Senator ‘Educate yourselves or you’ll get stuck in Iraq’ Kerry (D-MA): ‘Everybody knows’ most legislators don’t read the bills they sign.

Remember in 2006 when John Kerry infamously told students:

You know, education, if you make the most of it, if you study hard and you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, uh, you, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.

So, Senator Kerry should be all for giving legislators (and the public) 72 hours to read sweeping legislative bills before they are voted on, right? Well, not exactly. This is what he said to the members of a Senate Finance Committee last week:

This is fundamentally a delay tactic. I mean, let’s be honest about it. The legislative language, everybody knows, is relatively arcane, legalistic, and most people don’t read the legislative language.

Doublespeak much, Senator Kerry?

I wonder when Stephen King will weigh in.

 

Photo: FreeRepublic.com

 

ACON

I won’t be a minute. I told Naomi and the ACORN bunch I’d stop in and visit as soon as they were settled at the new headquarters.

For more fun, visit www.DiversityLane.com

 

Diversity Lane: Lion of the Cemetery

Leave it to Teddy…

For more fun, visit www.DiversityLane.com

 

WolframAlpha – Making the Web Computable

Remember in Star Trek, when crew members aboard a space ship were able to simply say, “Computer,” and then ask the computer some question about a planet, civilization, or fellow crew member? In reply, Computer would rattle off a bunch of information, some bits more useful than others. It was all very cool and futuristic.

Well, thanks to WolframAlpha.com, that’s almost not “futuristic” anymore.

The main difference between what we are calling “Web 2.0″ (the internet as we have known it over the last few years) and “Web 3.0″ is the integration with current technology of databases in ways that are useful and meaningful to us, also known as the Semantic Web (also see a video, here).

In the video below, Stephen Wolfram explains his new “computable knowledge engine.” You need to be a little smarter than I am to think of intelligent queries for this search engine right now, and it’s so new that everyone is still in the “let’s-play-with-this-and-see-what-it-can-do” phase, rather than the “oh-cool-this-is-going-to-save-me-a-lot-of-time-!” phase that it will be in shortly after we all figure out what it can do, and after it’s beefed up a little. But keep an eye on this one. It promises to be a key player in the development of the web.

Click to view video – Video will open in a new window.

Click to view video – Video will open in a new window.

 

Also see:

• About WolframAlpha
• #WolframAlpha Discussion on Twitter
• Mashable: Five Things that WolframAlpha Does Better (And Vastly Different) than Google