Driving While Female

In Saudi Arabia, it’s a crime, punishable by torture straight from the 7th century.

Saudi woman sentenced to 10 lashes for driving car, as religious establishment toughens stance

A Saudi woman was sentenced Tuesday to be lashed 10 times with a whip for defying the kingdom’s prohibition on female drivers, the first time a legal punishment has been handed down for a violation of the longtime ban in the ultraconservative Muslim nation.

Normally, police just stop female drivers, question them and let them go after they sign a pledge not to drive again. But dozens of women have continued to take to the roads since June in a campaign to break the taboo.

See also:
Saudi Woman Faces 10 Lashes for Defying Driving Ban [REPORT]
Saudi woman faces flogging for driving
Saudi Woman Sentenced to 10 Lashes for Driving Car
Saudi Woman Sentenced To Lashes After Defying Driving Ban
Saudi woman sentenced to 10 lashes for driving car
Female Driver Reportedly Sentenced to Lashing in Saudi Arabia
Saudi Woman Driver Sentenced to 10 Lashes After King Grants Vote
Saudi woman to get 10 lashes for driving a car
Saudi Woman To Be Lashed For Driving Car
Saudi woman driver vows to appeal flogging sentence
Saudi woman sentenced to 10 lashes with whip for driving car

It’s bad enough that the Saudi oil ticks are so backward that they make their women wear bags in public, but now they’re going to flog a woman, for driving? How barbaric is that? Where’s the outcry from the feminists and human rights activists? If this was happening in Israel, there’d already be a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning it.

/the whole Lefty world was in a prolonged uproar, screaming torture and war crimes, because the United States waterboarded three scum of the Earth terrorists, which resulted in no permanent physical or psychological harm, can you just imagine if we had subjected them to lashing?

Whitewashing The Jihad

So, the Park Police find Yonathan Melaku lurking near the Pentagon and he tells them that he’s carrying explosives. When they search Melaku’s car, the police find written material sympathetic to al Qaeda. What little tidbit of information is missing from almost every mainstream media news account? The fact that Yonathan Melaku is a Muslim is systematically omitted. Why might that be?

Losing His Religion

There was a terror scare at the Pentagon this morning. As CBS News reports, it started when the U.S. Park Police “came upon” 22-year-old Yonathan Melaku wandering around Arlington National Cemetery, which was closed. “The Park Police then launched a search for a vehicle, which was found near the Pentagon.”

A search of the car turned up “no suspicious items,” but Melaku told the cops “that he was carrying explosive materials.” They checked his backpack and “found what appeared to be an unknown quantity of ammonium nitrate,” a chemical “that is widely used in fertilizers and can be used in explosives with the correct concentration.”

We learn from the CBS story that Melaku is a lance corporal in the Marine Reserves. The Associated Press adds that he is a naturalized American citizen, originally from Ethiopia. CBS also reports that “Melaku was carrying a notebook that contained the phrases ‘al Qaeda,’ ‘Taliban rules’ and ‘Mujahid defeated croatian forces’ when he was detained,” but “that the suspect is not thought to have been involved in a terrorist act or plot.”

All of which raises an obvious question–but one that goes unanswered in the reports from CBS and AP, as well as others from ABC News and the Washington Post. We could only find one news organization that had the answer: Fox News Channel, which reports that Maliku is Muslim.

See also:
Suspect in Custody for ‘Suspicious’ Backpack Is Marine Corps Reservist
Marine Identified as Suspect in Pentagon Terror Scare
Pentagon Bomb Scare: Is the Suspect a Lone-Wolf Terrorist?
Marine reservist held in suspicious materials investigation near Pentagon; no explosives found
Yonathan Melaku: Suspect in Pentagon scare
Suspect in Pentagon scare is in Marine Reserve
Marine reservist detained near Pentagon; materials in pack non-explosive
Pentagon ‘bomb plot’ man held
Police Arrest Marine Reservist in Pentagon Bomb Scare
Pentagon Bomb Scare Suspect a Marine Reservist
Pentagon Bomb Scare Suspect, Yonathan Melaku’s, Franconia Home Searched
Police Detain ‘Suspicious’ Man, Search Vehicle Near Pentagon
Marines reservist held in incident near Pentagon

Al Qaeda is a Muslim terrorist organization dedicated to the destruction of Western civilization. Virtually all terrorism worldwide is carried out by Muslims. Yonathan Melaku is found near the Pentagon, carrying “explosives” and written material referencing al Qaeda, and yet every single news organization, save one, blatantly ignores the fact that Melaku is a Muslim. How is that fact not relevant to the strory?

If Melaku had been a Christian, you can bet your ass that it would be first paragraph, front page news. When does news journalism become agenda driven, politically correct propaganda and deliberately biased misinformation? Perhaps the bigger question is why the news organizations engage in this deception by omission, what drives it, is it coordinated and, if so, by who or what and on what level and for what purpose?

/willfully ignoring and whitewashing the very real existential threat of Islamic terrorism does not make it go away, it only makes it harder for us to defend ourselves

Watson Wins!

Okay, so it’s only a practice round but, nonetheless, it’s pretty damn impressive. Just remember, these aren’t ordinary Jeopardy! Champions that Watson is beating like a drum, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter are the top two all time Jeopardy! Champions.

Computer beats Jeopardy! champs – is world domination far behind?

IBM recently created a supercomputer named Watson that will compete against humans in the “Jeopardy!: IBM Challenge.”

The other two contestants? Previous “Jeopardy!” champions Ken Jennings, who won 74 consecutive matches, and Brad Rutter, who won a record-breaking $3.3 million as a contestant. The televised match will air in February, but today IBM offered a teaser in a three-round test battle.

Watson has been in the works for approximately four years. It is powered by 10 racks of IBM servers and has 15 terabytes of RAM. However, Google or KGB are no help to the machine, as it’s not connected to the Internet. Instead, it gets its information from myriad encyclopedias, dictionaries, books, and other sources of information it has digested. According to IBM, Watson has access to the equivalent of 200 million pages of content.

Watson also works just like a human contestant would: he has a buzzer and answers in the form of a question. Although as a bonus for the audience, the top three answers that Watson believes are correct are projected on a screen, giving insight into its decision-making process.

The results of the today’s match shouldn’t be too surprising. Tech blog Engadget.com
reports that no question went answered incorrectly by any of the contestants, but the computer beat the human champs, as Watson led with $4,400, Jennings was second with $3,400, and Rutter rounded out the scoring with $1,200.

See also:
IBM’s Watson supercomputer destroys all humans in Jeopardy practice round (video!)
IBM’s Jeopardy supercomputer beats humans in practice bout
IBM’s Watson wins Jeopardy practice round: Can humans hang?
Are You Smarter Than A Computer The Size Of 10 Refrigerators?
Machine Bests Man in “Jeopardy!” Practice Round
Domo arigato, Mr. Watson: IBM computer takes on ‘Jeopardy’
Jeopardy! supercomputer: Is the next game show champ a machine?
The computer wore Jeopardy’s buzzer
Computer wins first test against 2 ‘Jeopardy!’ champs
The DeepQA Project
Watson Research Center
I’ll Take Machines That Play Jeopardy For $500, Trebek

Did you watch the way Watson destroyed those two hapless human Jeopardy! champions? Instead of Jeapardy! trivia, they should stuff Watson full of all the known economic, military, scientific, and political knowledge.

/I’d vote for Watson over Obama for President in 2012, America would be a much safer and more prosperous country

I’ll Take Machines That Play Jeopardy For $500, Trebek

What is Watson, Alex?

IBM supercomputer to appear on ‘Jeopardy’

What is the end of the world?

For some, it would be dedicating your life to appear on a TV game show. For others, it would be creating a machine that can prove itself better than anyone who dedicates their life to appear on a TV game show.

For myself, it seems clear that IBM has created something that will be the apogee of appointment television by honing a supercomputer to compete with the finest mailmen, insurance brokers, and nurses to prove that it can, well, find the question in the answer.

Yes, IBM’s Watson is, according to The New York Times, to appear on “Jeopardy!”!

Eric Brown, Watson’s research manager, said on the IBM video here embedded: “A question can be posed in natural language and, having read a whole bunch of information, data, documents, it can come up with a very precise answer to that question.”

This does sound very slightly like a large box of Google with human tendencies.

One of the Watson team members describes it in extremely romantic terms. He posits the “Jeopardy!” appearance as a competition between a human, who is all “carbon and water,” and Watson, rippling with its silicon and its unslippable disk.

See also:
Supercomputer plays ‘Jeopardy’
This supercomputer plans to beat humans on Jeopardy!
VIDEO: IBM’s Supercomputer to go on Jeopardy!
IBM’s Jeopardy! computer plays to win (and does)
There’s Nothing Elementary About IBM’s Remarkable Watson
What Is I.B.M.’s Watson?
IBM invites you to outwit supercomputer
The DeepQA Project
Watson Research Center

Oh sure, it’s a cute publicity stunt, man versus machine and all.

/but can Watson beat Ken Jennings?