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But only if you’re a New York City bus driver.

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Which is not the same as what I would have told him to do with his entire administration. Just in case you were wondering.

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Well, if I were fishing for sharks, I’d certainly want a rocket launcher. You never know.

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Regulation didn’t work? Why, then, we need … more regulation.

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US military boffins are about to produce a field-ready computer gunsight which will let snipers kill people on their first shot from a mile away – even with troublesome winds blowing.

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Steve Ballmer has been CEO of Microsoft since 2000. During his tenure, Microsoft came out with Windows Vista, perhaps the most unsuccessful operating system in modern history (Windows ME doesn’t count, since Microsoft’s core customer base was using NT/2000); it tried a “Microsoft inside” strategy in digital music and, when that failed, launched the Zune, which also failed; it watched Firefox (and Safari and Chrome) eat a large chunk of its lunch in Internet browsers, the application most people use more than everything else put together; it launched Windows Live, a marketing strategy with no noun behind it, which completely flopped at whatever it was supposed to do; it got blown away in Internet search to the point where it had to re-launch as Bing, a plucky underdog;  and in mobile phones, which everyone has known for a decade would be the next big thing, it stuck with its bloated, awkward Windows Mobile for far too long, letting everyone (RIM, Apple, Google, and even Palm) pass it by to the point where it has no customer base left. (BlackBerry rules the corporate market, Microsoft’s traditional stomping grounds.) Recently I saw a headline saying that Microsoft is going to try to relaunch Hotmail to make it cool. Really, why bother?

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At Princeton University and Portland-based Reed College, a small liberal-arts institution, students praised the Kindle for its long battery life, paper savings and portability. They then complained they couldn’t scribble notes in the margins, easily highlight passages or fully appreciate color charts and graphics.

“You don’t read textbooks in the same linear way as a novel,” said Roesner, 23, a graduate student in computer science and engineering. “You have to flip back and forth between pages, and the Kindle is too slow for that. Also, the bookmarking function is buggy.”

Sounds like a job for the iPad.

Check it out.

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The Times editorial and other media pronouncements have perpetuated a drastic misreading of history and of government’s role in ending racial discrimination in this nation. This history is far more nuanced than is widely assumed. At the center of the Jim Crow system lay the “Jim Crow laws.” They were indeed laws, i.e., requirements that persons and businesses and government agencies must practice racial discrimination or face civil or criminal penalties. In other words, government had bolstered discrimination instead of suppressing it. For example, the famous 1896 Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, which endorsed “separate but equal” treatment in railroad travel and eventually in other spheres such as public education, was about whether an 1890 state law in Louisiana requiring segregation was constitutional. The court said it was.

The Jim Crow system did not start in the South. It first arose in the North (although the term dates only from the early 20th century) as a way to deal with free blacks, including ex-slaves. After the Civil War ended slavery in the South, some politicians rallied poor whites and newly freed blacks in support of economic populism, while others sought different forms of accommodation that stopped well short of systematic, state-enforced racial separation. It was only in the last two decades or so of the 19th century—especially in the 1890s—that the Southern states enacted laws to force a level of segregation that had not arisen spontaneously, creating the rigid legal apparatus that some people still remember from the first half of the 20th century. Far from forming the vanguard of segregation, businesses tended to lag, with the railroads particularly notable for their persistence in maintaining a substantial degree of integration until forced by law to halt their practices.

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Oh, gee, just what we need: Another war.

I have an idea: Let’s let the South Koreans fight this one on their own. Time to graduate, young padawan.

Cringely does LifeLock.

What LifeLock does primarily when you subscribe is they put a fraud alert on your file at all three national credit monitoring agencies — Equifax, Experian, and Trans-Union. A fraud alert says “this person’s identity has been stolen, don’t approve any unusual expenditures without proper verification. ” So the cable bill you’ve been paying with a credit card for five years still goes through but any new request for credit or an unusual expenditure gets flagged. The problem with this is that the fraud alert isn’t real; there has been no fraud. You only signed-up with LifeLock, which is now screaming at the credit bureaus that you’ve been ripped-off when, in fact, you haven’t.

Credit bureaus hate LifeLock.

But wait, Todd Davis (Mr. 457-55-5462) was ripped-off 13 times despite being a member of LifeLock. With an fraud alert on his file, how was this even possible?

Because the frauds didn’t involve his credit file.

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Time to bring back the M-14?

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Having dramatically expanded the role of the government in your doctor’s office and your bank this year, the Obama administration is turning its attention to your kitchen. Sara Burrows, a reporter for the Carolina Journal, reported on the ramifications of the Obama administration’s war on salt, announced recently as a nationwide decade long program by the FDA. I followed up with her on a podcast for Health Care News. Hold your breath for the potential casualties — that’s right, we’re talking about ham and bacon.

Laugh while you can, monkey boy.

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Robin Gibb, the Bee Gees singer, reportedly became enraged when asked to submit to extra security checks at an airport, swore at staff and refused to fly.

And I don’t blame him a bit. This ‘security theater’ is ridiculous. It does absolutely nothing to improve safety; all it does is piss off consumers and allows the bureaucrats to pretend that they’ve Done Something.

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Really, you can’t make this stuff up.

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MICHAEL MULGREW is an affable former Brooklyn vocational-high-school teacher who took over last year as head of New York City’s United Federation of Teachers when his predecessor, Randi Weingarten, moved to Washington to run the national American Federation of Teachers. Over breakfast in March, we talked about a movement spreading across the country to hold public-school teachers accountable by compensating, promoting or even removing them according to the results they produce in class, as measured in part by student test scores. Mulgrew’s 165-page union contract takes the opposite approach. It not only specifies everything that teachers will do and will not do during a six-hour-57 ½-minute workday but also requires that teachers be paid based on how long they have been on the job. Once they’ve been teaching for three years and judged satisfactory in a process that invariably judges all but a few of them satisfactory, they are ensured lifetime tenure.

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The IRS has posted statistics on taxpayers coming and going from various states in 2008 versus 2007. New York lost 201,570 taxpayers with aggregate adjusted gross income of about $12.3 billion, mostly to Florida, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, California, North Carolina, and Connecticut. Over the same year, the Empire State gained 173,194 taxpayers with aggregate adjusted gross income of about $8.4 billion. The biggest feeder states to New York were New Jersey, foreign countries, Florida, Pennsylvania, and California. On a net basis, the state lost taxpayers, and the ones that left earned more money than the new ones who arrived.

Don’t let the government hit you in the wallet on the way out.

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Wouldn’t mind having one of these.

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From Columbus Dispatch – “Mayor Michael B. Coleman has banned city workers from traveling to Arizona…” and “He agrees with those who want to send a message to the state of Arizona that this is not the American way.” Really?

I wonder if Mayor Coleman lives in a gated community. I wonder if Mayor Coleman has a fence around his residence. I wonder if Mayor Coleman has a lock on his door. Oh the humanity. How un-American of him.

Read it.

It is one thing to have no shame and quite another to have no class. Carly Fiorina apparently has neither.

Never did, actually.

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UC San Diego Professor Ricardo Dominguez spearheaded the March 4 digital protest by calling on demonstrators to visit a webpage that sent a new page request to the UC president’s website every one to six seconds. A separate function automatically sent 404 queries to the server. A “spawn” feature allowed participants to run additional pages in another window, multiplying the strain on the targeted website.

Dominguez, an associate professor in UC San Diego’s visual arts department, said the demonstration was an act of “electronic civil disobedience,” a field he’s been studying for more than a decade and for which he earned tenure in 2006. He said he’s organized or participated in at least 16 similar protests and until now has never been accused of criminal hacking.

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Sometimes reality intrudes into even the rosiest scenario.

As I posted two days ago, the City of Central Falls (whose slogan is “A City With a Bright Future”) filed for receivership, the state equivalent of bankruptcy. Rhode Island law does not allow a municipality to file for federal bankruptcy protection, but provides the state receivership alternative.

First, Central Falls’ “actuarial accrued liability” for pensions exceeds $35 million, but there are only $4 million in assets. The annual contribution required by the actuaries for 2009 was $2.7 million, of which the City actually contributed $0. No funds are available for 2010 contributions.

Second, of the $18 million budget, $6.5 million is for employees with collective bargaining agreements. According to The Providence Journal, “City Solicitor John T. Gannon said the city is in the middle of all its municipal employee union contracts. Mayor Charles D. Moreau has been trying to negotiate concessions, he said, but without success.”

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To lower the fuel consumption of airplanes and ships, it is necessary to reduce their flow resistance, or drag. An innovative paint system makes this possible. This not only lowers costs, it also reduces CO2 emissions.

Not to mention that they look really, really sharp.

Read it.

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New Zealand’s Maori have been accused of trivialising their own culture after a centuries-old welcoming ceremony for visiting dignitaries was given to Mickey Mouse.

Hey, don’t mess with the mouse….

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HSAs are the greatest thing since sliced bread.

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A mafia mobster responsible for one of Italy’s most shocking crimes – dissolving in acid the son of a police informer – has been released from a life prison sentence because he is depressed and has diabetes.

I’m curious as to why this guy is still breathing.

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From a New York Times brief on the departure of a deputy under secretary at the federal department of education: “Mr. Shireman has been seen as such an important figure in the department’s effort to regulate for-profit higher education that the word of his departure, late Monday, caused stocks of the publicly traded higher education companies to soar.” Is this really the kind of country we want? When the news of the departure of not an elected president, not a cabinet secretary, not an under secretary, but a bureacrat with the title of deputy under secretary is enough to affect hundreds of millions of dollars of the valuations of publicly traded companies?

Does the underlying value of the education these companies are providing students change this much, this fast, depending on whether Mr. Shireman is or isn’t the deputy under secretary of education? No, the courses and teachers and requirements are all the same. But the government has the power to affect the perceived value of the education in the marketplace for degree-holders, and it controls the financing levers through student loans. What an amazing illustration of the power of government to destroy value by threatening regulation or to create it by leaving a business alone.

Tyler Cowen is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

How much would the world differ if Harvard reserved a fifth of its entering class for those individuals who showed the most talent for fraud?  I don’t mean that question in a cynical light, it is one genuine way of trying to think about how education adds value to labor market outcomes.

Science Marches On!

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1. Thank God you don’t live in Britain.
2. Without eternal vigilance, it could happen here. Probably once Obama realizes that we don’t have the money to pay for his bright ideas.

Read it.

CNOOC Ltd., the Hong Kong-listed unit of China National Offshore Oil Corp. has partnered with the state-run Turkish Petroleum Corp. (TPAO) to win a contract with Iraq to develop the lucrative Missan oil-field in southern Iraq, marking CNOOC’s first upstream access to Iraqi oil following its two major rivals, CNPC and Sinopec.

According to CNOOC, the 20-year contract includes an increase of Missan’s production capacity to 450,000 barrels per day from the current 100,000 barrels a day within six years. CNOOC has agreed to price every additional barrel of oil produced after capacity rises by 10 percent at US$ 2.30.

CNOOC will be the operator and hold 63.75 percent of the interest. TPAO will have 11.25 percent interest while an Iraqi drilling company will hold the remaining 25 percent.

Our blood, their oil. Wonder whether they even said Thank You? Probably not. No good deed goes unpunished.

None of the Crust care, of course, if they’re even paying attention.

Wafa Sultan draws back the curtain.

A new mosque is now being planned in New York near “Ground Zero,” two blocks from where the World Trade Center used to be. This mosque is headed by an Imam, Feisal Abdul Rauf, founder of the Cordoba Initiative, who proposes to convert the now-shuttered Burlington Coat Factory on Park Place into an Islamic Cultural Center which would contain a mosque.

It is crucial to study the supremacist ideology of Islam and to recognize, for example, that the building of a mosque especially at Ground Zero is viewed by Muslims as a decisive victory over the infidels in Islam’s march to establish its ultimate goal: the submission of all others to Islam and to Sharia Law.

Reminder for the dimwitted: Islam is an oppressive totalitarian ideology with which no co-existence is possible.

Google has their own way of doing things.

We rely on the Lake Wobegon Strategy, which says only hire candidates who are above the mean of your current employees.

Another hiring strategy we use is no hiring manager. Whenever you give project managers responsibility for hiring for their own projects they’ll take the best candidate in the pool, even if that candidate is sub-standard for the company, because every manager wants some help for their project rather than no help. That’s why we do all hiring at the company level, not the project level. First we decide which candidates are above the hiring threshold, and then we decide what projects they can best contribute to.

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And, really, who could blame them?

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Don’t you sleep better at night with those wonderful folks in D.C. watching out for you? It’s not enough that they’ve screwed up the economy in general, and are in the process of further screwing up our medical care. Now, they’re working toward dismantling our defenses against terrorists and regimes that sponsor terrorism.

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In a recent report in the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers from the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit of the University of Cambridge and the Coma Science Group at the University Hospital of Leige describe their use of fMRI technology to scan the brains of patients diagnosed as being in a persistent vegetative state. Surprisingly, they found that a small proportion of the patients could understand and respond to a series of questions even though they showed no outward signs of consciousness. This finding is sure to rewrite the textbook on defining and diagnosing disorders of consciousness.

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Texas doctors are opting out of Medicare at alarming rates, frustrated by reimbursement cuts they say make participation in government-funded care of seniors unaffordable.

Can’t really blame them.

“You do Medicare for God and country because you lose money on it,” said Culpepper, a graduate of the University of Texas Medical School at Houston. “The only way to provide cost-effective care is outside the Medicare system, a system without constant paperwork and headaches and inadequate reimbursement.”

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Everything bad is good for you.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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A council which spent £3 million to build Europe’s first artificial surfing reef has finally admitted that it produces the wrong kind of waves.

Everything government touches gets screwed up. You’d think people would eventually learn that.

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[T]he difference between a Jewish liberal and a Jewish conservative is that when a Jewish liberal walks out of the Holocaust Museum, he feels, “This shows why we need to have more tolerance and multiculturalism.” The Jewish conservative feels, “We should have killed a lot more Nazis, and sooner.”

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A 60-year-old lawyer ripped a Muslim woman’s Islamic veil off in a row in a clothing shop in what police say is France’s first case of “burka rage”.

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For years the major question regarding China has been whether it will embrace the post–World War II order. The answer is no.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

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So obviously to fix the problem we need more laws and regulations, right? Oh, wait….

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Time-shares for the Apocalypse?

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Sounds like a win-win.