. brbrCopyright 1981-(current year) Muze Inc. For personal non-commercial use only. All rights reserved

One of John Ford's most cherished projects, THE QUIET MAN took years to finance but became one of his greatest box-office successes and an enduringly beloved classic. John Wayne stars as Sean Thornton, a retired American boxing champion trying to put tragedy behind him by returning to Innisfree, the bucolic Irish village of his birth. He purchases his birthplace from its current owner, enraging the wealthy and bellicose Red Will Danaher (Victor McLaglen), who had designs on the property. On arriving at his cottage, Thornton finds it being swept out by Mary Kate Danaher (Maureen O'Hara), a redheaded vision from whom he steals a not completely unwelcome kiss. After engaging in a subterfuge involving a horse race, some of the locals manage to get the disgruntled Red Will to allow his sister to be courted by the American. But the courtship ritual of the village is only the first of many local practices that the bewildered Thornton must endure if he is to have Mary Kate. Wayne gives a surprisingly nuanced performance as the fish out of water, and he is perfectly matched with the radiantly rambunctious O'Hara. The rest of the cast is splendid as well, and the lush color photography garnered an Academy Award for Winston Hoch. John Ford also won an Oscar for his directing, and it's impossible not to be charmed by the artistry with which he weaves his rollicking, robust tale.

After catching his mother and her boyfriend "in flagrante delicto" and dispatching both of them with a farm implement known as a sling blade, a simpleminded 11-year-old boy is sent to a mental hospital where he spends the next 25 years. Upon his release, the emotionally and mentally stunted man-child returns to his Arkansas hometown and takes a job in a local garage, only to have the past inexorably repeat itself. An indie-film triumph, adapted by star-writer-director Thornton from his 1993 short, "Some Folks Call It a Sling Blade." Academy Award Nominations: 2, including Best Actor--Billy Bob Thornton. Academy Awards: Best Adapted Screenplay.

Darby O'Gill (Albert Sharpe) is a man with the Irish gift of gab who finds himself face-to-face with the magical little people, the leprechauns, in an underestimated Disney classic. Unexpectedly, one of the old storyteller's tall tales comes true when he captures the King of the Leprechauns, who must grant him three wishes. Unfortunately, all the wishes backfire in amusing, and sometimes frightening, ways. This classic family film features the era's cutting edge special effects and beautiful Irish scenery.

An easy-going father's life is suddenly turned upside down when his car hits a real-life bigfoot. Thinking it's dead, they bring it home only to find that it is quite alive. Trying to hide their furry friend as they race to get him back to his natural environment isn't so easy. Academy Award Nominations: Best Makeup.

Splinter, the rat ninja master is kidnapped by the evil Shredder and his gang of hoodlums. The green teens with the help of an ambitious reporter embark on a perilous journey through the city streets and sewers to save him.

. brbrCopyright 1981-(current year) Muze Inc. For personal non-commercial use only. All rights reserved

The world's favorite western/sci-fi/comedy/action cult hit rides again Here on 8 discs is the complete series about Brisco (Bruce Campbell), a tough-as-rawhide cowpoke, debonair ladies' man and Harvard-educated smarty-britches who roams from Frisco to Jalisco in pursuit of outlaws who killed his father...and in search of a mysterious orb possessing out-of-this world powers. Hot lead and cool anachronisms await Brisco as he and his sidekicks - including Comet, the intellectual equine who doesn't know he's a horse - fight for justice in the way, way, way-out West. Put your boots in your stirrups, your tongue in your cheek and join the fun. Let's play cowboys and aliens. brbrCopyright 1981-(current year) Muze Inc. For personal non-commercial use only. All rights reserved

LITTLE BIG MAN was significant when it was made because of its editing, which was still being explored in Hollywood at the time as a vehicle for innovative, simple storytelling.

A broken bone turns into a lucky break for a twelve-year-old Little Leaguer when his healed arm is capable of delivering a 100 m.p.h. fast pitch Soon the pint-sized dreamer is the Chicago Cubs' new star, and his last-place team is headed for victory.

The fourth entry in the Resident Evil universe not only takes players out of the country on a recovery mission but also into the arms of a whole new enemy.

When one man is not enough, it will take an army of two to fight through war and a conspiracy so vast it threatens the entire world.

In Final Fantasy XIII, players will embark on a journey through the cityworld of Cocoon and the outerworld of Pulse, encountering and fighting alongside a diverse group of allies.

God of War III puts Kratos at the center of the carnage and destruction as he seeks revenge against the Gods who have betrayed him.

This New Super Mario Bros. is a throwback to the style of the original Super Mario Bros. and allows four players to play the game together.

In Battlefield: Bad Company 2, the Bad Company crew again find themselves in the heart of the action, where they must use every weapon and vehicle at their disposal to survive.

A survival horror game that brings new meaning to the phrase "retail hell."

RPG set 200 years in the future in an epic universe, in a vast galactic community in danger of being conquered by a legendary agent gone rogue.

Experience the excitement of the lanes with AMF Bowling: Pinbusters Take on the challenge alone in single-player mode or strike up competition with up to three of your friends in multiplayer mode.

Packing tons of party games in one box Game Party 3 features 19 different game options including eight new party games like Billiards, Bocce Ball, Racquetball and more.

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suraj.sun tips a report up at CNet which begins: "Browser makers, grappling with outmoded technology and a vision to rebuild the Web as a foundation for applications, have begun converging on a seemingly basic but very important element of cloud computing. That ability is called local storage, and the new mechanism is called Indexed DB. Indexed DB, proposed by Oracle and initially called WebSimpleDB, is largely just a prototype at this stage, not something Web programmers can use yet. But already it's won endorsements from Microsoft, Mozilla, and Google, and together, Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Chrome account for more than 90 percent of the usage on the Net today. 'Indexed DB is interesting to both Firefox and Microsoft, so if we get to the point where we prototype it and want to ship it, it will have very wide availability,' said Chris Blizzard, director of evangelism for Mozilla. ... Microsoft publicly endorsed Indexed DB on its IE blog: 'Together with Mozilla, we're excited about a new design for local storage called Indexed DB. We think this is a great solution for the Web,' said program manager Adrian Bateman." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes "David Cummings, a programmer who worked on the Mars Pathfinder project, has written an interesting editorial in the L.A. Times encouraging Toyota to drop claims of software infallibility in their recent acceleration problems. He argues that embedded systems developers must program more defensively, and that companies should stop relying on software for safety. Quoting: 'If Toyota has indeed tested its software as thoroughly as it says without finding any bugs, my response is simple: Keep trying. Find new ways to instrument the software, and come up with more creative tests. The odds are that there are still bugs in the code, which may or may not be related to unintended acceleration. Until these bugs are identified, how can you be certain they are not related to sudden acceleration?'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Lanxon writes "Robots of the future will be capable of learning more complex behaviors than ever before if a new, pan-European research project succeeds in its goal of developing the world's first architecture for advanced robotic motor skills, reports Wired. If successful, the four-year AMARSi (Adaptive Modular Architecture for Rich Motor Skills) project could see a manufacturing world filled with autonomous, intelligent humanoid worker bots that can learn new skills by interacting with their co-workers." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

gregg writes "HM Cancri has been confirmed as a binary system of two white dwarfs orbiting each other so closely that they complete one orbit every 5.4 minutes; they are separated by a mere 8 Earth diameters. 'These are the burnt-out cinders of stars such as our Sun, and contain a highly condensed form of helium, carbon and oxygen. The two white dwarfs in HM Cancri are so close together that mass is flowing from one star to the other. HM Cancri was first noticed as an X-ray source in 1999, showing a 5.4 minutes periodicity, but for a long time it has remained unclear whether this period also indicated the actual orbital period of the system. It was so short that astronomers were reluctant to accept the possibility without solid proof. '" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hugh Pickens writes "The Associated Press reports that the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers has deferred a decision until June on whether to create a '.xxx' Internet suffix as an online red-light district, beginning a 70-day process of consultations on a domain that could help parents block access to adult sites. ICM Registry LLC first proposed the '.xxx' domain in 2000, and ICANN has rejected it three times already since then, but an outside panel last month questioned the board's latest rejection in 2007, prompting the board to reopen the bid. Backers of '.xxx' have billed the proposal as a way for the adult-entertainment industry to clean up its act, though some adult sites worry that governments would wind up mandating the use of '.xxx' and that sites with the '.xxx' suffix could easily be blocked by government web filters in the future. 'I am very concerned and fearful of censoring adult material that should be made available for adults. It scares the hell out of me,' says Malcolm Day, head of AdultShop.com, adding that if adult websites weren't allowed to have '.com' domains and could only register under the '.xxx' address, then 'many governments (across the world) would try to block them.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "PJ of Groklaw has found some really interesting documents coming out of the never-ending SCO trial. Specifically, in SCO v. Novell, SCO doesn't want the jury to find out about the email Blake Stowell (then a PR guy for SCO) sent to Maureen O'Gara that asked her to 'send a jab PJ's way.' For those who don't remember that far back in the SCO saga, the 'jab' was when O'Gara wrote an inaccurate, rambling and irrelevant 'exposé' on PJ which got O'Gara fired for violating journalistic ethics after angry readers complained to the publisher — an act which caused Ms. O'Gara to tell SCO, 'I want war pay.' For those wondering how they can keep going after that final judgment against SCO over a year ago, it's hard to do the saga justice without glossing over everything, but the short version is that SCO ran to bankruptcy after they were mostly dead, but before becoming completely dead. That automatically stopped all the cases against SCO due to standard bankruptcy court rules, then SCO effectively re-litigated a bunch of issues via bankruptcy court rules. Currently, they're accusing Novell of 'slander of title' over copyrights that two different courts have ruled SCO does not own, and we're waiting to see if a jury will reach the same conclusion. They're also trying to use the company's lawsuits as assets and to sell them to various SCO insiders so that the legal wranglings can continue even if nothing is left of SCO. From the very start, SCO has always been the type to fight dirty." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

holmesfsf writes "Creeped out by the Lower Merion School District's remote monitoring of students? Check out the Free Software Foundation's response to the laptop spying scandal and help build a wiki listing of school districts that provide students with laptops, so that the FSF can campaign against mandatory, proprietary laptops." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Barence writes "Beneath the web pages indexed by Google lies an online world that few know exists. It's a realm of huge, untapped reserves of valuable information containing sprawling databases, hidden websites and murky forums. It's a world where academics and researchers might find the data required to solve some of mankind's biggest problems, but also where criminal syndicates operate, and terrorist handbooks and child pornography are freely distributed. Interested? You're not alone. The deep web and its 'darknets' are a new battleground for those who want to uphold the right to privacy online, and those who feel that rights need to be sacrificed for the safety of society. The deep web is also the new frontier for those who want to rival Google in the field of search." The melodrama is tempered, though: "The deep web isn’t half as strange or sinister as it sounds. In computer-science speak, it refers to those portions of the web that, for whatever reason, have been invisible to conventional search engines such as Google." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MMBK writes "Dennis Chamberland is one of the world's preeminent aquanauts. He's worked with NASA to develop living habitats and underwater plant growth labs, among other cool things. His next goal is establishing the world's first permanent underwater colony. This video gets to the heart of his project, literally and figuratively, as most is shot in his underwater habitat, Atlantica, off the coast of Key Largo, FL. The coolest part might be the moon pool, the room you swim into underwater." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

superapecommando writes "GCHQ lost 35 laptops in one year, potentially containing highly sensitive data. The UK's electronic spy centre was today lambasted by MPs for having a 'cavalier' attitude to data security. The centre is responsible for tracking the electronic communications of terrorists. In a new report, the Commons Intelligence and Security Committee expressed concern that GCHQ appeared to be entirely unaware whether or not the computers, lost in 2008, contained top secret information on people posing an imminent security threat to the country." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In this week's Summary Judgment, Mark Jordan Legan sums up what critics are saying about the big weekend movies: Green Zone, Remember Me, and She's Out of My League.

[more ...] ]]>

[more ...] United States - Gmail - State visit - Vice president - Complete Bidenisms]]>

[more ...] Energy - Technology - Conservation - Business - Organizations]]>

[more ...] Woody Allen - Annie Hall - Robert Byrd - Republican - Marshall McLuhan]]>

[more ...] Eric Massa - Glenn Beck - United States - Larry King - United States Congress]]>

[more ...] NASCAR - Carl Edwards - Brad Keselowski - Atlanta - sport]]>

[more ...] Slate - White House - Health care - United States - Politics]]>

[more ...] Mother - Bong Joon-ho - Film - Rube Goldberg machine - Joan Crawford]]>

[more ...] Elmo - Wine - Limbo Rock - Chubby Checker - Total Wine & More]]>

TechCrunch's most-discussed stories, 1/31/2010Well, on this past Wednesday, Jan. 28, Apple finally unveiled its long-rumored tablet computer - the iPad. Needless to say, any Apple innovation is discussed to death on the intertubes, and the iPad is...

© Heather Powazek ChampYes, the internet is not a dump truck, it's a series of tubes. Or whatever. One of the benefits of this "series of tubes" is access to folks/stuff the un-internet would never present. Thanks to Google or whatever,...

Here are the headlines: Google's mobile hopes go beyond Nexus One WSJ: Apple tablet shipping in March Microsoft sets Office 2010 pricing Three links - all on CNet.com - about stuff that happened today/yesterday (Google's phone; Office 2010...

One item I just forgot to mention in my 2010 Prognostications entry: 2010 will be the year of mobile (hardware/software/start-ups). Yes, the iPhone started the real mobile craze, and this was in 2007(?); last year saw the introduction of other...

Ah, that time of the year - time to see how well I predicted events for this year (2009), and then onto prognostications for 2010. First, how'd I do last year?: Yahoo! will significantly change its direction, and make search deal with...

I dunno, I think this is this simplest, cleanest explanation about the way SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is not worth paying for, much less endorsing: Search Engine Optimization is not a legitimate form of marketing. It should not be undertaken...

Officially winter; the longest night of year behind us. What bodes for this winter/spring (and so on)? It's been a crazy year (employment, elections, ecommerce, journalism and so on). Bring it on...

The most annoying part of OSX (for me): Whenever I plugin my iPhone or the memory card from my camera,...

Nothing to see here.. and no I'm not dead, just busy!...

We've been doing a lot of phone interviewing at work lately to fill a couple positions. Granted, Connecticut isn't exactly...

Just a few books for the next couple of months All the Mathematics You Missed But Need to Know for...

A new SUV named 'patriot'. No message there!...

My server was hacked last week. It was not a super-smart uber hacker who did it. There isn't enough interesting...

.. well, at least error message translation does, so users don't see this (click on image to see larger): Arrived...

It's hard to believe, but three long years have passed since I purchased my old, trusty powerbook. Three, long, slow...

I have a coworker who sometimes likes to spray air freshener in the office. It really bothers me. I'm sensitive...

While in the process of looking through code to see what I need to change for my current project I...

I haven't written much here recently. And that's really due to a lot of reason, not the last of which is being busy and that we have a wonderful new kitten named Bear: The other issue is that I've becoming increasingly unhappy with my blogging tools, the custom hacks I've added over the years, and the required maintenance and upkeep. So I've decided to give WordPress a try. You can visit my new experimental (likely semi-permanent) blog here: Jeremy Zawodny's...

A few weeks ago, Kathleen and I went on our first cruise together. It was her fifth and my first, so I got to experience a lot of new things. If time allows, I'll try to write about that in the future. But for now, I want to talk about one of our shore excursions. Our first day in port was in Puerto Vallarta. The weather was absolutely perfect: a few scattered clouds, light winds, and about 80 degrees with...

I arrived at the Knoxville, TN airpot a bit ago for my slightly delayed flight back to San Jose via Dallas. Since I finished my book on the flight(s) out, I stopped by one of the shops to do something I rarely do: buy print media. Well, I still buy books now and then. But today I bought a couple of magazines: Disocver and Business Week. I sat in the Ruby Tuesday's at the airport and managed to read a...

Yesterday was a very sad day for us. Barnes, one of our four cats, had to be put to sleep after we took him to the pet hospital because he was having trouble breathing. A bit over a year ago, Barnes was diagnosed with Diabetes and he'd been getting regular insulin injections (2 per day) and vet visits. In fact, his most recent visit (3-4 weeks back) was very good. The doctor was happy with his progress and he generally...

A week ago I decided to finally get serious about putting gearman to use for search indexing. I had been batting the idea around in my head for a long time (too long, really) but figured I should just write the code and see what happens. It took less than a day to get a prototype working in our development environment, but the end result made me very happy. Today, in our production deployment, when a sphinx cluster pulls new...

Marshall Kirkpatrick is reporting that Yahoo! will shut down MyBlogLog next year. Well, color me unsurprised. The service has languished for years. I removed it from my site a long time ago. It made me a little sad to do so, but it was just slowing things down and not really "adding value" as they like to say. It's sad because I was involved in the MyBlogLog acquisition at Yahoo! and believed in what they were doing. I worked to...

In a 10-point press release issued today Oracle has listed a series of "commitments" regarding their acquisition of MySQL by way of acquiring Sun. I am not impressed. As a former employee of a large Internet company (the largest at the time, in fact) that used both Oracle and MySQL, I'm utterly puzzled by this. I can't think of why we should trust Oracle to do right by the users of MySQL--especially the non-paying users. You see, for years Oracle...

I really have no idea what prompted this: This is Rev.Willson and am interested in some of your Barrel. I need the Barrel in the specifications of 55 Gallon Barrel. Blue Plastic.So what will the total cost of the Barrel with the dimensions i gave and i need 100 quantities of the Barrel.So i will like you to go ahead and quote me the total charges of 100 quantities of the Barrel + tax without shipping charges included.Because i will...

I'll be speaking Tuesday night at the San Francisco MySQL Meetup. Here's the blurb from the announcement: Jeremy Zawodny will talk about Craigslist's current use of MySQL, where it's painful, and how things are being re-architected to make the pains go away. This includes hardware changes, sphinx, redis, memcached, and some custom Perl work. Despite not living too far away from the SF MySQL Meetup venue, I'm a little annoyed at myself for never having attended. So this will be...

I've recently been accumulating some MySQL configuration variables that have defaults which have proven to be problematic in a high-volume production environment. The thing they all have in common is a network blip or two can trigger some very undesirable behavior. max_connect_errors If a client is having trouble connecting to MySQL, the server will give up waiting after connect_timeout seconds and increment the counter which tracks the number of connect errors it has seen for the host. Then, when that...

Talks with China over censorship have reached an apparent impasse and Google, the world's largest search engine, is now "99.9 percent" certain to shut its Chinese search engine, the Financial Times reports.

A slew of new tablets are set to hit the market but they won't kill e-readers. Tablets and E Ink-based reading devices are likely to co-exist, targeting different groups of consumers.

What if you could reliably diagnose autism at age 14 months? Findings in a new study could lead to better outcomes for autistic kids because of early intervention.

An FBI report says the amount of reported damages stemming from online fraud has more than doubled to $560 million. And the No. 1 consumer online complaint concerned e-mail scammers posing as the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The MP4-25 offers an innovative solution to the age-old problem of maximizing downforce in the curves and minimizing drag on the straights.

Large earthquakes can shorten pregnant women's gestation period by small but significant amounts, a new study finds.

Twice the screen but half the quality, the Entourage eDGe is a lofty e-reader that falls short in nearly every area.

A new form of motor sport needs a new form of governance, one where the teams have a say in making the rules, settling the disputes and share in the profits.

To settle a privacy lawsuit, Netflix is canceling a second round of its innovative contest to improve its movie recommendations. The lawsuit claims the anonymized user data given to outside researchers put users at risk of being identified.

Chances are, if you have a newer mobile phone, it's a television screen in your pocket. These tiny smartphones are truly smart, and the latest mobiles are connected to the internet and sport a sharp small screen.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's political standing is "perilous" because of divisions within his coalition over efforts to pursue peace with the Palestinians, a senior U.S. official said on Friday.

KABUL (Reuters) - Afghanistan rowed back on Saturday from a total ban on media broadcasts of "disturbing" images from insurgent attacks or live pictures of security operations.

MINGORA, Pakistan (Reuters) - A Taliban suicide bomber targeting security forces killed at least 11 people on Saturday, Pakistani police said, part of a renewed push against the state after one of the biggest security crackdowns in years.

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Shi'ite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki held a wide lead on Saturday in early results from Baghdad, the major prize in a tight election race that Iraqis hope will bring stability after years of sectarian conflict.

SHANGHAI (Reuters) - Talks with China over censorship have reached an apparent impasse and Google, the world's largest search engine, is now "99.9 percent" certain to shut its Chinese search engine, the Financial Times said on Saturday.

DUBLIN (Reuters) - Irish police have released three of the seven people arrested on Tuesday in connection with an alleged plot to murder a Swedish cartoonist over a drawing depicting the Prophet Mohammad with the body of a dog.

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - The Vatican rallied around Pope Benedict on Saturday, dismissing suggestions he had tried to cover up priestly child abuse in Germany.

SAARISELKA, Finland (Reuters) - The foreign ministers of Turkey and Sweden condemned on Saturday a vote in the Swedish parliament that defined the early 20th-century killing of Armenians by Ottoman Turks as genocide.

BOSSASO, Somalia (Reuters) - French navy officers handed over 22 suspected Somali pirates to semi-autonomous Puntland's authorities and they will be arraigned in local courts, officials said on Saturday.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Authorities in Ireland are investigating whether a second American woman was involved in a suspected international plot to kill a Swedish cartoonist for mocking the Prophet Mohammad, The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.

The Pakistan Taliban says it carried out a suicide bombing that killed 13 people one day after twin attacks on a military convoy in Lahore killed 44 people.

Former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was admitted to a hospital in Seoul today for "minor stomach troubles," the state-run Yonhap news agency reported.

Is the Coffee Party on the scale of the Tea Party movement? Saturday is the first big test in attempting to answer that question.

Dozens of tips have poured in after California authorities recently released more than 100 photos of women and children that are believed to have been taken by a serial killer who appeared on the "Dating Game."

A soldier who received the third-highest award for valor after his outpost was attacked by the Taliban has also received a letter of reprimand for his actions leading up to the same battle, according to Army officials.

Corey Haim's death is linked to an "illegal and massive prescription-drug ring," California's attorney general said. The coroner hasn't ruled on a cause of death.

American figure skater Johnny Weir says he doesn't understand why the only ice skating tour in the United States doesn't want him.

Singer and activist Annie Lennox wants the world to know that the HIV virus and the debilitating condition it causes, AIDS, are the leading killers of women of reproductive age in the world.

It's so tiny, you can't see it with the naked eye.

The closures of Statewide Bank in Louisiana and Florida's Old Southern Bank brought the number of bank failures this year to 30, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.

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