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July 24th, 2016.Josef Konsumer, a home-based employee and portfolio manager for ICBC/CiticorpChase, a Chinese-owned multinational investment bank, wakes up to hear his alarm clock go off at 8am, and gets out of bed, his 47-year old body aching from an aggressive personal trainer session from the day before. His morning double espresso with frothed skim milk and mocha is already waiting for him, thanks to his new Korean-made LG RoboCafe, which brews and extracts a perfect crema every time using pre-portioned, mess-free nitrogen-sealed pods imported from Brazil. He considers nudging his wife, Mindy, to get up and make him breakfast,...

* The economy is by far the No. 1 issue on most Americans' minds. Gas prices are a close second. The two issues are intimately related. But the spike in oil prices this year is just the tip of the iceberg. Due to similar developments in supply and demand, electricity prices are set to skyrocket next year. While American oil consumption has grown only 15% since 1973, electricity use has shot up 115%. Right now the U.S. has 760 gigawatts of power to meet consumption. We will need 135 gigawatts of new capacity over the next decade to keep the...

When you buy a new PC today, unless you hunt down a Linux system or you buy a Mac, you're pretty much stuck with Vista. Sad, but true. So, when I had to get a new PC in a hurry, after one of my PCs went to the big bit-ranch in the sky with a fried motherboard, the one I bought, a Dell Inspiron 530S from my local Best Buy came pre-infected with Vista Home Premium. Big deal. It took me less than an hour to install Linux Mint 5 Elyssa R1 on it. As expected, everything on this 2.4GHz...

Quick! What state symbolizes the old petroleum economy? Texas, of course. Now, what state leads the way towards a future of clean, renewable wind energy? Texas again! By early 2008, Texas had installed more than 5,300 megawatts of wind production -- more than twice second place state California -- and had another 2,000 megawatts under production. Why in the name of Sam Houston is the state of Spindletop messing with wind?

You would think it would be simple, but I forget that the concepts of Duty, Honor & Country are dirty words to the left/press. None who have served, well none with more than 4 months in the motor pool, wonder what John McCain proved to us. We know that a man who would refuse to be released ahead of others and allow the enemy a propaganda victory definitely understands and stays true to those three pillars. The clowns on the left toss out the straw man that he learned nothing about foreign policy there. Well I disagree, he learned at...

And to think Microsoft used to be popular with the developer crowd... Not anymore. A recent report from Evans Data shows fewer than one in 10 software developers writing applications for Windows Vista this year. Eight percent. This is perhaps made even worse by the corresponding data that shows 49 percent of developers writing applications for Windows XP. Such appreciation for history is not likely to warm the cockles of Microsoft's heart, especially when Linux is getting lots of love from developers (13 percent writing apps for it this year and 15.5 percent in 2009). The Mac? I don't have...

AUSTIN, Texas — A newly created microbe produces cellulose that can be turned into ethanol and other biofuels, report scientists from The University of Texas at Austin who say the microbe could provide a significant portion of the nation's transportation fuel if production can be scaled up.Along with cellulose, the cyanobacteria developed by Professor R. Malcolm Brown Jr. and Dr. David Nobles Jr. secrete glucose and sucrose. These simple sugars are the major sources used to produce ethanol. "The cyanobacterium is potentially a very inexpensive source for sugars to use for ethanol and designer fuels," says Nobles, a research associate...

A lot of blame has sloshed around for the sub-prime meltdown, from greedy borrowers to greedy mortgage brokers to Alan Greenspan, but if you want the real culprit, it was the repeal of the Glass-Stegall Act. On November 12, 1999, the champagne must have been shooting from the walls at Citigroup, which had worked behind the scenes for over 30 years to get the act overturned. Snip - Snip Robert Rubin was (Clinton's) Secretary of Treasury, which had oversight over Glass-Steagall regulation. Days before he resigned, Glass-Steagall was repealed. Just over a year later, he became chairman of the Citi...

As I'm writing this column for the Financial Post, I am simultaneously editing a page on Wikipedia. I am confident that just about everything I write for my column will be available for you to read. I am equally confident that you will be able to read just about nothing that I write for the page on Wikipedia.

PROVO, Utah — No one really disputes that Chad Hudgens was waterboarded outside a Provo office park last May 29, right before lunch, by his boss. There is also general agreement that Hudgens volunteered for the “team-building exercise,” that he lay on his back with his head downhill, and that co-workers knelt on either side of him, pinning the young sales rep down while their supervisor poured water from a gallon jug over his nose and mouth. And it’s widely acknowledged that the supervisor, Joshua Christopherson, then told the assembled sales team, whose numbers had been lagging: “You saw how...

Huge, perhaps historic, victory for Berlusconi's "Popolo della liberta' " (which translates a bit awkwardly as "the people of liberty;" maybe it's better to call it "the freedom folks"). It's considerably worse than AP lets on. Berlusconi defeated Walter Veltroni's "Democratic Party" by a full 9 points in both the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies. And since the Italian electoral system gives a bonus to the winning side, the margins are very big and stable: 340 to 241 in the Chamber (with another 36 for a couple of small parties), and 167 to 137 in the Senate (with 5...

Some people are still under the delusion that Linux is written by unwashed hackers living in their parents' basements whose only social life is playing D&D and having flame wars over IRC (Internet Relay Chat) about whether vi or EMACS better and debating Picard versus Kirk. Nothing, nothing could be further from the truth. The LF (Linux Foundation) has just released a new report, "Linux Kernel Development: How Fast It is Going, Who is Doing It, What They are Doing, and Who is Sponsoring It." This comprehensive study of the last three years of Linux kernel development, from version 2.6.11...

Who in the *** is Asustek, and why does Microsoft hate them more than any other company in the industry? Why does Apple, Dell and Palm Computing hate them? And why does Intel love them? Taiwan's Asustek -- better known as ASUS -- is one of the most interesting, innovative and fastest-growing companies in technology. At its core, Asustek makes motherboards -- more than any other company. Asustek motherboards are the heart of Sony's PlayStation 2 consoles, Apple MacBooks, Alienware PCs, and some HP computers. But that's not why they're hated. The source of ire is a tiny laptop called...

Last week, a student at Big Spring High School in Newville, Pennsylvania was given detention for using Firefox on a school computer. Quoted below is the key explanation from the official detention writeup: “Today in class [name] had a program launched called Foxfire.exe. I had told [name] to close the program and to resume work but he told me that is was just a different browser and that he was doing his work. I had given him two warnings but he insisted that it was just a ‘better’ browser and he wasn’t doing anything wrong. I had then issued his...

PC system isn't just for 'geeks' anymore Tuesday, November 27, 2007 By Elwin Green, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette At the beginning of November, Wal-Mart gave shoppers a chance to get an early start on their holiday shopping by offering a $199 desktop computer, both in its stores and online at WalMart.com. As desktop machines go, the Everex TC2502 is not particularly powerful, with a 1.5-gigahertz processor, 512 megabytes of RAM, an 80-gigabyte hard drive and no monitor. But consumers judged it powerful enough -- in less than two weeks, the retailer was out of stock. Given the price point, the sellout might...

“Posterizing” the Democrat Party contest: Announcing the finalists By Michelle Malkin • November 25, 2007 07:59 AM Submissions for the michellemalkin.com “posterizing the Democrat Party” photo shop/graphic art contest–parodying the Huffington Post’s “posterizing the modern GOP” campaign–have poured in the past few days. Many of you did clever send-ups of the text-based HuffPo posters designed by “Got Milk” ad guru Rich Silverstein. Many others of you sent your favorite Dem-mocking photoshops. Several of you sent in fresh new, excellent designs. Thanks to everyone who e-mailed/blogged their entries. It was great fun sifting through all of them over the Thanksgiving...

On Easter morning this year, I linked to this article on Iraqi Christians praying for peace: A new wave of explosions and shootings killed or wounded dozens of Iraqis on Easter Sunday as the Christian minority celebrated the holy day, praying that this would be the last year they live through the violence and terrorism gripping their country.Early Sunday, thousands of Christians throughout Iraq went to Easter Mass and some churches were uncommonly full. In recent years, after attacks on dozens of churches, attendance had fallen off dramatically.St. Joseph Chaldean Church in central Baghdad was jammed with more than 1,000...

A little over a week ago, reviews of Asus's Eee PC 701 started to trickle out onto the Internet. Some of the larger publications, like CNet and LAPTOP Magazine got their hands on the unit first, but as it has become more widely available sites like HotHardware and PC Perspective have now put out their own reviews of the Eee PC. The overall verdict is fairly unanimous: the device's keyboard is a bit cramped, but in terms of price, performance, and features the Eee PC hits the trifecta. Indeed, Asus appears to have gotten so many things right with the...

HIDDENITE -- A teller was robbed at gunpoint at a Hiddenite bank Tuesday afternoon. The suspect was dressed from head to toe. The robbery happened around 3:40 p.m. at People’s Bank on N.C. 90 East, five miles outside of Taylorsville. No one was injured. No one has been arrested. Alexander County sheriff’s deputies and Federal Bureau of Investigation agents are investigating the robbery. Deputies say the robber entered the bank, approached the teller and demanded money. The robber pointed a small handgun at the teller. The suspect (deputies have not released the gender) gave the teller a black plastic bag...

The Storm worm botnet has grown so massive and far-reaching that it easily overpowers the world's top supercomputers. That's the latest word from security researchers who are tracking the burgeoning network of Microsoft Windows machines that have been compromised by the virulent Storm worm, which has pounded the Internet non-stop for the past three months. Despite the wide ranging estimates as to the size of the botnet, researchers tend to agree that it's one of the largest zombie grids they've ever seen -- one capable of doing great damage. "In terms of power, the botnet utterly blows the supercomputers away,"...