Links and Minifeatures 07 20 Friday

Obama: Don't stay in Iraq over genocide

SUNAPEE, N.H. - Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama said Thursday the United States cannot use its military to solve humanitarian problems and that preventing a potential genocide in Iraq isn't a good enough reason to keep U.S. forces there.

I disagree. Nonetheless I'm glad he's got the intestinal fortitude to make his case - to acknowledge the opposing arguments and try to win the argument not by kneejerking against the other side, but by trying to build the case that his argument is stronger.



If he's elected President, the voters will have decided he's correct. So he'll be on track to get the requirement for a genocide out of the way early in his term. Carter and Cambodia. Clinton and Rwanda. Can't have a Democrat elected president without a genocide. They have a tradition to uphold!



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Swedish woman gets superfast Internet 40 Gigabits - Uff da!



Of course, the bottleneck is far more commonly the ability of the servers to access it and send it to you. Nonetheless, I'm sure there are spam-meisters whose eyes lit up reading that. At 1k per message, they could theoretically send 40 million pieces of spam per second. And you thought your inboxes were full of spam already...



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This is just too good: Tiny brain no obstacle to French civil servant



What can you add to a story like that?



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Restored Saturn V rocket unveiled



Does anyone care about a rocket in a museum? I'm interested in the ones that actually go into space.



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I'm probably going to stay up tonight long enough to walk over to the neighborhood supermarket and buy a copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. They're open 24 hours, and I haven't seen a better price advertised. Since it's less than 100 meters, I don't have to pay for gas or shipping. Cheap, quick, and effective. Then I'm planning to do something my wife doesn't expect - let her read it first. Unless she reads the site today, of course, but one of the few downsides of her employer is that they block internet access.