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Embraer ERJ 190
Jet set and Samba
Embraer ERJ 190
Brazilian corporation Embraer's innovative regional jets have enabled it to join the ranks of the world's large aircraft manufacturers. Lufthansa is one of the major airlines to put its money on the latest models of the E-Jet family
Bandeirantes was the nickname given to the adventurers who arrived in Brazil along with the other Portuguese colonialists. Derived from the word bandeira (flag or banner), the bandeirantes were the pioneers who struck out into the interior from the town of São Paulo in the 17th and 18th centuries in search of legendary gold, silver and diamonds. 300 years later, the Brazilians re-coined the word bandeirante as the name of the first aircraft ever developed in their country. A lovingly restored prototype of the two-engine, propeller machine now adorns the entrance to the headquarters of aircraft manufacturer Embraer. This robust, 21-seater plane made its first flight in 1968 and was the foundation stone for aircraft production in this now booming Latin-American threshold economy. The state- owned aircraft manufacturing corporation Empresa Brasileira de Aeronáutica (Embraer) was founded in 1969.
The various versions of the bandeirante have been a stunning success – a good 500 were built. More than 40 years later, Embraer, now a privatized company, is considered a symbol of the new Brazil – successful and self-confident, but unobtrusive. Embraer currently occupies third place in the global league table of manufacturers of passenger jet aircraft – behind Airbus and Boeing. The Brazilian corporation is a specialist in the market for regional aircraft with accommodation for up to 120 passengers. Embraer has delivered a total of around 5000 different types of aircraft since its foundation.
Passengers like the "Samba Birds"
Ultramodern "Samba Birds" are now in service with Lufthansa CityLine and Air Dolomiti. They are popular with passengers, partly for comfort reasons – their leather-upholstered seats in two rows of two offer more legroom and every passenger has either a window or an aisle seat, plus, the hand baggage bins are nice and roomy. "Our customers are over the moon about our Embraer jets," says Michael Kraus, CEO of Lufthansa's Italian subsidiary Air Dolomiti, "partly because they are the first really brand-new aircraft ever to fly for Air Dolomiti." For example, the E195 cuts 15 to 20 minutes off the flight time from Frankfurt to Verona. And that cuts down fuel consumption and CO2 emission too. "The E195 consumes less than four liters per passenger per 100 kilometers; that's about half the figure consumed by our former jets," explains Kraus.
An hour's drive from São Paulo's international airport Guarulhos, the terrain starts to get hilly and the seemingly endless mass of houses forming this city with its 20-million population gives way to rich-green pastureland. It is the neighboring town of São José dos Campos that houses Brazil's aircraft-building expertise in the form of Embraer and a university offering the necessary study courses for upcoming aeronautics engineers. Embraer's managers like to tell visitors that their headquarters plant has an area equivalent to 55 soccer pitches – everyone knows that soccer is the Brazilian criterion for just about everything.
Visitors are taken to a darkened room to learn more about the innovative drive that has gotten Embraer into its present position. Wearing 3-D glasses, they can enjoy a green, pink and blue three-dimensional view of all the details of an E-jet's cabin. "The systems here in our Virtual Reality Center are the same as those used to produce the sci-fi film I, Robot. We use them to show customers what their finished plane is going to look like," explains Product Development Engineer Edgard Souza Jr. This ultramodern viewing facility is a big competitive advantage for Embraer. "It cuts development time to market by a half. That was down to only two years with the E jets," says Embraer Market Researcher Luiz Sergio Chiessi. And it enables the Brazilians to be more innovative than their competitors. "Ever since 1999, we have been able to make a start on a new aircraft development project every single year. That would be unthinkable without our virtual
development facilities," says Chiessi.
The first ethanol-powered aircraft
Embraer's product range also includes executive jets, gliders and military machines. And they have developed the world's first-ever ethanol-powered aircraft, the Ipanema, for use in agriculture. Embraer has not been able to escape the trend toward globalization. The E jet fuselages are assembled at the Latécoère plant in the Airbus capital Toulouse of all places. The assembled fuselages are transported by sea-freight to the Brazilian port of Santos, then onward by flatbed truck over the last 160 kilometers to Embraer.
This evening, another E jet is being handed over to a customer. There's a ceremony attended by the corporation's top brass. It's all pretty informal – with a few speeches and an exchange of gifts, barmen mixing caipirinhas in the hangar to a background of soft samba music. A warm wind wafts through the open hangar doors. "We are all totally motivated here and we're not afraid of working really hard to get results," says Mauro Kern from the Embraer top management, explaining the corporate philosophy. That's exactly how those bandeirantes would have put it 300 years ago.


text:
This project has been temporarily blocked for exceeding its bandwidth thresholdProjects and users who host on SourceForge.net are given web space to augment their communities and interact with their users. In cases where a project or user's web space exceeds pre-determined thresholds, this message will be displayed. This block is typically short lived (10-15 minutes), unless the cause of the bandwidth usage is not mitigated. We recommend that the administrator of the site take action to reduce bandwidth usage. If you feel you are receiving this message erroneously, please contact SourceForge.net Support for assistance. Typically this message is displayed when files that belong in the FRS are uploaded into project web, or someone tried to host some pr0n or w4r3z. SourceForge.net Support is willing and able to assist in resolving the cause of this error.
Hmm, für sowas fehlen noch ein paar Millionen downloads, denke ich

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Allied Veterans trial winds down in Central Florida
Kelly Mathis accused of illegal gambling
SANFORD, Fla. – The trial of a Jacksonville attorney charged with using a veterans group to help build a network of storefront casinos throughout Florida is winding down.
Prosecutors and defense attorneys on Monday haggled over jury instructions at attorney Kelly Mathis' trial in Sanford.
Mathis is charged with more than 100 counts of illegal gambling and possessing slot machines. He is pleading not guilty, claiming he gave legal advice to the Allied Veterans of the World affiliates.
His attorneys also say the network of Internet cafes were legal.
The arrest of Mathis and 56 other defendants earlier this year caused the Florida Legislature to ban Internet cafes and led to the resignation of Lt. Gov. Jennifer Carroll.
Carroll had worked as a consultant for Allied Veterans. She wasn't charged with any crime.
Copyright 2013 by ClickOrlando.com. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.


text: A Qantas jetliner takes off from Sydney Airport in Australia Oct. 31. Rick Rycroft/AP hide caption toggle caption Rick Rycroft/AP The Salt Thanksgiving Abroad: How You Feast When Far From Home November 24, 2011 How do Americans celebrate this national holiday when overseas? We put the question to our Facebook fans. Among the more than 1,200 responses: Turkey with all the fixings plus pasta in Villasanta, Italy; buying a small turkey for $60 in Katmandu, Nepal; and sharing dumplings with Czech friends in Prague.


text:
It's only a matter of time before Californians know if they're being take for a ride, a high-speed ride for sure, but a ride nevertheless.
It's only a matter of time before Californians know if they're being take for a ride, a high-speed ride for sure, but a ride nevertheless.
The California High-Speed Rail Authority this week unanimously approved two major steps toward initial construction of a multi-billion dollar, north-south bullet train system.
It was approved with a "memorandum of understanding" to "blend" the bullet train with commuter service on the San Francisco Peninsula. And a request that state officials sell up to $8.6 billion in voter-approved bonds to begin building the first phase of the system, a segment critics reasonably view as a rail-line to nowhere between Merced and Bakersfield.
That 130-mile stretch will be built using about $3 billion in state bonds and about $3 billion in federal money.
Both steps face court challenges but rail officials argue they are on firm legal ground and are pushing ahead in advance of a legal resolution, including a trial set for May.
Huge questions remain about this whole undertaking, although at least one was answered by Monday's rail authority action: that long-promised two hour and 40 minute train trip between San Francisco and Los Angeles won't happen. Putting a bullet train on a commuter line will slow the trip considerably.
Just how many other long-promised things about this project will eventually go off the tracks remains to be seen.


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As NFL kickers have reached unprecedented accuracy levels, a tweak to the overtime rules makes sense.
In the last NFC Championship game, the New Orleans Saints won the overtime coin toss, cobbled together a modest drive and kicker Garrett Hartley split the goal posts to lift his team to victory over the Minnesota Vikings.
The Saints went on to their first Super Bowl in franchise history, a game they won over the heavily favored Indianapolis Colts.
Due to a new NFL rule announced this week, the kind of sudden death witnessed in the NFC title game will be a thing of the past in high-stakes postseason games.
Beginning next season, if a team wins the coin toss and then kicks a field goal, the other team gets the ball. If their next series ends with another field goal, play continues under the current sudden-death rules.
If the team that wins the coin toss scores a touchdown on their first drive, the game ends.
Team owners voted 28-4 in favor of the rule change.
Not everyone is happy with the change. Some have expressed their desire to stick with the traditional method of deciding a winner when a game goes into overtime.
But in the modern era of professional football, the old way put too much emphasis on the sheer luck of the coin toss. If a team wins the flip, they have a better shot of winning because most kickers are highly accurate these days.
Largely untested Hartley was able to step into the pressure-packed situation and make it look easy – his kick sailed perfectly through the Louisiana Superdome uprights.
Take practically any NFL kicker and put him in the same situation, and more often than not, the same result would occur. Kicking field goals in the NFL is not nearly the adventure it was decades ago.
Many were against the overtime changes in college football a few years back. While it may not be a perfect system for determining a winner, it's certainly better than deciding a game essentially by a coin toss.
The college system lets players breathe a little. It's OK to give up a field goal or a touchdown, as long as it's matched. This creates an exciting environment. It encourages a shootout.
It couldn't hurt for the NFL to experiment with some overtime rule changes. If the new rules go well this year, perhaps it's worth looking into applying the same rules to regular season games.
It may be tough for Saints fans to fathom, but imagine if the Vikings won the coin toss and hit a game-winning field goal without the Saints' high-powered offense ever stepping onto the field of play in overtime.
Especially with a comeback specialist like Brett Favre, surely lots of Vikings fans have wondered "what if."
Michael Tortorich writes for the Weekly Citizen of Gonzales, La.


text:
PLEASE NOTE: These costs are applicable to the 2019-2020 academic year.
Application Fees
- Application fee for Massachusetts Residents: $10 (The application fee is waived for online applicants.)
- Application fee for non-residents: $35
- Application fees are non-refundable
- The application fee is waived when completed online. Find the Bristol online application here.
- Massachusetts Residents (MA)*: $24/credit (Set by the Massachusetts of Higher Education)
- Non-Massachusetts Residents and International Students: $230/credit
- Auditing a course is 50% of tuition
- College Fees**: $182/credit
- Student Support Fee (non-refundable): $37
- Instructional Support Fee***: $9 and up
- Student Health Insurance**** (Fall 2019): $2390.00 year or $1595.00 Spring semester only
- Auditing a course is 50% of college fees and instructional support fee
* Some Rhode Island areas will qualify for Massachusetts Resident in-state tuition and fee rates under the New England Regional Student Program. See Admissions for more details.
** Portion of the College Fee (mandatory charge) is collected from all students and used to pay for general college operations not funded by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. These include, but are not limited to, instructional computer equipment, educational supplies, audiovisual aids, library books, and laboratory supplies.
*** The college also charges an Instructional Support Fee for courses with high technology, materials, or human resource costs. These fees range from $9 and up. Please consult the academic catalog for details on specific courses.
**** Please note that an insurance fee for the academic year is applicable for all students taking nine or more credits who do not have health insurance coverage. Students who have insurance coverage may waive this fee by completing a waiver form.


text: Vote up! 192 UTS Library asked 8 years ago: Do you offer corporate membership? Answer question 1 answer 37336 views Answers Most VotedNewestOldest Corporate membership (ie Vote up! 53 Corporate membership (ie membership for a company rather than an individual) may be available by negotiation, depending on the needs of the organisation. Answer question membership Updated: 21/12/2012 - 09:40 Tweet


text:
Twin Room
Each Twin Room in CheapSleep has 2 single beds and a bed side table with lamp as well as clothes rack
There are multiple electrical outlets and free WiFi.
All twin rooms has a view of the historic wood housing district of Vallila. All are away from the busier streets for extra peace and quiet. The twin rooms, like the rest of the hostel, was renovated in October 2016 and feature relaxed, modern and tasteful design.
Terms & Conditions
Payment can be made with credit cards, debit cards or cash on arrival.
It is also possible to pay with bank transfer (the transfer must be received before arrival, so contact us earlier for details).
CheapSleep offers free buffet breakfast including blueberry porridge with cinnamon and cardamom, cornflakes, muesli, coco pops with milk, coffee, tea and juice. With a small charge, you can upgrade your breakfast with delicious hot sandwiches. Breakfast is served between 7 and 10 every day.
Towels and slippers are available from the reception for an additional fee.
Any guest staying over 17 days in a 30 day period requires the prior written permission of management.
Free cancellation prior to 38 hour prior to 2pm on check-in date. Late cancellation will be charged the value of the 1st night. The same charge applies for guests who do not show up for their reservation.We may use third-party service providers to process your personal information on our behalf for the purposes of this booking. For example, we may share some information about you with these third parties so that they can contact you directly by email (for example: to obtain post stay reviews about your travel experience).


text:
On n/a, Ms. Fernandez was informed by a notice of December 15th 2006 that she was suspected of speeding at n/a on the road n/a in n/a on September 13th 2006 at n/a (art. R413-14 of the road code).
On n/a, she had to deposit €180 to get her non-guilty plea registered by the prosecutor (art.530 of the code of penal procedure).
On January 7th 2008, the applicant appeared in court without being able to get access to the prosecution file of evidence of her case. She was not assisted by a lawyer and wasn't informed when the judgment will be given (art.462 of the code of penal procedure). On n/a, the judge found her guilty of n/a and condemned her to a fine of €135, to administrative cost of €22. Following the condemnation, she automatically lost 1 point out of her 12 points driving license.
On February 18th 2008, she filed an appeal to the supreme court (Cour de cassation) against the judgement. On May 3rd 2010, she was informed that on September 17th 2008 the supreme court ruled her appeal inadmissible (art.605 of the code of penal procedure) for a violation of article 568 of the code of penal.
On October 29th 2010, she filed an application to the ECHR on the ground that the lack of access to the prosecution file of evidence was a violation of article 6-1 of the Convention. She added that the lack of formal notification of the judgment of Montpellier was a violation of article 6-1 and 13, and that the requirement to file in person her appeal to the supreme court, was a violation of article 6,13 and 14 of the Convention. She stated that the prosecutor was not required to file in person his appeal.
On January 17th 2012, the 5th section of the Court ruled her application inadmissible on the surprising ground that because the administrative judge Fernandez was condemned to a fine of €135, "the applicant has not suffered significant disadvantage regarding her right to a fair trial" (art.35-3-b) of the Convention).
On October 6th 2011, the 5th section of the Court ruled in judgment Wagner v. Luxembourg (43490/08) that the allegation of violation of article 6-1 during proceedings following which the applicant lost 4 points out of his 12 points driving license, was admissible (§25).
On March 18th 1997, the Court found in judgment Foucher v. France (22209/93) that the lack of access of the accused to the prosecution file of evidence was a violation of article 6-1 and 6-3 of the Convention. In this case, Mr. Foucher was condemned to a fine of €457 for insults.


text:
For the record, he was wearing a Christian Ehrhoff shirtsey.
As one of the indelible faces of the riots, this young man's jubilation was numbered from the beginning. It was just a matter of time before Vancouverite justice prevailed. It did in a big way earlier today with one firebombing moron, and today the publicity caught up with this high school student who took part in smashing the windows at the Bank of Montreal branch at Homer and Georgia. We don't have to name him, since it's all over the internet. And scuttlebutt from classmates says he was arrested at school yesterday, on the last day of classes.
From the very beginning the caption on the Getty Images photo indicated he was taking part in the destruction, rather than defending the bank against other rioters. And to erase any doubt, now video emerges of him in action. (He enters the scene at the 0:44 mark.)
Meanwhile, the good apples have been helping clean up Downtown and offering gestures like this: covering a police car with Post-It Notes expressing their apologies and thanks. You can read a few of them here.
Thanks for joining us for a strange week. Hickey's your man tomorrow.


text:
French Politicians Worry That Free Creative Commons Works Devalue 'Legal' Offers
from the what??? dept
As Techdirt noted last year, France has a regrettable habit of dreaming up really bad ideas when it comes to the Internet, most famously with the three-strikes scheme, now known there by the name of the body the oversees it -- Hadopi. Guillaume Champeau points us to a piece in the French newspaper Libération, which contains yet more appalling possibilities (original in French).
The article concerns Pierre Lescure and his team, who have been charged by the French government with coming up with ways to help the world of culture in France adapt to the Internet economy. One idea, kindly suggested by the French recording industry, is to replace Hadopi's court procedures for those accused of unauthorized file sharing with an automatic fine of 140 euros after three strikes. That is, from being guilty until proven innocent, as now, under the proposed scheme those accused would simply be found guilty without any further discussion. And then there's this:
In parallel, no de-penalization for non-commercial sharing, but a desire to "increase the value" of free licences of the Creative Commons kind. The Lescure team believes that letting works circulate freely (as they do now...) would hinder the development of legal offers, particularly VOD [Video On Demand].
Yes, apparently the way to "increase the value" is to no longer allow Creative Commons content to "circulate freely" because it might compete with other business models. Lescure has now taken to Twitter (kudos that at least he's on Twitter) to state that what was reported bears "almost no relation to what we are preparing." But he doesn't explain what exactly they are planning, nor does he deny that their plans involve Creative Commons licenses.
We shall have to wait to see what he has in mind. But it would be hard to find a better symbol of the French establishment's attitude to the Internet and its extraordinary new possibilities than trying to make people pay for works that could be shared freely (because their creators want that), on the grounds that it might hinder a service that turns the Net into television.
Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+
Filed Under: creative commons, devalue, france, free, hadopi


text:
No matter how many times I hear it, I still can't think past:
"Space may be the final frontier
But its made in a Hollywood basement"
No doubt others will now beat it though.
No matter how many times I hear it, I still can't think past:
"Space may be the final frontier
But its made in a Hollywood basement"
No doubt others will now beat it though.
marc71178 - President and founding member of AAAS - we don't only appreciate when he does well, but also when he's not quite so good!
Anyone want to join the Society?
Beware the evils of Kit-Kats - they're immoral apparently.
An insane coincidence! I was thinking how clever that lyric was about an hour ago!.. I don't usually listen to the chilli's..
You can pick so many from that song..
"A teenage bride with a baby inside, getting high on information
and buy me a star on the boulevard, thats Californication.."
marc, i think that lyric is indeed very clever
"Matt Damon"
Yeah, Californication has got some great lyrics.
One of my favourite lyrics would be:
"Hush little baby, don't say a word
And never mind that noise you heard
It's just the beast under your bed
In your closet, in your head"
I don't know if you'd call it clever but its good..
A little while ago I was thinking about some great lyrics around, and now I've forgotten them all
For cleverest lyrics, I nominate Madvillain - Great Day...a link since you have to listen/read to all the lyrics to really 'get' it.
Whooooop to ES, mad song, though I`m a tad sick of it now.Originally Posted by Sir Redman
"Shake their spears with Shakespeare."
I`ll certainly post more up later. SOAD have some mad ones about war.
Jesus brings life eternal
"Bounce pogo, pogo, pogo, pogo, pogo, pogo..."
Hang on, thats more stupid than clever..
Last edited by benchmark00; 02-06-2005 at 08:28 AM.
Parmi | #1 draft pick | Jake King is **** | Big Bash League tipping champion of the universeCome and Paint Turtle
"If songs could kill
I'd spell out your name"
Tom McRae - Boy With The Bubblegun
once you think you're out they pull you back in
Originally Posted by jason diakite
Every at the drive in/the mars volta song is pretty wild literacy wise.
but my personal faves are from Park:
Park - Which Wrist First
"Don't let me shut this light
For the killer in my head
Needs a signal to prove that I am not dead just yet
But burned out and going blue
The salt is set with open wounds
Doused and fresh
Just act as if I'm gone
And decaying in my room
I hold a shadow as close as a silver ghost
Grasps onto an image known to him as you
At this fast rate, I'll be lucky if I'm dead by morning
Tonight I'm spent
Pretend this razor is your lips
You're finding ways to kiss
(Ways to kiss me)
Deeply on the wrists
I loved what I had
It's impossible to get it back"
Park - Pomona For Empusa
"Are these lungs desperatley filled by someone
starving and sad,
because you know your lover,
won't be back?
Are these words useless and absurd?
Such a sight of this,
makes the harbor and the water sick.
I understand your reasons,
for this awkward dance.
I'd leave me, too,
if I thought I had the slightest chance.
I cry loud to these sheets they grip back tight.
Fall asleep to the sound of my own life.
If I drink this bottle fast enough,
I might get lucky and won't wake up. "
I pity you, fool.Originally Posted by benchmark00
"Stupid people do stupid things, smart people out-smart each other."
...that`s pretty cool.
I had a date
It didnt go well
I wonder if its
The way that I smell?
Well I took a shower
but sometimes you just cant tell
What will turn some people
Nerds Night In by The Previous
Originally Posted by SupaFreak2005Originally Posted by steds
Nice oneOriginally Posted by KennyD
Haha... now sing those words to the tune of Skater Boy.Originally Posted by KennyD
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text:
Kit with profile design
The ZEISS CARFIT CMP series lets you create measuring fixtures yourself. The base for this series forms hard-coated grid plates. The kit principle of the ZEISS CARFIT CMP series enables measuring fixtures to be made quickly and cost-effectively with short reaction times. The ZEISS CARFIT CMP model is best suited to larger components that have to be vertically mounted and measured.
All ZEISS CARFIT standard components are modular, compatible with each other and can be delivered on short notice.
The kits are multifunctional, reusable and expandable. Flexible configurations are supported through setup instructions and an electronic catalog.


text:
| >
** Voucher validity subject to product availability. Enter the offer code at the basket stage of checkout online to receive the offer. Prices and offers subject to change without notice. Only one promotion code may be used per transaction.
© Shop-4 2016 copyright reserved. About us Contact us Online prices are constantly changing. Always check the retailer's current price before ordering.
Shop-4.com Cookies Policy: To give you the best possible experience, this site uses cookies. Using www.shop-4.com means you agree to our use of cookies. We have published an updated privacy policy, which you should read to find out more about the cookies we use. View Policy.


text:
How many of you have ever used (or even know of) the Visual Studio Text Templating Engine?
I mean, T4 templates have been around for quite some years now. The where initially included in Visual Studio 2005 SDK, and they where moved to Visual Studio 2008 core just before releasing it.
What I want to know is if this is really used out there. I mean, why doesn't the VS team invested in a descent minimal editor for the templates? It doesn't even have syntax couloring! I know there are a couple of good T4 editors out there, but as they don't come built in, I tend to think that this is an unknown feature for most developers.
Have you ever used T4 templates in any of your projects? I'm really interested in answers that explain how they created their own T4 to accelerate, automate, or generate artifacts for your project.


text:
Screwdriver Sets
Screwdriver sets are the most common tools used by professionals and DIY enthusiasts. Screwdrivers are hand held devices use to install and uninstalling fasteners or screws. Screwdrivers rely upon the physical strengths of the operator to deliver accurate force when turning clockwise or anti clockwise via screwdriver handle.
Screwdriver set types
We offer a range of screwdriver sets from VDE, Interchangeable, precision and electronic. The different types of screwdriver are primarily down to the drive tip shape required for a specific head type of a given screw. However, we offer a range of screwdrivers that are application specific.
Screwdriver Construction
For each screwdriver in the set they are made of up of three main parts;
The screwdriver handle which is used for gripping has changed material over time and has increased in variety for different applications. The handle is generally shaped to prevent rolling on flat surfaces and can also be ergonomic to improve comfort when gripping. Most commonly the handles are made of a composite of hard plastic such as cellulose acetate and rubber and can be covered in a soft material such as a thermoplastic rubber to improve grip.
Shaft or shank
The screwdriver shaft or shank is commonly made of strong steel to ensure that bending or twisting deformation does not occur when applying force. The shaft is rounded or has a hexagonal shape so that a spanner or wrench can be used to apply increased torque. The shaft is generally different colouration and material to the drive tip which can be interchangeable.
Drive tip
The drive tip can be an integrated part of the shank if it is not detachable or it can be an interchangeable part known as a driver bit similar to drill bits. A cordless drill can be used as an electric screwdriver in this capacity. Drive tips can be made in a variety of metals and alloys such as:
- Titanium
- Stainless steel
- Tool grade steel or S2
- High speed steel or HSS
- Chromium-vanadium-molybdenum or CVM tool steel
What should I avoid doing?
Do not hold the screw in one hand while using the screwdriver. If the screwdriver slips out of the slot you run the risk of serious hand injury.
Never use an incorrect screwdriver on screws, you will damage the head of the screw making the task of removal even greater.
Are they available separately?
Direct replacement screwdrivers are available for certain brands, please browse our Screwdrivers.
Application Information
Screwdrivers and Screwdriver Sets are used by electricians, engineers and mechanics, they are a vital component during assembly of furniture, mechanical repair or general maintenance around the home.


text: I'm hearing reports around the league that players have taken it upon themselves to start "unorganized" workouts. I haven't heard anything about any of our Steelers doing this but I know that some of the Carolina Panthers met at a local high school today and began workouts. I wonder if this is a sign that the players think the lockout will be resolved or are they just trying to stay in top physical condition lockout or not? What do you guys think?


text:
Americans are still trying to digest the news that one of the country�s iconic sports events, the Boston Marathon, was the target of an apparent terrorist attack that killed at least three people and injured over 170.
Americans are still trying to digest the news that one of the country�s iconic sports events, the Boston Marathon, was the target of an apparent terrorist attack that killed at least three people and injured over 170.
The terrible toll of the dead and injured included an 8-year-old boy and at least 17 people still in critical condition as of Tuesday afternoon.
The nation hasn�t endured this type of terrorist attack on a public location since the horrific attacks on New York City�s Twin Towers and the Pentagon in 2001. Army psychiatrist Nidal Hassan, motivated by religious and ideological extremism, killed 13 soldiers and wounded 32 at Fort Hood, Texas, in 2009; however, his actions have not been classified as a terrorist attack by the current administration.
There were several near-misses during this period that highlighted a continuing danger for the American people.
Investigators are probing for answers, but it appears that terrorism has hit home again � on a day when thousands of people gathered in Boston for the running of the city�s famous marathon. When a fire broke out at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, located about three miles from the scene of the bombing, authorities weren�t sure whether there was a connection to the attack on the marathon. No one was hurt at the library, but the fire increased tensions in a city already shaken by the bombings on the marathon route. Contrary to earlier reports, authorities have disclosed that there were only two explosive devices.
More than 20,000 runners participate in the Boston Marathon and tens of thousands gather along the route to cheer the runners. Runners from all over the world take on the famous course. The 2013 marathon drew around 400 runners from North Carolina.
With runners streaming toward the finish line about 2:50 p.m. Monday, two loud explosions unleashed carnage and chaos. In the midst of the bloodshed, video of the scene showed runners and race volunteers rushing to aid the injured. That courageous impulse to run toward the danger may have saved the lives of some of the injured runners and spectators, keeping a deadly attack from taking an even greater toll. In the modern age of terrorism, it can be a disturbingly small world.
It�s still too early to know what motivated the Boston bombing or whether it was an isolated attack or possibly part of a larger wave of planned assaults on U.S. targets. The White House, the FBI and state and local authorities all over the country are taking precautions. If there is one thing the attack makes clear, it�s that Americans cannot afford to minimize the dangers of terrorist attacks.
In the days ahead, the search for answers will proceed and the perpetrator or perpetrators must feel the full weight of justice.


text:
Think about your own worldview to decide if it is free of supernatural or mystical deities, forces, and entities. If you decide that you fit the description above, then you are, by definition, a bright!
Website: http://www.the-brights.net/
Members: 629
Latest Activity: Apr 1, 2017
Started by Mark D. Zima. Last reply by Bill_Hicks_Worshipper Aug 21, 2014. 4 Replies 0 Likes
On my YouTube channel, I am beginning a series of videos exploring the hypothesis that the visions, hyper-religiosity, dramatic religious conversion, and perhaps even hypo-sexuality, of the Apostle…Continue
Tags: hyper-religiosity, epilepsy, hypo-sexuality, religiosity, visions
Started by MarkFL. Last reply by Reason Being Feb 14, 2012. 92 Replies 3 Likes
By definition I am a bright. However, I hate the name. Why are Brights not naturalists, which is more descriptive, accurate, and less cocky sounding. Where does the term come from and why do people…Continue
Started by Limber Lightfoot. Last reply by House Oct 27, 2011. 21 Replies 0 Likes
Hi All, Am I the only person who recognises the logo for this group as being very similar to the Egyptian Amarna period artistic representations of the sun god, the aten, around 1350BC. …Continue
Started by Apeman Jim. Last reply by Charles Alexander Zorn Oct 28, 2010. 4 Replies 0 Likes
John Stewart is hosting a rally at the Capital Mall. I think it will be a lot of fun! Continue
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The Brights Movement was featured in a Sacramento local paper. There is a ton of good stuff in the article!<b>Feature Story</b> (link)The Bright sideIs atheism going mainstream? One…Continue
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Thar be (a) Var! (Credit: NASA/Space Telescope Inst).
Its hard to imagine that less than a century ago, our home galaxy was thought to be the extent of the universe. That all changed the moment that Edwin Hubble wrote his famous Var! remark across an image of the Andromeda Nebula, M31. The intrinsic brightness of the star dubbed V1 enabled astronomers to get the first fix on the distant smudge, and they were floored by what they had found; clearly, M31 was an island universe onto its own.
Fast forward to today. Researchers at the Hubble Space telescope institute have recently partnered with the American Association of Variable Star Observers to compile new images and a new light curve of this famous Cepheid variable star. The results were unveiled at the recent meeting of the American Astronomical Society held in Boston, Massachusetts this past week. The project was part of the Space Telescope Institutes Hubble Heritage project.
Why study old variables? This project represents a refinement of one of the most crucial cosmic standard candles at cosmological distances. Its also interesting to note that backyard observers have the capabilities that only a few years ago were the realm of professionals. Seriously, Ive seen some mind-blowing backyard images of M51 and its ilk that scant years ago that even professional technology couldnt touch. The capability is out there, man why not put that backyard light bucket to scientific use; join the AAVSO and the quest for cosmological knowledge!


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Author's note: Before anyone jumps all over me, I use "brown" here as a general term for people of African or indigenous American descent, not solely South Asians or Central Americans, though the article discusses issues for all POC travelers, not just the ones with darker skin.
Ah, Madrid.
I had decided that for spring break in 2005, instead of going to Memphis as planned, I'd take a week-long trip to Paris and Madrid instead. After all, in a weird twist of fate, the plane tickets to Europe were only about 100 dollars more than those I had bought to go to the place Elvis and I both called home. I figured as I could speak, read, and understand Spanish and French, I'd be fine. I'd been to Paris before, and loved it, and had heard awesome things about Madrid from my friends, so I thought, "Why not? Just breathe, and take a chance." So I did, though I wasn't exactly prepared for the less than warm reception in one of the liveliest cities in the Iberian Peninsula.
Paris was no problem, possibly due in part to the city's expressed love (read: borderline fetishizing) of black folks (Josephine Baker, anyone?) or the running assumption that I was Moroccan/generally North African and not a black American. Most people just treated me like I was French, before I opened my mouth, of course (despite my perfect French accent, my occasional pause to find vocabulary words from my high school French mental database was a dead give-a-way). No one was rude to me or my friend with whom I went out on occasion (who is half white American, half indigenous Mexican, and clearly "of color").
Madrid, on the other hand, completely did me in.
On a super basic level, I wasn't a big fan of the traditional Spanish food, and, instead, flocked to the numerous Middle Eastern restaurants like water in a desert mirage. And though I was only there for three days, these little hole-in-the-wall, family-run eateries ended up being my surrogate safe havens as walking around on the street proved, well, difficult. I would say the city, overall, was far from receptive. While I understood having a pride in being Spanish, or a Mardileño, to be more specific, what I did not understand was why that translated into racism. I faced constant stares, and I mean constant, many of which were steeped in anger or confusion, despite my more than proper attire (I was not one of those fanny pack-wearing, head buried in a map, incapable-of-speaking-the-native-language types of tourists, trust me). I was cat-called, a lot, and though I was conditioned to that from having lived in NYC for four years at that point, what I hadn't been exposed to was the overtly sexual racist epithets thrown my way (none of which I will repeat here). I tried to search the eyes of other people of color for an explanation. People of Asian descent seemed happy, even moreso there than in Paris. And people clearly from Africa also seemed OK, though I am sure their black skin proved problematic at times (look no further than the Madrid soccer related racism or even the recent Formula One racing incident in Barcelona). It was the somewhat racially ambiguous brown folks who seemed to run into trouble.
El Salvadorans, Guatemalans, Mexicans, and other phentoypically outcast Latin American immigrants (along with black Africans) held lower-echelon jobs and noticeably received stares and a little street harassment as well. Their spoken Spanish was a reminder of Spain's colonial past that history had erased, glossed over, or simply euphemized, much like textbooks of Japan, the United States, or any nation, and their appearance even more so—typically indigenous and/or African features blending with those of the Spanish conquistadores and settlers of yore rendering many of the Latin American immigrants who had come to Spain in search of work easy to spot. I noticed that Caribbean Latinos and mulatos caught hell too, receiving the same sets of glaring eyes that I did when on public transportation or simply andando a pié.
To put it nicely, it was an awkward existence I led, at best, ceasing my outdoor activities more or less once the sun set because I had been propositioned more than once in the day time, and didn't want to risk full on sexual assault at night due to my having been assumed to be a prostitute on account of my skin color. The hostel employees (all of Latin American descent) and the falafel bar owners loved me, but they were about the only ones in Madrid who made me feel somewhat human. On the cab ride to the airport, a place where I would later be racially profiled (read: separated from a line of a ton of other people, searched, forced to weigh my carry-on, a small backpack, and made to pay 60 Euros for it being a few kilos overweight on account of an art book I had bought for a friend from the Museo del Prado!), I vowed never to come back and counted down the minutes until I'd return to Paris for my departure to New York.
But during this cab ride, I learned a few things to which I was not initially privy prior to going to Madrid. The cab driver asked me how I liked Madrid, to which I replied, "I liked it, but I don't think it liked me too much," which led to our discussing (no kidding) race relations in Spain. The driver, born and raised in Spain, offered a perspective I had not fully considered. He mentioned the abject poverty and limited knowledge of Spanish that plagued African immigrant communities, and in many Spaniards' minds, the state, as they were paying taxes to support unwelcome refugees. He also discussed the cause for my frequent run-ins with men who had less than Puritan intentions in their approach: that many women from the Dominican Republic and North Africa became prostitutes in Madrid to make ends meet. His explanation for the differing treatment of Asians vs. people of indigenous or African descent boiled down to the ability to assimilate.
"They come here already speaking Spanish," he said. ". . . and with money" he added. He didn't agree with how I was treated, and noted that I "seemed fine," but was sure to note that "a lot of Madrileños aren't ready for that kind of change. The young people, maybe, but their parents and people my age, not so much. They think they are pure, and forget about the years the Moors were here. They want things to stay the same. Come back in ten years, and maybe things will be better."
Though I was back in Paris a few hours later, I thought about what he said for a while after that. While comfortably nestled in the plush leather-upholstered seats of the Swiss Air flight back to New York, I wondered if my little trip to Spain would have been different if I possessed a lower level of melanin, or even if I looked noticeably more African instead of bearing an appearance that confused people. Upon returning to the United States, the same friends who had recommended Madrid felt a tinge of regret for not having mentioned "the racism thing" or at least not having forewarned how it may have affected me. In retrospect, they all noted, as whites, they had never thought about it. They had only heard stories, those they had selectively compartmentalized in a place far away in the back of their brains because they didn't really have to worry about it in Europe or in the United States in the same way, say, someone visually different from the majority would.
The experience and the discussions I had in the aftermath of my time in Madrid made me reflect on the privileges, or lack thereof, we have while traveling. Though I had a bad experience in Madrid, that is not to say every person of color has a comparable story. In fact, I know a few black women who loved Madrid and who have gone back several times, stating that they experienced a few incidents of racism, but mainly that it was more an issue of mistaken national identity than anything else. I think, too, of what the cab driver expressed in relation to his (and, arguably, the city's) impression of Asians. Even my white friends had expressed a considerable sense of alienation in Madrid at times, not due to language, but mainly in relation to cultural differences or even physical ones (being super tall or Nordic in appearance, you name it). In looking back on the experience and after hearing those of others, I was able to put things more into perspective.
Even I am "privileged" (in a physical sense) in some locations, notably northern and central Brazil, where my appearance did not garner unreasonable attention, many assuming that I was just "one of them." I even thought of my experiences in the United States. I didn't feel as if my physically assigned racial characteristics made me stand out in some Brooklyn neighborhoods, whereas my white or Asian-American friends expressed extreme discomfort on account of stares and even statements geared toward them. I find myself losing sight of how powerful my appearance can be at the right place and at the right time, but never forget how much of a burden it can be in other situations.
In reflecting on my previous travel experiences as I prepare for an upcoming trip to Portugal, I began thinking about how many additional things I have to consider as a woman, and, in particular, a person of color before I travel. It's amazing how many things travel guides leave out when it comes to the treatment a person of color may receive in a certain country, how to react to incidents of racism, or even whether or not what you are experiencing has nothing to do with race and all to do with cultural miscommunication. Though maybe I should expect it by now as many of the travel guide writers are white. Then again, only white people travel, right? (kidding, though on average, whites DO travel more widely and frequently than blacks, at least.. . though, given, this could be due to a series of factors that would lead me into an entirely new post, so I'll shelve this for now).
Besides consulting the Minority Travel Forum on Rick Steve's Graffiti Wall with posts from travelers of color (including people involved in interracial relationships, who have adopted children of a different race/ethnicity from their own, etc), which I highly recommend, it's worth considering the following:
1. The travel guide will most likely leave out information about the reception, or lack thereof, you may experience as a person of color. This includes common words/sayings with which you may not be familiar, but that are actually not racist (i.e. if someone in the Dominican Republic were to call you "negrito" or "indio," it would not be meant as a racial slur, rather a term of endearment based on your skin color and/or heritage).
2. Expect the unexpected, and don't go into the situation assuming your experience will match those of your white peers and/or friends and family of color. Your command of the native language, body language, familiarity with the culture, style of dress, etc can alter how you are perceived and treated.
3. Don't always assume racism is at play. As a result of the history of the United States, people of color and whites alike have been rendered into sensitivity machines, often analyzing things at a level of sociological sophistication that may not be of issue in some other countries. Also, bear in mind that every nation has its own respective history and deals with race and ethnicity accordingly. Don't attempt to color their history with your own. Think of these things before you jump the gun.
4. Find out what you can do if you ARE a victim of racism. There are several anti-racist groups (i.e. SOS Racismo in Spain and Portugal) that hold workshops and do outreach based on race-related issues. Sites like this may be worth checking out prior to taking a trip.
5. Reconcile your prior experiences with those of the present. The United States and/or your home country more likely than not has witnessed acts of racism, many of which continue. Don't assume that it's only the country you are visiting that has problems. If we think of the Amadou Diallo case or the Jena 6 or Vincent Chin, the U.S. is a scary and ugly place for POC too. It doesn't make racism here or elsewhere any better, but it definitely makes you realize that every country has its problems, so you can't let a few instances of racism frighten you away.
6. If traveling by yourself and feel threatened as a result of your race/ethnicity, try to remove yourself from the situation, if possible and find a place where you feel more welcome. You may even want to try to get to know other people like yourself in that country, depending on the duration of your stay, to get tips on places to avoid, how to behave in the case of a threat, etc.
7. Do your homework. Before traveling anywhere, ask around and look up information detailing the experiences of people like yourself. As I mentioned before, their experience may not entirely mirror the one in which you are about to partake, but it may offer some helpful advice.
8. Have a good time, despite any adversity you may encounter. If anything, I learned to laugh at the experience in Madrid in retrospect, and in a weird case of Stockholm syndrome, have considered going back one day, though with a friend this time. If you have spent the money to go somewhere else, you might as well try to get as much out of it as you can!


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Owl Love You Forever - Anniversary or Valentine's Day Card
This rather sweet card features two little owls with button eyes and a button heart above their heads and the text 'Owl love you forever!' Perfect for an anniversary or for Valentines day!
Size: 135x135mm (5.3x5.3 in)
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Pig Variables and Semicolons
Pay attention to where you put your semicolons lest they become part of the value!
Pig Script:
%default QUOTED '20090101';
%default UNQUOTED $QUOTED;
l = load '/logs/$QUOTED';
l = load '/logs/$UNQUOTED';
After preprocessing with
pig -x local -r script.pig:
l = load '/logs/20090101';
l = load '/logs/20090101;';
Incrementing Hadoop Counters in Apache Pig
Information about incrementing Hadoop counters from inside Pig UDFs is not currently well-documented, judging by the user list traffic, so this is a brief note showing how to do that.
Hadoop counters are a way to report basic statistics of a job in Hadoop. I won't go into a detailed discussion what they are and when to use them here — there's plenty of information about that on the internet (for starters, see the Cloud9 intro to Counters, and some guidelines for appropriate usage in "Apache Hadoop Best Practices and Anti-Patterns").
Pig 0.6 and before
Counters were not explicitly supported in Pig 0.6 and before, but you could get at them with this hack (inside a UDF):
Reporter reporter = PigHadoopLogger.getInstance().getReporter() if (reporter != null) { reporter.incrCounter(myEnum, 1L); }
Pig 0.8
Pig 0.8 has an "official" method for getting and incrementing counters from a UDF:
PigStatusReporter reporter = PigStatusReporter.getInstance(); if (reporter != null) { reporter.getCounter(key).increment(incr); }
You can also get Counters programmatically if you are invoking Pig using PigRunner, and getting a PigStats object on completion. It's a bit involved:
PigStats.JobGraph jobGraph = pigStats.getJobGraph(); for (JobStats jobStats : jobGraph) { Counters counters = jobStats.getHadoopCounters(); }
Pig 0.7
Unfortunately I don't know of a way to do this in 0.7, as the old hack went away and the new PigStatusReporter hadn't been added yet. If you have a trick, please comment.
Watch out for nulls
We've observed that sometimes the reporter is null for a bit even when a UDF is executing on the MR side. To deal with this, we added a little helper class
PigCounterHelper to Elephant-Bird that buffers the writes in a Map, and flushes them when it gets a non-null counter.
So there. If someone asks about counters in Pig, send them here.
New Features in Apache Pig 0.8
The Pig 0.8 release includes a large number of bug fixes and optimizations, but at the core it is a feature release. It's been in the works for almost a full year (most of the work on 0.7 was completed by January of 2009, although it took a while to actually get the release out), and the amount of time spent on 0.8 really shows.
I meant to describe these in detail in a series of posts, but it seems blogging regularly is not my forte. This release is so chock-full of great new features, however, that I feel compelled to at least list them. So, behold, in no particular order, a non-exhaustive list of new features I am excited about in Pig 0.8:
This is exactly what it sounds like — if your favorite language has a JVM implementation, it can be used to create Pig UDFs.
Pig now ships with support for UDFs in Jython, but other languages can be supported by implementing a few interfaces. Details about the Pig UDFs in Python can be found here: http://pig.apache.org/docs/r0.8.0/udf.html#Python+UDFs
This is the outcome of PIG-928; it was quite a pleasure to watch this develop over time — while most Pig tickets wind up getting worked on by at most one or two people, this turned into a collaboration of quite a few developers, many of them new to the project — Kishore Gopalakrishna's patch was the initial conversation starter, which was then hacked on or merged into similar work by Woody Anderson, Arnab Nandi, Julien Le Dem, Ashutosh Chauhan and Aniket Mokashi (Aniket deserves an extra shout-out for patiently working to incorporate everyone's feedback and pushing the patch through the last mile).
A contribution by Romain Rigaux, PigUnit is exactly what it sounds like — a tool that simplifies the Pig users' lives by giving them a simple way to unit test Pig scripts.
The documentation at http://pig.apache.org/docs/r0.8.0/pigunit.html and the code at http://svn.apache.org/viewvc/pig/trunk/test/org/apache/pig/test/pigunit/TestPigTest.java?view=markup speak for themselves as far as usage.
Pig can now provide much better visibility into what is going on inside a Pig job than it ever did before, thanks to extensive work by Richard Ding (see PIG-1333 and PIG-1478). This feature is a feature in three parts:
1. Script statistics.
This is the most easily visible change. At the end of running a script, Pig will output a table with some basic statistics regarding the jobs that it ran. It looks something like this:
Job Stats (time in seconds):
This is extremely useful when debugging slow jobs, as you can immediately identify which stages of your script are slow, and correlate the slow Map-Reduce jobs with the actual Pig operators and relations in your script — something that was not trivial before (folks often resorted to setting parallelism to slightly different numbers for every join and group just to figure out which job was doing what. No more of this!)
2. Data in Job XML
Pig now inserts several interesting properties into the Hadoop jobs that it generates, including the relations being generated, Pig features being used, and ids of parent Hadoop jobs. This is quite helpful when monitoring a cluster, and is also handy when examining job history using the HadoopJobHistoryLoader , now part of piggybank (use Pig to mine your job history!).
3. PigRunner API
The same information that is printed out when Pig runs the script from a command line is available if one uses the Java API to start Pig jobs. If you start a script using the
PigRunner.run(String args[], ProgressNotificationListener listener), you will get as a result a PigStats object that gives you access to the job hierarchy, the Hadoop counters from each job, and so on. You can implement the optional ProgressNotificationListener if you want to watch the job as it progresses; the listener will be notified as different component jobs start and finish.
Documentation of the API, new properties in the Job XML, and more, is available at http://pig.apache.org/docs/r0.8.0/piglatin_ref1.html#Pig+Statistics
It's very common to need to use some calculated statistic in a calculation to inform other calculations. For example, consider a data set that consists of people and their eye color; we want to calculate the fraction of the total population that has a given eye color. The script looks something like this:
people = LOAD '/data/people' using PigStorage() AS (person_id:long, eye_color:chararray); num_people = FOREACH (group people all) GENERATE COUNT(people) AS total; eye_color_fractions = FOREACH ( GROUP people BY eye_color ) GENERATE group as eye_color, COUNT(people) / num_people.total AS fraction;
Pretty straightforward, except it does not work. What's happening in the above code is that we are referencing the relation
num_people from inside another relation,
eye_color_fractions and this doesn't really make sense if Pig does not know that
num_people only has one row.
In the past you had to do something hacky like joining the two relations on a constant to replicate the total into each row, and then generate the division. Needless to say, this was not entirely satisfactory. In PIG-1434 Aniket Mokashi tackled this, implementing an elegant solution that hides all of these details from the user — you can now simply cast a single-row relation as a scalar, and use it as desired. The above script becomes:
people = LOAD '/data/people' using PigStorage() AS (person_id:long, eye_color:chararray); num_people = FOREACH (group people all) GENERATE COUNT(people) AS total; eye_color_fractions = FOREACH ( GROUP people BY eye_color ) GENERATE group as eye_color, COUNT(people) / (long) num_people.total AS fraction;
This makes the casting explicit, but Pig is now smart enough to do this implicitly as well. A runtime exception is generated if the relation being used as a scalar contains more than one tuple.
More documentation of this feature is available at http://pig.apache.org/docs/r0.8.0/piglatin_ref2.html#Casting+Relations+to+Scalars
A new annotation has been added,
@MonitoredUDF, which makes Pig spawn a watcher thread that kills an execution that is taking too long, and return a default value instead. This comes in handy when dealing with certain operations like complex regular expressions. More documentation is available at http://pig.apache.org/docs/r0.8.0/udf.html#Monitoring+long-running+UDFs
This is a simple one, but useful — when running Pig over many small files, instead of creating a map task per file (paying the overhead of scheduling and running a task for a computation that might only take a few seconds), we can merge the inputs and create a few map tasks that are a bit more hefty.
Two properties control this behavior:
pig.maxCombinedSplitSize controls the maximum size of the resulting split, and
pig.splitCombination controls whether or not the feature is activated in the first place (it is on by default).
This work is documented in the ticket PIG-1518; there are additional details in the release notes attached to the ticket.
I wrote about this one before — a small feature that allows you to invoke static Java methods as Pig UDFs without needing to wrap them in custom code.
The official documentation is available at http://pig.apache.org/docs/r0.8.0/piglatin_ref1.html#Dynamic+Invokers
One of the more common mistakes people make when writing Pig scripts is forgetting to specify parallelism for operators that need it. The default behavior used to be that this means parallelism of 1, which can lead to extremely inefficient jobs. A patch by Jeff Zhang in PIG-1249 changes this behavior to instead use a simple heuristic: if parallelism is not specified, derive the number of reducers by taking
MIN(max_reducers, total_input_size / bytes_per_reducer). Max number of reducers is controlled by the property
pig.exec.reducers.max (default 999) and bytes per reducer are controlled by
pig.exec.reducers.bytes.per.reducer (default 1GB).
This is a safeguard, not a panacea; it only works with file-based input, estimates number of reducers based on input size, not the size of the intermediate data — so if you have a highly selective filter, or you are grouping a large dataset by a low-cardinality field, it will produce bad number — but it's a nice safeguard against dramatic misconfigurations.
When porting to Apache Pig 0.8, remember to audit your scripts for parallelized operators that do not specify the
PARALLELkeyword — if the intent is to use a single reducer, make this intent explicit by specifying
HBaseStorage has been shored up in Pig 0.8. It can now read data stored in as bytes instead of requiring all numbers to be converted to Strings; it accepts a number of options — limit the number of rows returned, push down filters on HBase keys, etc. In addition, it can now be used to write to HBase in addition to reading from it. Details about the options, etc, can be found in the Release Notes section of PIG-1205.
Note that at the moment this only works with the HBase 0.20.{4,5,6} releases, and does not work with 0.89+. There is a patch in PIG-1680 that you can apply if you need 0.89 and 0.90 compatibility; it is not applied to the main codebase yet, as it is not backwards compatible.
We are very interested in help making this Storage engine more featureful, please feel free to jump in and contribute!
Although we try to make these a rarity, sometimes cases come up in which a custom Map-Reduce job fits the bill better than Pig. Weaving a Map-Reduce job into the middle of a Pig workflow was awkward before — you had to use something like Oozie or Azkaban, or write your own workflow application. Pig 0.8 introduces a simple "MAPREDUCE" operator which allows you to invoke an opaque MR job in the middle of the flow, and continue with Pig:
text = load 'WordcountInput.txt'; wordcount = MAPREDUCE wordcount.jar STORE text INTO 'inputDir' LOAD 'outputDir' AS (word:chararray, count: int) `org.myorg.WordCount inputDir outputDir`;
Details are available on the wiki page: http://wiki.apache.org/pig/NativeMapReduce
The ticket for this one has been open for a while, since Pig 0.2 days, and it's nice to see it finally implemented. Thumbs up to Aniket Mokashi for this one.
This feature, also implemented by the amazingly productive Aniket Mokashi, is also a bit of a power-user thing (and also an ancient ticket, PIG-282). It allows the Pig script author to control the function used to distribute map output among reducers. By default, Pig uses a random hash partitioner, but sometimes a custom algorithm is required when the script author knows something particularly unique about the reduce key distribution. When that is the case, a user can now specify the Hadoop Partitioner to swap in instead of the default:
B = group A by $0 PARTITION BY org.apache.pig.test.utils.SimpleCustomPartitioner parallel 2;
More specific documentation can be found in the Release Notes section of PIG-282
Upcoming Features in Pig 0.8: Dynamic Invokers
Pig release 0.8 is scheduled to be feature-frozen and branched at the end of August 2010. This release has many, many useful new features, mostly addressing usability. In this series of posts, I will demonstrate some of my favorites from this release.
Pig 0.8 will have a family of built-in UDFs called Dynamic Invokers. The idea is simple: frequently, Pig users need to use a simple function that is already provided by standard Java libraries, but for which a UDF has not been written. Dynamic Invokers allow a Pig programmer to refer to Java functions without having to wrap them in custom Pig UDFs, at the cost of doing some Java reflection on every function call.
Pig, HBase, Hadoop, and Twitter: HUG talk slides
I presented tonight at the Bay Area Hadoop User Group, talking briefly about Twitter's use of Hadoop and Pig. Here are the slides:
GROUP operator in Apache Pig
I've been doing a fair amount of helping people get started with Apache Pig. One common stumbling block is the GROUP operator. Although familiar, as it serves a similar function to SQL's GROUP operator, it is just different enough in the Pig Latin language to be confusing. Hopefully this brief post will shed some light on what exactly is going on.
Presentation on Apache Pig at Pittsburgh Hadoop User Group
Ashutosh and I presented at the Pittsburgh Hadoop User Group on Apache Pig. The slide deck goes through a brief into to Pig Latin, then jumps into an explanation of the different join algorithms, and finishes up with some research ideas. A pretty wide-ranging talk, for a diverse audience.
Scribd messed up some of the colors, so if you can't read some of the text, try downloading the original.
Great Database Performance Presentations and Videos
Percona is posting presentations from their Performance Conference at this blog: http://www.percona.tv/ , both the videos and the PPTs. There is some great info in there, not just on MySQL, but also on Hive, PostgreSQL, performance monitoring and more. Well worth checking out.
Building an Inverted Index with Hadoop and Pig
Note: For some reason, this post appears to be pretty popular. Here's the thing. This was the first thing I wrote when learning Pig. Literally -- I wrote it down the evening I sat down to play with Pig's syntax. You wouldn't really ever construct an inverted index this way. The point was that you can, not that you should. It is, however, kind of neat.
Pig is a system for processing very large datasets, developed mostly at Yahoo and now an Apache Hadoop sub-project. Pig aims to provide massive scalability by translating code written in a new data processing language called Pig Latin into Hadoop (map/reduce) plans.
In this post, I present a (very) brief description of the Pig project and demonstrate how one can construct an inverted index from a collection of text files using just a few lines of PigLatin. (more…)
Dealing with underflow in joint probability calculations
Been meaning to post this for a while, but it kept dropping to the bottom of the to-do list. There is a subtle bug in the code I posted earlier for splitting long strings into words.
The problem is that for most words, their probability of occurrence is extremely small. This means that when we have a sequence of several words, the probability of all of them occurring is
P(a, b, c) = P(a) * P(b) * P(c)
which is three very small numbers multiplied by each other, which is a far smaller number. If we get enough of those, we quickly encounter the undeflow problem — internal computer representation of these small numbers does not have enough bits to represent the enormous smallness of them, and rounds them to roughly zero. (more…)


text:
Yo-Yo Monkey Sewing Pattern
These 16" comical monkeys are easy and fun to make.
Make one version by stringing yo-yos together for the body and adding a stuffed head with a curly tail. The other version is stuffed all over. See Large & Jumbo Circle Yo-Yo Makers.
Overall rating:
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Yo-Yo Monkey Sewing Pattern
Bonnie B
July 13, 2014
July 13, 2014
I have never seen yo-yo Monkeys! These are wonderfully fashioned! The yo-yo's can be done by hand in the evenings while watching TV. A GREAT take along craft! And the faces are more realistic than most. Can you tell I am in LOVE with this pair of monkeys? I'll race you to the checkout!
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Home Posts tagged "hon. tammy franks mlc"
capril motion – south australian parliment 2nd May 2012
The Hon. G.A. KANDELAARS (16:57): I commend the Hon. Tammy Franks for moving the motion before us today, a motion which endeavours to highlight Capril, an initiative raising awareness of depression in our community. The campaign encourages members of the community to wear a cape in the month of April as a sign of 'cape-ability', and I note that the funds raised will go to beyondblue, a national depression initiative.
Click here to read more…


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The longshot horse in the shiny cooper coat, Drosselmeyer, held out in the last stretch to win the 142nd Belmont Stakes.
From the gate, First Dude who took second place at Preakness, led the pack and set the pace of the race. But in the last quarter-mile turn, Drosselmeyer with 13-1 odds inched his way from the outside to the front of the pack, overtaking First Dude and then holding firm against runner-up Fly Down.
"Of all my career, of all the great ones I have won, to win this one is unbelievable," said jockey Mike Smith after the race. Smith has raced Belmont 12 times before and this was his first win, lucky number 13, on the longest track of the Triple Crown.
U.S. & World
At 1 1/2-miles, Belmont Stakes is not only the longest, but also the oldest, and often considered the toughest of the Triple Crown races. Since 1944 of the 30 horses that have entered Belmont as possible Triple Crown winners, 19 have lost their chances and "their legs" at the Stakes.
For Drosselmeyer, the secret was stamina. "He always keeps coming," said Hall of Fame trainer Bill Mott who earned his first win in a Triple Crown Race. Smith added, "you just want to get him in that rhythm."
On a hot and sticky Saturday afternoon, more than 45,000 spectators packed the stands at Belmont Park in Elmont, New York to watch Drosselmeyer cross the finish line to victory and $600,000.
Drosselmeyer, owned by WinStar Farm which also owns this year's Kentucky Derby Winner, Super Saver, won at a time of 2:31.57. Both Super Saver and Preakness winner, Luckin At Lucky, did not run at Belmont.
Favorite, Ice Box who finished second at the Derby, crossed at a disappointing ninth place in a field of 12 horses.


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FORT DRUM, N.Y. -- It has been said by people the world over that dance is a universal language in which anyone from anywhere can become fluent, if they are willing to watch and learn. A moment of their time and a little willingness to disregard one's inhibitions are all it takes to gain an understanding of one another without exchanging a single syllable. Sometimes, in the process, that connection can yield something far bigger -- a lifetime passion.
An individual can find his or her passion and share it for the benefit of all through the universal languages of music and dance. That is exactly what Sgt. Mustafa Al-Ibraheem of D Company, 2nd Battalion, 87th Infantry Regiment, 3rd Brigade Combat Team, believes. In fact, it has taken him much farther. Not only has he learned a dance style, he has become a student of a culture and a teacher of its contributions to the worlds of dance and music.
Growing up in Baghdad, Iraq, Al-Ibraheem describes his childhood as a happy one, with many hours spent playing sports with his friends and studying hard for his classes. His parents were well-educated and open-minded, and he credits them with giving him a love for learning and new ideas.
"I grew up like an ordinary kid -- you know, played a lot of soccer. (I) studied a lot, (since) I had very educated parents," said Al-Ibraheem. "They were also very open-minded, so I was very fortunate."
He also credits his Family, his parents in particular, with imbuing him with confidence, which he says is hereditary. It is this confidence that would later have him assuming leadership roles at a very early age.
"In kindergarten, I sang a lot on stage and I did a lot of shows," said Al-Ibraheem, "and I became president of my class when I was 6 years old, taking care of my classmates when the teacher was gone, keeping them quiet and everything."
Al-Ibraheem's love for learning, along with his confidence, gave him a curiosity early on about the world and a desire to see and experience new things. He told his parents while still very young that he wanted to travel and see what else the world had to offer him.
"My intention to leave Iraq came very early," Al-Ibraheem said. "I told my mother that I want to leave, I want to travel, to get out of Iraq."
His opportunity to travel came when U.S. forces landed in Iraq during Operation Iraqi Freedom.
He quickly found employment as an interpreter with the Marines, with whom he saw many parts of his own country for the first time and eventually found himself at Contingency Operating Base Adder, formerly known as Tallil Air Base at Al-Nasiriyah, southeast of his hometown of Baghdad and where he discovered salsa music for the first time.
"It hit me when I was at COB Adder," said Al-Ibraheem. "There was a Puerto Rican guy named Jose, and he was teaching (salsa) there."
Jose noticed Al-Ibraheem's serious intention to learn as well as how quickly he caught on to the dance steps. He pulled Al-Ibraheem aside and told him that his contract was running out and asked him if he would consider taking over the class.
"I began by being the DJ and teaching people the basic steps," Al-Ibraheem said. "Then I started watching YouTube, educating myself about the moves, and then started teaching advanced classes."
The time he spent with the Marines as well as other branches of the U.S. armed forces as an interpreter did more than just give him access to parts of his country he may never have seen; it gave him a view of a lifestyle and a set of ideals that inspired him do more. It inspired him to join the Army. He remembers the men who inspired him in particular and to this day stays in close touch with one of them.
"One of my colonels, he was an amazing leader and he treated me like one of his guys and he took care of me," said Al-Ibraheem. "It's basically because of the people I served with and because I love America, because it's good to give back to the country that changed my life."
The colonel in particular that he refers to is Lt. Col. Christopher DeGaray, but it was Sgt. 1st Class Charles Hagwood, now retired, whom he credits with teaching him about the Army way of life, as well as how to be an American citizen. He remains close to Hagwood, through email and telephone calls as well visiting his Family on holidays.
"Till this day we talk and I visit his Family. He has a wonderful Family," Al-Ibraheem said. "He was the one who taught me about life in the United States, about taxes, about the Army and how to deal with the upper and lower levels (of leadership), to do the right thing at all times."
Al-Ibraheem eventually came to Fort Drum, and not long after his arrival, he deployed to Afghanistan in support of Operation Enduring Freedom.
Shortly after he got back, he noticed that there was no real outlet for the Latin community in the local area. He decided to do something about it and went to the USO to see if he could start a salsa class as a way to not only give the Fort Drum Latin population an outlet, but to spread the word about salsa music and dancing to everyone else. He began teaching salsa at the USO in August.
"When he came to Fort Drum, he found that there was nothing in town and nothing on Fort Drum as far as any salsa dancing," said Karen Clark, director of USO Fort Drum. "I knew that he had been involved in it overseas, so he came to us to see if we would support him in teaching a class."
The USO helped Al-Ibraheem by providing a facility and by getting the word out, using marketing tools like social media, community leader forums and flyers posted around Fort Drum. Word definitely got out, and people came to his classes. The size of the classes varies with the operational tempo of the Soldiers, but it was the fact that the classes have such a varied make-up as far as backgrounds and race that Clark noticed.
"We've had big classes and we've had small classes, depending on the mission tempo," Clark said, "but what was neat was that there was a real sense of community. They didn't have to come from a Latin background to have a good time."
Clark describes Al-Ibraheem's classes as incredibly joyful and clearly senses the feeling of camaraderie among the participants. She also describes Al-Ibraheem's teaching style as one that is inclusive and easy to follow.
"His teaching style is not one where you're going to get a grade. People are just coming to have fun, just to have a good time," Clark said.
The intangibles that are communicated in the dancing -- such as community, camaraderie and joy, regardless of anyone's background -- have demonstrated to Al-Ibraheem and to the people in his classes that dance really is a universal language. It is a language spoken with the things that we all as human beings possess: bodies, emotions and a need to be social. He has seen it for himself having had opportunities to dance with people from so many different places and backgrounds.
"Dancing I think, is the international language," Al-Ibraheem said. "You can express yourself and have a great time. I once danced with a girl from Portugal. I don't speak Portuguese, but we danced just fine."


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Sinai based and international award wining journalist Ahmed Abu Draa has turned to be arrested by the army since last Wednesday and will be referred to a military trial.
People found out the shocking truth when the photo of Abu Draa was published in Al Youm News website among other detainees labeled as a terrorist !! He is the man wearing white shirt and Jeans.
|Like a criminal , Abu Draa stood in white shirt and jeans
|Now and then
Here is Abu Draa speaking in a video about his important that exposed how the security authorities are involved in the human trafficking in Sinai.
Some say that the false claims are the report of Abu Draa in Al Masry Al Youm and ONTV about the strikes of the Egyptian army in North Sinai earlier this week. The official spokesperson claimed that the army killed and injured in air raids about 23 militants and destroyed some warehouses used by those militants.
In his report Abu Draa said the army's Apache attack injured only 4 and destroyed houses and a mosque in that air raid.
Abu Draa was not the only reporter from Sinai to deny what the official army spokesperson claimed , other reporters "including reporters I trust like Mohamed Sabry and Mostafa Singer" and other citizen journalists confirmed what he said and even went and took photos from the area that was attacked by the army !!!!
According Mostafa Singer , the famous and trusted journalist in Sinai Abu Draa was arrested when he went to the security HQ in Al Arish in order to seek the release of one of his relatives who had arrested from couple days ago. Abu Draa was transferred later to Ismailia.
Mostafa Singer and other journalists in North Sinai are trying their best to release their colleagues. Already these journalists are having an independent News Facebook page called "Sinai Now TV Channel" about the news of governorate. It is very important and active. Abu Draa was a member in the page that is going to be turned in to a full News portal soon.
|Abu Draa in Tahrir square when it used to mean something
The page announced that it will suspend its work till the release of Abu Draa.
Ahmed Abu Daraa is the correspondent of ONTV and Al Masry Al m newspaper , both are in good terms with the army especially ONTV which many consider as the morale department's official TV channel more than National TV !!
Of course none of them spoke about him up till now. Only other journalists including the journalists from Sinai were the ones who brought up the matter.
As we live in time Senator McCarthy would be proud of , you will find people attacking anyone speaks about how Ahmed Abu Daraa is not a terrorist by claiming that we know nothing and the Egyptian government knows best plus the army is fighting war against terrorism !!
Journalist and reporter Ahmed Abu Daraa is the second Egyptian journalist from Sinai to be referred to military court after journalist and dear friend Mohamed Sabry. Sabry's military trial was the first military trial in time of ousted President Morsi. It has been adjourned for months now. Next court session should be next month.
I can not also forget that there are other journalists who are currently detained in jails , of course most of them are accused of being members in the Muslim brotherhood including Al Jazeera English reporter Mohamed El Shami.
I can not also forget the fact the people of North Sinai are speaking about the return of the arbitrary arrests campaigns in that war of terrorism there where innocent people are arrested and referred to military trials while they are not the real terrorists.
Ahmed Abu Draa is not a terrorist and regardless of what he has done , he should stand in front of his judge , a civilian judge and a civilian prosecution.
By the way the military trials for civilians article is untouched in the upcoming constitution , it was not amended by the 10-members technical committee.


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FRISCO, Texas — MVP. Three letters whose sum has much more meaning than its parts — much like a team. Yet MVP is always applied to the individual.
As the MLS regular season heads into its final third, discussions about the league's MVP are heating up. One name increasingly mentioned is David Ferreira.
The FC Dallas midfielder has six goals and seven assists, which ties him for fourth in the league. Three of those helpers have been of the game-winning variety, which ties him for second-most in MLS.
Ferreira's numbers aren't surprising considering that in 2009 he had eight goals and seven assists, earning a nomination for the league's top newcomer.
This year, the 5-foot-5 Colombian is no longer an unknown commodity for opposing defenses—he has suffered more fouls than anyone else in the league—but he has been even more devastating in playing all but one minute for FCD. He will start again on Saturday when Dallas host Chivas USA at Pizza Hut Park.
"I think he's starting to get a lot more recognition, probably a lot more this year than he ever has," said FCD coach Schellas Hyndman. "He's the most fouled player in the league and he's probably been the most durable player in the league."
During his club's current 10-game unbeaten streak that has them as the hottest team in the league, Ferreira has been the driving force. The former Atlético Paranaense midfielder has five goals and three assists during the stretch.
"He's a huge difference-maker," Hyndman said. "I think when you look at MVP, you not only look at an MVP of what that player is doing but you also look at the expectations of that team. For us to be in the position that we're in means a lot of people are playing well and that means he's probably playing better as an MVP for this team than someone else on a different team."
While Ferreira's numbers thus far are on par with his goals and assists from last year, there remains some unfinished business—helping FCD return to the playoffs for the first time since 2007. That bigger picture remains his focus.
Still, being mentioned as an MVP candidate is cool, if humbling.
"It's always an honor for any player to be mentioned as a candidate for an award like that," he said through an interpreter after practice on Thursday. "I've been blessed this year to have the opportunity to do well.
"I also give thanks to my teammates. They have helped me play well. The team has done well and they have helped me become a better player."
At this point, FCD's foes center their defenses around limiting the 31-year-old's touches on the ball. Several teams this year have been effective at exerting high pressure, which forces Ferreira further back on the field, thus limiting his effectiveness and role in the attack.
"It's good to know that other teams are worried about me," Ferreira said. "I still have that sense of responsibility that I have to figure out ways to beat other teams. [But] I think most of the opponents are not only thinking about me but the rest of the team with what we've been doing."


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A Rainy Day With The Dreaded Minutemen
Well, we live in a trailer at the edge of town. You never see us, because we don't come around. We've got 25 rifles, just to keep the population down.
- Neil Young, `Revolution Blues'.
Two old guys in a little travel-trailer with a leaky roof, drinking coffee, content with one another's company and the affections of three little dogs - a shihtsu, a miniature daschhund, and a pug. No Confederate flags. No Ak-47s. No Christian Patriot mugs. Not even any beer.
That's what you find if you go looking for the command centre of the Washington State Minutemen. It's a trailer in a field just a short drive south of the Canada-U.S. border at Blaine, a white guy who's not quite as quick on his feet as he once was, and a Metis, originally from St. Boniface, Manitoba. They sit in the trailer and chat by walkie-talkie with about a dozen grandparents parked in cars and campers at a series of roadside spots along the border between Blaine and Sumas.
That's it.
If you subscribe to a Fox News version of the world, you might be surprised to find no well-formed battalions of disciplined young patriots patrolling the rolling hills and woods of Whatcom County, protecting America's porous northern borders against the threat of terrorists from British Columbia who are making plans to slip into the United States and blow stuff up, as any fool knows.
Similarly, in the "No One Is Illegal!" conception of reality, you can well imagine that if you drive down that same quiet country road a few minutes from the 266 exit off the I-5, you'll soon find yourself surrounded by a private army of half-witted right-wing vigilantes, white supremacists and dangerous, heavily-armed hate-mongers whose self-appointed mission along the border is a cover for their real agenda, which is to inflict violence and suffering upon people of colour.
The problem is that in the real world, all you'll find is a couple of old guys in a trailer, or maybe not, because they might be out making the rounds of their fellow Minutemen volunteers, parked on backroads along the border between Blaine and Sumas. The volunteers get lonely. They run out of coffee. They get nervous. The other day, a U.S. Border Patrol officer popped by a Minuteman post to say that five people were hiding in some bushes on the Canadian side, apparently intending to make dash across the line, so the volunteers should keep their eyes peeled. It was hugely exciting. But nothing came of it.
Some of the volunteers persist in the exotic American custom of lawfully possessing handguns, but mainly they're armed with binoculars. They keep an eye out for pot smugglers headed south, or gun smugglers headed north, and if they see something odd they call the Border Patrol. If it turns out that their vigilance results in the apprehension of some whackjob from the Army of Mohammed, then hey, righteous. High fives.
. . . But I'm still not happy, I feel like there's something wrong. I got the revolution blues. I see bloody fountains, and ten million dune buggies, comin' down the mountains.
Well, I'm sorry for you, but I'm afraid that's all there is. Besides, I suffer from a condition of my own. I'm Canadian, I'm some kind of socialist, and I confess to an affection for Yanks that is usually tempered by the degree to which I can be confident that they're safely at home and seeing to their own affairs. It's a bit like that same Neil Young song:
So you be good to me and I'll be good to you, And in this land of conditions I'm not above suspicion. I won't attack you, but I won't back you.
It was in this frame of mind that I spent a rainy afternoon the other day wth those two guys in the trailer with the leaky roof.
The white guy was Tom Williams. He's the 64-year-old State Leader of the Washington Minuteman Detachment. Born in San Diego. Lives in Deming, a little town nearby on the Nooksack River. Williams served in Vietnam with the U.S. Marines. He'd learned Spanish from his buddies in high school, so he got a Marines' job as a linguist. Then he got a psychology degree, did duty evaluating comissioned-officer candidates, and later specialized in post-traumatic distress disorder. Took up a civilian career as a trauma counselor, a position on the board of directors of the International Society of Traumatic Stress Studies, spent some time with the National Organization of Victims Assistance, and ended up incapacitated by the suffering of his own clients. It was the kids, mainly. They get to you.
The Metis guy was Claude LeBas. He's Williams' right-hand man, the Minutemen "intel officer" whose job requires a familiarity with the operation of walkie-talkies and cellphones and other such paramilitary know-how. Barrel-chested. Ponytail. At 60, he's the youngest of the Washington Minutemen regulars. LeBas was in in Vietnam in the early 1960s, a Canadian soldier in a small international contingent that was engaged in the "police action" that rapidly became a full-scale American war. When Canada pulled out, LeBas stayed, became an American citizen, joined the Marines, and in his later civilian life he worked as a field officer with the U.S. Customs, then took early retirement after suffering a stroke and undergoing a triple bypass heart operation. Ask him how he ended up in the Minutemen and you get a sheepish smile. Williams answered for him: "Actually, Claude wasn't going to do it until he knew I was going to for sure, and, well, he knows I can't take care of myself so good, so. . . ."
Here's Williams on being right-wing: "I don't even listen to Rush Limbaugh." On being a vigilante: "We don't take the law into our own hands anymore than you do when you report a drunk driver." On leading a militia: "You figure you'd have to be armed or something to be a militia, right?" On being a racist: "I'm not a racist." He'd stopped smiling. "Racism pisses me off." He was quiet, and then: "It increases my heart rate when I think about that."
Williams has a thing about wildflowers. That's how he got tangled up with the Minutemen. He was down in Arizona looking at flowers, and he met some former marines who'd gone to join up with the Minutemen there. They'd just started their ridiculously controversial citizen-patrol operations to protest the ongoing consequences of the Bush administration's underfunding of border security: More than a million people sneak into the United States across the Mexican border every year. After Williams satisfied himself that the Minutemen weren't just a bunch of gun nuts, he reckoned "it would be fun to ride around the desert in a nice jeep," and one thing led to another.
But there are nightmares involved in all of this.
That otherwise reasonable Americans will end up doing Block Parent duty with fieldglasses in the woods along Washington state's border with British Columbia can be explained at least partly by the visions that have been haunting them in recent years.
They tune into Seattle's KIRO 7 television news and "investigative reporter" Chris Halsne tells them that Hezbollah and Hamas and al Qaida and 52 other terrorist groups and "hundreds of seasoned terrorists" are busy in British Columbia with plans to use Canada as a "launching pad" to swarm into the United States and slaughter innocent Americans. Halsne has reported that al Qaida is selling drugs in the streets of Vancouver. He has reported that some of these terrorists have already slipped into America because Washington's ill-defended border is "an open gate."
These same reasonable people sitting in the front seats of their pickup trucks at the dead-ends of roads branching off "H" Road between Sumas and Blaine can read in their newspapers that their president promised 2,000 new border-guard positions after 9-11, but managed to scare up the cash for only 400 or so.
Behind Bellingham City Council's panicky resolutions admonishing the Minutemen, there are even more nightmares. Long before 9-11, Washington state had already endured fright-making encounters with heavily-armed survivalists and backwoods neo-fascists. It should come as no surprise that Bellingham is not immune to the intellectual and political paralysis so many Americans seem to suffer whenever they find themselves in situations where terms like "race" and "national security" are being freely tossed around. Some people hear "Minutemen," and right away they see "Branch Davidians," and a compound in Waco, in flames. It's the way things work.
But if you want to make more elaborate sense of all this, go ahead and consult the Northeastern Federation of Anarchist Communists if you want. On their way out to pick fights with the Minutemen in Vermont, they might stop long enough to explain to you that national borders are really just a form of racism. And Vancouver's anti-Minutemen "No One Is Illegal!" protesters will tell you the same thing. They're against the very existence of the Canada-U.S. border. They say the only reason it's there is to allow the white race to assert its illegitimate claim of entitlement to North America.
With all the fantasist gibberish infecting the discourse about race and borders, it's no wonder that there's a threat of White Power sociopaths being drawn into the discussion. That's another thing that worries Tom Williams and Claude LeBas.
To his credit, Williams isn't afraid to be candid about how the Minutemen enterprise got so bent out of shape, so fast: "It's race. Race has been coupled with border protection, and then suddenly you've got people who don't want our borders protected, and it goes crazy."
The news media feed the pathology, and round it goes.
Marc Cooper, of the Nation and the L.A. Weekly, has found a similar disparity between what happens in the real world and the media's account of the Minutemen on the Mexican border. He points a way out: "Now more than ever, the public needs news media that are serious, thoughtful and analytical, not compliant suckers for the wound-up partisans and pandering politicians who are increasingly likely to inflame or obfuscate the issue with goofball dog-and-pony shows."
If that's too hard for you to get your head around, then go right ahead, wet your pants, set your hair on fire, and join the chorus. Here's your song sheet:
I hear that Laurel Canyon is full of famous stars. Well, I hate them worse than lepers, and I'll kill them in their cars.
Marc Cooper's reports on the Minutemen can be found here (the headline advising the Minutemen to "march north" was just an unfortunate coincidence of sorts) and here, and Marc's excellent web log is here. My Georgia Straight column on the subject (which is also topped with a strangely funny headline) is here. For amusement, KIRO 7's contribution to the declining standard of "investigative journalism" in the matter of terrorism can be found here. Neil Young, a great Canadian and one of my heroes, has been on temporary loan to the United States for some while now. His homepage is here, and the lyrics to that great tune `Revolution Blues' are here.


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By Staff Writer | October 1, 2013
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Bell Helicopter has issued a contract to Frasca International to supply an FAA Level B qualified simulator for its 407 series. The simulator will be used at Bell's Customer Training Academy in Fort Worth, Texas, and will have capabilities to convert between the standard Bell 407 and 407 GX with the Garmin G1000 avionics system. Bell will use the simulator for initial aircraft qualification and instrument training at its academy. The simulator will be Frasca's first FFS qualified to Level B in the United States.
In a separate development, the German Federal Police Air Support Group has received FTD 2 FNPT III MCC qualification for its Eurocopter EC155 helicopter flight training device (FTD). Urbana, Ill.-based Frasca built the EC155 FTD, which will receive the FTD 2 FNPT III MCC qualification from EASA. Frasca is currently working on a contract for several additional flight training devices.