The surprise for the West was that the election was fair; they expected Fatah to cheat enough to win. Everyone who'd been following the situation knew that Fatah was thoroughly discredited for their corruption and the lack of any positive results from their strategy; it appeared to most that the Fatah leadership were extracting great wealth in exchange for agreeing to run a big jail for Israel.

And now the West has decided to deal with the Fatah dictatorship on the West Bank (and that's what it is, they are rounding up and killing Hamas sympathizers) and starving the Hamas dictatorship in Gaza. Reportedly Israel is preventing any food from crossing into Gaza.

Of course the Palestinians bear responsibility for the brutality, but the US and Israel have been trying to create a Hamas vs. Fatah war, and they did not expect Hamas to win so decisively in Gaza.

There's one outfit that is sitting on oodles of cash, and generating a couple hundred billion more every year: China. And recently China has made noises about how it might be able to do better in the equities markets than it can by just putting the bulk of its cash in US Treasury bills.

Any chance that China might wind up owning big chunks of the American economy because there's no other big creditor to turn to?

The problem with publicly revealing every aspect of the search engine algorithm is that the people who want to pump their stocks, sell you their junk, and enhance the size of your sex organs want their pages to appear on top. If the Google algorithm were completely open, Google would be much less useful, as every search you do would have the unethical scam artists filling the first page. Searches for a company's product might take you only to pages plugging the company's competitor, or even to phony pages put out by someone trying to steal money from you.

Now, maybe I'm wrong and people can come up with an algorithm that can be public but can't be exploited. At best, it would require continuing modifications, which might mean that pages you can find on one day can't be found on the next.

Open source operating systems can be secure because there is some data (passwords, crypto keys) that is not public. Likewise, an open-source search engine might be secured from "attackers" if certain data, like the relative weights assigned to various page features, are kept secret. I run Linux as well, and am composing this message on a Linux system. On the other hand, Google's search engine is one of the world's biggest Linux apps.

I'm not saying that it is impossible to have a totally open search algorithm that can't be spoofed by consultants promising higher page ranks. I'm only saying that it has never been done.

While the industry continues to shrink the physical dimensions and increase the transistor counts, there was a major transition that took place in roughly 2003, caused by the fact that atoms don't scale. Engineers have had to give up making processors faster, because it takes so much power that your chip would melt, and instead make more of them, putting multiple processors on the same chip. The clock speed is actually going down, and programs designed to run on one processor are actually going to get slower. The industry is trying to make you feel good about this, calling it "multiply your possibilities" and the like, but many software vendors have gotten used to bloating up their programs with more features every year, so that the programs run slower. They've counted on faster processors to hide this.

Instead of seeing a faster generation of processors every year, you'll start seeing the number of processors in the computer double every year, and the software will have to be redone to take advantage of this.

... so many so that I wouldn't be surprised if the domestic workforce is largely female (women go abroad for work as well, but I'm sure that the number is higher for males).

I haven't decided who I'm supporting in the primaries. One thing I'm waiting for is for some presidential candidate to say that he or she is not running for king, that Bush and Cheney have grabbed too much power, it's not what the founders fought a revolution for, and that he/she will work to roll back these powers and make sure that the president is accountable. That if the president believes that Congress has unconstitutionally usurped presidential power, the courts are the proper referee.

This is why it won't do for the Democrats to just let the clock run out on the Bush administration: the damage is permanent.

Because the news media focus on the strange and unusual, they are a poor source if you want to analysis about baby naming.

If you want to see what parents are really naming their children, the Social Security people can help. Click the link attached to my name below any you can search by state to see what the most popular names are. You'll see boring, ordinary names like Daniel and Emily, or Spanish names like Isabella, Jose, and Angel.

We need to get the pollsters not only to ask whether they approve or disapprove, but for the top reasons why they approve or disapprove. If Glenn is right, and I believe he is, that's the only way we're going to motivate the Congressional Dems to be tougher.

Specifically, we need to ask people whether they disapprove of Congress because they're being too mean to the president, or because they are rolling over for him. Also, what actions Congress could take to improve public approval.