But before I go - let me point you to here:
This guy is fantastic!
Now this is cool:
Link
CIA Used Dragonfly, Catfish as Spy Gadget Models
Tue Oct 28,12:35 PM ET Add Technology - Reuters to My Yahoo!
By Tabassum Zakaria
LANGLEY, Va. (Reuters) - The CIA (news - web sites) once built a mechanical dragonfly to carry a listening device but found small gusts of wind knocked it off course so it was never used in a spy operation.
The agency also tested a 24-inch-long rubber robot catfish named "Charlie" capable of swimming inconspicuously among other fish and whose mission remains secret.
Charlie and the dragonfly were among spy gadgets displayed at CIA headquarters in an exhibit to mark the 40th anniversary of the Directorate of Science and Technology. It is not open to the public.
"Charlie's mission is still classified, we can't talk about it," Toni Hiley, curator of the CIA museum, told Reuters on a tour of the exhibit. "All we can say is he's our work on aquatic robotic technologies."
After seeing the life-like "insectothopter," Hiley jokes that she cannot look at a dragonfly in the same way anymore.
More nails in the coffin:
Why Multiculturalism Is a Fraud and a Disaster for Women's Rightsby Brenda Walker
Key points:
Multiculturalism argues that all cultures are equal expressions of our human variety. In fact, some diversity adherents even portray traditional cultures as superior to our crass western ways. Colorful ethnic attire and interesting cuisines do have a certain cachet when seen from a distance. But when the reality of women's brutal oppression worldwide is considered, multiculturalism can be seen as a fraud. Indeed, it supports the continuation of the monstrous crimes against women by its “celebration” of traditional cultures while ignoring the dark side.
While the social status of women in western cultures has improved markedly in recent decades, the experience of life for women outside of Europe and America remains largely one of cruelty and coercion. For example, Sixty Minutes reported in 2000 that India is missing 22 million women and girls because of sex-selective abortion, infanticide and the murder of adult women by their husbands for insufficient dowries. In several Latin American countries a rapist can be legally absolved by offering to marry the victim. The scourge of “honor killing” continues around the Islamic world, a practice where thousands of women are murdered for the smallest affronts to rigid social codes. An unproved charge of sexual infidelity or even a husband's paranoid dream may result in a woman being burned or hacked to death. Her murderer receives the approval of family and community for his action.
The false ideology of multiculturalism with its accusations of racism toward anyone who will not submit has intimidated Americans into believing it is desirable to welcome millions of immigrants from cultures which consider women inferior. Western culture, for all its faults, is a comparative oasis of equality for women, unlike the traditional cultures so esteemed by the multiculturalism proponents. It is alarming that some Americans are so naive or brainwashed that they seek to increase such retrograde diversity in our institutions and in the nation as a whole, evidently to prove their rejection of racism. However, the absurd preference for third-world cultures in our immigration policy amounts to importing sexism. Is that supposed to be some sort of improvement — trading racism for sexism? Don't we already have enough male privilege in this society without inviting the misogyny of the world?
ROPMA...
NORTH KOREA’S HELL
Back after World War II, there were a lot of recriminations about the Holocaust. Some said that the Allies didn’t do much because they didn’t know what was going on. Others said that they knew, but couldn’t do much anyway except try to end Hitler’s reign as soon as possible. Still others said the Allies knew, but didn’t care enough to do anything.
Where North Korea is concerned, the only choices are categories two and three above, because we can’t claim that we don’t know. As Anne Applebaum notes, a new report makes clear that what’s going on in North Korea is horrific:
The pictures that the committee has procured — and now published, together with a report called “The Hidden Gulag”— are satellite photographs of North Korean concentration camps. With remarkable clarity they show, for example, the contours of Yodok, one of the most notorious prison camps in North Korea: the barracks and “villages” inhabited by different categories of prisoners, including political prisoners; the mines, the flour mill, the farms where prisoners work; the cemetery. They also show the outlines of Bukchang, another vast camp, including its cement factory, its hospital, its punishment barracks, its school for prisoners’ children. Distinct objects, including the high walls that enclose the camps, are clearly visible.
You can read more in this story: Link
Nice place for holiday donations - build classrooms, get musical instruments and buy toys - for kids in Iraq. I know my donations that used to go to NPR will be going here.
Linux will be the main operating system for IBM's upcoming family of "Blue Gene" supercomputers--a major endorsement for the operating system and the open-source computing model it represents. IBM's $100 million Blue Gene program is directed at creating, by late 2005 or early 2006, a new family of supercomputers that will be able to perform a quadrillion calculations per second (one petaflop).
Blue Gene/L, the first member of the family, will contain 65,000 processors and 16 trillion bytes of memory. Due in 2004 or 2005, the system will be able to perform 200 trillion calculations per second. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory will use the system for performing nuclear weapons simulations.
The decision to adopt Linux came, in part, as a result of the growing size and strength of the open-source community. Thousands of developers around the world are participating in the evolution of Linux. Creating a new OS inside of IBM would require a massive engineering effort.
"We had two choices of operating systems for the Blue Gene family, either use a special-purpose system or Linux," Bill Pulleyblank, director of Exploratory Server Systems at IBM Research, said in a statement. "We chose Linux because it's open and because we believed it could be extended to run a computer the size of Blue Gene. We saw considerable advantage in using an operating system supported by the open-source community, so that we can get their input and feedback."
Linux already has a stronghold in supercomputers. IBM expects the Unix offshoot to be more popular than its own version of Unix, called AIX, when it comes to linking Big Blue's blade servers together to create what amounts to a single high-performance machine.
Linux has become a key operating system for IBM's server division. Historically, IBM promoted different operating systems--such as zOS for mainframes and AIX for midrange Unix servers--for the different members of its server and mainframe family.
While IBM still offers a specific operating system for each of its four server families, it also supports a version of Linux for each. This makes it easier for application developers to adapt applications for IBM's entire server line.
It's easier, for example, to bring a Linux-based application from IBM's pSeries line of RISC chip-based servers to the xSeries line of Intel-based servers than it is to port an AIX-based application for pSeries to the xSeries line.
Tailoring Linux to run on these upcoming machines will require substantial research, according to IBM. The company has, for instance, created a technique where only select processors can access the full hardware resources of the machines. IBM is also looking at ways to reduce interference between different tasks.
The IBM research team is currently running a large Linux cluster to simulate Blue Gene.
Tracks and bold-faces ones that have been uodated in the least 24 hours. Interesting view of their culture - one that is not reported by the media - either mainstream or alternative...
NY Times article - registration required
This is actually a good thing - Global Warming is a complex issue and there is not a simple answer. We are leaving a mini-ice age and the warming we are going through is more climate driven than human driven. The majority of the warming happened before 1940 - well before the majority of the CO2 release...
WASHINGTON, Oct. 30
The Senate rejected a plan today that its supporters said would help curb global warming. But the 55-to-43 tally showed how remarkably the political landscape has changed in six years.
The bill called for scientific research on climate change and a system of economic incentives and curbs to prod industrial plants into lowering their carbon-dioxide emissions and other greenhouse gases over the next several years.
While the issue was far from the most exciting to come before the lawmakers, today's vote was politically interesting nonetheless. It contrasted sharply with the 95-to-0 vote in 1997, when senators turned down any global-warming policy that would significantly hurt the American economy.
The 43 senators who voted today in favor of steps to curb emissions may have done so because they sense greater awareness among the electorate.
Then, too, six Republicans voted in favor of the bill, even though the measure runs contrary to the approach of President Bush, who opposes mandatory curbs. The six were Senators Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, Susan Collins and Olympia J. Snowe of Maine, Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, Richard G. Lugar of Indiana and John S. McCain of Arizona.
Mr. McCain, who was a co-sponsor, with Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut, refused to concede defeat in the long run.
"We will be back on this issue just like we were back on the issue of campaign finance reform," he said during debate.
Some foes of the bill said privately that it had less genuine support than the vote tally indicated. According to that theory, some senators who voted "yes" did so to curry favor with environmentalists, knowing all the while that the measure would not pass.
Ten Democrats voted against the measure: Senators Max Baucus of Montana, Carl Levin of Michigan, Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia, Zell Miller of Georgia, Blanche Lincoln and Mark Pryor, both of Arkansas, Kent Conrad and Byron Dorgan, both of North Dakota, and John Breaux and Mary Landrieu, both of Louisiana.
The Vatican released an amazing document that clearly outlines the problems with radical Islam and it's relationship with non-islamic nations.
Christians in Islamic Countries
“La Civiltà Cattolica,” edited by a group of Jesuits in Rome, is a very special magazine. Every one of its articles is reviewed by the Vatican secretary of state before publication. So the magazine reflects his thought faithfully.
In its October 18 edition, “La Civiltà Cattolica” published a strikingly severe article on the condition of Christians in Muslim countries. The central thesis of the article is that “in all of its history, Islam has shown a warlike and conquering face”; that “for almost a thousand years, Europe lived under its constant threat”; and that what remains of the Christian population in Islamic countries is still subjected to “perpetual discrimination,” with episodes of bloody persecution.
Now if the rest of Europe would wake up to the danger...
Christians in Islamic Countries
by Giuseppe De Rosa S.I.
How do Christians in Muslim-majority countries live? [...] We must first highlight a seemingly rather curious fact: in all the countries of North Africa (Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco), before the Muslim invasion and despite incursions by vandals, there were blossoming Christian communities that contributed to the universal Church great personalities, such as Tertullian; Saint Ciprian, bishop of Carthage, martyred in 258; Saint Augustine, bishop of Hippo; and Saint Fulgentius, bishop of Ruspe. But after the Arab conquest, Christianity was absorbed by Islam to such an extent that today it has a significant presence only in Egypt, with the Coptic Orthodox and other tiny Christian minorities, which make up 7-10 percent of the Egyptian population.
The same can be said of the Middle East (Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Jordan, Mesopotamia), in which there were flourishing Christian areas prior to the Islamic invasion, and where today there are only small Christian communities, with the exception of Lebanon, where Christians make up a significant part of the population.
As for present-day Turkey, this was in the first Christian centuries the land in which Christianity bore its best fruits in the areas of liturgy, theology, and monastic life. The invasion of the Seljuk Turks and the conquest of Constantinople by Mehmet II (1453) lead to the founding of the Ottoman empire and to the near destruction of Christianity in the Anatolian peninsula. Thus today in Turkey Christians number approximately 100,000, among whom are a small number of Orthodox, who live around Phanar, the see of the ecumenical patriarchate of Constantinople, who has the primacy of honor in the Orthodox world and who holds communion with eight patriarchs and many autocephalous Churches in both East and West, with approximately 180 million faithful.
In conclusion, we may state in historical terms that in all the places where Islam imposed itself by military force, which has few historical parallels for its rapidity and breadth, Christianity, which had been extraordinarily vigorous and rooted for centuries, practically disappeared or was reduced to tiny islands in an endless Islamic sea. It is not easy to explain how that could have happened. [...]
In reality, the reduction of Christianity to a small minority was not due to violent religious persecution, but to the conditions in which Christians were forced to live in the organization of the Islamic state. [...]
THE WARRIOR FACE OF ISLAM: “JIHAD”
According to Islamic law, the world is divided into three parts: dar al-harb (the house of war), dar al-islam (the house of Islam), and dar al-‘ahd (the house of accord); that is, the countries with which a treaty was stipulated. [...]
As for the countries belonging to the “house of war,” Islamic canon law recognizes no relations with them other than “holy war” (jihad), which signifies an “effort” in the way of Allah and has two meanings, both of which are equally essential and must not be dissociated, as if one could exist without the other. In its primary meaning, jihad indicates the “effort” that the Muslim must undertake to be faithful to the precepts of the Koran and so improve his “submission” (islam) to Allah; in the second, it indicates the “effort” that the Muslim must undertake to “fight in the way of Allah,” which means fighting against the infidels and spreading Islam throughout the world. Jihad is a precept of the highest importance, so much so that it is sometimes counted among the fundamental precepts of Islam, as its sixth “pillar.”
Obedience to the precept of the “holy war” explains why the history of Islam is one of unending warfare for the conquest of infidel lands. [...] In particular, all of Islamic history is dominated by the idea of the conquest of the Christian lands of Western Europe and of the Eastern Roman Empire, whose capital was Constantinople. Thus, through many centuries, Islam and Christianity faced each other in terrible battles, which led on one side to the conquest of Constantinople (1453), Bulgaria, and Greece, and on the other, to the defeat of the Ottoman empire in the naval battle of Lepanto (1571).
But the conquering spirit of Islam did not die after Lepanto. The Islamic advance into Europe was definitively halted only in 1683, when Vienna was liberated from the Ottoman siege by the Christian armies under the command of John III Sobieski, the king of Poland. [...] In reality, for almost a thousand years Europe was under constant threat from Islam, which twice put its survival in serious danger.
Thus, in all of its history, Islam has shown a warlike face and a conquering spirit for the glory of Allah. [...] against the “idolaters” who must be given a choice: convert to Islam, or be killed. [...] As for the “people of the Book” (Christians, Jews, and “Sabeans”), Muslims must “fight them until their members pay tribute, one by one, humiliated” (Koran, Sura 9:29). [...]
THE REGIME OF THE “DHIMMA”
According to Muslim law, Christians, Jews, and the followers of other religions assimilated to Christianity and Judaism (the “Sabeans”) who live in a Muslim state belong to an inferior social order, in spite of their eventually belonging to the same race, language, and descent. Islamic law does not recognize the concepts of nation and citizenship, but only the umma, the one Islamic community, for which reason a Muslim, as he is part of the umma, may live in any Islamic country as he would in his homeland: he is subject to the same laws, finds the same customs, and enjoys the same consideration.
But those belonging to the “people of the Book” are subject to the dhimma, which is a kind of bilateral treaty consisting in the fact that the Islamic state authorizes the “people of the Book” to inhabit its lands, tolerates its religion, and guarantees the “protection” of its persons and goods and its defense from external enemies. Thus the “people of the Book” (Ahl al-Kitab) becomes the “protected people” (Ahl al-dhimma). In exchange for this “protection,” the “people of the Book” must pay a tax (jizya) to the Islamic state, which is imposed only upon able-bodied free men, excluding women, children, and the old and infirm, and pay a tribute, called the haram, on the lands in its possession.
As for the freedom of worship, the dhimmi are prohibited only from external manifestations of worship, such as the ringing of bells, processions with the cross, solemn funerals, and the public sale of religious objects or other articles prohibited for Muslims. A Muslim man who marries a Christian or a Jew must leave her free to practice her religion and also to consume the foods permitted by her religion, even if they are forbidden for Muslims, such as pork or wine. The dhimmi may maintain or repair the churches or synagogues they already have, but, unless there is a treaty permitting them to own land, they may not build new places of worship, because to do this they would need to occupy Muslim land, which can never be ceded to anyone, having become, through Muslim conquest, land “sacred” to Allah.
In Sura 9:29 the Koran affirms that the “people of the Book,” apart from being constrained to pay the two taxes mentioned above, must be placed under certain restrictions, such as dressing in a special way and not being allowed to bear arms or ride on horseback. Furthermore, the dhimmi may not serve in the army, be functionaries of the state, be witnesses in trials between Muslims, take the daughters of Muslims as their wives, be the guardians of underage Muslims, or keep Muslim slaves. They may not inherit from Muslims, nor Muslims from them, but legacies are permitted.
The release of the dhimma came about above all through conversion of the “people of the Book” to islam; but Muslims, especially in the early centuries, did not look favorably upon such conversions, because they represented a grave loss to the treasury, which flourished in direct proportion to the number of the dhimmi, who paid both the personal tax and the land tax. The dissolution of dhimma status could also take place through failure to observe the “treaty”; that is, if the dhimmi took up arms against Muslims, refused to remain subject or to pay tribute, abducted a Muslim woman, blasphemed or offended the prophet Mohammed and the Islamic religion, or if they drew a Muslim away from Islam, converting him to their own religion. According to the gravity of each case, the penalty could be the confiscation of goods, reduction to slavery, or death – unless the person who had committed the crimes converted to Islam. In that case, all penalties were waived.
CONSEQUENCE: THE EROSION OF CHRISTIANITY
It is evident that the condition of the dhimmi, prolonged through centuries, has led slowly but inexorably to the near extinction of Christianity in Muslim lands: the condition of civil inferiority, which prevented Christians from attaining public offices, and the condition of religious inferiority, which closed them in an asphyxiated religious life and practice with no possibility of development, put the Christians to the necessity of emigrating, or, more frequently, to the temptation of converting to Islam. There was also the fact that a Christian could not marry a Muslim woman without converting to Islam, in part because her children had to be educated in that faith. Furthermore, a Christian who became Muslim could divorce very easily, whereas Christianity prohibited divorce. And apart from all this, the Christians in Muslim territories were seriously divided among themselves – and frequently even enemies – because they belonged to Churches that were different by confession (Chalcedonian and non-Chalcedonian Churches) and by rite (Syro-oriental, Antiochian, Maronite, Coptic-Alexandrian, Armenian, Byzantine). Thus mutual assistance was almost impossible.
The regime of the dhimma lasted for over a millennium, even if not always and everywhere in the harsh form called “the conditions of ‘Umar,” according to which Christians not only did not have the right to construct new churches and restore existing ones, even if they fell into ruins (and, if they had the permission to construct through the good will of the Muslim governor, the churches could not be of large dimensions: the building must be more modest than all the religious buildings around it); but the largest and most beautiful churches had to be transformed into mosques. That transformation made it impossible for the church-mosques ever to be restored to the Christian community, because a place that has become a mosque cannot be put to another use.
The consequence of the dhimma regime was the “erosion” of the Christian communities and the conversion of many Christians to Islam for economic, social, and political motives: to find a better job, enjoy a better social status, participate in administrative, political, and military life, and in order not to live in a condition of perpetual discrimination.
In recent centuries, the dhimma system has undergone some modifications, in part because the ideas of citizenship and the equality of all citizens before the state have gained a foothold even in Muslim countries. Nevertheless, in practice, the traditional conception is still present. [...] The Christian, whether he wish it or not, is brought back in spite of himself to the concept of the dhimmi, even if the term no longer appears in the present-day laws of a good number of Muslim-majority countries.
To understand the present condition of these Christians, we must refer back to the history of the 19th and 20th centuries. In the Ottoman empire of the 19th century, where the millet system was in force, the tanzimat, “regulations” of a liberal character, were introduced. [...] From the second half of the 19th century to the end of the first World War, there was a “Reawakening” (Nahda) movement in the Arab world, under Western influence, in the fields of literature, language, and thought. Many intellectuals were conquered by liberal ideas.
On another front, the Christians created strong ties with the Western powers – France and Great Britain in particular – which, after the dissolution of the Ottoman empire, obtained the protectorate of the countries that had belonged to the empire. This permitted the Christians both greater civil and religious liberty and cultural advancement. Moreover, during the first half of the 20th century various political parties of nationalist and socialist, and thus secularist, tendencies were born, such as the Ba’th, the Socialist Party of the Arab Renewal, founded at the end of the 1930’s in Damascus by Syrian professor Michel ‘Aflaz, a Greek Orthodox. In 1953 this party was united with the Syrian Popular Party, founded in 1932 by Antun Sa’ada, a Greek Orthodox from Lebanon. In brief, political regimes inspired by the liberal and secular principles of Western Europe rose up in various Islamic countries.
THE BIRTH OF RADICAL ISLAM
These events provoked a harsh reaction in the Islamic world, due to fears that the secularist ideas and “corrupt” customs of the Western world, identified with Christianity, would endanger the purity of Islam and constitute a deadly threat to its very existence. This reaction was fed by strong resentment against the Western powers, which had dared to impose their political rule upon Islam, “the greatest nation ever raised up by Allah among men” (Koran, s. 3:110), and against their customs “despised” by the “nation (umma) that urges to goodness, promotes justice, and restrains iniquity” (ibid, s. 3:104).
Thus was born “radical Islam,” which set itself up as the interpreter of the frustrations of the Muslim masses. Hasan al Banna, Sayyd Qutb, Abd al-Qadir ‘Uda in Egypt with the Muslim Brotherhood; Abu l-A‘li al-Mawdudi in Pakistan, and the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran are its most significant witnesses, and their followers have spread from Dakar to Kuala Lumpur. [...]
THE PRESENT CONDITION OF CHRISTIANS IN THE MUSLIM WORLD
Radical Islam, which proposes that shari’a law be instituted in every Islamic state, is gaining ground in many Muslim countries, in which groups of Christians are also present. It is evident that the institution of shari’a would render the lives of Christians rather difficult, and their very existence would be constantly in danger. This is the cause of the mass emigration of Christians from Islamic countries to Western countries: Europe, the United States, Canada, and Australia. [...] The estimated number of Arab Christians who have emigrated from Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, and Israel in the last decade hovers around three million, which is from 26.5 to 34.1 percent of the estimated number of Christians currently living in the Middle East.
Furthermore, we must not underestimate grave recent actions against Christians in some Muslim-majority countries. In Algeria, the bishop of Orano, P. Claverie (1996), seven Trappist monks from Tibehirini (1999), four White Fathers (1994), and six sisters from various religious congregations have been brutally killed by Islamic fundamentalists, although the murders were condemned by numerous Muslim authorities. In Pakistan, which numbers 3,800,000 Christians among a population of 156,000,000 (96 percent Muslim), on October 28, 2001, some Muslims entered the Church of St. Dominic in Bahawalpur and gunned down 18 Christians. On May 6, 1998, Catholic bishop John Joseph killed himself for protesting against the blasphemy law, which punishes with death anyone who offends Mohammed, even only “by speaking words, or by actions and through allusions, directly or indirectly.” For example, by saying that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, one offends Mohammed, who affirmed that Jesus is not the Son of God, but his “servant.” With this kind of law, Christians are in constant danger of death.
In Nigeria – where 13 states have introduced shari’a as state law – several thousand Christians have been the victims of incidents. Serious incidents are taking place in the south of the Philippines and in Indonesia, which, with its 212 million inhabitants, is the most populous Muslim country in the world, to the harm of the Christians of Java, East Timor, and the Moluccas. But the most tragic situation – and, unfortunately, forgotten by the Western world! – is that of Sudan, where the North is Arab and Muslim, and the South black and Christian, and in part, animist. Since the time of president G.M. Nimeiry, there has been a state of civil war between the North, which has proclaimed shari’a and intends to impose it with fierce violence on the rest of the country, and the South, which aims to preserve and defend its Christian identity. The North makes use of all of its military power – financed by oil exports to the West – to destroy Christian villages; prevent the arrival of humanitarian aid; kill the cattle, which are the means of sustenance for many South Sudanese; and carry out raids, for Christian girls in particular, who are brought to the North, raped, and sold as slaves or concubines to rich, older Sudanese men. According to the 2001 report of Amnesty International, “at the end of 2000, the civil war, which started again in 1983, had cost the lives of almost two million persons and had caused the forced evacuation of 4,500,000 more. Tens of thousands of persons have been compelled by terror to leave their homes in the upper Nile region, which is rich in oil, after aerial bombardments, mass executions, and torture.”
We must, finally, recall a fact that is often forgotten because Saudi Arabia is the largest provider of oil to the Western world, and the latter therefore has an interest in not disturbing relations with that country. In reality, in Saudi Arabia, where wahhabism is in force, not only is it impossible to build a church or even a tiny place of worship, but any act of Christian worship or any sign of Christian faith is severely prohibited with the harshest penalties. Thus about a million Christians working in Saudi Arabia are deprived by violence of any Christian practice or sign. They may participate in mass or in other Christian practices – and even then with the serious danger of losing their jobs – only on the property of the foreign oil companies. And yet, Saudi Arabia spends billions of petrodollars, not for the benefit of its poor citizens or of poor Muslims in other Muslim countries, but to construct mosques and madrasas in Europe and to finance the imams of the mosques in all the Western countries. We recall that the Roman mosque of Monte Antenne, constructed on land donated by the Italian government, was principally financed by Saudi Arabia and was built to be the largest mosque in Europe, in the very heart of Christianity.
Daily Sucker for Wednesday, October 29, 2003
America's Web Site brings you another site that deals with dogs.
I'm at a grantwriting conference all day today, so here's a really simple example where almost everything is wrong and it keeps up yesterday's theme of dogs. Here's the e-mail:
I'm sure my animal rights activist daughter won't get a chuckle out of the chimps and monkeys page or too many of the other pages.
I teach a film studies course at a high school in Massachusetts. I was trying to find some sources for one of my students who is interested in animal actors and animal training, and I found this:
It has been a while since I read your excellent book Web Pages That Suck, but I remember enough to know that you might get a chuckle out of this website.
Info Glut - Five Exabytes of Data Created in 2002
securitas writes "If you had any doubts that you are overwhelmed by the volume of information in your life, a new Berekley study (PDF) shows that five exabytes ...
Rid your system of adware and spyware with the latest version of this free utility.
Intel Desktop Control Center 1.0
Perform stress tests to verify system stability and to conduct performance testing.
[License: Freeware| Requires: Win All | Size: 10.2 Mb]
An instant picture of the traffic situation on your network.
[License: Freeware| Requires: Win NT/2K/XP | Size: 4.7 Mb]
I’ve often wondered where the PLO gets the money to fund student groups, print posters, lobby Congress, and push their agenda with the all-too-willing US media. Now I know.
They get it from us: Your Taxes for PLO Propaganda...
The editors of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer must have gotten the sports section of their newspaper confused with the hard news section. How else to explain the otherwise incomprehensible distortions of statements made by Congressman George Nethercutt except that, in the tradition of all "homers," their team must win at all costs? (The Congressman was simply criticizing the press for emphasizing the deaths of American servicemen, which he also abhorred, over reports of progress in democratizing Iraq.)
Of course, to the PI, Northcutt's words were anathema to the "home team"--some dated version of liberalism that is actually a disgrace to the word. I remember the day, and it wasn't so long ago, that liberals like me were attacking our government for supporting dictators. Now these new "liberals," or whatever they want to call themselves, attack our government for taking down dictators.
Well, it sure does sound like sports in which fans can switch sides in a heartbeat. As an LA Lakers fan, I was screaming my lungs out last night for former nemesis Karl Malone (now with LA). Good thing too--we can use him! But somehow... and maybe there's something wrong with me... I don't feel so comfortable switching sides in the political arena. I hated dictators then and I hate them now. And I always want to see them go--even if it means my party losing one election in my country. After all, I'm helping people in another country get free (and hopefully permanent) elections in theirs.
Let's get this out of the way first: Small- and midsize businesses need to have a regular backup routine for their servers.
Heightened Activity on Sun Disrupts Technology, Lights up Sky
An extremely large solar flare erupted from a sunspot and sent a large burst of radiation directly at Earth at approximately 6 a.m. EST Tuesday morning, NASA officials say. The energy from the explosion is expected to disrupt communiation and electrical systems into Thursday. "The eruption was positioned perfectly," astrophysicist John Kohl told CNN. "A major geomagnetic storm is bound to happen."
Disposable DVD experiment looks more and more like a flop.
Court Upholds FCC's 2007 Deadline For Digital TV
phil reed writes "According to this article on Digital Spy, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit has upheld a Federal Communications ...
ACD Systems release FotoCanvas 3.0
Software: ACD Systems has released FotoCanvas 3.0, the latest version of its photo editing software program. ACD FotoCanvas is an affordable and easy-to-use program with all of the essential tools needed to enable users to make edits to their digital photos and create simple web graphics. New workflow enhancement features in ACD FotoCanvas 3.0 include the Dodge and Burn tool, the ability to add Bubble Talk to images, an easy step-by-step Photo Correction Wizard and a Professional Color...
U.S.S. Enterprise analyzed. "For StarTrek [sic] fans we tested the USS Enterprise in our super-orbital expansion tube... We perform similar tests on other models investigating dissociation and ionisation processes which occur during atmospheric re-entry."
MSFT - not the high-growth story it was
MSFT is not the monster growth stock it was during the 1990s, and it is unlikely to demonstrate that level of growth again. With no fewer than nine price-driving stock splits since going public in 1987, Microsoft has been a substantial wealth generator. On October 21, 2002, shortly after Microsoft reported its blow-out quarter (resulting almost entirely from a switch to a licensing model for its software sales) I wrote on thestreet.com's Real Money Pro site that Microsoft would begin to encounter hurdles that would delay, and perhaps even curtail, long-term outperformance; And that those earlier high-growth days appear to be history for Microsoft. The PC explosion during the 1980s and 1990s was a one-off growth opportunity in this sector. While similar growth opportunities may materialize for Microsoft in other areas of tech in the years ahead, I'm not holding my breath. Previously, to make money in MSFT stock you just had to buy and hold, unless you bought at around a split-adjusted $120 between end-1999 and end-2000. The price has since steadily eroded to the $23-$30 range where it continues to trade.
Nationmaster
Welcome to NationMaster.com, a massive central data source and a handy way to graphically compare nations. Using the form above, you can generate maps and graphs with ease on all kinds of statistics. What's more, you can select exactly which countries you want to include.
Rabbis back Israeli 'guard pigs'
Until now, Jewish settlements have been guarded by men with guns and also by guard dogs.
But a new idea - guard pigs - has been thought up by an organisation called The Hebrew Battalion.
The man in charge, Kuti Ben-Yaakov, insists it is a serious proposal.
"Pigs' sense of smell is far more developed than that of dogs," he said.
"The pigs will also be able to identify weapons from huge distances, and walk in the direction of the terrorist, thereby pointing him out.
"Moreover, this animal is considered to be dangerous by Islam and, according to the Muslim faith, a terrorist who touches a pig is not eligible for the 70 virgins in heaven."
Linux creator Linus Torvalds was up to his old tricks again Monday, releasing a new Linux kernel that he developed with maintainer Andrew Morton.
Linux creator Linus Torvalds was up to his old tricks again Monday, releasing a new Linux kernel that he developed with maintainer Andrew Morton.
The software release, available online at www.kernel.org, is the test9 release version of the Linux 2.6 kernel, and is designed specifically for use on the corporate enterprise level.
The release also is the latest in a series of test versions that will lead to the final production release of 2.6 Linux. Torvalds, who crafted Linux in 1991 while at university in Finland, left a high-profile job at chipmaker Transmeta (Quote, Chart) earlier this year to work on the kernel. He and Morton released their first test version in July -- a version that established stable APIs, including Posix and thread interfaces.
With news of the latest version, officials from the Open Source Development Labs in Beaverton, Ore., called upon major Linux customers, independent software vendors, and leading systems providers to target the test9 kernel for validation and enhancement to prepare for the next production release. Torvalds, an OSDL fellow, echoed these statements himself in a prepared statement released yesterday.
X17 Solar Flare Sends 2B Tons of Plasma at Earth
Dr. Zowie writes "This morning a very large solar flare erupted from a large sunspot group that is crossing the face of the Sun. The explosion sent over 2 ...
More info is also available at the excellent Space Weather site...
Post to MovableType or Typepad from FeedDemon
In the FeedDemon newsgroup Jakub Kazecki shared how to post to MovableType directly from FeedDemon RSS Reader, as shown below. See also Glenn Slaven's post for posting to Typepad from FeedDemon. FeedDemon 1.0 RC2 is also now available. See today's post for links and details. (168 words, 8 links)
World Domination for Small Web Businesses
You want to own the global Web development market? Ditch that inclusive marketing approach and narrow your focus to self-contained segments. Andrew presents the theory and practice of niche marketing, arguing that it's easy to be a big (and prosperous) fish when the pond is small.
Nikon Japan has today announced that it is to delay the launch of the D2H. First announced in July this year this is the much anticipated sucessor to the D1H. It was due to go into retail channels late this month but has now been put back to late November.
I let Jennifer know that this new blog was up and running...
Her reaction?
U R a nut!
What's not to love... :)
Starting this to provide an outlet for news regarding Jen's and my various hobbies and businesses and also to provide a forum for some ideas that have been kicking around in my brainpan.
Updates will be somewhat sporadic depending on available time and actually having stuff to write about.
There are some new websites going up that cover each of our plans in a bit better detail:
Black Mountain Cider is the biggie - this is what will be occupying our energies.
The Luminous Web is for my photography.
Northwest Data Securityis a consulting business specialising in business network security and administration (nothing there yet) and
Lunamusica is for my music (nothing there yet either)
This should be fun - stay tuned!!!
Dave