Category: The Dish

See if you can beat this.

The future of electronics:

As chips are progressively able to perform more calculations for less money, and in a package that’s continually shrinking, Kurzweil told the Game Developers Conference audience to look for the price-to-performance ratio of computers to improve a billionfold in the next 25 years.

My italics.

A reader writes:

No offense, but you left yourself open to the dissent of the day when you failed to highlight the most damning piece of the Newsday article. It’s this one:

"’I have been informed that the complainant is emotionally unstable with a tendency to seek out older men and to engage in fantasizing,’ wrote Rodham, without referring to the source of that allegation. ‘I have also been informed that she has in the past made false accusations about persons, claiming they had attacked her body.’

"Dale Gibson, the investigator, doesn’t recall seeing evidence that the girl had fabricated previous attacks."

This is the Clinton behavior we’ve seen time and again: quite likely fabricated charges, so skillful so as to become impossible to completely disprove, which serve "the greater good" of whatever cause they’re using at the moment to burnish their credentials, experience, or legacy.

What’s disturbing about this article isn’t that Clinton mounted a vigorous case as a public defender. It’s that it appears she played fast and loose with the truth in order to satiate her manic desire to prove her "bulldog" toughness to other observers. You can mount a vigorous case, but you’re not supposed to conjure up the circumstances that allow you to make that defense. Lying to help yourself out during your first court assigned case is not an indispensable part of the country’s legal defense system.

Pretty crushing nationally at this point – over McCain, as well.

It’s related to the widespread tolerance among hard-core movie-goers of really bad film.

A B-2 goes down in Guam. Bob Kaplan’s masterly review of the plane can be read here.

He’s walking back his hundred years comment, as he surely must. But it’s a remarkable sentence:

“And by the way, that reminds me of this hundred year thing.  I was asked in a town hall meeting back in Florida, how long would we have a presence in Iraq?  My friends, the war will be over soon, the war for all intents and purposes although the insurgency will go on for years and years and years, but it will be handled by the Iraqis, not by us, and then we decide what kind of security arrangement we want to have with the Iraqis  … "

Now what does this mean?  How do you separate "the war" from the occupation and the insurgency?  I think you could make an argument that we won the war four years ago but lost the occupation. But war is politics by other means. What does McCain mean by the end of the war, then? Does he mean the vanquishing of al Qaeda in Iraq, an entity that was not in Iraq in any great numbers before we invaded? Does he mean the pacification of the country – a task that is clearly beyond anyone. Does he mean Shiite control of the south? But that’s already a fact. I don’t know what he means, except that he understands that if he runs on waging this war in Iraq for his entire term, he won’t get elected.

My friends, if you’ll pardon the expression, I think the GOP nominee may have just declared victory. Which means the battle will now be over how to spin the exit. Funny how quickly that "war" ended, isn’t it?

A new device lets a totally color-blind artist create. The eyeborg is born.

Their new poll gives Obama a double-digit national lead. Their tracking poll? Dead heat.

It won an Oscar last night for best documentary short. It’s about a married couple fighting to allow a New Jersey cop’s pension to go to her wife after her impending death from cancer. But gay couples are deemed beneath respect and equality and support by social conservatives; and so it was a struggle. I really wish the social right was actually pro-family, don’t you? Btu even when it comes to public servants and cops, it is somehow more important to punish a couple’s commitment to each other than to celebrate it.