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Comrades! Tractor Production Up 300% This Year!

Gartner puts Apple’s 1996 share at 4.6 percent, IDC at 5.1 percent. Market share in 2005 was 2.2 percent from Gartner and 2.3 percent from IDC. According to Gartner, Apple’s market share peaked at 15.8 percent in 1980 — four years before the Mac was introduced … Apple is somewhat stronger in U.S. consumer market share, with Gartner giving Apple 5.8 percent in 2005 and IDC at 2.9 percent. It’s also worth noting that Apple’s worldwide market share did move up slightly last year from 1.9 percent in 2004, according to Gartner, or 2.0 percent.

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Moro Islamic Liberation Front

How unfortunate for the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, an Islamic jihadist and violent movement in the Philippines. Their callsign, “MILF“, basically now fails to strike fear into the hearts of most people. Contrary to my expectations, however, they do manage to appear on the first page of Google’s MILF results, which at least is something.

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What To Do In Iowa When You’re Bored

Skyler Bartels kept looking over his shoulder. It’s a habit he picked up living at the Windsor Heights Wal-Mart for three days. Really living there. Eating, sleeping, checking out the DVDs, never leaving. The plan was to spend his entire spring break there. Under the radar … There was the military recruiter who told him he had what it takes … Long hair, scruffy college-kid beard, slender build. Pleasant, laid-back demeanor. I had to know. What does it take? “He said I had good posture and didn’t look sad.”

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Light, Sweet Porridge

An average of more than 7 calories [29.3 kJ] of fossil fuel is burned up for every calorie of energy we get from our food. This means that in eating my 400-calorie [1.7 MJ] breakfast, I will, in effect, have consumed 2,800 calories [11.7 MJ] of fossil fuel energy. (Some researchers claim the ratio is as high as 10 to 1.) But this is only an average. My cup of coffee gives me just a few calories of energy, but to process 1 pound of coffee requires more than 8,000 calories [33.4 MJ] of fossil-fuel energy — the equivalent energy found in nearly a quart [.94 L] of crude oil, 30 cubic feet [850 L] of natural gas or about 2.5 pounds [1.1 kg] of coal.

Old but good: The Oil We Eat.

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Campus Watch

The Lobby also monitors what professors write and teach. In September 2002, Martin Kramer and Daniel Pipes, two passionately pro-Israel neo-conservatives, established a website (Campus Watch) that posted dossiers on suspect academics and encouraged students to report remarks or behaviour that might be considered hostile to Israel. This transparent attempt to blacklist and intimidate scholars provoked a harsh reaction and Pipes and Kramer later removed the dossiers, but the website still invites students to report anti-Israel activity.

Minitrue.

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Every Time You Click A Lawyer Pays…

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Web 2.0, Debadgered

Wankr, a shining example of what Web 2.0 is made of…

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Dick Cheney Demands Perrier and Fox News

So much for the France Boycott. Dick cheney’s hospitality rider specifies mineral water for his wife (Perrier is recommended) and that all TVs be tuned to Fox News. Nothing about taking out the red M&Ms.

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Yakuzasploitation

This is all over the web, but it’s so fun it’s worth repeating. Part of the “Pinky Violence” genre, with Reiko Ike as a generally pissed off but highly sexed female yakuza boss.

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The Forever Not-Quite-War

In the three days after the bombing of the Shia shrine in Samarra on 22 February, some 1,300 people, mostly Sunni, were picked up on the street or dragged from their cars and murdered. The dead bodies of four suspected suicide bombers were left dangling from a pylon in the Sadr City slum.

Even inside Iraq’s spotless new schoolhouses, the freshly painted and refurbished pride of U.S. reconstruction efforts, Shiite children have begun to sit on one side of the class, Sunni children on the other. “My daughter came home and asked me, ‘Daddy, what sect do we belong to?’ ” said Shafiq Mahdi Jabouri, a Baghdad educator who belongs to a tribe with both Shiite and Sunni branches. “I was shocked. Sect used to be a joke in Iraq. Now it’s a dividing line.”

Sectarian politics and wealthy regional governments ensure a weak central government in Baghdad. Sunni and Kurdish resistance to Ibrahim al-Jaafari’s continued service as prime minister continues to slow progress toward the formation of that government. When central authority is weak, the state is vulnerable to manipulation–even intervention–from outside. Just as Syria dominated Lebanon’s politics for decades, Iran stands ready to exploit a divided Iraq. The centrifugal pull of sectarian politics and the absence of a strong national identity will leave Iraq open to many forms of Iranian interference–political, economic, even military–once U.S. troops have gone home.

The bloodshed of recent weeks exposed the waning power of Shia religious and political leaders to rein in the vigilantes. Even Mr Sadrs calls for restraint were ignored. Hadi al-Amery, the head of the Badr organisation, an arm of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, one of the main Shia parties, told Reuters news agency that small armed groups were being formed in villages and towns to protect the population … More militancy among the Shia majority plays into the hands of the Sunni insurgents and could help them draw broader support from the Sunni Arab community … The enemy, which used to be described as the occupying forces, is now increasingly seen as the Shia sectarian government backed by Iran waging war against the Sunnis.

Muqtada [al-Sadr] was still publishing his original newspaper, Al Hawza, and it warned of an American plan to split Iraq and printed a cartoon of British Prime Minister Tony Blair saying, Hello, Bush, we succeeded in splitting Iraq. One article discussed the role of Islam in the Iraqi constitution and concluded that Islam could not be applied truly unless the Mahdi returned or his assistant appeared, suggesting the possibility that Muqtada was the Mahdis assistant. Another headline reported a study that showed that 25 percent of Europeans are insane.

In the Palestinian territories, Lebanon and Egypt, voters have turned out in large numbers to support the militant group Hamas, Hezbollah guerrillas and the conservative Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood, respectively. “War has increased the wave of Islamism,” said Essam el Erian, a spokesman for the influential Muslim Brotherhood, which is now Egypt’s leading opposition force. In the wake of Hamas’ victory, the United States is widely perceived to have muted its pro-democracy rhetoric, leading to a sense that American support for democracy is fickle.

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