Came across these and liked them, so I am passing them along.

"Of all the passions of mankind, the love of novelty most rules the mind. In search of this, from realm to realm we roam. Our fleets come loaded with every folly home."
- Shelby Foote

"Home is a place not only of strong affections, but of entire unreserve; it is life's undress rehearsal, its backroom, its dressing room."
- Harriet Beecher Stowe

"Where we love is home. Home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts."
- Oliver Wendell Holmes

"The dreams which accompany all human actions should be nurtured by the places in which people live."
- Charles W. Moore

"There is nothing like staying at home for real comfort."
- Jane Austen

"We shape our dwellings, and afterwards our dwellings shape us."
- Winston Churchill

"In the South, perhaps more than any other region, we go back to our home in dreams and memories, hoping it remains what it was on a lazy, still summer's day twenty years ago."
- Willie Morris

This guy just has to much time on his hands - yes, pun intended  

http://www.dailyartpress.com/2009/05/art-with-folded-paper-by-simon-schubert.html

Click and be impressed!

Enjoy,
Pedro

Study: DRM makes pirates of us all -- CNET

In Cambridge professor's report, she lays out the effect DRM restrictions have--namely, that people are driven to download illegally.

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Obama Cybersecurity Report Addresses Critical Infrastructure and Privacy Issues -- Wired

A cybersecurity report published by the White House on Friday provides a list of wide-ranging guidelines advising President Barack Obama on how the government should proceed in its national plan to secure cyberspace.

It touches on everything from establishing communication networks for emergency response teams to the role government should play in the protection of critical infrastructure networks and whether or not entities that experience a breach should have to notify governments and law enforcement agencies. Privacy and civil liberties concerns receive a repeated nod, with privacy being mentioned in the report more than five dozen times.

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Protect Yourself from Ambulatory Gadget Fixation Syndrome (AGFS) - PC World

"Hey. Hey. Hey! hey! hey! Look up. Look up. Look up." That's me walking to work on Second Street in San Francisco, about to get into a head-on with someone whose full attention is on the smart phone or Kindle they're holding close to their face while walking, paying no attention to where they're going.

Sometimes they don't even hear me (most of them have their headphones in), forcing me to veer widely out of their path. Sometimes they hear me, look up momentarily with a sort of glazed-over look, then return to the device. Sometimes they hear me and alter their course, shooting me a look that says: "how dare you; I was updating my Facebook." Like I had just violated one of their most basic rights.

read on ...

Well, Wired has created time-lapse video of NASA satellite photos that show "deforestation, urbanization and drought".

White House: cybersecurity facing a Sputnik moment - Ars Technica

The Obama administration has sent a number of signals that it takes the information infrastructure of the nation seriously, having approved stimulus money for broadband and established a post for a national CTO. In parallel with these actions, the administration authorized a review of the national cybersecurity policy, and that review is now complete. Depending on how you read the resulting report, it concluded either that we don't have a cybersecurity policy, or that we have too many of them; in either case, its authors have made a number of very specific suggestions as to how to improve the situation.

The report is fairly blunt, stating early on that "the architecture of the Nation’s digital infrastructure, based largely upon the Internet, is not secure or resilient." As our network infrastructure has developed, the focus has been on things like performance, ease-of-use, and compatibility, and security consciousness was pretty low for much of its history. So, it's not a surprise that both government and private computer systems have been victimized, and evidence suggests that both private parties and foreign governments have been behind these attacks.

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Peacefires newest Circumventor:

http://www.tummyplatter.com/

(Remember you can access it with either "http" or "https" at the beginning.)

Remember, always try https://www.stupidcensorship.com first.

The big list.

Peacefires newest Circumventor:

http://www.spellshirt.com/

(Remember you can access it with either "http" or "https" at the beginning.)

Remember, always try https://www.stupidcensorship.com first.

The big list.

Bank bailout: The greatest swindle ever sold - Salon
The six biggest ways (we know about) that TARP scams taxpayers.

On Oct. 3, as the spreading economic meltdown threatened to topple financial behemoths like American International Group (AIG) and Bank of America and plunged global markets into free fall, the U.S. government responded with the largest bailout in American history. The Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, better known as the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), authorized the use of $700 billion to stabilize the nation's failing financial systems and restore the flow of credit in the economy.

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© Cam Cardow - Ottawa Citizen - 05.26.2006

The quote above was written in 1914 and is the fourth stanza of "For The Fallen" by Laurence Binyon.

With proud thanksgiving, a mother for her children,
England mourns for her dead across the sea.
Flesh of her flesh they were, spirit of her spirit,
Fallen in the cause of the free.

Solemn the drums thrill; Death august and royal
Sings sorrow up into immortal spheres,
There is music in the midst of desolation
And a glory that shines upon our tears.

They went with songs to the battle, they were young,
Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.
They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted;
They fell with their faces to the foe.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years contemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

They mingle not with their laughing comrades again;
They sit no more at familiar tables of home;
They have no lot in our labour of the day-time;
They sleep beyond England's foam.

But where our desires are and our hopes profound,
Felt as a well-spring that is hidden from sight,
To the innermost heart of their own land they are known
As the stars are known to the Night;

As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust,
Moving in marches upon the heavenly plain;
As the stars that are starry in the time of our darkness,
To the end, to the end, they remain.

~~~~~~

From KnowledgeNews:

Today, America's Memorial Day tends to be more beach-and-barbecue than reflection-and-remembrance. But Memorial Day still exists to commemorate the sacrifice of the more than 1.1 million American service members who have died in battle - and to remember why they gave up their lives.

No one has ever done that better than Abraham Lincoln in his Gettysburg Address. Even before Americans began decorating Civil War graves to give Memorial Day its start, Lincoln's short speech pointed the way to the greatest memorial of all.

On November 19, 1863, President Lincoln visited Gettysburg to help dedicate a new national cemetery. The president was not the event's main speaker. That honor belonged to Edward Everett, a Massachusetts statesman and perhaps the best-known orator of the time. As was customary, Everett delivered a lengthy oration, speaking for two hours straight. Lincoln spoke for just two minutes

The day after the ceremony, Edward Everett wrote to Lincoln, "I wish that I could flatter myself that I had come as near to the central idea of the occasion in two hours as you did in two minutes." Today, the central idea of the occasion remains the same. As Lincoln points out, we honor the sacrifice of soldiers for freedom and self-government best by carrying forward the work of democracy. We dedicate memorials by dedicating ourselves.

- Steve Sampson

The Gettysburg Address:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that this nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow, this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us--that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion - that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

- Abraham Lincoln

 
Pearls Before Swine by Stepan Pastis -- 20 May 2009

Better than a thousand useless words is one word that gives peace.

- Buddha

Obama's anger management on abortion - CSM Editorial
His task force to reduce the number of abortions could alter American politics.

As if Barack Obama didn't already have enough on his plate, he is now attempting to do the impossible in American politics. He has formed a White House task force of advocates on both sides of the abortion divide and asked them to agree on ways that government can help reduce the number of abortions.

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Going for Broke -- TomDispatch
Six Ways the Af-Pak War Is Expanding

Yes, Stanley McChrystal is the general from the dark side (and proud of it). So the recent sacking of Afghan commander General David McKiernan after less than a year in the field and McChrystal's appointment as the man to run the Afghan War seems to signal that the Obama administration is going for broke. It's heading straight into what, in the Vietnam era, was known as "the big muddy."

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The house that taxpayers built -- Salon
New York's billionaire mayor used public funds to build the new Yankee Stadium for the richest team in sports.

Even amid CEO testimony, Bernie Madoff grimaces and Rick Santelli diatribes, nothing better captures the moment's destructive greed than a billionaire politician using the municipal office he bought to defend charging $2,500 a ticket to a new Yankee Stadium he forced the public to finance. If there is a single act showing how kleptocracy and let-them-eat-cake-ism are systemic and local rather than momentary and exclusively federal, Bloomberg turning the House that Ruth Built into the House That Taxpayers Built is it.

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The Great Obama-Cheney Face-Off -- MotherJones
In dueling speeches, the president and former veep do battle on torture and terror.

It was close as it gets to a grand Lincoln-Douglas-style debate. On Thursday, President Barack Obama spoke at the National Archives, where America's values are enshrined on the nation's age-stained founding documents; a mile or so away, former Vice President Dick Cheney addressed the American Enterprise Institute, where neocons spent years pushing for the war in Iraq. Both men addressed fundamental issues of national security and civil liberties, taking on such controversial matters as torture (or enhanced interrogation techniques), Guantanamo, and warrantless wiretapping. Guess who was Lincoln?

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