AdamSmith

Excellent piece by two tax specialists on why there almost have to be skeletons in Mitt's tax closet: http://www.cnn.com/2012/07/18/opinion/kleinbard-canellos-romney-tax/index.html?hpt=hp_t1

Amusing & illuminating bit from The Guardian... http://m.guardian.co.uk/ms/p/gnm/op/sudIx8UvmA8z5iLRAfqL-dQ/view.m?id=15&gid=commentisfree/2012/aug/07/pubic-hair-has-job-stop-shaving&cat=most-read Must say I agree.

Respectfully beg to differ. When world-class engineering organizations put their mission-critical IP into the cloud, the security is banking-level. Agree, as I said before, that is far different from many consumer-oriented cloud services. My point is that security is not inherently put at risk simply because of something being cloud-based these days. Just depends on how it is implemented.

Cowplop. World-leading manufacturing companies do their high-demand engineering simulation in the cloud today, and would not think of going back. Including the most paranoically security-conscious defense contractors. I know firsthand that a shitload of the simulation that went into the Joint Strike Fighter, etc., etc., etc. was done in the cloud. TY, you too know this firsthand. Lockheed Martin Defense Systems, General Dynamics Land Systems, Raytheon, General Dynamics Electric Boat, Pratt & Whitney, General Atomics, on and on and on -- these guys may be evil but they are not dummies. They are all way into the cloud today. Likewise with the big EPCs -- Fluor, Bechtel, Halliburton, Jacobs Engineering, Brown & Root, et al. Granted, consumers may always get the shaft (see related post on the clusterfuck of hotmail's demise -- I hate that like everyone else). But business customers have clout that will sink a cloud provider if one single breach occurs. Look at the success of salesforce.com -- I fought tooth and nail with an old boss who would on no account put our customer lists in the cloud. But now no sensible company would do it any other way. Relying on my own maintenance of my in-office server to keep alive such a critical resource, instead of the professionals at salesforce whose whole business would go down the toilet if they (1) failed to maintain the absolute integrity of my data or (2) allowed any kind of security breach, would just be delusional thinking on my part. We already trust online banking, providing we have adequate security on our local devices. What is more important than our money?

"...that soiten air of savoire-faire / In the merry old land of Oz"! The Lion (apart from the Wiz himself -- "This is absolutely the greatest exhibition ever assembled! -- ah ... Well, in any event" or whatever) got all the best lines. The highly self-aware vaudevillian writing was, to think of it, really superb all through. Just about every one of Margaret Hamilton's lines similarly had a high lapidary finish to them. How many among us, if melting into oblivion, would think to lament our "beautiful wickedness"?

Thank you for the memory jog! That and Mary Poppins are the first two movies I can remember my parents taking me to when I was little. I loved them, but even more remember being kind of awed to discover such a medium existed. The impact was so different from TV. I still really dislike watching good films on TV, even a big flat-screen with a good sound system. Barry Lyndon, 2001 (sorry for the Kubrick fixation but you do what you can with what you have ), Apocalypse Now, Aguirre, most any visually large-scale pic just annoys me to try and watch at home. But I will contradict myself. Something like Wild Strawberries, as I think about it, is sweet to stumble across on TV of a weekend afternoon. Suits the small screen. W.C. Fields does too. Ditto Marx bros. Also much noir-ish mental-type stuff in the vein of The Snake Pit or Lost Weekend (couple of you may here suppress two or three remarks). OK, I don't really have a point here!

Ahh...playing hard to get, eh?

Wow. Also cool, from the same site: The only existing video footage of Mark Twain, as filmed by Thomas Edison

I love that he put 2001 on there. He was the first major critic to get it. The brilliant but insufferable windbag Pauline Kael not to mention the rest of the rabble totally missed it first time around. But what else to expect from Ebert, given he was also the screenwriter for the incomparable Beyond the Valley of the Dolls? "You will drink the black sperm of my vengeance!" If I had to be anybody but myself, or Kubrick, or Clarke, I think I might choose Ebert. Jaw cancer and all. Just THE model of what to do with your consciousness, long as it endures.

??? Where are you these days? Approximately...

You realize he already has a partner. Lucky guys!

Absence of any response to notions such as these affirms Lucky's suspicions.

Titles and authors, please! Else how can one be an intellectual stalker?

This is NASA back to being at its finest. The sometimes under-sung Jet Propulsion Laboratory too. http://www.cnn.com/2012/08/04/us/mars-rover-scott-maxwell/index.html?c=weekend-homepage-t

Forgot to mention my ur-text: http://books.google.com/books/about/Introductory_Lectures_on_Psychoanalysis.html?id=Sfz0l6WSqFgC

I will be eternally in your debt the next time I make it to Puerto Vallarta.

One can add that our beloved MsGuy has similarly overlooked (or possibly just mokusatsu'd) the latest taking of his nomen in vain: http://www.maleescortreview.com/forum/index.php?/topic/11217-currently-reading/#entry64078

ROFL Yer jurisprudential sharpsightedness had me in fear. How affirming!

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lips_Together,_Teeth_Apart#section_1

FourAces, you really have been a great and valuable citizen of our little Athens here. (Gomorrah, then. Whatever!) Heartiest congrats. From one who knows it feels good to win. At the time, and again later when you spend it!

Now reading, in parallel: Flannery, Brad Gooch's recent biography of Flannery O'Connor, the brilliant and alarming and iconoclastic (believing Catholic, infusing her fiction with it, yet Southern) writer. Asked why Southerners wrote about the grotesque so much, she replied, "Because we're the only ones who can still recognize it." Right, MsGuy? Riveting read, if you grok her work. The Strangest Man: A Biography of Paul Dirac, by one Graham Farmelo. Life of the indeed strange, possibly autistic, physicist savant who figured out how the electron truly behaves. Or, rather, a set of impossible-to-solve equations that would, were they soluble, describe how it behaves. In reading some parts of it, I drift into the fleeting illusion that I grasp some vague notion of what quantum electrodynamics really is. Then I put down the book, go have supper, and realize I have not the least idea what I just thought I had almost understood. As I love books like that, having a high old time with this one. Johnny Von Neumann, Einstein and other acquaintances color the story too. American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the magisterial biography by Martin J. Sherwood and Kai Bird of the father of the bomb. I have read and re-read it so obsessively already that I could likely give a Samuel Clemens-like recitation evening behind a public lectern without once referring to the printed text. Utterly compelling. Joins a long list of books about the science, personalities, and politics of all things nuclear that are on my shelf of essentials. Among many: Richard Rhodes's The Making of the Atomic Bomb. McGeorge Bundy's Danger and Survival: Decisions about the Bomb in the First Fifty Years. General Leslie Groves's memoir Now It Can Be Told -- military director of the Manhattan Project, who selected Oppie as Scientific Director, and who single-handedly, more or less, commandeered the budget and drove through the contracting and construction that built the national atomic bomb production complex -- an enterprise on the same economic scale by the end of the war as the U.S. automotive industry at that time. You will note the wide diversity and absence of mania in my choices.

That article seems fairly sad thinking. Go out, pick somebody up, take them home, fuck and/or get fucked, fall in love or not as seems meet. I just turned 53. I'm not Spiderman but nor am I Grendel. At the moment, working on a cute straight (more or less, I think) guy 20 years my junior. That will turn out to have.been something of a mistake, likely, but you play it as it lays. The mental affair between us already something. Life is short! We will only regret our economies.

Microsoft is a client of mine. Everybody there with a brain left microseconds after Gates did. They have a lot of altitude and lift left but Ballmer is nothing more than a salesman. It will be a long slow drawn-out glide path but ultimately they will end up in the Hudson. I have already made some not inconsiderable consulting moolah saying so, privately, where the moolah resides. Slowly figuring this shit out.

The situation in NC is not so great. Rah rah for the progressives who can pay close to NYC rents to live in downtown Raleigh or Charlotte (doing my best to re-become one of them!) but the hog and soybean farmers far, far outnumber them in the electorate. (I hold no grudges against hogs nor soybeans, only their cultivators. ) If I had to place money today, I'd say ain't gonna break Barack's way. Cf. Billy Graham (not to mention ol' limb-o'-Satan ((H.P. Lovecraft)) Franklin Graham, Billy's son).

(sorry, senescence)