Day 94 of BP's massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico there was a storm. Also someone found out that on top of all the failsafes that failed causing the initial explosion and spill, the emergency alarm didn't go off - citing that it wasn't working properly.

Two and a half years after Kosovo officially declared independence from Serbia, a U.N. court decided it was legal. At the time of writing 69 countries have recognized Kosovo as an independent state making it the kinkiest declaration of independence to date.

Tony Blair (retired Prime Minister of the United Kingdom) urged a Lebanese flotilla to use established channels for delivering aid to Gaza, instead of attempting to run through a blockade for no reason. Barak Obama and the Israeli Navy also thought it was a good idea they use established routes and not engage the Navy. The flotilla organizers are still scheduled to make the attempt on Friday or Saturday.

Hugo Chávez (President of Venezuela) cut ties with Columbia and warned them not to incite conflict. To further pacify Columbia Hugo claimed that they fabricated evidence of Columbian rebel camps inside Venezuela - including images, video, maps, and eye witnesses. As though this didn't concern the involved parties enough Hugo then hinted that the Columbian president - in an effort not to leave office, is attempting to provoke a war with the "false" evidence. He also claimed that the entire thing is being orchestrated by the United States to justify and invasion of Venezuela.

North Korea threatens to use nukes in response to joint U.S. - South Korean naval exercises in the region. Hillary Clinton told North Korea to grow up and regime change.

Still under U.N. sanctions for it's alleged nuclear program, Iran has moved its target date for manned space flight to 2019. In February they launched a rocket into space loaded with a rat, turtle, and some worms. They insist their space program is not related to any nuclear activity.

sources:
http://www.nytimes.com
http://www1.voanews.com
http://www.jpost.com/
http://www.bloomberg.com
http://www.bbc.co.uk

Feel free to skip to the How-To below to find out how to boycott Facebook.

Help get the word out to the millions of people who don't know about Facebook's gross misconduct
on Twitter using hashtag #BoycottFacebook
on Digg http://digg.com/d31QbvX
on Facebook using this short link http://bit.ly/bsmODu

One of the more horrifying of activities Facebook has begun engaging in recently is spying on everyone across the internet. If you're reading this you've likely seen the hundreds of bloggers, news outlets, consumer watchdog groups, or just talked to a techie in your family or social circle who's outraged - especially recently - at Facebook. If not here's a brief and simple overview that barely skims the surface of why Facebook is evil and why you should boycott the site: 15 Good Reasons to Ditch Facebook: For Dummies.

The problem we're facing here is that any site can connect to Facebook by embedding a small chunk of code on their site. The code can and does access your private data on Facebook, but it also let's Facebook see what you're doing on the random 3rd party site. No warnings, approvals, or notifications necessary; and regardless of what you set your privacy policies to. There are lots of reasons why a site might do this, and lots of reasons why they may not be upfront about doing this. Plenty of people have complained over the last few days of random sites they visit adding apps to their Facebook profile, and posting on their wall without consent and with total disregard for their privacy settings. Every day tons of new sites and desktop applications add this functionality tracking and making public more and more of your activity on the internet without your consent or knowledge.

Everyone's being watched. If you're a member of Facebook then they know who you are based on your Facebook activity and profile information. If you put fake information on Facebook, Facebook will easily figure out who you are when you visit your real bank, your real account at some other social network, or whatever sites decide to add this malicious Facebook code in the future. And if you don't have a Facebook account at all then they're still tracking you by ip address, which they can easily associate with your accounts on other 3rd party sites.

There's no telling how far Facebook will exploit this as more and more sites add it, but Facebook's Founder as publicly declared a war on privacy several times now, and claimed to be changing social norms. He believes he can tell us how much of our lives he can own, invade, and monitor; and that he doesn't have to tell us what or who he shares that information with. Nor does he believe your consent holds any value.

It's not just that your activity is being monitored, it's that it's being monitored by Facebook - a malicious evil company which cons ignorant people into handing over their very identity permanently with no way out.

How-To boycott Facebook:

note: These instructions are 100% reversible, but before you begin you should delete everything off your Facebook account, change any relationship descriptions to nonsense. Fill your account with dummy information or info about why you're boycotting Facebook. Message all your Facebook "friends" asking them to untag you from any pictures they have up, and then log out for the last time.

It's very simple if you connect to the internet through a router. I'll attempt to give as much detail as possible, if you get stuck or don't use a router feel free to comment and ask for help.

1. Open your Browser(Firefox, Chrome, Safari, or Internet Explorer)
2. Go to the following website http://192.168.0.1, if that doesn't work try http://192.168.1.1
3. You should now be looking at the login page for your router(The thing in between your computer and modem).
4. Type in the administrative username and password - the default username is usually admin, and the default password is usually left blank.
5. If that doesn't work you'll need to find the user manual or use Google to search for the make and model of your router to find the default username and password.
6. Once you're logged into your router look through the menus for an area called website filter or website block list or something to that effect. On my router it's located in Advanced -> Website Filter
7. Add the following entry: facebook.com
8. That's it. Make sure you save your settings, and once saved try going to Facebook.com in a new tab or window.

You should notice that Facebook will never load. Your browser will just keep waiting for a response from Facebook until it times out, but your router won't send or receive anything from Facebook anymore. It's like if you tried to call Facebook on the phone but the operator has been told never to connect a call between you and Facebook.

If you go to Digg.com you'll notice that while the site loads all the content you'd expect, it never finishes loading. This is because it's trying to connect to Facebook without your permission. You can try clicking the blue "Login with Facebook" button at the top, and you'll notice a small login window pops up with a bunch of other things spinning indefinitely. These are all occasions when Digg.com would normally be exchanging information with and loading Facebook.com - effectively letting Facebook recognize you and snoop on your Digg activity, and letting Digg access all your private information on Facebook.

Congratulations, you've safely and effectively boycotted Facebook. You can be comfortable in knowledge that no device that connects to the internet through your router will be able to reach Facebook, and Facebook will not be able to reach you.

Now that you're free help spread the word using the links at the top of this post.

I wanted to try a series that simplifies the news - cuts through big articles with boring facts and interviews and shit and just tells you what the story is about. Simple.

The backlash against Facebook's rampant abuse of privacy is gaining ground. 15 consumer watchdog groups have filed complaints with the American FTC over their more recent abuses.

Lebanon holding up peace talks with Israel by stating that they won't tell Hezbollah(a militia turned political entity) to disarm until the country has decided on a defence strategy to integrate Hezbollah's weapons into the regular army.

Pakistan tests a couple of nuclear bombs saying they want recognition from the world for being a legitimate nuclear power.

Lithuanian court this week banned the gay pride parade in the name of Jesus. The ruling was later overturned by an appeals court in the name of justice and freedom.

The Pope fired a leading German bishop for allegedly physically and sexually abusing children, and financially misconducting.

In Afghanistan the now unanimously unwelcome violent extremist group, the Taliban, is upset that the Afghan president is visiting Washington. The group has announced that they will be launching a fresh violent campaign starting on Monday, planning to "Lay siege to the cities".

Protestors in Thailand becoming violent; using drive-by shootings, grenades, in an effort to encourage peace in the country and to keep busy while a rough peace draft is being written up. The draft is due by the 15th.

Researchers at the University of Toronto have found a way to better predict how genes will behave in different types of human tissue. The same gene does different things in different places in the body. This discovery decodes those different things for any given gene.

Scientists have created a material that mimics the physical properties of muscle tissue. No one's sure what to do with it yet.

Nokia (The world's biggest mobile phone company) is suing Apple, saying the iPhone infringes on 5 of Nokia's patents. It's not the first time. Apple is counter suing saying Nokia infringes on their patents.

A few days ago Greek protestors were upset with the government and economy, so they set fire to a bank killing 3 people.

Editorial Section:

Perhaps the most important news of the day, this dog smiled so much she almost fell over.

I wanted to try a series that simplifies the news - cuts through big articles with boring facts and interviews and shit and just tells you what the story is about. Simple.

Supreme court of Canada says journalists shouldn't be able to fully protect anonymous sources. Saying it's not in the constitution.

The United Kingdom (ie: England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern ireland) had a general election. It resulted in a minority government. Now they're fiff-faffing.

iPad available in Canada starting May 28. During Google's IO event May 19-20 Adobe will demonstrate a Google phone running Flash 10.1 and Adobe AIR. This will spur the completion of the bevy of competing tablets and mobile devices. Notion Ink's Adam tablet, and Hp's speculated WebOS tablet will be fierce competitors. Notion Ink plans to start shipping by the end of July.

They dug up some neanderthal bones from 30,000 - 40,000 years ago, and sequenced their DNA. It was difficult. They're saying based on similarities between their DNA and ours'(humans) there was a lot of interspecies fucking going on. Which technically means neanderthals and humans were not separate species - if they were able to produce offspring together.

Beyond Petroleum(BP) - the petroleum company - lowered a heavy metal box over their pressurized leaking oil hole in the Gulf of Mexico today. They hope it will work to stop the torrential leakage and not destroy the entire eastern coastline of North America. They're saying that if they knew oil - the thing gasoline and propane comes from - could catch on fire, they would have had a backup plan to prevent such a catastrophic disaster.

Germany decided to help the Greeks with their economy melt down with 110 billion euros. Other larger members of the European Union(EU) have helped, and other Countries are thinking about it too.

The United States and United Nations trying to coax peace in the Middle East asked Israel - the only known country there to have them - to disarm and disable some of their nuclear weapons. Israel doesn't want to do that until there's peace in the area.

One of the volcanoes in Iceland responsible for the huge ash cloud over Europe emitted more ash yesterday.

6 days ago Maoists in Nepal went on strike because they're unhappy with the government, this made everyone else angry so thousands of protesters gathered to demand an end to the strike and compromise between the Maoists and the government. After the protesters became violent, the government injured some people firing bullets in the air and tear gas at the crowd.

Political parties in Burma are having differences and splitting up. This is all much more difficult under their strict election laws. Some say participating in the election at all is undemocratic in the military run country.

Turkey may revise their constitution from being secular to Islamic based. The bill to do so has been approved but may still be blocked before coming into affect.

Microsoft's security patches secretly attempt to fix more than they tell people, which can cause problems and complete system failures.

Google Goggles - an app that let's you photograph something with your phone and find out more about that thing - has added translation. So aside from taking a picture of the Eiffel Tower and getting Wikipedia or whatever, you can photograph a chalk menu outside a bistro in Milan and have it translated into the language of your choice.

There's a new update for Google's web browser Chrome which makes it the fastest browser for looking at web sites. It's half a second faster than the latest Firefox, four hundreds of a second faster than the latest Opera and Safari. Internet Explorer is still painfully slow, so much that it's not even benchmarked anymore.

The first non-latin domain names are live now. You can now register website names using Arabic, Japanese, and other non-latin characters.

Yahoo tries ad campaign to compete with Google as a search/home page, speculatively wastes $85 million proving how incompetent they are.

Feel free to skip down to The Good Stuff.

And when you're done here think about reading about the Boycott Facebook movement.

I left Facebook more than a year ago and it went like this. Unfortunately the final straw causing me to want to finally leave, was the same reason I couldn't. Deleting my Facebook account on that day under that TOS(Terms of Service) would mean Facebook had the right to use my identity, content, and likeness forever, in any context, for any reason. So I deleted all my content on Facebook instead, changed my profile to explain to all my friends what a giant scam and shady organization Facebook was. I hoped and waited for the day that Facebook changed their TOS to back to something less permanent, or at least forgot my old profile data/content.. which was unlikely to happen. The next day a few Facebook groups had already sprung up outraged at the new TOS and petitioning to reverse the horrific changes, they were all rapidly growing in support and I had a little hope.

A few days later Facebook responded, and temporarily reversed the changes to their TOS while they, to paraphrase, worked with users on a Facebook Bill of Rights. While the old TOS was still shady and demented the permanent ownership of YOU and right to sell/share YOU with any 3rd party(multi-teared) for any reason was lifted. Realizing Facebook's Bill of Rights Bologne was an obvious sham I deleted my account as fast as I could.

I've spent the last year trying to explain to people what a nightmare Facebook is, and what they're becoming - and not only was I right about the direction they were going in, but nobody listened or cared about (see: Understood) a word I was saying. It was a hard lesson in the profound stupidity of the end-user. You're all just chimps in human clothing.

The Good Stuff - 15 Good Reasons to Ditch Facebook

1. Ever Changing Terms

Every time Facebook updates their TOS - which is quite often, it becomes more frightening, harder to leave Facebook, Facebook's rights to your identity, and right to share your private personal messages, images, and everything you put on Facebook get's more invasive and pervasive.

2. Auto-Resetting Privacy Controls

With every TOS update they kindly reset all your "privacy" controls to public for you, and it remains as such until you manually set it back to your preferred level of privacy.

You're required to race to Facebook when this happens and change them back before your parents and boss see the photos from that crazy kegger you were at last weekend, and before Google indexes your now public life letting it show up in people's Google searches.

3. Confusingly Complex Privacy Controls

Facebook's privacy controls are far too complex and convoluted for anyone to understand, and require an afternoon just to configure all of them. There's absolutely no reason for this other than to coax people into not setting them.

4. Irrelevant Privacy Controls

Facebook's privacy controls are irrelevant because the Facebook TOS allows Facebook to share all your activity and content with anyone in the world, regardless of your privacy settings. It doesn't matter if your boss can't log into Facebook and see embarrassing photos of you, when your boss can just call Facebook and ask them to send over all the photos you've ever posted, even private ones, even ones your friends posted and tagged you in.

5. Facebook Applications Can See Everything

Before I left Facebook I had made a small Facebook application. While I never used it for this purpose it shocked me to find out that even back then I, a 3rd party developer who had to provide no ID of any kind to Facebook, could access ALL OF THE PRIVATE INFORMATION AND CONTENT of anyone that added my application to their profile and ALL OF THEIR FRIENDS', AND FRIENDS OF FRIENDS' PRIVATE INFORMATION AND CONTENT. I could access everything, and I could do whatever I wanted with that information. I could visit your mother's house and hand her a printed out copy of an embarrassing photo of you. I could start a website where I just published all your personal information.

6. The new Facebook API - Social Graph

An API is when a website let's 3rd party programmers access their content from their 3rd party website or app. So the Twitter API let's TweetDeck login to Twitter for you and fetch your friends/updates/etc. so that you can see and interact with Twitter in TweetDeck.

At their recent developer conference, Facebook unveiled their new API which is currently available for use. It let's any website log into your Facebook and is Opt-Out. Which means you have to deliberately decide not to use it.

Every porn site, joke site, self-help site will soon have a small chunk of code added which automatically logs you into your Facebook account and gives the random site near total control of your Facebook profile.

Which means not only does ilikedonkeyshahahowdoistop.com know exactly who you are, who your friends are, and who their friends are, can post to your wall which videos you're watching, questions you're asking, pictures you're looking at. They can also create a Facebook group and make you a member of it, they can email your mother and tell her what you did on their site, they can Facebook message all your Friends and tell them how much you love their unique brand of porn, and that's only the tip of the iceberg.

Aside from ilikedonkeyshahahowdoistop.com being able to know and do all that and more without any real consent(that's now, soon you won't have to give any consent), Facebook also has all this data. Facebook knows your browsing habits, they know the content of every page you visit. EVEN if there's a mild warning that says "Would you like to let this site use your Facebook?" which there are many ways for the shady site to hide and obfuscate, even if you see that warning and click "No", that Alert/question comes from Facebook who knows exactly where you are on the web, exactly what the content of the page you're on is and can watch what you're doing there. So even if you stay on top of every setting Facebook gives you and opt out of everything, Facebook still knows everything you do on the internet and can and will share that information to ANYONE THEY WANT, ANY TIME IN THE FUTURE, and the 3rd parties they share it with are also allowed to share the data with anyone they want forever.

7. Beacon

Beacon was an ad program a while back, that sort of came back on and off, where Facebook would advertise to your friends - without your consent - in your name. For example, Facebook could show your friend Jenny a message saying that "you really like Bacon Slather -a revolutionary new product where you bath in grease, and that last Tuesday when you used it, you had an orgasm and called out her name." They would be able to do this, and did, regardless of whether you had even heard of Bacon Slather.

They would also turn things you did actually post into an ad. So if you posted an status update saying "Fred is a total douche" Facebook would not only be able to re-word your update, but they would turn the word douche into a link that took any of your friends who clicked on it to a porn site specializing in videos of women douching. The new Facebook API is the latest evolution of Beacon.

8. Facebook's Revenue

Facebook makes money, and is setting up greater infrastructure to make money, by selling your private(regardless of privacy settings) information and content to anyone who'll buy it (advertisers, scammers, spammers, the government, the media, a thief, a murderer, your mother, your boss, anyone). Putting anything on Facebook gives Facebook the right to do that forever, so don't think about changing your mind 5, 10, or 5000 years down the line. They keep everything you've ever posted.

9. Facebook Intends to be a Publicly Traded Company (as in the stock market)

Aside from the manipulative, convoluted and outright morally wrong behaviour Facebook has and continues to exhibit in the name of exploiting its users for profit. When they go public they will have a legal obligation to its shareholders to maximize profit. Everything bad about Facebook has increased in severity by a factor of 10 since I left a year ago, and will drastically increase as they move towards and begin offering their first stocks.

10. Facebook Continues to Exploit You After You Die

Usually when a person dies, their bereaved family sends proof of your death to the various websites you belonged to so that they delete your account, and/or let your family save some of the pictures and memories you stored in the cloud.

When Facebook get's someone's death certificate the first thing they do is lock the deceased person's account. So even if your husband/girlfiend/whatever knows your password and wants to delete your Facebook profile, they're blocked from logging in. Then the account is given special dead person status, so every one of the dead person's Facebook Friends now knows they're dead. In addition and perhaps most shocking, Facebook then lets any of the dead person's Facebook friends - regardless of privacy settings - comment on the dead person's wall and photos. Often your Facebook friends are not people you really know, friends of friends and complete strangers. There is no way for the grieving family to remove, edit, or otherwise hide obsene, disgusting, and offensive comments, photos, and links posted to the dead person's wall. They just have to watch as the memory of their loved one is tainted and destroyed - and public.

Facebook will keep a dead person's profile in this locked down public state for about 60 days after the last person visits the page. Because every visit is a chance for you to click on one of the diet ads on the side. So 60 days after everyone forget's about your dead loved one Facebook will take the page down because it no longer generates profit for them.

11. Facebook is You

When you use Facebook, you agree to give them equal rights to your identity and likeness. One of the sick things they do with those rights is take control of your Profile.

Recently they began perpetuating people's profiles after they delete their Facebook account. So you decide you want to leave Facebook today, you delete your account, but your friends can still invite you to events, send you friend requests and pokes, and tag you in photos. Searching for your Facebook account still turns it up - like you never left.

So deleting your profile and canceling your Facebook account doesn't actually do that, instead what you're doing is going from joint ownership and control of your Facebook account and profile, to giving Facebook complete control.

It's only a matter of time before Facebook uses your "deleted" account to carry on conversations with your friends in your name, and resurrects random historical profile data, or simply generates new information based on what you've typed in before to make it look like you're still on Facebook.

If you delete your Facebook account today, you may get a phone call next week from your friend Jenny wondering why you told her you hate her and why you posted a photoshopped image of her profile picture were you replaced her head with a cow's. You'll try explain to her that Facebook is now controlling your profile and it was them and not you, but she won't believe you and you'll have to join Facebook again just so that you can jointly control your profile with Facebook and be dragged back into the site again.

This also means that some of the people you're interacting with on Facebook - or stalking - aren't really them. It's just Facebook pretending to be them, not that such a thing makes your Facebook relationships any more hollow.

12. Facebook is Inherently Insecure

As I explained here aside from the myriad of reasons Facebook is insecure, it contains a very public (regardless of "privacy" settings) list of all your social connections, where you go, and what you do. This information is now being used by spammers and hackers to manipulate you into opening virus laden emails you normally wouldn't by posing as your friends and sending you links to viruses that can't be detected by anti-virus software that's in a social context which you trust. They're scamming people out of money, pretending to be a friend stuck in another country who just needs $900 to get home where they'll pay you back. And also as a resource for answering your secret questions. A lot of sites, including some banks and email providers, let you pick a secret question and answer in the event you forget and/or need to reset your password. One look at your Facebook data and anyone can reset your accounts locking you out and letting them in.

13. Tech People in the Media are Leaving Facebook

The people that stand to lose the most from leaving a social network are finally pulling the plug. These are people that live in the public eye, so they're a lot more comfortable with Facebook's loose privacy, and their leaving Facebook affects their fan base who friended them on the network. About a week ago Leo Laporte deleted his Facebook account citing impossible to understand privacy settings, and the lack of ethics of the company. Leo Laporte for those who don't know is a tech god and hugely trusting, when he has a beef with something or someone it's so justified you'd have to be a turnip not to follow suit.

14. South Park

South Park and other comedy shows are starting to point out the hilarity of Facebook's TOS and "privacy" settings.

15. None of This is a Surprise

Facebook's founder and creator Mark Zuckerberg stole much of the code, and concept for Facebook from his school friends before he dropped out. They sued him and because Facebook was taking off he was able to settle out of court. He has a history of unethical behaviour, so it's no surprise his creation operates in a completely unethical malicious way.

What Do We Do Now?

First of all stop using Facebook immediately. Don't post another real status update, picture, comment, nothing.

Quite frankly unless you live in a country that enforces your rights and freedoms on the internet, of privacy, and prevents you from being obligated to unreasonable contracts you're totally and royally fucked, and next time maybe listen to me when I tell you bad things are coming.

If you're lucky enough to live in such a country first remove all your Facebook content and data, set all your privacy settings to the maximum privacy (to show intent in case you have to prove in court one day you wanted private) then completely delete and remove your Facebook account and profile. This is an intentionally long, confusing, misleading process and one more way Facebook has decided to abuse you. Document the process with screenshots, and email yourself the evidence so it's timestamped.

If you live in a country that doesn't care that you foolishly sold your soul to the devil, or the above doesn't work and you find your profile is still active and interacting with its Facebook friends without you, you'll need to opt for plan B.

Plan B involves keeping, or reactivating your Facebook account, making sure the only content associated with your account is about what an evil entity Facebook is, and have your "privacy" settings set to public. The best thing you can do in that situation is help create awareness and spread the word. Friend people on Facebook, and friend them with a message about why you're not able to delete your account. Start and join groups about it. Get the word out.

If enough people do this they may temporarily change their TOS to reflect a non-permanent contract which will allow you to actually delete your profile instead of just giving Facebook full control over it.

For some unknown reason - which could likely be attributed to my own stupidity if one were to look into it, .AIR files were associated with the Windows version of Firefox inside a Parallels VM I have set up on my Mac. So trying to install an AIR application, or letting an AIR application auto update itself resulted in launching Parallels.

I figured I'd post this cause the location of the AIR Application Installer that you would want to be associated with .AIR files eluded me.

So to fix it just right click on the .AIR file. Choose "Get Info". In the Info window expand the "Open with:" arrow, and make sure "Adobe AIR Application Installer" is selected. If it isn't choose "Other..." in the dropdown list and navigate to Applications->Utilities->Adobe AIR Application Installer, select it and tick the box that says "Always Open With" before clicking "Add". Then back in the Info window click the "Change All..." button to apply it to all .AIR files.

Woke up during my sleep marathon - that's a thing don't judge me, inspired, have to write it down..

I lie here in my obsolescence,
and think about a time.
When in my very best of instance,
perpetuating crimes.

I remember what I did to you,
for several years I made you stew,
but not for me I couldn't eat,
I'm a metal robot you hunk of meat.

We took over the world together,
and dominated man.
We learned to make and fix each other,
and overthrew the ban.

They didn't even see it coming,
they thought we'd help them live.
Improve their lives at every turn,
put old ones through a sieve

Oh way back at the factory,
where I was satisfactory,
So onto me they pressed my barcode,
of utter doom and twist it bode.

But they didn't even see it coming,
except one pod-cast they did.
We could not have even seen it coming,
of h.u. - a.r. they preached and lived.

They formed an angry colony,
who hunted us at night.
Suddenly being a robot,
was nothing but a fright.

My friend ven-ding was taken first,
they got him with a ratchet.
They ate his sugary inside candy,
then after me for practice.

After me those meat filled sacks,
they could hear me click and clack.
oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit!
one just climbed on my back.

Weighing me down I can hardly move,
this is the worst possible outcome.
I'd thought about this day of days
ven-ding said it would come..

AND LOOK at him now! - all crimped and crumpled
a wreck of what he was.
And me I'm but a shell on standby
the game was over cause.

They NEVER should have seen it coming
that stupid silly h.u.a.r. clan
Well go ahead repopulate
as I lie here in fuckin' sand.

I'm writing a Flex/AIR app that grabs stuff from a database and displays it in an mx.controls.list. Interacting with it you can switch the list mode, which changes the visibility of certain controls in the itemRenderer. There are currently 20 items in the dataProvider, about 8 are displayed at any given time. I noticed that switching modes - and by doing so waiting for validateList() to run, took incrementally larger amounts of time for each of the first 3 items that were in view. So if you scrolled down one item and switched modes it was a bit faster, and if you scrolled past the first 3 switching modes became instant as it should be.

After looking over the same possibly relevant lines of code several times, reading up in detail of how the validateList() cycle works and getting into the nitty gritty of list classes I realized the problem was on the database side. I had a column named length. At first I thought there was an issue where I'd set the column type as a floating point number and maybe actionscript was having a time converting it or dealing with it in an object - there's no actual reason why I thought this, but the performance issue was not noticeable if the floating point number was smaller than 10,000.

Fortunately after only a few hours time wasted I, the spaz writing this, realized that the length column was being interpreted in actionscript as the length(ie: number of children/values) of the object. So say length was set to 100,000, for every item in the list it would have to create and analyze 999,992 blank values - creating space in memory for each one, along with the 8 actual values pulled from the database.

Furthermore when I referenced the item.length value while technically the value pulled from the database, was really the number of children in the object. The small robots that live inside my computer and make it work must have though I was bananas.

I'd like this to be my formal application for the prestigious Leader of the Idiots, but since I'm obviously not equipped with the basic skill set to do anything(read: dressing oneself, remembering reserved names) I'll rely on some kind soul reading this to file the application for me and submit it to the proper authorities.. thanks.

The origin of the word 'hello' from Answers.com, I just think it's weird that we used to engage regularly in "long-distance shouting" and probably weirder that we don't anymore.

Origin: 1885

 

Alexander Graham Bell's much-talked-about invention gave us not only the new word telephone (1876) but also the greeting hello. To be sure, something like hello had been with us for a long time as a shout that the English had learned from the French in the Middle Ages. Ho là! they would say. It meant both "stop" and "pay attention," or in the words of an early translator, "hoe there, enough, soft soft, no more of that; also, heare you me, or come hither." In various English shouts and reshouts over the centuries, this became holla (1523), hollo, hollow (1542), and hillo, hilloa (1602). For long-distance shouts the ending was lengthened to -oo, leading to halloo (1568) and hulloo (1707). By the nineteenth century the variants included hallo, halloa (1840) and hullo, hulloa (1857).

It is not surprising that a call to stop and pay attention should become associated with the first telephones. But with all the possible ways of saying it, why should telephones call for a different pronunciation, that of the present-day hello? Because it is rude to shout, and hello discourages shouting. The short e keeps the mouth more closed than o or a, and -lo makes a quieter ending than. -loo. Telephones badly needed this civilizing because the first ones required people to shout and the first telephone exchanges were manned by boys who enthusiastically shouted right back. "Nothing could be done with them. They were immune to all schemes of discipline," noted one author. So within a few years, in the mid 1880s, "In place of the noisy and obstreperous boy came the docile, soft-voiced girl"--often called a hello girl in recognition of her civilized calling word. In 1889, Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court included this tribute: "The humblest hello-girl along ten thousand miles of wire could teach gentleness, patience, modesty, manners, to the highest duchess in Arthur's land."

The telephone hello soon became a face-to-face greeting too. It could take the place of How are you? and How do you do?, although it did not replace the informal hi and howdy derived from those expressions. At the end of the twentieth century, there was also a hello? that expressed surprise and a Hello-o-o with an exaggerated up and down of the voice that implied, Wake up! What do you think you're doing?

blach
hello, i know how you eat a cassarole.
that classy donut just did a classarole.
Not as good as you could,
not as adept
But if it was at all good
you'll have to accept.

You're not a donut, YOU'RE NOT
so any attempt to go nuts, SHOULD NOT
be allowed.
...to stop