Yearly Archives: 2012


This is way cooler than watching the entire San Diego fireworks show go up at on…

This is way cooler than watching the entire San Diego fireworks show go up at once

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Watch All 135 Space Shuttle Launches At Once
From Kottke comes this spectacular video showing all 135 of NASA's Space Shuttle launches simultaneously. It ably captures the drama, power, and danger of our ascent into space. The video starts as th…

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Here's a terrific teardown of Aaron Sorkin and The Newsroom, (despite the typos…

Here's a terrific teardown of Aaron Sorkin and The Newsroom, (despite the typos and need for a copy editor, something I'm guilty of myself far too often).

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The Newsroom, the Horror – Lawyers, Guns & Money : Lawyers, Guns & Money
When I saw the persuasive bad reviews from Emily Nussbaum and Willa Paskin, I knew I was probably going to have to watch The Newsroom so I could judge for myself. And yet, as a longtime Sorikn-on-TV d…

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+Ford Motor Company marketing boss Jim Farley will be in France this weekend where…

+Ford Motor Company marketing boss Jim Farley will be in France this weekend where he will be one-third of the driving crew for a pristine 1968 GT40 Mk 1 running in the Le Mans Classic.

The GT40 is an icon of the French endurance classic having it won four years in a row from 1966-69.

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More Racing News – articles | Ecurie Ford France Races GT40 At 2012 Le Mans Classic | The Official Site of Ford Racing |
Le Mans holds a very special place in Ford's racing heritage, and the company has been a faithful partner of the Le Mans Classic since 2004. This year, Ecurie Ford France returns to the race fielding …

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My respect for Judge Richard Posner grows each time he speaks recently

My respect for Judge Richard Posner grows each time he speaks recently

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Richard Posner: “I’ve become less conservative since the Republican Party started becoming goofy.”

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Reagan-Appointed Judge Defends Roberts, Says GOP Has Become ‘Goofy’
Judge Richard Posner was appointed to the bench by former President Ronald Reagan, earning a sparkling reputation as a conservative jurist. But Posner, a 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals judge in Chi…

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The winter months of early 1993 were particularly educational for me 4

I spent 3 1/2 months in far northern Sweden with a couple of weeks in England thrown in. 

I was working for an automotive supplier known at the time as Kelsey-Hayes (which was later subsumed into Lucas and then later still into TRW but that's another story). We had begun work a few months earlier on a full speed traction control system that managed both the brakes and the engine torque.  Up until that time we had only done work on brake-only systems so we basically started from scratch. 

I spent countless hours that winter driving on frozen lakes, snow covered roads and even some heated asphalt and learned a lot about real world vehicle dynamics and how we could influence it with electronic control systems. Although I didn't know it at the time, many of the lessons I learned from driving and analyzing the sensor data would later be incorporated into enhanced ABS, stability control and even launch control systems. 

+Motor Trend Magazine takes a look at the differences between traction control and launch control in an excellent primer.

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Launch Control vs. Traction Control – Motor Trend
Just as closed-loop control systems have enabled powertrain engineers to extract more work from every drop of fuel, they're also helping vehicle integration engineers do the same when it comes to enab…

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Every year or two +Ford Racing builds a run of just 50 Mustang CobraJets

Every year or two +Ford Racing builds a run of just 50 Mustang CobraJets. These are factory built drag race race specials that competitors can buy and trailer directly from the dealer to the local strip. Most of the assembly process takes place right on the same line with all of the other regular Mustangs at the Flat Rock assembly line. Before the body-in-white heads into the paint shop the techs do some extra welding on the seams to extra rigidity and install a full competition roll-cage.

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It's a damn shame to hear that HBO has opted to grant a second season to Newsroom…. 3

It's a damn shame to hear that HBO has opted to grant a second season to Newsroom. Frankly the show sucks and Aaron Sorkin is easily amongst the most over-rated screen writers of recent times. While his dialog moves along at a brisk pace, it is mostly inane and Sorkin may well be the most prolific serial self-plagiarizer of all time judging by this video montage. His female characters are also poorly developed and generally weak or ditzy. 

I had high hopes when I saw the first trailer but following teh overwrought Jeff Daniels rant, the show quickly goes downhil and I not inclined to watch the show anymore.
#overratedaaronsorkin  

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It's not about fighting fraud, it's about taking away votes from those that… 8

It's not about fighting fraud, it's about taking away votes from those that would vote for the other party

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Wow

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Pennsylvania Voter-ID Law Could Disenfranchise Up To 750,000
The impact of Pennsylvania’s new Voter-ID law could be much wider-reaching than the state’s Republican officials claimed when passing the bill, the Philadelphia Inquirer reports.

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I totally agree with this and I think that there should be a total moratorium on… 4

I totally agree with this and I think that there should be a total moratorium on new patents until we can come up with a better solution that fits the modern world.

Reshared post from +Ashley Esqueda

I know a lot of you here on G+ are hell bent on this #BoycottApple  thing. 

But do you understand that Apple is merely a SYMPTOM of a much larger problem? The US Patent System is incredibly broken. And since a lot of you are so vehemently charged up about technology/mobile patents, I'm asking you TODAY to get outraged about another sector of the patent system that needs revamping. 

Did you know that drug companies can patent GENES? As in, ones that cause breast/ovarian cancer? Because they can. 

And then they can refuse other lab requests to do research on said gene, therefore stifling any manner of "cure" testing. In fact, if they let a lab test, often that lab has to pay huge fees to license the patent in order to research. 

This isn't just about people's cell phones. This is about human lives. How many more relatives will we lose to a disease whose gene was patented by a pharmaceutical company before we speak up for OUR rights? 

If you want to be mad at Apple, go ahead. Be mad. But realize it's just like being mad at the itchy red spots on your skin when you get chicken pox. Those spots show up because that's what the disease tells it to do.

Combat the disease, not the symptoms. And share this with your offline family, too. People should be outraged by this. 

#NerfPatents

http://www.aclu.org/free-speech-womens-rights/aclu-challenges-patents-breast-cancer-genes-0

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ACLU Challenges Patents On Breast Cancer Genes: BRCA
On May 12, 2009, the ACLU and the Public Patent Foundation (PUBPAT) filed a lawsuit charging that patents on two human genes associated with breast and ovarian cancer are unconstitutional and invalid…

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