Philip Bennett, the Washington Post's managing editor, paid a visit to the University of California, Irvine for a little chat earlier this week. During his comments on the subject of religion and politics, Bennett claimed that the MSM should hire more Muslims because the media has too many misconceptions about Islam. Bennett told the UCI audience, "At the Post I want more Muslim readers and I want more Muslim journalists." One wonders how far this new understanding of Islam in the media will go for Bennett, though? Will his desire to be inclusive and to create a new politically correct understanding go as far as excusing Islamofascism as we try to better understand Islam?

The report in the Daily Pilot from Newport Beach, California also reported that the newsroom at the Washington Post was even debating whether or not they should even use the word "Islamist" because it might be too "contentious." This WaPost debate alone does not auger as well for any better understanding as it does for overlooking the evil perpetrated in the name of Islam in favor of making believe that our understanding of them will somehow stop the violence and hate against us.

Brasch Words

Told the Rocky Mountain News, 'If I can help people focus on preparedness, how to be better prepared in their homes and better prepared in their businesses - because that goes straight to the bottom line - then I hope I can help the country in some way.' Now, that's altruism. He's a real patriot. Will probably make more from consulting than he ever did on the federal payroll. Even has a fancy office in Washington, D.C."

That fancy office, I learned, was in the high-rent posh office suite of Joe M. Allbaugh, who ran President George W. Bush's first campaign for the White House. For his loyalty, but certainly with almost no knowledge of emergency management, Allbaugh became Mr. Bush's first FEMA director before he resigned to become a consultant and lobbyist.

Allbaugh bestowed the nation's disaster response upon his college buddy Michael Brown.

Woomail Wants To Woo You Away from Spam

The recipient gets an e-mail saying, "I only read secure e-mail" and a link that takes the recipient to a reply page on the Woomail server , so that no part of the communication travels through cyberspace.

Putting Users in Control

John Halloran, a Puerto Rico-based precious-metals dealer, created Woomail after struggling with the huge amount of spam his brokers and office staff were dealing with. He said that his goal was to put users in charge of their communications, inbound and outbound.

"The problem was that anyone in the world can send you communication from anywhere, and I can't stop them from sending it to my servers," he said. "If I can get them to come to me by typing in a URL or Woo to Woo message, then I can control communications on my server and so I can prevent fraudulent use." (A "Woo to Woo" message is one in which both parties have Woomail accounts.) Sending a message from within the site cannot be done without a challenge-and-response question, putting the kibosh on automated spammers.

Will authorized hosting put MySQL on a par with Oracle and DB2?

Although real comparability to Oracle and IBM databases could still be some time away, MySQL's new authorized hosting program might help broaden out the niche for the open source database a lot more quickly.

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World's finest tech sites immortalised

They may have transformed man's understanding of the universe but the monumental impact of the world's first large radio telescope and the planet's largest particle physics lab has never been fully recognised.

Experts on the history of science and world heritage from 15 countries are taking part in the London-based sessions to create the framework, which is expected to stimulate a surge in the number of science and technology heritage sites across the world.

Enormous Jurassic Sea Predator, Pliosaur, Discovered In Norway

The 150 million year-old Jurassic fossil was discovered on the remote Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, at 78 degrees north latitude, approximately 1300 km (800 miles) from the North Pole. It was found in the summer of 2006 by a team of Norwegian paleontologists and volunteers from the University of Oslo Natural History Museum, led by Dr. Jørn Hurum. The fossil was excavated in the summer of 2007 and has until now been prepared and conserved by a team at the Natural History Museum in Oslo .

A pliosaur is a type of plesiosaur, a group of extinct reptiles that lived in the world's oceans during the age of dinosaurs. Pliosaurs had a tear-drop shaped body and two sets of powerful paddles that it used to "fly" through the water. Their short neck supported a massive skull full of an impressive set of teeth.

BIND 9 DNS Administration Reference Book

This book comes to me in an unusual way. I received an email from the publisher and editor asking if I'd be willing to review BIND 9 DNS Administration Reference Book. Ok, that's not unusual. In fact, it happens to me all the time. What is unusual is that I'd never heard of Reed Media Services before. One reason is that they seem to be a smaller publishing house that was originally started to "print newsletter publishing, online publishing (including related software design), and providing related internet hosting services". The other reason is that they've only produced two books thus far (The OpenBSD PF Packet Filter Book is the other one).