as a primary exhibit in the first trial against teaching ID? The reality is that Avida study, in which Pennock was third author, has much to do with strategically rebutting ID.
Looks more to me like it empirically rebuts irreducible complexity.
In his conspiracy theorizing Luskin neglected to mention that in addition to his appointment in philosophy, Pennock is also a Member of the Digital Life Laboratory at Michigan State, along with two of the other authors, Charles Ofria and Richard Lenski. Chris Adami is also associated with the Devolab as a collaborator. The work published in the Lenski, et al., paper is well within Pennock's professional purview: it's by four colleagues associated with the same lab. It wouldn't surprise me at all to find that Pennock suggested the study's main outlines to his co-authors, since IDists use the notion of irreducible complexity as their primary weapon in their culture war against evolutionary theory and Pennock is interested in that effort. Knowing something about Avida, I have no problem imagining that Pennock saw the Avida platform, a main tool in the Devolab, as an excellent tool to do some research on the question of the evolvability of IC structures.
That they didn't mention intelligent design isn't amazing. As far back as Darwin the question of how those kinds of structures could evolve has been raised, so Behe contributed no new issue to address. Lenski, et al., anchored their paper directly to Darwin in the first paragraph. Since the ID creationists have not published anything in the professional literature of biology to which to refer in the context of the Lenski, et al., paper, it seems strange to complain that they didn't reference ID. If ID had some actual professional literature to cite one might sympathize, but it doesn't. Luskin's conspiracy theory is more than a little incongruous coming from the socio-political movement that didn't bat an eyelash when the ID-sympathetic editor of an obscure taxonomic journal slid around the publishing society's editorial guidelines to get Meyer's Hopeless Monster published. Do I detect projection here?
Then Luskin repeated a common ID creationist criticism by writing
Pennock asserted on the witness stand that this study accurately modeled biological reality. Well, if biological reality was pre-programmed by an intelligence to evolve certain simple logic functions, then he's right. Avida programmers knew that EQU was easily evolvable from the proper combination of only 5 primitive logic operations before the simulation even began. This is called "evolution by intelligent design," because the environment seems literally pre-programmed to evolve the desired phenotype.
In fact, Avida programmers had no idea whether digital critters capable of performing input-output mappings corresponding to EQU could evolve in Avida. That human programmers could write an Avida instruction string that performed the EQU mapping is irrelevant to the question of whether it could evolve via Darwinian mechanisms. Programmers writing code is ID's position, not evolution's. (Incidentally, Luskin misrepresents what actually evolved in the Lenski, et al., experiments. "EQU" didn't evolve any more than flight evolved in animals like birds and bats. Morphological structures that enable flight evolved; flight didn't. Similarly, assembly language programs that performed the input-output mapping corresponding to EQU evolved, not EQU itself. That's not a trivial distinction. A given function can be performed by a number of different structures.)
Further, while human programmers could write an Avidian critter to perform the input-output mapping corresponding to EQU using 5 "primitive" logic functions, the 23 lineages that evolved in the main condition in the Lenski, et al., study did so in 23 different ways. The 23 lineages that evolved to perform the mapping were all different, and in addition to EQU they performed 17 different combinations of the "primitive" functions, ranging from four to eight. None of them evolved the 'EQU' program the human programmers wrote. That phenomenon extends to other aspects of the Avida critters. For example, running Avida with no fitness landscape, so selection is on replication efficiency alone, evolves critters that perform self-replication in fewer instructions than any human-written program. Recall Leslie Orgel's Second Law: Evolution is smarter than [programmers] are.
Luskin then wrote a particularly error-filled paragraph.
Pennock seemed impressed that the digital organisms "invented" many creative ways of performing EQU. But the flaw of the simulation lies therein: EQU was destined to evolve because the addition of each logic function greatly improved the fitness of the digital organism. Pre-programmed into the Avida environment were functionally advantageous digital mutations which were guaranteed to keep the digital organisms alive and doing interesting things. Thus, if one assumes that anything more than extremely minor cases of irreducible complexity never exist, then Pennock's program show evolution can work.
There are four main problems with Luskin's representation in those four sentences. First, "functionally advantageous mutations" were not "pre-programmed" into the Avida environment. Random mutations occurred, some of which were deleterious (in the sense of decreasing reproductive fitness) or even lethal, some were neutral, and some were advantageous. Gee. That's just what a slew of biological research teaches us: mutations come in three basic flavors.
Second, Luskin claimed that those mutations were "… guaranteed to keep the digital organisms alive …". That's flatly false. Tens of thousands of digital organisms die in the course of an Avida run under the conditions Lenski, et al., used. Some die because they fail to replicate due to lethal mutations in their replication code, and some die because they're killed – over-written – by a reproducing neighbor regardless of their advantageous mutations. Thousands of species emerge, flourish for a while, and then go extinct, and thousands of lineages go extinct. There are no guarantees at all.
Third, it is not necessary that "…the addition of each logic function greatly improve[s] the fitness …". While the fitness landscape defined by the values assigned to the various logic functions in the Lenski, et al., study was fairly steep from simple to complex logic functions, a number of Avida runs I have done with a flatter topography produce lineages that also perform the most complex logic functions. It just takes longer because the dynamics of lineages evolving on flatter landscapes are slower. So long as there is at least some net selective advantage for performing a more complex function, more complex functions can evolve.
Finally, do we now have a distinction between micro-IC and macro-IC? Luskin's reference to "extremely minor cases of irreducible complexity" suggests that we have to make that distinction, but where the boundary might be is not clear. Do I hear echoes of "microevolution is fine, but not macroevolution"?
I'll note here that what one might reasonably believe to be cases of irreducible complexity, like a three-legged stool which cannot function if any of the three legs or the seat is 'knocked out', are no longer IC. William Dembski has recently added two new operational tests for ICness. In addition to Behe's original knockout operational criterion, now Dembski tells us we must also determine (1) that a simpler structure cannot perform the same function, and (2) after a successful knockout one must show that no adaptation and/or rearrangement of the remaining parts can perform the original function. As Dembski tells us, that means that a three-legged stool is not IC since a solid block of wood can keep one's butt off the ground. I have argued elsewhere that Dembski's additional operational criteria mean the Death of Irreducible Complexity (see also here and Mark Perakh's post here). On Dembski's new and improved definition, not even Behe's mousetrap is IC.
Finally, Luskin claimed that a control condition in the Lenski, et al., paper that employed a fitness landscape that was flat across logic functions except for EQU showed that
… when there is no selective advantage until you get the final function, the final function never evolved! This accurate modeling of irreducible complexity, for there is no functional advantage until you get some to some minimal level of complexity—that's IC in a nutshell. Yet the study found that the evolution of such a structure was impossible.
Of course they claim this is what they "expected," but without using the words "irreducible complexity," they just demonstrated that high levels of irreducible complexity are unevolvable.
I'll be darned. Luskin is back to If it can evolve incrementally by indirect routes involving intermediates that are themselves functional, it ain't IC. If it can't evolve, it is IC, and by the way, IC shows that it can't evolve. In other words, we're back to the "We don't know how it could have, so it couldn't have and therefore ID" style of argument. And there's that "high levels of irreducible complexity" phrase – we've got to deal with microIC and macroIC again, too. Stuff that's got just a little bit of IC can evolve, but stuff that's got a whole lot of IC can't. When did irreducible complexity become a scalar variable? Luskin must be resurrecting Behe's even more question-begging "evolutionary" definition of irreducible complexity. I guess it's handy to have a series of alternative definitions of a core concept ready to hand.
In a way I feel sorry for Luskin. It can't be easy writing about genuine research when you have no clue what it did and what it means. On the other hand, he has plenty of role models for that behavior at the Discovery Institute, and I have no doubt that he'll learn fast.


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Posted on 12/19/2005 5:47:52 PM PST by wagglebee
We Go to War for Civil Liberties? |
December 19, 2005 |
RUSH: I got an e-mail from a friend of mine in St. Louis. "Rush, did you hear what Tim Russert said after Bush's press conference today?" He said, paraphrasing -- and I haven't seen this, so I probably ought to double-check this, but we will. Paraphrasing, Russert said, "People go to war to protect their civil liberties, so isn't counterproductive to take away these liberties while doing it?" All of you out there listening, how many of you think we go to war to protect civil liberties? When is the last time you heard a president declare war on the basis that we gotta go protect our civil liberties? I can't think of one, and I have a fertile memory, my friends. Lots of deep, dark crevices in my brain, and still half of it's tied behind my back to make it fair, and even that I don't remember. We do not go to war to protect our civil liberties. That's like saying we go to war for peace. We don't do that, either. You go to war to kill people and break things, and that leads to the other things. The primary reason for going to war, you heard the president talk about it time and time again today, to save lives. We go to war, and we are at war to save our lives so that we will then have the opportunity to continue protecting our civil liberties. Our civil liberties are worthless if we are dead! If you are dead and pushing up daisies, if you're sucking dirt inside a casket, do you know what your civil liberties are worth? Zilch, zero, nada. You aren't even here! Ask the families, ask the people who were in the World Trade Center towers right before they were attacked if they are more concerned with the loss of their civil liberties than the loss of their lives. They can't sue Saddam Hussein for loss of civil liberties because they're dead. How can you sue somebody for your civil liberties being taken away when they killed you first? This gets more absurd with the passing of each hour. Who's next on this program? Texarkana, Texas. Isn't that where Perot was born? CALLER: I'm not sure. |
RUSH: I think it is. I could be wrong, but nevertheless, Alan, welcome, nice to have you on the show. CALLER: It's great to talk to you, Merry Christmas and thank you for everything you do. RUSH: Thank you, sir. CALLER: I just wanted to say I really hope that every conservative will be ready and be patient, and God willing it won't happen, but if it does, if there's an attack after the Patriot Act now is dead, every Democrat, especially the leadership, they need to be held responsible for this. RUSH: Oh. They will be. CALLER: Because if it's proven that the attack was made possible because the intelligence industry did not have the tools of the Patriot Act to prevent it like they have the last four years, it's the Democrats' responsibility. RUSH: Said this on Friday. We know who to blame. If we get hit again, we know whose responsibility it is. It's the Democrats in the Senate and these four Republicans: Larry Craig, Chuck Hagel, Lisa Murkowski and Sununu. For what reasons I can't imagine, they voted with the Democrats on this. Probably something to do with civil liberties, because I guess, you know, you gotta be concerned, folks. If you lose your civil liberties, what's life worth? You may as well die. (interruption) Craig doesn't like some of the provisions in the House bill? Larry Craig doesn't like it. Do you know what the provisions in the House bill are that Larry Craig doesn't like? Because I don't know what the provisions in the House bill are that Larry Craig doesn't like. I don't know what Hagel's reason is. I don't know any of their reasons, but I know they weren't sent there to vote this way, that's not what the people who elected them thought was going to end up happening. By the way, can I ask you a question? This whole NSA thing, this is how the template was set. And I'm not going to accept the premise that civil liberties have been violated. Somebody tell me what civil liberties have been violated. I want to know, give me one person who is in jail who has been falsely charged because of the Patriot Act. Folks, I'm going to leave myself out of this. Tempting but I'm going to leave myself out of this. Patriot Act hasn't been diddly-squat to me. I'm going to leave myself out of this. I want to know, what civil liberty is being violated? I want the press to answer this question. If we're going to go to war to protect our civil liberties, what the hell civil liberties have been lost? What are we losing? What are the civil liberties that we have lost? The press is disloyal as ever, nobody is stopping their anti-American reporting apart from a prosecutor that they demanded. What's the press been stopped from doing, what civil liberties have anybody been prevented from utilizing? What? Somebody tell me. Oh, you know who -- I'm sorry. I'm sorry. My friends, I apologize. I forgot what this is about. We are talking about the civil liberties of terrorists. They're the ones who must be protected. They're the ones who are protected against so-called torture. They must be given the rights -- thank you, Senator McCain -- afforded to US citizens under the US Constitution. They're the ones who must get lawyers. That's right: the Patriot Act is screwing with the terrorists. Sorry. BREAK TRANSCRIPT |
RUSH: We've been playing a little game here, Stump the Staff, during the break at the top of the hour. I asked them a little history question. I know my history, and I think not enough people do, particularly in the news media. I know my history, and I asked them one simple question. "Who said, 'The Constitution is not a suicide pact?'" And they guessed. What did you say? Truman, FDR, Kennedy. Those are the three guesses. Nope. "Who said, 'The Constitution is not a suicide pact?'" It was Abraham Lincoln. The telephone number, if you want to be on the program, is 800-282-2882. The e-mail address is firstname.lastname@example.com. Let me give you just a little Civil War history. During the Civil War, there was a group called the Copperheads. Now, the Copperheads have a modern equivalent today, the peace movement of the Democratic Party, or basically the Democratic Party. They were called the Copperheads back then. A former Ohio congressman, a man by the name of Clement Vallandigham called the prosecution of the Civil War wicked and cruel and he suggested that Lincoln and the Republican Party were using the Civil War to establish a dictatorship. Troops of the 115th Ohio Volunteer Infantry seized Clement Vallandigham from his home in Dayton. A military commission tried him for treasonable utterances and turned him over to the confederate army. Jefferson Davis didn't want Vallandigham any more than Lincoln did and eventually shipped him off to Canada from where he managed to slip back into the United States. Abraham Lincoln lamented, "Must I shoot a simple-minded soldier boy who deserts while I must not touch a hair of a wily agitator who induces him to desert?" Why, this conjures up all kinds of fun things! Grabbing Dingy Harry, putting him on trial, and expelling him to the remote regions of Pakistan where Al-Qaeda is holing up. That's interesting to contemplate. Abraham Lincoln did it. I don't know how he ever got a monument. The Democrats must have been looking the other way. "The Constitution is not a suicide pact," Abraham Lincoln. This is exactly how the Democrats would like it to read today. It is a suicide pact. We must extend constitutional rights to enemy combatants, according to the left, according to Senator McCain. We have the Tim Russert sound bite. Can we play that, please? Here's Russert. This is after the president's press conference today. RUSSERT: The reason we go to war is to protect our civil liberties. Constant references obviously to President Nixon back in '72 who tried to monitor, eavesdrop on American citizens and the Supreme Court said, no, you can't do that. I remember President Nixon having the doctrine of preventive detention where he would arrest war demonstrators ahead of time and here in Washington put them into RFK stadium and the courts threw that out. RUSH: Russert, yesterday, the Meet the Press show today, can't get off of Nixon. He can't get off of Watergate. Because that's the mode; that's the template: Bush is Nixon. This is Watergate. The war is Vietnam -- and they're not going to stop until they convince the American people of this. We don't go to war to protect our civil liberties; we go to war to save our lives. Our civil liberties are worthless if we are dead. If we have all assumed room temperature, folks, our civil liberties don't count diddly-squat. Again, I have to ask these people, what civil liberty is being violated here? I would love for the press to answer this question, what civil liberties are we losing? The press can be as disloyal to the country as they've ever been, nobody is stopping them from being anti-American or their reporting being anti-American. Take it back. Pat Fitzgerald put a woman in jail, but they wanted that prosecutor. They wanted that case. |
FDR? Did he protect civil liberties when he rounded up 110,000 Japanese and moved them from their homes and businesses to internment camps? And Lincoln suspended habeas corpus? Lincoln actually deported somebody he thought was just an agitator? Somebody he thought was just an agitator? How about RFK, Robert F. Kennedy, authorizing the wiretapping of Martin Luther King, Jr.? Last I looked, Lincoln and FDR are among our greatest presidents ever, among our greatest civil libertarians ever. You want to test this, go tell some Democrat friend of yours that FDR was no friend of civil liberties. See what you get. They think he's the greatest guy we've ever had, and RFK the greatest president we almost had is also considered to be a fabulous guy and he's out there wiretapping Martin Luther King. Are these the kind of civil liberties these people are talking about? I need to have this answered because I can round up all kinds of Democrats that violate civil liberties left and right in the prosecution of war because the Constitution is not a death sentence, Abraham Lincoln. It's not a suicide pact. BREAK TRANSCRIPT |
RUSH: You want to hear some more history? Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus when he had reporters thrown into prison, because they wrote against him in the union. He threw nine members of the Maryland legislature into prison to prevent that state from possibly pulling out of the union. This is all history and when you understand history, it will put him in even greater context just how legally and in a restrained fashion Bush is fighting this war. Lincoln is one of our greatest presidents ever. Here he deports an agitator to the south. The south, "We don't want the guy." They recognize a traitor when they see one. They send him to Canada. Can you imagine sending Dingy Harry over to Pakistan or Afghanistan? Ha-ha! Can you imagine putting New York Times reporters in jail? Except the president didn't do that. Sorry, the prosecutor they asked for did. Can you imagine the president doing this? Folks, folks, I can't tell you what I would do if the president decided to put the press in jail. (Gasping) We are in the midst of a war, and when you understand that everything changes -- and if you don't have a historical context for these kinds of things, if you think history began the day you were born, and so nothing that has happened outside your lifetime is relevant, you're not going to understand the important things about the country's past and preserving our country's future. This business of going to war to protect civil liberties that Tim Russert's been on the past couple days, the Supreme Court has made clear that at a time of war the president has inherent powers to protect national security. That's why there's one commander-in-chief and not 535 of them. The court's made a distinction between the criminal justice system and military actions, including intelligence activities related to national security. It's all in the opinions, Tim, go read the opinions, they're right there for everybody to read. You people in the media can read these opinions. They're worried about judicial review, go review some judicial works. It's all in there. It's why some of this stuff is so frustrating. I watched these people ask the president questions and comment, and it's clear they don't know any history, either. Can you imagine the argument you would get into with your average run-of-the-mill White House reporter if sit them down and say, "You know what Lincoln did to people like you? Put you in jail!" "He did not!" "Yes, he did." "Well, he must have had a reason." They can't really complain about Lincoln because he ended slavery. How can they start criticizing Lincoln, the libs? And you know what else he did? He put nine members of the Maryland legislature in jail too, and he suspended the writ of habeas corpus and he deported some former congressman from Ohio who was an agitator, and you think what's going on now poses a threat to the country? You're the threat! But you send an average reporter down and give them just this little bit of history and I guarantee you it will be all over the world that Limbaugh lies, makes things up just to fit his context. They won't even bother looking it up, they'll find it so absurd. "Not possible in this country," they'll say. END TRANSCRIPT |
Read the Background Material... (NRO: Mark Steyn: The Defeaticrats) (Roll Call of U.S. Senate Vote on the Patriot Act) The Military Trial of Clement L. Vallandigham, 1863... (Military Commission Transcript of the trial, May 1863) (Perry argument for the Government) (Pugh argument for Vallandigham) (General Ambrose Burnside's statement) |
*Note: Links to content outside RushLimbaugh.com usually become inactive over time. |
and with Levin batting behind him, they both kept on hitting the ball out of the park today.
This is another piece in the Democrats' complete meltdown this week--another piece being their admission that they have no plans for the WOT.
They have given Bush a Not My Fault Guarantee. I hope there will never be another attack, and if there is, Bush can say, honestly, "We have to wonder what changed from September 12 to now to let this happen." And FOX, at least, will show that clip of Harry Reid proclaiming "We defeated the Patriot Act today!" to applause.
I don't get to hear Levin where I live, I love to hear him when he's on Rush's or Sean's shows though. It is a real treat when he finds time to come spend some time with us here online.
The Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and people, equally in war and in peace, and covers with the shield of its protection all classes of men, at all times, and under all circumstances. No doctrine, involving more pernicious consequences, was ever invented by the wit of man than that any of its provisions can be suspended during any of the great exigencies of government. Such a doctrine leads directly to anarchy or despotism, but the theory of necessity on which it is based is false; for the government, within the Constitution, has all the powers granted to it, which are necessary to preserve its existence; as has been happily proved by the result of the great effort to throw off its just authority.
Civil Liberty and the Civil War: The Indianapolis Treason Trials
bttt caught about 1/3 of it great stuff
Burnside's statement is a must read.
Face it folks, this war will be a lot more interesting when 2-3 million New Yorkers are littering the streets NYC. Be great for ratings. Kids and grandkids? The NYT has already given the it's "P*ss on the kid$" blessing. It's really gonna be a lota fun you know. You can bet the NYT feels it is entirely justified in it's attempts to help the enemy destroy this nation. Bet on it.
Unfortunately if (when?) it does happen the Dems and their leftwing radical buddies will say it was plotted by Bush to justify his actions. They (Dummies) have no shame.
...All of you out there listening, how many of you think we go to war to protect civil liberties? When is the last time you heard a president declare war on the basis that we gotta go protect our civil liberties? I can't think of one, and I have a fertile memory, my friends....
You worthless assclown, our nation was born in a war to protect our civil liberties.
George Washington ring a bell?
...Our civil liberties are worthless if we are dead!...
Ben Franklin spits on you.
And so do I.
Why are your medical records so damned private if you've got nothing to hide?
Oh, and if we're at war, why are the borders wide open?
"The Constitution is not a suicide pact," Abraham Lincoln
2) Get a history book. Read up on the Revolution. Face up to the fact that your publik screwel education CHEATED you of a solid understanding.
3) Learn to write properly. FReepers might pay better attention to you.
..."The Constitution is not a suicide pact," Abraham Lincoln...
As he repealed it.
How did that work out for him, anyway?
I forget my History. Did he live happily, ever after, a loved and respected hero of the nation, worshipped and fawned over in his old age?
We go to war for Civil Liberties? I thought it was to protect our precious bodily fluids? Lord knows we don't want them impurified.
So George Washington was not the president of a nation born in war over the God given rights of men?
Well, are you an assclown?
George Washington?
Heard of him?
It denigrates the Constitution to say its all about civil rights. The Constitution is THE LAW. Period, and should be enforced as such.
as for "civil rights" during war : there are hostiles, and their are civilians. The safety of the civilians comes before the hostiles. If someone plots and acts to hurt/damage/kill a civilian, they are HOSTILE, and shoudl be treated as such.
..live happily, ever after, a loved and respected hero of the nation, worshipped and fawned over in his old age?
I have visited the Lincoln Memorial, I would describe it as a place where he is adulated and yes 'fawned over' FOR ALL AGES. What a strange question!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.


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Dutch researcher Alexander le Fèbre has demonstrated that a field-emission current signal can be used to arrange the position of thousands of nanometre-sharp needles. These probes can be applied to write and read in new storage media with an extremely high density, using bits on a nanometre scale.
The development of the hard disk is now reaching its technical limits because the entire disk is served by just a single head. Consequently, the capacity of the disk and the reading and writing speed cannot expand much more in the future.
Therefore research into a memory based on probes is being carried out at the University of Twente's MESA+ research institute. Being able to control the position of each separate probe is essential for realising a system with extremely high densities.
Le Fèbre's measurements show that a field-emission current signal can be used to adjust the position of the probes without these making direct contact with the storage medium. If a constant current is maintained and the applied voltage is varied, the distance between the probe apex and the storage medium can be adjusted from several nanometres to about 100 nanometres. The resolution is sufficient for a probe-based storage system.
However for practical applications, the current stability and the lifetime of the probes will need to be improved further so that the accuracy and reproducibility of positioning can be increased.
Story Source:
Materials provided by Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
Cite This Page:


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*shakes head* seriously a Breaking Dawn Part 1 Extended Edition DVD/Blu-ray?? Couldn't they have just put the extra 8 minutes on the BD Pt2 release? Still milking it for all it's worth & beyond – why am I not surprised when it comes to this lot. Anyways here's the press release via Yahoo! Movies for those that are interested. There's also an 'announcement' video which I've included after the cut as it autoplays.
The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1
Extended Edititon
SATURDAY, MARCH 2, 2013And For The First Time Ever, Marvel Launches An All-New Second Screen App
That Provides Fans With Unprecedented Access To Exclusive ContentSanta Monica, CA (January 7, 2013) – Here is the chance to discover even more of the blockbuster film when The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1 Extended Edition, featuring eight minutes of never-before-seen footage, debuts only on Blu-ray Disc (plus Digital Copy and UV), DVD (plus Digital Copy and UV) and Digital Download on Saturday March 2nd from Summit Entertainment, a LIONSGATE company. Now with eight minutes of new and extended scenes added back into the film by Director Bill Condon, along with his optional audio commentary, fans can delve deeper into the epic series they adore. Experience the timeless romance and drama in a whole new way when The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1 Extended Edition, featuring the original theatrical version and the all-new extended edition with optional audio commentary from the director, arrives on Blu-ray Disc and DVD for the suggested retail price of $29.99 and $22.98, respectively.
"As Twilight series devotees know, there was a lot of ground to cover in adapting Breaking Dawn to the screen," said Condon. "Between the wedding, the honeymoon, the birth, and everything in between, naturally there were things that didn't make it into our final cut. But I wanted to make sure that for all the Twihards out there, there was a chance to see some of these cut scenes – several of which are fan favorites from the book."
The Twilight Saga has held its spot as the top-selling home entertainment franchise since 2008 and The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1 took in $281.3 million in domestic box office sales after its release on November 18, 2011. The worldwide phenomenon continues to ignite a huge following of passionate and loyal fans that have driven the success of the Saga from the beginning.
The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1 Extended Edition now featuring additional footage, presents the marriage, honeymoon and the birth of a child that brings unforeseen and shocking developments for Bella and Edward and those they love, including new complications with werewolf Jacob Black.
Street Date: March 2nd, 2013
Year of Production: 2011
Title Copyright: © 2012 Summit Entertainment, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Type: Special Edition
Rating: Not Rated
Genre: Drama; Romance
Blu-ray Closed Captioned: English SDH
DVD Closed Captioned: English
Subtitles: English and Spanish
Blu-ray Format: 1080P High Definition 16×9 Widescreen (2.40:1)
DVD Format: 16×9 Widescreen (2.40:1)
Feature Running Time: 124 minutes
Blu-ray Audio Status: English 7.1 DTS HD-MA, English 2.0 Dolby Digital Optimized for Late Night Listening and Spanish 5.1 Dolby Digital Audio
DVD Audio Status: English 5.1 Dolby Digital EX, English 2.0 Dolby Digital Optimized for Late Night Listening and Spanish 5.1 Dolby Digital
Nothing about an Australian release yet but we'll let you know if this changes.


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Allow me to share one final experience before I close. As you're probably already aware, the bond between those of us with this illness is strong. If you're like me, you're best friends are PWC's/ME. They're the ones I contact when I really need support from someone who truly understands and vice versa. Our relationships with one another are special and, I believe, quite unique in that not only do our friends and families have difficulty understanding us but so does the medical community. This tends to present itself as a sort of intense loneliness that would be difficult to explain to anyone, even someone who is suffering from another illness. This bond resulted in me finding myself drawn to observing other patients of Dr. P.'s.
As soon as we set up "camp" in the parking lot I would gaze out the window and wonder if that person entering the building was his patient are not. One, in particular, was quite obvious. I saw her emerge from the car and handicapped parking space adjacent to ours. The man who had driven, held her hand as they walked slowly down the walkway to the elevator. She had that walk, you know the one… wide stance for balance, slow, deliberate gait…and the look on both of their faces was a bit sad and a bit worn out.
As I sat in the waiting room the following day they sat across from me. Even though Dr. P sees patients without CFS/ME I knew she was one of us. The man who accompanied her arose to get the papers she needed to sign and then returned them to the receptionist for her. My husband did the same for me.
The following day when I saw them once more, I noticed her hair was obviously unwashed. I understood. In a couple of days, I'd be in the same boat… appointments to make, tests to take…. the ponytail would have to do for now. When my eyes met hers I could "see" the spaciness. I smiled but didn't think she could focus enough to see it.
Back home, when I'm in my GP's waiting room I'll often glance at the other patients. One coughs, another sniffles and the others seem perfectly healthy; none of them have CFS/ME. There is no connection, only a brief wish to trade places with any one of them if only for a day or two.
But this place was different. There was no desire to trade places. We were all fighting the same fight. One of the rooms in the office seemed to be used for those receiving IVs. One day while parked in my wheelchair directly across from that room, I caught glimpse of a young woman seated in a chair, I.V. slowly dripping into her arm.
Our eyes met and though we weren't close enough to speak I felt I knew almost everything about her. Her eyes mirrored mine …that glassiness that says "I'm exhausted and I'm sick ". Her hair was disheveled and she sat up with that slump that says "I'm too weak to sit up straight ". Off and on she would put her head into her hand, rubbing her forehead . Perhaps she had a headache, or perhaps her head was just too heavy to support … either way I'd been there and done that.
I had the urge to give her a hug and might have if I'd had the strength to get up, walk across the room and introduce myself. For now a silent prayer would have to do. It had been quite a while since I was able to attend a CFS/ME support group meeting so for me it was quite touching to be reminded of how powerful this bond is between us.
Thank you for allowing me to share what I consider a very privileged experience. Perhaps if you are one of the close to 1,000 names on Dr. P.'s waiting list this can help you in your decision to persevere or not.
I would like to send a special thanks to Cort Johnson who graciously transcribed my scribbles into electronic type and literally spared me many painful migraines! "Thank you, Cort!" And thank all of you for allowing me to share my experience.
Feel Well,
Corinne's Early Test Results
Virology –
• active EBV
• enterovirus (evidence of active infection)
• HHV-6 (evidence of active infection)
Immunology –
• Extremely low function and number of NK cells
• Low IgG subclass 3
• Very high Interleukin-8 (pro-inflammatory cytokine)
• High levels of fragmented (Low Molecular Weigh) RNase L (protein quantification)
• Abnormally high spinal fluid pressure
• abnormal brain MRI (UBO's)
• orthostatic intolerance (low BP, low HR)
• low blood red blood cell volume
• very low VO2 max
• High levels of citrobacter braaki (" bad" gut bacteria)
• very low levels bifido and Lactobacillus ("good" gut bacteria)
Corinne's Tests
- Lumbar puncture
- Bicycle exercise/stress test
- MRI brain with and without contrast
- Brain Spect scan
- 24 hour EKG monitor
- 24 hour blood pressure monitor
Pathogen Tests by Real-Time PCR
- Chlamydia tarchomatis
- Mycoplasma hominis
- Chlamydolphia pneumonia
- Mycoplasma penetrans
- Mycoplasma pneumonia
- Chlamydia species
- Lyme, Borrelia burgdorferi
Other Pathogen Tests
- HHV-7 DNA (plasma
- Rapid HHV-6 culture and antigenemia
- Nested HHV-6 PCR
- Nested cytomegalovirus (HCMV) PCR
- Rapid HCMV Culture and antigenemia
- Epstein-Barr virus chronic/active infection
- HTLV – 1/II antibodies, Qual
- Enterovirus antibodies profile
- ACTH, plasma
- Cortisol a.m. and p.m.
- FSH and LH
- IGF-1 (insulin like growth factor)
- Thyroxine (T4), free, direct, S
- Testosterone, serum
- Thyroid panel with TSH
- RNase L Panel (activity assay and protein quantitation)
- Immunobilan
- Immunoglobulin, M.,Qn, serum
- Immunoglobulin a, Qn, serum
- Cytokine profile (interferon-y, interleukin's, etc)
- C. reactive protein, Quant
- Natural killer cell (total T cells)
- TNF alpha, circulating levels
- T and B gene rearrangement, PCR
- IgG, subclasses (1-4)
- HCV Ab w Rflx, to RIBA
- Complete metabolic panel (14)
- Lipid panel with Chol/HDL ratio
- Lactic acid, plasma
- Heavy metals (Pb, As, U-Hg, U)
- Heavy metals sensitivity tests
- Ferritin, Serum
- Creatine kinase, total serum
- CBC with Diff/platelet
- Nitric oxide synthase assay
- Amino Acid Prof. Qn (random urinalysis)
- Amino Acid Prof. Qn, Plasma
- UA/M w reflex culture (urinalysis)
- Prothrombin Time (PT)
- Narcolepsy evaluation
- Iron and TIBC
- D- lactate, plasma
Cerebrospinal Fluid Tests
- Cerebr+MBP+Oligoc+Pr+CSF (includes total protein, IgG, albumin, IgG Index, IgG/? Ratio, immunoglobulin G., myelin basic protein, illegal clonal bands)
- Lyme PCR, CSF
- Meningoenceph reflex (West Nile virus ab IgG; herpes simplex virus type 1 and 2 antibodies, IgG)
- Cell count, CSF
- Glucose, CSF
- Epstein-Barr virus PCR, CSF
- Lactic acid, CSF
- Nested HHV-6 DNA PCR
Tests to take at Home
- CDSA w/ parasitology (purge/random still analysis)
- Intestinal permeability
No related posts.


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One of the reasons that vanilla baked goods are often thought of as being "plain" is that they lack the pops of color that you might find in other foods, like Funfetti cakes, blueberry muffins or chocolate chip cookies and quick breads. I love "plain" vanilla goodies, but I'll admit that it is nice to get some color into your baked goods, too. Adding berries, chocolate, nuts or other elements makes cookies, cakes and other desserts look even more tempting because the flavors in them jump out at you. This Brown Butter Blueberry Apricot Loaf is a great example of a colorful baked good that delivers a lot of flavor in every bite.
Apricots and blueberries are a fruit combination that I really like and use regularly in muffins and things. They both lend beautiful colors to baked goods, of course, but the juicy blueberries make a nice contrast with chewy dried apricots in both flavor and texture, as well. This quick bread is a great option for either breakfast or for an afternoon snack and it showcases these fruits very well. The blueberries remain juicy after baking and the chopped dried apricots plum up in the oven and become both sweeter and more tender than they started out. I prefer larger chunks of apricot, but you can chop yours more finely if you prefer a wider distribution in your loaf. If you are using frozen blueberries, there is no need to defrost them before using.
The "secret weapon" in this quick bread is the browned butter that goes into the batter. Unlike the berries and apricots, it doesn't jump out at you, but you'll taste the nutty and addictive flavor of the browned butter in every bite. It makes the bread seem a bit richer and works very well with the apricots in particular, which have a honeyed flavor that pairs extremely well with the browned butter. Butter can be browned on the stovetop or in the microwave, just make sure that you cool it slightly before adding it to the rest of the batter.
This bread is moist, tender, and it keeps extremely well when stored in an airtight container. You'll be able to enjoy fresh-tasting slices for several days after baking. If you don't think you will go through it that quickly, you can also individually wrap slices and pop them in the freezer for another day.
Brown Butter Blueberry Apricot Loaf
1/4 cup butter, room temperature
2 cups all purpose flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1 cup sugar
1 large egg
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 cup milk
3/4 cup chopped, dried apricots
1 cup blueberries, fresh or frozen
1 tbsp coarse sugar, for topping
Preheat oven to 350F. Lightly grease a 9×5-inch baking pan.
In a small saucepan or a large microwave-safe bowl, cook the butter until browned. Set aside to cool slightly.
In a medium bowl, whisk together flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt.
In a large bowl, whisk together the sugar and egg until well-combined. Add in cooled, browned butter and vanilla extract and whisk to combine. Stir in half of the flour mixture, followed by the milk. Stir in remaining flour mixture and whisk until no streaks of dry ingredients remain.
Fold in blueberries and dried apricots until well-distributed (*Toss blueberries and apricots in 2 tsp of flour to help prevent them from sinking to the bottom of the loaf during baking). Pour into prepared pan. Sprinkle with 1 tbsp coarse sugar.
Bake for 50-55 minutes, until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean and the top springs back when lightly pressed.
Cool in the pan for 5 minutes, then turn out onto a wire rack to cool completely.
Makes 1 loaf.


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Now after doing this post on the Club 27 Deaths.. I found some more information about the death of Amy Winehouse.. Could it be a coincidence that a lot of people died in the entertainment industry at age 27? I found this piece of information which is interesting; Cognitive Decline Begins Around 27. So does this 'brain decline' have anything to do with all these mysterious deaths?! After that I found this fascinating quote by Kurt Cobain's Mom which was on BBC News : "Now he's gone and joined that stupid club, I told him not to join that stupid club." What is she talking about? Did he have a choice? I just don't know what to think about this conspiracy or if there even is one! The quote below explains the crazy connection between the Illuminati and the Amy Winehouse..
The 27 year old singer was found dead at her home today. The reason for death has not been confirmed yet, but "drug overdose" is the suspected cause. Though how she died might be still a question, we have a clue who exactly was responsible. Joining more than 34 artists in the "27 club", she was a sacrifice.
Winehouse was quoted saying, "I have a feeling I'm gonna die young", in 2008 to her former personal assistant, Alex Haines who's exact quote was: "She reckoned she would join the 27 Club of rock stars who died at that age. She told me, "I have a feeling I"m gonna die young.'" December 2008, also the exact year of her Blood Sacrifice art sculpture of her shown dead and shot with blood out of her brains *Monarch Mind Control and a Minnie mouse mask *Mickey Mouse Programming, November 2008. Her sacrifice was planned out 3 years later, and she died 3 days after last performance. Many artists do a photoshoot or movie that depicts their own death and in that exact way they are dead. In her case, a blood sacrifice art sculpture left her in a blood sacrifice for the 27 Club. She predicted her own death after the photoshoot which is typical: Brittany Murphy, Tupac, Heath Ledger, and many more all knew they were going to die. However she was heavily under mind control and programming at the time of her death.
Amy Winehouse was programmed since birth or rather born into ritual/typical Mk-Ultra abuse, and Kelly Osbourne tweeted that who is also a Mk-Ultra slave whom her dad has the key to her alters.
Rehab is another word or code for reprogramming, so yes she was in her programmed alter/state of mind (dissociation) when she died. Found 'dead' on 7/23/11, age 27 and 311 days. Obviously masonic 311 stands for 3 x 11 or 33 (degree). Since she is a member of the 27 Club, the amount of days after they turned 27 is important and counted. So exactly on the 311th day after tuning 27 she is dead. The whole date together (7+2+3+1+1) is 14 and 27 (2 x 7) is 14. 7×2=14 3×11=33 or 7×2=14 3+11=14 so 14/14 from the date: (7/2)(3/11) 7/23/11 . Now using the total 14: 14-11 is 3 and 14-3=11. See the pattern? 2011 (2+0+1+1) is 13. Numerology works with a number/number, so (2+3+1+1)=7 or 7/7. 14/14. Double digits or the same number repeated 77 gives power to the ritual. Add the numbers (7+2+3+11), you get 23 altogether. Add (7+2+3+2+0+11), you get 25 or 7. Artists are known to die on the date 25/age 25 or age 27. This is because 25 in the occult stands for 7 while 27 stands for 9. 7, 9, 11, 13, 23, 25, and 33 are occult numbers which are all used in the date. Her tattoos consists of a bluebird, ruby shoes, lightening. Kelly Osbourne tweeted this: "I miss my friend. I'm going to be off Twitter for awhile.
Thank you for all your support!" How many artists said the same exact thing when someone in their family died or a friend? Soulja Boy and Nicki Minaj both tweeted 'thanks for the support' or 'i'm going to be off twitter for a while'. Always on twitter (bird dehumanization). The 'support' or thanking from their fans is part of the whole ritual sacrifice the feed off the mass media publication. The number 27 is a lunar symbol, for light in darkness or light itself. 27 Club consists of other artists specifically rock who also had problems with drugs, addiction, and substance abuse which led them to death or a ritual sacrifice. Note this. At age 27, there's the highest brain activity, and then it starts to deteriorate slowly. That's why it's called the "Forever 27 Club" or 27 curse. It is linked with Mk-Ultra- living "forever young". She was a blood sacrifice to Kelly Osbourne (most likely) other conclusions her godchild or her father. R.I.P For more on Amy Winehouse: click here Her body was taken out of her home in a complete, red body bag. Red is the color of ultimate blood sacrifice and a ritual. Time of death: Amy Winehouse was found in her apartment at 4:05 P.M. 4+5=9. She died 27 years 2+7=9.
Red body bag, blood sacrifice ritual.
-Found dead 4:05 P.M (9)
-Died 27. (9) 27 Club.
-Screaming, howling, drums beating early morning by her neighbor which he said was completely unlike her, he is certain she died Friday. I do too.
-Carried out in complete red.
-Died 27 years old and 311 days (33)
-Blood sacrifice art sculpture with blood and a minnie mouse mask 3 years before her death.
-Died 3 days after last concert.
-Told her manager she was going to die exactly 27 years old.
-7/23/11 (Contains all numerology in date)
-Unknown cause of death, Autopsy fails, inconclusive. (lethal injection) 100% not caused by overdose or drugs for autopsy failed.
-So she was killed on Friday in a ritual than her dead body found in her apartment on the exact numerology planned date. If she died Friday, which I 100% believe she did just as her neighbor confirmed noises. she would have died 7/22/11 22+11=33 the same day as the Olso bombing, still masonic either way 311 days 3×11=33. They couldn't have the death on the exact same day too much distraction. So Amy's death was planned the next day.
-Was a 100% Monarch Programmed slave born into ritual.
-Murdered as ritual killing, blood sacrifice to someone, solstice sacrifice to the Forever 27 Club.
Her Neighbor in Camden Heard 'Screaming and Howling'
One of her neighbours said he is convinced she died in the early hours of Friday because he heard screaming."I think something happened that night. It sounded like some weird sexual game. There was screaming and howling."The man, who would not be named, said he was woken by the sound at around 2am that night.
"It just sounded really weird and my son said he heard some kind of drum beating." This afternoon he heard one of Winehouse's friends crying in the house, and realised she was dead. He believes a friend left her at home after a night out, and returned this afternoon to find her body.
"She's been quite low-profile and that's why, when I heard these sounds – screaming – I thought it was unlike her.
"I said to my son 'Maybe she's taken a bad drug'." He said he saw her about three weeks ago being helped into the house by her minders, and was unable to walk at 10am. "She couldn't walk, she could hardly put one foot in front of the other."
Her cat, Sky, would come into his house for food and to sleep, he said.Local restaurant owner Ze Silva, 56, said Winehouse would come in as regularly as twice a week.
She saw her last Tuesday and said she had stopped drinking. "She had nothing to drink. She said to me 'Darling, don't give me any alcohol, I'm not drinking any more'. "She was normal. She would speak to everyone, have pictures taken with the kids, give autographs to the kids.
Amy Winehouse Shaped Into A Triangle?
Amy Winehouse funeral: Kelly Osbourne attends, cremation follows
'Brain decline' begins at age 27