Republican Senator Ted Cruz walks out on Raul Castro's speech at Mandela memorial !

Republican Senator Ted Cruz, part of a Congressional delegation at Nelson Mandela's memorial service, walked out of the service Tuesday when Cuban Dictator Raul Castro started speaking.

Cruz’s communications director, Sean Rushton, told National Review that the GOP senator “very much hopes Castro learns the lessons of Nelson Mandela.”

“For decades, Castro has wrongly imprisoned and tortured countless innocents. Just as Mandela was released after 27 years in prison, Castro should finally release his political prisoners; he should hold free elections, and once and for all set the Cuban people free,” he added.

President Barack Obama made some waves earlier in the day when he was photographed smiling and shaking hands with Castro before the memorial service. The White House said the interaction was not planned and no substantive discussion occurred.

Cruz’s father, Rafael Cruz, fled Cuba and the ruthless Fidel Castro regime when he was just a teenager. He came to the United States and fell in love with the country.

Happy Birthday Grace Hopper American Computer Scientist - Commodore Grace M. Hopper, USN

Developed the first Compiler for a Computer Programming Language

Grace Murray Hopper (December 9, 1906 – January 1, 1992) was an American computer scientist and United States Navy Rear Admiral. A pioneer in the field, she was one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I computer, and developed the first compiler for a computer programming language. She conceptualized the idea of machine-independent programming languages, which led to the development of COBOL, one of the first modern programming languages. She is credited with popularizing the term "debugging" for fixing computer glitches (inspired by an actual moth removed from the computer). Owing to the breadth of her accomplishments and her naval rank, she is sometimes referred to as "Amazing Grace". The U.S. Navy destroyer USS Hopper (DDG-70) is named for her, as was the Cray XE6 "Hopper" supercomputer at NERSC.


Early life and education
Hopper was born Grace Brewster Murray in New York City. She was the oldest in a family of three children. She was curious as a child, a lifelong trait; at the age of seven she decided to determine how an alarm clock worked, and dismantled seven alarm clocks before her mother realized what she was doing (she was then limited to one clock). For her preparatory school education, she attended the Hartridge School in Plainfield, New Jersey. Rejected for early admission to Vassar College at age 16 (her test scores in Latin were too low), she was admitted the following year. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Vassar in 1928 with a bachelor's degree in mathematics and physics and earned her Master's degree at Yale University in 1930.
In 1934, she earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from Yale under the direction of Øystein Ore. Her dissertation, New Types of Irreducibility Criteria, was published that same year. Hopper began teaching mathematics at Vassar in 1931, and was promoted to associate professor in 1941. She was married to New York University professor Vincent Foster Hopper (1906–76 from 1930 until their divorce in 1945. She never remarried, and she kept his surname.

World War II


In 1943, during World War II, Hopper obtained a leave of absence from Vassar and was sworn into the United States Navy Reserve, one of many women to volunteer to serve in the WAVES. She had to get an exemption to enlist; she was 15 pounds (6.8 kg) below the Navy minimum weight of 120 pounds (54 kg). She reported in December and trained at the Naval Reserve Midshipmen's School at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. Hopper graduated first in her class in 1944, and was assigned to the Bureau of Ships Computation Project at Harvard University as a lieutenant, junior grade. She served on the Mark I computer programming staff headed by Howard H. Aiken. Hopper and Aiken coauthored three papers on the Mark I, also known as the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator. Hopper's request to transfer to the regular Navy at the end of the war was declined due to her age . She continued to serve in the Navy Reserve. Hopper remained at the Harvard Computation Lab until 1949, turning down a full professorship at Vassar in favor of working as a research fellow under a Navy contract at Harvard.

COBOL

In the spring of 1959, a two-day conference known as the Conference on Data Systems Languages (CODASYL) brought together computer experts from industry and government. Hopper served as the technical consultant to the committee, and many of her former employees served on the short-term committee that defined the new language COBOL (an acronym for COmmon Business-Oriented Language). The new language extended Hopper's FLOW-MATIC language with some ideas from the IBM equivalent, COMTRAN. Hopper's belief that programs should be written in a language that was close to English rather than in machine code or languages close to machine code (such as assembly language) was captured in the new business language, and COBOL would go on to be the most ubiquitous business language to date.

From 1967 to 1977, Hopper served as the director of the Navy Programming Languages Group in the Navy's Office of Information Systems Planning and was promoted to the rank of captain in 1973. She developed validation software for COBOL and its compiler as part of a COBOL standardization program for the entire Navy.

WHITE HOUSE ADMITS THERE MAY BE A HUGE PROBLEM WITH THOUSANDS OF OBAMACARE ‘ENROLLMENTS’

Fox reporter challenges State Dept. on lies over secret Iran talks

A body language expert could have a field day analyzing the reaction of the State Department spokeswoman as she fumbled her way through pointed questions from a Fox News reporter on why reporters were lied to about the years long secret negotiations with Iran.

Spokeswoman Jen Psaki kept breaking into odd, beaming smiles as Fox’s Chief Washington Correspondent James Rosen pressed her on why the State Department continually denied the Obama administration was engaged in secret talks with Iran over its nuclear program, reportedly since 2011.

THERE’S A REASON THIS A CAPPELLA COVER OF ‘LITTLE DRUMMER BOY’ HAS GONE MEGA VIRAL

You are in for a treat.

Pentatonix, an a capella music group consisting of five members, published a cover of “Little Drummer Boy” on Nov. 25 to rave reviews on the Internet.

“Incredible, what talent,” one user wrote on YouTube.

Train derailment kills 4 in NYC

NEW YORK - Four people were killed and more than 60 were injured Sunday when a Metro-North commuter train derailed in the Bronx.

The Fire Department of New York also said about 50 units and 135 firefighters were at the derailment location just north of the Spuyten Duyvil station working to get passengers and crew out of the train.

Five of the southbound train's seven cars derailed in an area along the Hudson River and Sputen Duyvil just north of Manhattan, according to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

The seven-car train originated at 6:54 a.m. in Poughkeepsie, one of New York City's northern suburbs, according to the MTA. The derailment forced a suspension of all service on the MTA's Hudson line between Grand Central Station in Manhattan and the Croton Harmon station in Westchester County, a northern suburb.

The New York City Police Department declared a "level-three mobilization" -- a somewhat-common alert for a serious incident -- sending officers from across the Bronx to the derailment scene.

The Associated Press, quoting a woman at the scene, initially said that some cars of the Metro-North passenger train toppled into water. Edwin Valero told AP he was in an apartment building above the accident scene when the train derailed. He said none of the cars went into the water where the Harlem River meets the Hudson, but at least one ended up a few feet from the edge.

Spuyten Duyvil is a neighborhood in the Bronx. Metro-North's Hudson line serves New York City and Westchester, Putnam, and Dutchess counties, ending in Poughkeepsie.

The Metro-North noted the incident on its website with a note that "Hudson Line Customers will experience indefinite delays south of Croton Harmon. More information will be provided as it is obtained."

Harry Reid pulls the trigger on “nuclear option”, Senate strikes down 225 years of precedent

Veterans Day Tribute 2013

Freedom Is Not Free Therefore, We Owe You
Thank You !