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http://www.abqtrib.com/news/2007/oct/04/cost-equip-us-soldier-17500-please/

Looks like it was about 17.5k in 2007.....

20 years for a laser pointer? Here in the Old West, a guy allegedly shot down a police helicopter because it was disturbing his dog, but he was released because of "ballistics issues" with the evidence.

Speaking of Fred Saberhagen, he actually just passed away last month of cancer. He was one of my favorite authors as I got hooked on him when I found his Sword series at my library during high school. I'm sure he won't be remembered as one of the greats, but I look back at his work very fondly.

http://www.abqtrib.com/news/2007/jul/06/remembranc e-albuquerque-author-fred-saberhagen-was/

It's worse than you think - dealing's a step up - here's the former judge in charge in Albuquerque - he was simply charged with possession.... those federal boys ain't whistling dixie. http://web.abqtrib.com/archives/news04/090204_news _hombren.shtml

But, wait a minute, in your view, and the director of NASA's view, possible Global Warming due to extreme release of CO2 is not anthropogenic, but, however, cutting back on CO2 release is anthropogenic.

This is like when Fox News showed Mark Foley and printed under him "Mark Foley (D) Florida". They're just blatantly changing the reality. It's that crazy.

I think the reason the previous poster said that the money was "pissed away" is because of the apparent lack of progress in Iraq. While there have been some advances in electricity and healthcare, these advances are fairly limited and violence is still a daily fact in Iraq. According to estimates 4000 Iraqi civilians died last year due to insurgent attacks alone. Additionally, another 1600 Iraqi police and soldiers are died last year due to the insurgency. The civilian death toll for the first two months of 2006 is 1000 people (source here). So violence seems to be trending upwards.

Iraq is the new breeding ground for terrorists because of the high unemployment, oppression, and poverty. Unemployment is at 60% according to Senator John Murtha this week. He also states that oil production is below prewar levels and only 30% of Iraqis actually have running water. Also, Amnesty International reports that prisoners in Iraq are still being tortured (source here). I still believe that torture is unacceptable and so do many other Americans and people all over the world.

I think the real frustration is that there is no real strategy or plan for the American actions in Iraq (just repeating "stay the course" is NOT a plan). As it stands right now, it seems we will be on the ground in Iraq indefinitely. American troops in Iraq will only help fuel the insurgency as time goes on and the Iraqi people become more resentful of our presence. With British troops set to pull out by 2008, America will be pretty much alone in the country.

Here's a picture of the mugs (pre-drop). http://web.abqtrib.com/art/news06/022006_mugs.jpg And yes they do look sort of like a very ugly bomb.

Here is a different article with pictures of the mug

Well I'm certainly glad to hear that there is another plant making Xbox 360s. I usually wait a few months before buying next gen hardware, but even for me the prospect of having a difficult time finding a 360 was becoming annoying. The other news of some, rather morbid, interest is the fate of Gizmondo. This just seems to be a device that's all dressed up with no place to go. The GPS capability certainly has interesting possibilities, especially with the added risk of mortality in this time of heightened security. But with the handheld market already crowded by the likes of Nintendo and Sony, there's little room for anyone else unless they are able to bleed some serious cash.

As long as we're talking about the shuttle, here, it's interesting to remember that it was the Nixon administration that essentially cooked the numbers to make the shuttle program seem cost-effective, and that got the thing through congress. Meanwhile the Dems, Walter Mondale prominent among them, regarded the shuttle program as wasteful high-tech socialism. (Can you say "enormous federal boondoggle"?

With respect to the particular program, Mondale's argument had a big measure of truth. The "productive" space program in terms of science is pretty clearly the low(er)-cost uncrewed probes now, isn't it? On the other hand the engineering involved in crewed exploration has a different set of challenges, and the ISS and the shuttle are more about those.

Maybe we think the shuttle's an example of the sort of corrupt, pork-laden process you're talking about. "Military industrial complex" and all that. (Please, where is Mr. Eisenhower when we need him?) But the lines involved aren't nearly as clean as our more doctrinaire partisans would think. The Republicans were all for the enormous spending program, and the Democrats were extremely skeptical about whether it was cost-effective.

Well, if it was a typical web page, then I'd say the innovative part is to drive up hits so that the high apparent traffic would enable the site maintainers to charge their sponsors more money.

But in this case, the GOP already has fully-functional mechanisms for getting their sponsors to contribute money; now there are Super Rangers if you round up an extra US$300K.

If you're a less wealthy Republican and can't raise that kind of money you can help out the cause by garnering signatures to help get Ralph Nader on the ballot, particularly in swing states.

The HAV act (help amerca vote), created a land rush by mandating a minumum number of touchscreen voting machines by 2004. The stalking horse provision in the bill is that blind people cant use most voting systems without assistance, and people in wheel chairs have difficulties as well. Noble motivation yes, but the cure is worse than the problem.

This land rush was led by diebold with a first-to-market system. they acheived this by using off the shelf components and OS and DB. THe system has not proven reliable or safe. I wont regurgitaete the accusationsof fraud, except to mention that any time elections differ by 6 sigma from poll results someting reeks. Unfortunatley other companies ESS and Sequoia tried to keep pace. the ESS systems at least have the benefit of actually failing to boot so often that florida has abandoned them! THe Sequoia system is the best of the lot but still has its own flaw. At least the sequoia people, when pushed, seem to be trying to respond to the demand for voter verified balloting.

The good news is that After pressure by california's santa clara county (19 million dollar
contract), Sequoia voting system has agrees to implement (at no cost) a
voter verified, recountable, paper ballot in addition to the touch
screen systems.
(see here )

Already the House of representatives has a bill pending ( The Voter
Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2003) that will require
all touch screen voting systems to be voter verifiable.
(see here )

Indeed the entire country of brazil, which has 400,000 electronic
voting machines has decide to replace them with voter verifiable
systems.
(see here )

A 95 page caltech and MIT study surveying many years of voting reports
that among all voting methods, the method with the single largest
average error rate is electronic voting, which is senate and
gubenatorial elections has almost TWICE the error rate of optical scan voting. This means that by enfranchising blind people we disenfranchise far more people. a bad trade.
(see here page 21 )

Indeed reality is much worse since that's just an average, since
electronic voting errors tend to be both non-random and clustered in
catastrophic events.

For example, Bernalio county in Albuquerque reported 48,000 voters went to the polls
but only 36,000 votes were registered on Sequoia voting systems.
(see here )

Similarly, many votes were lost in the latest election in florida
counties using Sequoia voting systems. Janet reno is investigating
cases where heavily democratic counties registered ZERO votes for any
democrat. Sequoia systems has presented Los Alamos FALSE information
of Seqouia systems. For example, they claimed it did not run on
windows OS. In fact WinEDS their database collection system is based
upon microsoft OS, and uses a Microsoft-based SQL DB, and the password for
this system is "password" (really!).
(see here )

You can in fact obtain this very minute on CD rom a program which will
break into any diebolds MS ACCESS based database and change results then erase all log
entries of the intrusion. It's easy to imagine that SQL can nbe attacted too either by security hoiles or user admin mistakes in the table grants.

Sequoia's Glowing reviews in florida, santa
clara and Lousianna counties are somewhat marred by the fact that the
Luosianna county agent who reviews them highly is now under indictment
for a payoff from seqouia, like wise the santa clara and florida
registrar have both been (publicly) paid off by the

Gee, I must be really old but there seem to be a lot of people who have no clue. A pc is not a mainframe. There are many computer architectures in the world, not just Apple and IBM clones. calling an NT box a mainframe is as appropriate as calling a VW bug a super tanker. They both move stuff from place to place and are mostly metal, but just about everything else about them is different.

I don't want to sound angry here, I guess I just take it for granted that people know that 'mainframe' means the giant big-iron business computers sold by IBM (and clones from Amdahl/Fujitsu). So its my fault for not recognizing something I take as obvious.

The computer Obiwan called a "maniframe" was not in any way, shape, or form a mainframe computer. Anything that ran NT was a microcomputer. This is about the smallest weakest class of computers (above apliances like PDA's and Cell phones and calculators).

The mainframe is near the top when it comes to computing horsepower. Super computers are the next step up.

I guess the 64-bit Alpha machines might be classed with their Vax brothers as 'minicomputers'. They could run NT 3.5x. The new IA-64 may be in this class if it is linked to a more powerfull motherboard architecture.

This link will take you to an IBM webpage that shows some of IBM's current mainframe hardware. MicroSoft has never written any commercial software that runs on these. The Z-series can process millions of records a second. The I/O throughput on these beasts is mindboggling. almost everthing in them has automatic fail-over and hot-swap ability, even the CPU's! They are not very good at floating point math. I have never seen a mainframe 'crash'.

Linux does run on these machines as an alternative to the native IBM Z/OS, or along side it. IBM has a version of its own UNIX, AIX that can run on these machines as well. Yes they can run multiple operating systems at the same time. Java and perl and many other open software programs have been ported to the various mainframe OS's.

Links like this say that about 75% of the program source code in the world is COBOL on mainframes. Some programs currently running where I work predate the founding of Microsoft and Apple! I wouldn't be suprised if there are programs running in a bank or a government agency somewhere that predates Bill Gates or Steve Wozniak.

http://www.abqtrib.com/arc/013099_super .htm

Last year on NBC, 133 million Americans tuned in, and millions more watched in 144 countries around the world. This year, the National Football League expects 800 million world-wide viewers in 180 countries.


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