Spain has passed from rating 'AAA' to rating 'AA', after Standard & Poor's, the 1st international rating agency (IRA), lowered its assessment of long-term debt; so she did with Greece, Ireland and Portugal. This is the first time that the S&P financial rating drops for Spain in 30 years.

This month I'm conducting some research into web hosting security issues and ran into the aftermath of the German law passed in 2007 banning security research publication. The policy has had the effect of silencing security researchers from that country. While investigating issues in PHP security I came upon the Month of PHP Bugs website and when I attempted to download a proof of concept to illustrate what type of security issues PHP had back in 2007 I got an explanation from security researcher Stefan Esser explaining why he no longer feels comfortable publishing results to the Internet.

Wired reports: "The Justice Department, citing anti-trust and copyright concerns, asked a federal court judge late Friday to reject a controversial settlement that would have allowed Google to cut through knotty copyright issues in order to create the library of the future." The Justice Department's concerns mirror some of the sentiments expressed by Harvard law professor John Palfrey when a seminar last spring took up the settlement.

It is almost becoming a ritual in our house these days. At the end of a long day at work, the wife and I turn on MSNBC and watch, stunned, as Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow and Jon Stewart put on the parade of angry right wing lunatics. We sit, mouths agape, as we see manufactured rage at town halls over something tangential to health care, we see Glenn Beck weeping over something called "oligarhy" and a whole circus of birthers, deathers, truthers, tenthers, and every other sort of "-er" you can think of (except "thinkers").

President Obama is the Democrat's hero. Not only is he the popularly elected president of the United States, but he is also a talented, intelligent, and articulate leader. Since both parties are such big tents, people tend to use the heroes of the party to define it. Who is the hero for the Republican Party? There isn't one.

It turns out an ugly rumor about someone I admire very much -- a rumor even I had accepted as essentially proven -- might not be quite ready for chiseling in stone after all.

There have been many famines throughout history. However, until the era of modern large scale transportation there was never the possibility of universal famine. But now with supertankers and huge container ships it becomes possible to move enormous quantities of food at very little cost per calorie of food, therefore, now it is a question of who has the money to purchase the food who will get to eat it rather than the local person who farmed the food.

I already knew Wolfram|Alpha could do some cool astronomy calculations, like comparing the escape velocities of the Galilean moons. A recent W|A blog post also pointed out that you can calculate the next lunar eclipse.

An article in Time magazine today continues the coverage of the sorry private security situation at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul. With all the on-going and pained debate about getting more civilian help and State personnel on reconstruction teams around Afghanistan, it's a sad statement about State that they can't even fill their security jobs at the Embassy properly and that this is not a new conundrum for them. Private security is State's Achilles' heel.

I try to get my windows professionally cleaned a few times a year
and each time it is a real pain. The cleaners won't give you an idea
of the price until they come out and see your house and the prices
seem to vary so greatly that I've felt the need to have several
companies come out and give an estimate.

Read Older Articles