Jon McAlister

There's no doubt that the President of the United States needs a safe vehicle to be transported in. Various assassination attempts prove that case rather easily. President-in-waiting Barack Obama will be getting a brand-new armored "car" that will look like a Cadillac, but will really be based on the positively gigantic medium-duty GMC Topkick chassis. Nobody is quite sure what kind of armament the First Car will be equipped with, but let's just assume that there is plenty, including up to five inches of glass and ceramic ballistics materials. That should make this one heavy vehicle. In fact, a couple of heavy vehicles, as General Motors is likely building multiples so that decoys can be used. With all that weight to move around, we'd expect GM to use a version of its diesel engine (running perhaps on biodiesel? No?) and Allison transmission from its line of heavy-duty trucks. Alternatively, Obama could make a green splash by using GM's 2-Mode hybrid system. Just a thought. - grant via Bookmarklet

"If you think this is a silly story, a waste of your time, shame on you. What the Capitol Hill Baby-Sitting Co-op experienced was a real recession. Its story tells you more about what economic slumps are and why they happen than you will get from reading 500 pages of William Greider and a year's worth of Wall Street Journal editorials. And if you are willing to really wrap your mind around the co-op's story, to play with it and draw out its implications, it will change the way you think about the world." - Jon McAlister via Bookmarklet

A glimpse into Google-speak. It's like this all the time :-P. "That would be like trying to drive down the road of innovation with the parking brake on." - Jon McAlister via Bookmarklet

Does the road of innovation intersect the information superhighway? - Paul Buchheit

"But we're not going to let the prospect of a lengthy legal battle distract us from our core mission." *cough* YouTube acquisition *cough* - Philipp Lenssen

This is a tactic. "We better vote for McCain just to stop Palin in 2012" ;) - Dion Almaer

I think more likely is that she'll take a shot at chair of the RNC... - Jon McAlister

wouldn't that be like putting the last nail in the coffin? - Steven Hodson

A bull in the china shop, reducing the McCain campaign and the Republican Party to farce. - Sean McBride

some spazzy photos of me here - Lilly Irani

Barack Obama cleaning up after himself, and doing pull ups. Lots of great shots here from him from over the last year. - Jon McAlister via Bookmarklet

McCain too http://www.youtube.com/watch?v... - Paul Buchheit

@alice, maybe not the 2002 election, but a roast between Sarko and Séngolène would have been interesting. - James Williams

"Greatest weakness: It's possible I'm a little TOO awesome." - Rebecca Sun

haha - Ross Miller via Bookmarklet

they know Mike..... - amelia arapoff

It really only takes a few passes to get all cities west of Kansas - j1m via Bookmarklet

SIMPLY AWESOME! (And so sorry for the all caps, but I like math and couldn't help myself) - Mike Reynolds

Somebody has too much computing power. - John Lam

248,000 views and climbing ?! - Charlie Anzman

pity you can't vote on these issues they're talking about :-/ just hope that there's a candidate that matches enough of your views. yes, votings good, but it hardly covers these issues independently :-( - immaterial

1,323,315 votes - Matt Cutts

Google claims that its data centers get an average of 1.2 PUE (20% overhead for air conditioning, battery backup, etc.), much lower than the old expected value around 2.0 (100% overhead), and that one of their data centers got 1.15. PUEs are going up in the graph because cooling needs are higher in summer. The EPA expects that with improvements, by 2011 the average data center will reach 1.9, and the very best data centers will get down to 1.2. - Amit Patel

I don't think the crawling/indexing is included in that comparison, but It's still pretty amazing if true. - Sanjeev Singh

Gabe, the switches and routers probably take negligible energy compared to the servers. - Sanjeev Singh

"When you enable Mail Goggles, it will check that you're really sure you want to send that late night Friday email. And what better way to check than by making you solve a few simple math problems after you click send to verify you're in the right state of mind?" - Paul Buchheit via Bookmarklet

Is this for real? - Jamelle

Two problems with this gadget, a) I want to make it trigger on every email, but after you solve the problems successfully, there's a window during which you can send more outgoing emails unchallenged; b) even at max difficulty level 5 the problems take only 15 seconds to solve sober - it seems unlikely that they'd take more than twice as long to solve when drunk - though I will have to verify that experimentally, I guess. - ƃuɐʞ

More of my code being removed :( - Paul Buchheit

You can still do "define:________" - Mike Reynolds

"Update: The feature is back." - j1m

"Now mind you, avoidance is fine if it's, like, on the scale of going out to get a pedicure because you had a bad day. Avoidance is not, however, the best M.O. when it comes to larger issues like, ya know, governance. I mean, sure, I wish we could stimulate the economy in a vibrating chair and, after giving all of the troubled banks a relaxing peppermint soak, use a pumice stone to slough away our national debt, but that's just not how it fucking WORKS." - Jon McAlister via Bookmarklet

"From the Conventions to the First Debate in Three Minutes Slate V recaps everything you need to know about the presidential race from the party conventions through the first debate." - Jon McAlister via Bookmarklet

sadness :( - tony chang

"As a result, the energy used per Google search is minimal. In the time it takes to do a Google search, your own personal computer will use more energy than we will use to answer your query." - Jon McAlister via Bookmarklet

What?! - Josh Jenkins

Being a contrarian is fine, but you've got to be a smart contrarian. If you keep losing chess games after three or four moves, and then out of frustration send the chess pieces flying and refuse to play any more games, you aren't much of a player, contrarian or otherwise. - Sean McBride

hear hear karim - Cee Bee

"C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success. While accidents of history surely helped, it evidently satisfied a need for a system implementation language efficient enough to displace assembly language, yet sufficiently abstract and fluent to describe algorithms and interactions in a wide variety of environments." - Jon McAlister via Bookmarklet

"Yes, OS/2. Our subway runs on OS/2. You're not surprised, are you?" - Jon McAlister via Bookmarklet

hint hint - Alex

quit monkeying around - j1m

"What is happening, I think, is this: religious prejudice is becoming a proxy for racial prejudice. In public at least, it’s not acceptable to express reservations about a candidate’s skin color, so discomfort about race is sublimated into concerns about whether Mr. Obama is sufficiently Christian." - Jon McAlister via Bookmarklet

people do seem to think the difference is significant, for some reason -- as if napalming villages was the ultimate evil, but dropping 1,000 pounds of high explosive in built-up civilian areas is something people routinely do on Sunday afternoons after church service. - Karim

either way the point still stands -- John McCain rained death upon people, dumped his wife, and was caught up in the Keating scandal. Obama has done none of these things, and yet he's the one being demonized. - Karim

"The most ambitious part of the government plan is to create a new entity to purchase impaired assets from financial firms. The process could work as a type of reverse auction, in which the government would buy from the institution that sells its assets for the lowest bid. However, the government may find itself in a quandary: Does it pay more than fair-market value for hard-to-assess distressed assets, putting taxpayers on the hook for any losses? Or does it drive a hard bargain, buying for pennies on the dollar? The latter approach would further hurt financial institutions, since they would have to write down the losses and take additional hits to their balance sheets. The Treasury department, which hasn't commented on specifics about the plan, is expected to propose issuing debt in $50 billion tranches to fund the purchases." - Bret Taylor via Bookmarklet

I wonder how long they intend to do this as well. We have three more year of resets on Alt-A loans. I've been busy emailing Senators and Congresspeople asking them to put the brakes on this coddling of America. - AJ Kohn

The last I had heard is that Senator Pelosi and Senator Reid were encourageing the Deomcrats not to make any rash decisions and that most of the economic decisions would be made post-election - Jonathan Jesse

yeah, sure, just like pelosi and reid handled iraq ... they are enemies of change - Gregory Lent

"But in buying bad loans before banks fail, the Bush administration would be signing up for a financial war of choice. It would spend billions of dollars on the theory that preemption will avert the mass destruction of banks. There are cheaper ways to stabilize the system." - Jon McAlister via Bookmarklet

"opinion has swung behind the radical idea that the government should commit hundreds of billions in taxpayer money to purchasing dud loans from banks that aren't actually insolvent.... This is extremely dangerous." - j1m

"Billions in taxpayer money would be transferred to the shareholders and creditors of banks, and the banks from which the government bought most loans would be subsidized more than their rivals. If the government bought the most from the sickest institutions, it would be slowing the healthy process in which strong players buy up the weak, delaying an eventual recovery....Taxpayers would be spared the experience of wandering into a bad-loan bazaar and being ripped off by every merchant." - j1m

"The government should help not by buying banks' bad loans but by buying equity stakes in the banks themselves." - j1m

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v... - Photonic

Oooh de-duping. Nice! - Jon McAlister

"A reduction of recent state-level polls to a single high-precision snapshot of a Presidential election held today." - Tom Stocky

I clicked this because I thought they were talking about the band. Interesting nonetheless... - Jon McAlister via Bookmarklet