PaulSpoerry.com

If you’ve never heard of The Onion… well you’re just not into satire. They are the kings of satire. No matter which side of the creation vs evolution debate you side with, ya gotta admit this is totally hilarious:

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I consider myself a rational person. When I have a question, I turn to science and logic to find the answer. Regarding the origins of life, science tells us that humans evolved from single-celled organisms to our current form through a process of natural selection that took billions of years.

This much is clear to anyone with any background in modern thinking. We can look at the fossil record and trace many of our genetic traits back to ancient species. In fact, scientific reasoning can explain nearly every stage of life from the Big Bang to the present day. I say “nearly” because the period that scientists claim lasted from roughly 205 to 250 million years ago, commonly known as the Triassic period, was quite obviously the work of the Lord God Almighty.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not one of those religious nut cases who denies that evolution is real. Of course evolution is real, just not during the “Triassic period.”

This so-called Triassic period saw the formation of scleractinian corals and a slight changeover from warm-blooded therapsids to cold-blooded archosauromorphs. Clearly, such breathtakingly subtle modifications could only have been achieved by an active intelligence.

The secular Triassicists would have you believe that these changes were just the result of millions of years of nature favoring certain genes over others in order to adapt, the same way evolution worked prior to the Triassic. Obviously, that doesn’t make any sense. Think about it: I’m supposed to believe that the same process that we know slowly changed us from simple bacteria into highly advanced reptiles over the course of the Paleozoic era is also responsible for turning us into highly advanced reptiles with different body lengths? Do these people ever pause to think how ridiculous they sound as they advance these theories?

For a half-dozen million years, life advanced from prokaryotes to primitive fish to mammal-like reptiles via natural selection, and we’re supposed to believe that that just continued happening? I don’t think so. Isn’t it much more likely that a formless, invisible deity intervened, temporarily stopped the course of evolution, and shaped each and every trilobite over a period of six days? Of course it is, at least to any objective observer.

So, if you follow my reasoning to its logical end, the only sound conclusion is that, at some point, God paused evolution and stepped in, made a few modifications, and boom! Pterosaurs. There is simply no way evolution alone could be responsible for the giant leap between archosaurs and other, different archosaurs with better developed hip joints and slightly differently shaped teeth.

Everything about the Triassic period points to divine involvement. Let me ask you this: Could some kind of random genetic chance make the population of shelled cephalopods grow significantly? No, of course not. So the only logical explanation is that there was an infinite and all-knowing cephalopod creator who modified their mollusk foot into a muscular hydrostat that eventually, on the sixth day, became a tentacle.

So, when I tell you that after the Paleozoic era, Ceratodon lungfish became relatively common, it naturally follows that someone created that lungfish by hand and then took out one of its lungfish ribs and combined it with the dust of the Earth to create a female lungfish.

In the beginning, there were a few billion years of speciation and gene drift. And then nothing. And then, God made the lungfish and the trilobites, the ichthyosaurs and ammonoids with more complex suture patterns. He also made a couple new ferns.

And the Lord saw that these slight modifications were good, and allowed evolution to resume as normal in the Jurassic period and on up to the present day.

Now that I’ve inarguably proven the truth, we need to take a stand against these pseudoscientists who are misrepresenting 300-million-year-old fossils as 230-million-year-old fossils and claiming the Earth is 44 million years and 51 weeks older than it really is.

We need to get the Triassic period expunged from our public schools’ evolutionary textbooks. I don’t want my children to be exposed to this blasphemous Triassic garbage, and I assume you don’t want your children to be, either. They need to know that God is watching over them always, and that he has a plan for each and every one of them—a nonlinear, probabilistic plan he set in motion more than three billion years ago with single-celled organisms, ended with a group of small, lizard-like herbivores, infused with a bunch of miracles, and then restarted.

We can no longer ignore the empirical evidence.

Original Article

Most people who talk to me would call me a Democrat. I’m not, in fact I think calculated olarization that both parties attempt to get votes is revolting. People would consider me a Democrat because the last 8 years I’ve openly bashed the current administration… which just happens to be Republican. I’ve never considered the current administration “conservative” by any stretch of the imagination. There is one stand out Republican that is making waves, and who’s views I think are pretty spot on. From what I’ve seen so far, if he gets the Republican bid I’d vote for him.

Heres the top 10 highest rated Ron Paul videos on YouTube:

Ron Paul on Tucker

Neo-CONNED! by Congressman Ron Paul - Part 1 of 11

A Fox, a Wolf, and a Whole Lot of Bull (1 of 2)

Part 1 Congressman Ron Paul on The Korelin Economics Report

Ron Paul on Federal Reserve, banking and economy

Ron Paul : Stop Dreaming

Ron Paul Speech at Fundraiser In Austin May 19th Part 1

CNN Lou Dobbs Interview of Ron Paul

Ron Paul 0wnz the Federal Reserve

Ron Paul - Gulf of Tonkin

Congressman Paul’s consistent voting record prompted one of his congressional colleagues to say, “Ron Paul personifies the Founding Fathers’ ideal of the citizen-statesman. He makes it clear that his principles will never be compromised, and they never are.” Another colleague observed, “There are few people in public life who, through thick and thin, rain or shine, stick to their principles. Ron Paul is one of those few.”

www.ronpaul2008.com

Remember all the “evidence” we had about why we needed to go to war with Iraq? Remember the threat of WMD’s? We HAD to take them out right?  Well, turns out only six senators and a few House members are logged as ever reading the report that provided the so-call “intelligence” that indicated Iraq had WMD’s. Turns out in order to read the report members of Congress had to go to a secure location on Capitol Hill. I suppose the threat of war wasn’t enough to get them off their asses to go read the evidence before pulling the trigger. Most claimed they were briefed on the report and/or read the executive summary.John McLaughlin, then deputy director of the CIA said the intelligence report did contain passages that raised questions about the weapons conclusions. He also said that if the Senate and House members had read the entire report “they would walk away thinking the intelligence community generally thinks he has weapons of mass destruction, but there are quite a bit of differences.” He also said dissenting views by the State Department, Department of Energy and the Air Force made up about 10 to 12 pages of the report — but critics say those dissents were not highlighted.

So what we have is a report with the general “ya we think he’s got’em”, with a sprinkling of “hey we’re not so sure about that” by other agencies. What’s mind boggling is that our elected officials decided to just go on the word of the Executive and not READ the report themselves before deciding to give the authority to declare war on another nation.

Let me start by saying that I love the country I live in. However, I am very critical and suspicious of governement. I think our founding fathers intended us to be; clearly they were and that’s why we have three branches of governement to keep one another in check. Some disturbing news has recently hit the streets. For instance: Records obtained from the immigration courts under the Freedom of Information Act show that only 0.0015 percent of the total number of cases filed by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security were terrorism related. Read that again, not 15%, not 1.5%, but 0.0015%. The DHS and our trusty “Patriot Act” has scared the living snot outta me since Bush put them in place. From 2004-2006, $127.8 billion has spent on Homeland Security. Out of that $127.8 billion dollars we’ve had 4 sustained charges. That $31,950,000,000 per charge. Either the terrorist threat to America is vastly over hyped, we’re REALLY pathetic at catching terrorists. The other possiblility is that DHS isn’t really intended to thwart terrorism. DHS spokesman Russ Knocke called the TRAC report “ill-conceived” and said the group “lacked a grasp of the DHS mission.” Knocke said that, “by clamping down on all forms of immigration, DHS has made it difficult for terrorists to come to the United States.” What country is this guy living in? I think it’s common knowledge that we have droves of illegals coming to this country every year. The only shining light in the Republican party is Ron Paul, who said he’d want to eradicate Homeland Security the rest are apparently all for it.

Toss in the fact that our government potentially set up illegal wiretapping of it’s own citizens and the picture becomes more frightening. The illegal NSA domestic surveillance was first revealed by the New York Times on December 16, 2005, followed by further revelations in the NY Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, showing that the NSA has gained access to major telecommunications switches inside the US, giving it essentially unchecked access not only to international communications but to purely domestic emails and phone calls. The non-partisan Congressional Research Service’s analysis concluded that “it appears unlikely that a court would hold that Congress has expressly or impliedly authorized the NSA electronic surveillance operations” through the AUMF, and a group of 14 highly respected constitutional scholars and former government lawyers found “no basis for finding in the AUMF’s general language implicit authority for unchecked warrantless domestic wiretapping.”

So now we have a money gobbling DHS which produces little results in the arena of terrorism, and a government that has the capability to wiretap… everybody. So what right? It’s all for our safety. Let’s hope that’s the case… but since the beginning I’ve said that the fear is that an unchecked governement could abuse those powers. They could be used… oh let’s say to focus on and eliminate political adversaries. Perhaps these newfound powers could be used to target States Attourney’s who don’t follow in step with the current administration. Oddly enough we’ve seen the dismissal of eight United States attorneys, all belonged to the “other” political party. Everybody’s favorite Latino, Alberto Gonzales dismissed the matter saying they were all fired based on performance. But emails have been found showing he worked closely with the White House on developing the list of attourneys to be fired. The depth of this are still coming to light. This is the same Alberto Gonzalez found in connection with a series of memos concerning the treatement of terror suspects and the use of torture sanctioned by our government, we literally tossed the Geneva Convention out the window. Never in our history have we sanctioned torture, until now.

If you’re not scared yet, or at least a questioning “could our government REALLY be up to crazy ass shit like this?” then wait until you hear what came about about the 60’s. “In the early 1960s, America’s top military leaders reportedly drafted plans to kill innocent people and commit acts of terrorism in U.S. cities to create public support for a war against Cuba.” The plans were developed as ways to trick the American public and the international community into supporting a war to oust Cuba’s then new leader, communist Fidel Castro. The plans had the written approval of all of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and were presented to President Kennedy’s defense secretary, Robert McNamara, in March 1962. But they apparently were rejected by the civilian leadership and have gone undisclosed for nearly 40 years.

Before you get all crazy on me, I’m not saying we had anything to do with 9/11 or anything of the sort. Obviously, the 1960’s plan was never allowed to happen. But the Senate Foreign Relations Committee published its own report at the time on right-wing extremism in the military, warning a “considerable danger” in the “education and propaganda activities of military personnel” had been uncovered. Scary huh? What’s really scary is that it took 40 years for this to come out? What’s going on now and do we have the checks and balances in place to ensure that a run away grab for power, under the illusion of protecting us, doesn’t endanger the very way of life we want them to protect?!

Silvestre Reyes (D-TX), the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, this week announced his intention to hold hearings that will probe the extent of the cooperation between telephone companies and the NSA.

After resistance from the White House last year, the Republican-controlled Congress chose not to examine the issue, but it has been raised once again by a recent Bush administration request for immunity for the phone companies. That retroactive immunity was included in the government’s most recent House and Senate funding requests for US intelligence services, and it would grant the telephone companies immunity regardless of the legality of their actions.

Before granting such immunity, though, Reyes is determined to find out exactly what these companies might have done. In a statement issued by the Intelligence Committee, Reyes said, “Before granting immunity for any activities, it will be important to review what those activities were, what was the legal basis for those activities, and what would be the impact of a grant of immunity.”

To find out, Reyes plans to hold hearings in June to determine the nature of the NSA’s surveillance program and to find out whether it was legal. The hearings will also consider the issue of whether laws need to be changed to allow intelligence agencies to better track terrorist communications.

Reyes says that he “will not prejudge the outcome of these hearings,” but the fact that he has serious questions about the retroactive immunity suggests that he won’t be easily persuaded to sign off on it. That’s good news for organizations like the EFF, which is embroiled in a lawsuit with AT&T over the issue. Even if the administration doesn’t get its way in Congress, it will continue to push for the courts to throw out such cases on the grounds that they will expose state secrets. Thus far, though, the combined case against the telephone companies remains alive.

Original story

Apparently Jordin one. They went over on time and my DVR didn’t catch the tail end of it (who watches live tv any more?!?!). I think it was hers for the taking. She’s likeable and can sing circles around Blake. Blake is the cooler of the two for sure and will have a career when he’s not forced to sing pop songs. This was totally apparent by the beat boxing throwdown he did with Doug E. Fresh… check out the video:

The Idol finale sucked. It reminded me of Dancing with the Stars… filled with a bunch of useless crap to streatch it to two hours so they could fit more ads in. There were a lot of guest stars, but Carrie Underwood and Kelly Clarkson were the only two worth watching.  I don’t know who’s genius idea it was to have Bette Midler on there… but it sucked.

A 307-digit encryption key has been broken down into primes, and 1024-bit RSA keys are next, according to encryption researchers. Researchers from the University of Lausanne, the University of Bonn, and NTT DoCoMo have broken a new record in discovering the prime factors of a “special” 307-digit number this month, which took 11 months and roughly 100 years of computer time. The number was cracked using the special number field sieve method developed by cryptology professor Arjen Lenstra in the 1980s.

The 307-digit number itself was not an RSA key—the number was 2¹⁰³⁹-1, and RSA keys are typically generated by multiplying together two very large prime numbers, each at around 150 digits apiece. But the project shows that given enough time and computer power, the 1024-bit encryption keys used on many e-commerce sites could also be cracked in the not-so-distant future.

“Last time, it took nine years for us to generalize from a special to a nonspecial, hard-to-factor number,” Lenstra said in a statement, referring to a 155-digit number that his team had broken previously. More recently, a 200-digit non-special number was factored in 18 months and roughly 50 years of computer time. This 307-digit crack took even less (human) time, which Lenstra credits to more powerful computers and improved code. “I will not make predictions [about the future of 1024-bit encryption], but let us just say that it might be a good idea to stay tuned.”

Why does anyone care? While your average Joe or Jane on the street will not be able to crack a 1024-bit RSA key anytime soon, experienced attackers might not have such a hard time. Getting the computing power to crack a 1024-bit key could be as easy as employing a decent-sized botnet or two.

When asked whether 1024-bit RSA keys are dead, Lenstra said: “The answer to that question is an unqualified yes.” Hopefully, my bank is paying attention to these developments.

Original Article at Ars.

Lisa explains the dichotomy between Fox News’ conservative views and the Fox Network’s raunchy programming. Homer’s role in the clip sums up about 95% of the conservatives I know (ya I know who you 5% who walk the walk and talk the talk are, I may not agree with you but I can certainly respect you for your views). ”Liberals… I hate them so much.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFtsfDjOGjs

 If you don’t know what GTD is… well, you’ve been living in a box. GTD is the shorthand for “Getting Things Done”, which is a work-life management system and book by David Allen. It’s intention is to “transforms personal overwhelm and overload into an integrated system of stress-free productivity”.

There are many people who are REALLY into GTD, but you don’t have to be a die hard to take advantage of the methodology as it’s a very common sense approach to dealing with work/life. GTD is based on the “notion that with a complete and current inventory of all your commitments, organized and reviewed in a systematic way, you can focus clearly, view your world from optimal angles and make trusted choices about what to do (and not do) at any moment”.

So here’s my list of top 5 GTD websites that help you to work faster and get more done while stressing less. These sites are regularly updated with interesting, thought provoking content.

• Lifehacker - Probably my favorite of the bunch, Lifehacker makes getting things done easy and fun. It’s stuffed full with the latest in personal productivity technology and reveals the million ways hardware and software can improve our busy lives. This is one of the few sites on my iGoogle front page RSS feed.
• Lifehack.org - Similar in both name and concept to Lifehacker, Lifehack.org brings hacks, tips and tricks that get things done quickly by automating your daily life, increase productivity and getting organized.
• DigIGetThingsDone - A cool blog covering GTD in general as well as deeper into the specifics. It covers software, using Wordpress and more.
• ZenHabits - A personal blog about setting and achieving goals through the building of good habits that must be cultivated through daily practice.
• RirianProject - Extremely easy to digest site covering GTD. Most of the site is done in “lists” format. For instance:
  • 9 Little Known Ways To Sleep So It Counts
  • 5 Back-to-Basics Strategies For Renewing Your Energy
  • 5 Powerful Hacks to Immediately Improve Your Presentations

David Allen’s website

This article has gotten a lot of traffic from Stumbleupon. If you’re coming here from Stumbleupon, the URL to this article has changed (used to be paulspoerry.com/index.php/…. and now the index.php has been removed. If you could, please hit your “I like it!” button and give me a thumbs up.Thanx!

This is not my list… I snagged the list from tutorialblog.org, I’ve just compiled it all into a single resource. Below are 125 handy HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and AJAX snippets for your site or blog.

Part 1

Bubble Tool Tips - Bubble Tooltips are an easy way to add (via a bit of CSS and javascript) fancy tooltips with a balloon shape to any web page.

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Box Over - BoxOver uses javascript / DHTML to show tooltips on a website.

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Ajax Star rating Bar - This is a rating bar script done with PHP and mySQL that allows users to rate things like can be done on Netflix or Amazon, all web 2.0-like with no page refresh.

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CSS Star Rating Redux - Star rating with css tutorial

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Ajax Contact Form - An unobtrusive AJAX contact form (works even with JavaScript disabled)

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Wufoo - Build online forms easily with this web app

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Pretty Accessible Forms - It can be time consuming to make web forms both pretty and accessible. In particular, laying out forms where the form label and input are horizontally adjacent, as in the image below, can be a real problem.

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Adam’s Radio & Checkbox Customisation Method - Customised check boxes using images

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sIFR 3b1: The Mo’ Betta Beta - sIFR is meant to replace short passages of plain browser text with text rendered in your typeface of choice, regardless of whether or not your users have that font installed on their systems.

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Revised Image Replacement - Plenty of new and interesting revisions to the original Fahrner Image Replacement technique sprouted up in late 2003. This was an attempt to consolidate them.

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CSS Rounded Corners - Spiffy Corners is a simple way to generate the CSS and HTML you need to create anti-aliased corners without using images or javascript.

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CSS Speech Bubbles

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Even More Rounded Corners - Another article detailing a method of doing rounded corners with CSS. In this case, single-image, PNG-based, fluid rounded corner dialogs with support for borders, alpha transparency throughout, gradients, patterns and whatever else you (or your designer) could want.

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Vertical Bar Graphs - Who wants to use Excel to make a new graph each week? Using CSS and PHP you can create attractive bar graphs (yes, even the stacked kind) that are always up to date.

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CSS Vertical Bar Graphs - Here’s a fairly typical vertical bar graph showing a hypothetical set of quarterly data for, say, invoice and collection totals. The difference here is that the whole thing is a simple set of nested lists and CSS. Really.

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Suckerfish HoverLightbox - A really creative way to show a collection of images in a gallery.

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Lightbox JS - Lightbox JS is a simple, unobtrusive script used to overlay images on the current page. It’s a snap to setup and works on all modern browsers.

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CSS Image Maps - Image map that’s built entirely using CSS and XHTML.

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CSS Image Pop-up - This is an Pop-UP image effect that is similar to the ones you see using JavaScript on mouseover or on click but THIS ONE uses ONLY CSS!

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Sliding Doors CSS Navigation - A rarely discussed advantage of CSS is the ability to layer background images, allowing them to slide over each other to create certain effects.

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Taming Lists - I’ll demonstrate how to use CSS to bring unwieldy lists under control. It’s time for you to tell lists how to behave, instead of letting them run wild on your web page.

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The Art of Navigation - The main purpose of this design experiment is to see how far we can push CSS. Is it possible to create the most complex navigation (in terms of graphic design) and have it marked-up as an unordered list?

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Navigation Matrix Reloaded - This new experiment is, as the first one, based exclusively on graphics — therefore the same usability and accessiblity cautions apply.

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Light Weight Low Tech CSS Tabs - An example of light weight tabs by combining the Sliding Doors method with the Mountaintop corners idea.

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Accessible Image-Tab Rollovers - I wanted to continue to use a simple unordered list for the navigation in the markup. Much has already been said about using lists for navigation, here and elsewhere. They’re compact, lightweight and accessible to text browsers, screenreaders, PDAs, phones, etc.

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Part 2

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Tables with style - It might not seem like it but styling tabular data can be a lot of fun. From a semantic point of view, there are plenty of elements to tie some style into. You have cells, rows, row groups and, of course, the table element itself. Adding CSS to a paragraph just isn’t as exciting.

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CSS Shadows - So for a couple of years now, folks have been trying to find ways to work around the fact that the box-shadow property from CSS3 seems to perpetually be just a few months away from actually appearing in Web browsers everywhere. Box shadows are a very common design element, and not being able to use them on the Web is a real pain in the ass.

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Airtight Corners - Here’s a quick number on how to produce a box with rounded corners using only one image, and off-setting that image for each corner.

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Collapsing Tables With DOM and CSS - Each of the tables below has a class called “footcollapse” which makes the script add the arrow images in the footer allowing the table to be collapsed and expanded.

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3D Box Model Diagram - Here’s a thing. I’ve seen umpteen diagrams showing CSS beginners how padding, border and margin work together, but not the order in which elements such as background colour and image are stacked. To try and fill this hole, I’ve drawn a diagram.

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Docking Boxes - Docking boxes (dbx) adds animated drag ‘n’ drop, snap-to-grid, and show/hide-contents functionality to any group of elements.

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CSS Submit Button - For some time now we have all known about how you can treat a submit button as you would any tag when it comes to styling it with CSS, we can change its background colour, border and font styles using our trusty CSS.

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PHP Style Switcher - For your style-sheet-switching pleasure, A List Apart offers the Switcher, a piece of JavaScript that dynamically changes page styles. Functional as it is, it quite unfortunately relies on the user to have both JavaScript and cookies enabled. There’s not much we can do about the cookies, but we can sidestep client-side processing with a little help from PHP.

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Two Color sIFR - How to implement two color sIFR

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Styled images with caption - The problem is a simple one. A client wants to add an image to their site via the content management system. They want it to look attractive, not appear too boxy (let us say they want a nice rounded corner, as this is all the rage) and have a nice caption underneath it. However, they do not know how to use an image editor (beyond basic resizing) or how to edit HTML.

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Simple CSS Image Switcher - This is a pure CSS image switcher that is lightweight and standards-compliant. It could be used for a gallery or any similar function.

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Dynamic Pie Chart with CSS - This is an example of creating a semi-dynamic pie chart without the use of server-side imaging libraries

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Replicating a Tree Table - The aim is to replicate a graphic table tree using HTML

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Listamatic - Can you take a simple list and use CSS to create radically different list options? The Listamatic shows the power of CSS when applied to a simple list.

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Simple accessible external links - How to identify external links

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CSS Element Hover Effect - Using css and html only

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CSS Going to Print - You’ve seen them before: links that say “click here for printer-friendly version” or words to that effect. Every time you follow one of those links, you load a separate document that presents exactly the same information with a different layout, and probably different markup.

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Drop Caps with CSS - The code for the dropcap is simple, but we can fancy it up a bit. We use the inline CSS for fiddling with the look.

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CSS: Unordered List Calendar - This is a list boxes calendar. It isn’t the most semantic method, but it does seem to be faily stable and it resizes perfectly. A monospace font like Courier New must be used to ensure proper proportions and two characters must be used. Prepared with dynamic generation in mind.

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Visited Links - Everyone does visited links differently. Jakob Neilson flunkies use the old school blue-and-purple combo to help show visitors where they’ve been. People with actual design taste use more palatable colors, or perhaps a font-weight variation instead.

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Smart Back to top link - Back to top link’s purpose is to quickly position the viewport back to a beginning of a web page. Sometimes you have a variable height of the content and this link is unnecessary if a particular page is shorter than viewport height

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Displaying percentages with CSS - In turning this part of the design into something flexible on the website I saw two options; clever CSS, or ‘Lots of Images’. I decided that ‘Lots of Images’ was a bad idea

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Unobtrusive Sidenotes - Unobtrusive Sidenotes is a simple mix of Javascript and CSS that makes it ridiculously easy to incorporate sidenotes into your web pages or blogs.