Quotes

Soccer is a sport for countries without armies.

An ugly paradox of the 21st century is that some of our elegant symbols of modernity — smartphones, laptops and digital cameras — are built from minerals that seem to be fueling mass slaughter and rape in Congo. With throngs waiting in lines in the last few days to buy the latest iPhone, I’m thinking: What if we could harness that desperation for new technologies to the desperate need to curb the killing in central Africa?

In a typical response from other military officials, one Army officer with multiple tours in Afghanistan expressed anger at the lack of discipline displayed by General McChrystal and his inner circle. But he warned that it was symptomatic of wider problems with Mr. Obama’s strategy and among his national security advisers. “They brought this upon themselves and embarrassed the entire military as an institution,” said the officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid any punishment for criticizing his chain of command. “Hopefully, the president uses this as an opportunity to refine his policy and objectives, and also to shuffle the rest of his Af-Pak team, as well,” he said, using the abbreviation for the Afghanistan-Pakistan region. “McChrystal isn’t the only one who probably needs to move elsewhere.”

“Mr Hayward gave the impression that he was the most incompetent CEO in living memory. If that was the real Tony Hayward, then God help BP, but it wasn’t,” said David Buik of City firm BGC Partners.

Barton offers a rather remarkable apology to BP: “I apologise. I do not want to live in a country where every time a corporation does something wrong, it’s subject to a political process that amounts to a shakedown.”

http://current.com/18ggo4c – basically says “yo dawg, I heard you like dissing your friends, so we put a Vuvuzela in a RickRoll, so you can Vuvuzela while you’re RickRolling.”
Handle with care.

I really have to thank Facebook … I didn’t know what Facebook was, and now that I do know what it is, I have to say, it sounds like a huge waste of time. I would never say the people on it are losers, but that’s only because I’m polite…People say ‘But Betty, Facebook is a great way to connect with old friends.’ Well at my age, if I want to connect with old friends, I need a Ouija board. Needless to say, we didn’t have Facebook when I was growing up. We had phonebook…but you wouldn’t waste an afternoon with it.

This must be a joke, right? Who wants the functionality of the NYS Senate brought to your cell phone? I want my phone to work…

Navigation on an electronic device is not as automatic as flipping pages. Every element on the screen that has no direct semantic or obvious structural character can be misunderstood as a navigational control. Once the user learns it’s mere candy, it will effectively be blanked out by the user’s eye. Once that happens, important navigational elements are blanked out as well and the whole app becomes one baroque carpet (who would have thought that the yellow marked words are in app links?).

We all know about the Wright brothers and how their invention has helped shape Dayton, though few would suggest that it is their prior work with bicycles that may represent the future for Dayton. However, in this age of rising transportation costs, traffic congestion, growing obesity rate, climate change and culture shifts, U.S. cities are discovering that the bicycle can play a pivotal role in the quest for economic prosperity.