Incomprehensible!

That's my reaction to the news that Haley Barbour pardoned 208 people, many of them the worst kinds of criminals.  I know enough about Barbour to know that he's no softie on crime, nor is he known to be anything other than an honest man.  I simply cannot comprehend what the hell he was thinking when he decided to pardon these people.  I'm thinking that something like a brain tumor is not completely out of line as an explanation.  I don't know if we'll ever actually get an explanation, but I'd sure like to know how a guy who seemed like such a rock-solid conservative went off the rails like that...

The courts have stopped the pardons, for now at least...

Man, Is Hardware Getting Cheap!

Tiny, powerful, but with low power requirements, we're starting to see some amazing hobbyist hardware appear.  These little computers are powerful enough to let you write applications in a high-level language, and most use Linux as their operating system (meaning you don't have to learn an entirely new environment because you move to new hardware).  For little one-off, just-for-fun kinds of projects a hobbyist might be interested in, these are practically perfect little vehicles.  You might well pay more for the power supply and the enclosure than you do for the computer!