Man, I've got to get me one of these!  Video taken by a remote-controlled quadracopter over Niagara Falls.  Make sure you expand it to full screen.  Awesome...

You really can't make this stuff up.  Progressives in Minnesota confiscate trash cans and replace them with one quart models.  For Mother Earth and the children, of course.  Seriously.

America leads the way in the solitary confinement of children.  No other country even comes close.  Most of these kids are in jail for drugs or drug-related crimes.  Legalize drugs and they wouldn't be there at all...

Another in Reason's outstanding video series.  Watch this and let me know if you still thing the war on drugs is worth the price we're paying...

After 10 months, the IRS still has his $35,000 – but hasn't even filed any charges.  How have we Americans managed to let such a tyrannical bureaucracy take root?

Sometimes I think some good old-fashioned bureaucrat shaming might do some good.  Anybody up for bringing back the stockade, one with fat cat bureaucrat-sized holes?  Maybe tar-and-feathers, specially formulated with “renewable” tar made from algae?  Or perhaps a scarlet letter (“B” for bureaucrat) tattoo facility?

I'm one of the most creative guys in the world, if there's any truth to this account...

“Ma, ma, where's my pa?”  As any reader of U.S. history knows, sex scandals amongst politicians are nothing new. A particularly famous case became an issue in Democrat Grover Cleveland's campaign for president in 1884.  More is known now than was public contemporaneously, and it doesn't make Cleveland look good.

This scandal played a small role in my early interest in history.  In our U.S. history textbook in sixth grade, there was a brief mention of a scandal that dogged the Cleveland presidential campaign – but no other details.  I was already a frequent library user at that point (though mostly as a source for the science fiction I avidly read), so I went there to see if I could find out some more. 

Within a short time I found several pages on the scandal – and I was well and truly shocked.  My previous exposure to U.S. Presidents was all through the lens of fawning historians, whether on the legendary Washington and Lincoln, or on the Presidents I grew up with: Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy.  Lyndon Johnson had recently become President, after the assassination of Kennedy in 1963.  Reading about the Cleveland scandal was the first time it became clear to me that Presidents were people, too – not the flat, whitewashed figures of then-current textbooks.  This realization that historical figures were interesting, three-dimensional people became one of the reasons I started reading history...

Switch to SSL on your web servers for free, including a free certificate with a recognizable root authority.  The only catch is that its free only for personal use; commercial sites must pay.  The certificate vendor is StartSSL, and there's a nice tutorial on exactly how to do it...

An Estonian startup – AdCash, founded by a French guy, taking advantage of the business-friendly, tech-friendly environment around Tallinn, Estonia.  Another guy I know founded a startup (n.able) that has most of its development facilities in Tallinn, and people I know are part of several other startups there as well. 

It's places like this who are going to eat our (the U.S.'s) lunch on technology innovation when the progressives get done demolishing California.  They've already started...

How many people are in space right now?  A web site that wastes your time by showing you how many people we're wasting our money on by putting them into space.  This is a seriously boring web site...

U.S. geography puzzle: find two points inside the United States such that (1) both points are in the same state, and (2) the straight line segment (shortest great circle) connecting them crosses the largest number of distinct states.

It turns out that there are quite a few such lines that traverse four states (like the Missouri example at right), but only two that traverse five (and one of them uses Washington D.C. as a “state”).  Using the programming language “R”, a programmer going by “ATodd” automated the search, and then wrote an interesting article describing how he did it...

CNN, where they report the progressive narrative instead of the facts.  CNN recently interviewed Iranian President Rouhani, and reported (amongst other things) that he said “whatever criminality they [the Nazis] committed against the Jews, we condemn.”  But Rouhani never said any thing close to that. 

Usually CNN gets away with this kind of cleverly slanted reporting, which we see especially frequently from the Middle East. This time, they got caught – by, of all things, the Iranian house news agency, FARS.  Then today the Wall Street Journal weighed in, confirming the FARS accusations in every respect.

I haven't watched or read CNN for many years now, ever since their accommodation of Saddam Hussein became public knowledge.  I don't trust them to report the truth.  It seems my mistrust is still valid today...

ObamaCare: just leave it alone, it will die all by itself.  So says Daniel Henninger, writing in today's Wall Street Journal.  He wants Republicans to just leave ObamaCare alone, while pushing the alternatives that will be needed after ObamaCare inevitably implodes.  Key passage:

Medicaid is the worst medicine in the United States. It grinds on. Doctors in droves are withdrawing from Medicare. No matter. It all lives on.

An established political idea is like a vampire. Facts, opinions, votes, garlic: Nothing can make it die.

But there is one thing that can kill an established political idea. It will die if the public that embraced it abandons it.

Six months ago, that didn't seem likely. Now it does.

The public's dislike of ObamaCare isn't growing with every new poll for reasons of philosophical attachment to notions of liberty and choice. Fear of ObamaCare is growing because a cascade of news suggests that ObamaCare is an impending catastrophe.

Big labor unions and smaller franchise restaurant owners want out. UPS dropped coverage for employed spouses. Corporations such as Walgreens and IBM are transferring employees or retirees into private insurance exchanges. Because of ObamaCare, the Cleveland Clinic has announced early retirements for staff and possible layoffs. The federal government this week made public its estimate of premium costs for the federal health-care exchanges. It is a morass, revealing the law's underappreciated operational complexity.

But ObamaCare's Achilles' heel is technology. The software glitches are going to drive people insane.

Creating really large software for institutions is hard. Creating big software that can communicate across unrelated institutions is unimaginably hard. ObamaCare's software has to communicate—accurately—across a mind-boggling array of institutions: HHS, the IRS, Medicare, the state-run exchanges, and a whole galaxy of private insurers' and employers' software systems. 

My emphasis above.  My most recent employment experience was developing exactly the type of large-scale software system Henninger is talking about.  In my case, the system reconciled the needs of several hundred major corporations, all with different internal systems and processes – very much like the ObamaCare situation.  I can attest to the complexity and difficulty of getting such systems to work at all, much less to work accurately.

Until the last few days, I hadn't thought much about the IT aspects of ObamaCare – even though I have quite a bit of personal experience with the slow-motion disasters that poorly implemented IT projects can produce.  Yesterday I read Megan McArdle's excellent piece on Bloomberg, and that started me thinking along exactly those lines that Henninger is.  Her point about the crazy-short time frame for the project is particularly well-taken.  My own experience with government “requirements creep” (software engineer lingo for constant incremental changes to the definition of what they're supposed to build – the direct cause of failure for many a project) backs up Megan's assertion that this should have been a 5 to 8 year project, not a 10 month project.

I'm feeling more hopeful about ObamaCare's demise this morning than I have in months.  I think McArdle and Henninger are onto something with the IT issue, and that Henninger is quite likely right that leaving the Democrats to own ObamaCare alone will just end up making them fiddle it to death.  The opposition – which Henninger assumes is Republican, and I'd like to see more Tea Party or libertarian – needs to have a strategy in place to clean up after that ObamaCare debacle.  They need to present an attractive alternative to an electorate thoroughly pissed off by ObamaCare and its spectacular IT failure.

Now if we could just keep the politicians meddling with the requirements (that sounds easy!) and the competent software engineers out of it (that might be hard, if they throw enough money at the problem), this likelihood will become the reality...