Roger Handberg has a useful history of NASA and its budgets for those who still fantasize that we can (or should) resurrect Apollo.
CSI: Suborbit
Dwayne Day has an amusing review of what seems to have been a particularly stupid episode of CSI: Miami. I’ve never actually sat through an entire show (the only reason I’ve ever been able to see for watching it is Emily Procter, and that’s not enough, particularly since she doesn’t have anywhere near the southern accent that much of the hype about her would lead you to believe). Are they all this dumb?
What A Fool
Does Warren Buffet really think that Obama is going to pay any attention to him, now that he’s served his purpose in getting him into the White House?
So Where Are All The Editorials?
…blaming Al Gore for this?
Argentines Francisco Lotero, 56, and Miriam Coletti, 23, shot their children before killing themselves after making an apparent suicide pact over fears about global warming.
You know that if this had happened as a result of “right-wing” fear mongering (in this case, warm mongering), they’d be all over it.
Hurdles To Health-Care Deform
A long analysis by Keith Hennesey. Let’s hope the hurdles are sufficiently high. The best scenario is that they go all-out to pass this legislative totalitarian abomination, further enraging the electorate, but fail to do so.
A Response To Frank Rich’s Latest Vile Slander
“If Our Colleges And Universities Do Not Breed Men Who Riot…”
As noted, one of the left’s distinguishing features is to continually rewrite its own violent history, and attribute it and project it onto others. In addition to the slander, it also creates a continual amnesia, or ahistorical attitude on the part of new adherents to it who are so mistaught the history.
Robert McCall
…has died.
For me his most impressive work remains the mural at the Air and Space Museum. But it was just a scratch at the surface of his work. He was a leading chronicler of the first space age. May the new one bring forth new artists as great as it will be, as he was to it.
Walt, Walt, Walt…
I admire Walt Cunningham as a hero of Apollo, but it’s hard to do so as a policy analyst. The very title of his opinion piece is nonsense:
We must not discard greatest innovator in history
Presumably he’s talking about NASA, and specifically the human spaceflight program. But in fact, due to risk aversion, it is probably the least innovative technology program going, with “Apollo on Steroids” the most prominent and recent example. I’d wager that we get more innovation out of Silicon Valley in a month than we have from the entire history of the human spaceflight program. He expands in the first paragraph:
What A Surprise
The president doesn’t understand how insurance works. It seems he’s just as ignorant about it now as he was when he was a kid. I’d have laughed at him, too. I still do. Or would, if he weren’t running the country.
[Update monday morning]
More (amusing) thoughts from Tom Maguire:
Obama apparently blundered to the common (and thriftier) conclusion, since no one buys collision on a junker.
However, months later he realized that paying more for collision would have been a great idea, so history is re-written. It is now due to ACME’s rapaciousness that they are unwilling to right this wrong and write him a check. And they laughed! Surely Chait can hear the racial overtones there! After the laughter died they should have explained to the college grad that he could file a third-party claim against the other driver, assuming Obama was not at fault, but that also may have been too confusing.
Well. If even Obama can be duped by greedy insurers into saving his money and taking a sensible risk, what hope do the rest of us have? Surely we need these new health insurance mandates to make sure both that we buy policies and that the policies we buy have everything we need, not just everything we (stupidly think we) want.
I find the condescension and arrogance of these “brilliant” “liberals” insufferable.
Graphics Card Question
So my Samsung LCD monitor gave up the ghost (less than a couple years old, I think), and I went out to Frys to get a new replacement. I was looking at the displays and some of them looked like crap (blurry letters). I asked the salesman, and he said that they were being fed with VGA analog, whereas the sharp ones were digital (DVI or HDMI). If I were the manufacturers of those monitors, I’d be pretty unhappy with that situation, but I digress.
Anyway, I determined to not only get a replacement monitor, but to upgrade my video card as well to digital output. So I bought a new LG 21.5″ screen, and an MSI card with an NVidia N220GT engine, and a gig of DDR2 memory.
I got home, put in the card, and it turned out not to work without having to update Linux drivers from NVidia. But in changing it out, I also noticed that the old card (also an NVidia, with 128M of memory) had a DVI output, so I didn’t really need the new one in terms of digital output support. So I’m running with it now.
Question: I’m not a gamer, and don’t do anything really graphics intensive, such as video processing. Is there any point in updating drivers and reinstalling it, or should I just take it back and get my sixty bucks back? Will I see any performance improvement from it?
[Monday morning update]
Thanks for all the input in comments. I don’t need any of the things that y’all say the card will help with, so I’ll be taking it back. If I ever do need it, I’ll get a better one, cheaper, at that time.