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The UN attempted to dig up dirt on Hans Blix, the chief weapons inspector.

It has ignored, violated and stonewalled so many agreements in fact, that US negiotiators are now being deliberately excluded and lied to by international diplomats to prevent them screwing up the rest of the world even more.

While Bush was scaremongering the world about Iraqs (seemingly theoretical) chemical weapons supply, he was simultaneously authorizing the use of tear gas by US forces.

This kind of thing goes on and on.

The United Nations is a failed, disgraced, and corrupt organization. It is far better to be in violation of politically motivated UN resolutions than to kow-tow to countries that would see millions of people die if it meant that the United States lost a debate.

Feels good doesn't it? Makes you feel less guilty about the whole thing. I can understand that. Nonetheless, the vast majority of international agreements, treaties and resolutions the US have violated have been on economic or environmental subjects, nothing to do with waging war against enemy states.

If you see the US as a rebel with a cause, saving poor old Iraq and annoying the fusty old men at the UN along the way, then you're utterly deluded.

The UN has done tremendous good, and would have continued to do so, had that not conflicted with the goals of the US becoming more powerful and richer. As it is, Bush has effectively told the rest of the world that they'll bend down and like it - you have no idea how many enemies that has made his administration. It may have irrevocably damaged Americas international standing, permenantly.

The fact is that I feel far less threatened by China than America. It's sad, but it's the truth.

the miracles of google!

By the by, here are a couple of articles that address and expound upon (with bigger 'public' names like Bill Joy) the progress of A.I.

May artificial intelligence remain artificial
A.I. Can't Yet Follow Film Script

More complete story: http://straitstimes.asia1.com.sg/storyprintfriendl y/0,1887,188522,00.html?

A group of 5 students (including myslef) did the same thing around 2 years back during our third year in CS - October 2001 - for the Microsoft Asia Student .NET competition. Implemented the Home Automation service as an XML web service that could be consumed by external applications (after authentication of course :) ) to view home status information as well as trigger actions on home devices remotely.
The devices were controlled by a software gateway on a central home computer thru Wi-Fi and the specifications for communication between the gateway and the home device were encapsulated in an XML driver.
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2001/n ov01/11-14asia.asp
http://it.asia1.com.sg/newsdaily/news003_20011030. html

It's a little late for first-person "experience" of World War II. (Closest you can get is something like "The War 1939-1945," edited by Desmond Flower. Amazing book, mainly because it's almost all first-person accounts and it includes any perspective you can imagine.)

If WWII is your model, doing a Google by "D Day" and "invasion of France" has just got me around 5,000 hits.

For a party that makes a big deal out of not being "politically correct," our R'pubs do seem to have a problem saying this word all of a sudden. Iraq's another sovereign state. We may have all sorts of legitimate reasons for doing it, or not, but sending troops into another state to depose that state's government is being called an "invasion" by sympathetic sources like The Japan Times and unsymathetic ones like This Singapore newspaper.

Lord, how Orwellian we're becoming. "Liberate" is okay, but "invasion" isn't? Can I say "war" or do I need to say "police action" -- because we're supposedly enforcing the resolutions of the body that was so divided over whether we should do this? C'mon, give me some guidance here -- I'm not sure how to adhere to the party line. Re-educate us, comrade.

And everybody knows it was an accident. But okay, let's have it your way. Oh no, blood and gore! Let's end the war! Would ending the war end the suffering? Saddam would like us to pack up and go home so he could resume power and get back to the tyrant's regular business of inflicting suffering of a brutal and excruciating nature on his subjects; this kind of suffering as opposed to the comparatively few, inadvertent casualties due to the war.

Having no war in Iraq allows persecution. Having this just war is causing suffering for a time, but will end most of the suffering in the long run.

Horrible suffering like what you mentioned is imposed affliction du jour in Saddam's regime. Its torture methods include:

• Medical experimentation
• Beatings
• Crucifixion
• Hammering nails into the fingers and hands
• Amputating the penis or breasts with an electric carving knife
• Spraying insecticides into a victim's eyes
• Branding with a hot iron
• Committing rape while the victim's spouse is forced to watch
• Pouring boiling water into a rectum
• Nailing the tongue to a wooden board
• Extracting teeth with pliers
• Using bees and scorpions to sting naked children in front of their parents

Report on the fact that the people of Iraq don't want to be "liberated."

Nine in 10 Iraqis welcome US invasion

With a smug smile they say, "We will liberate you from your God, your money, and your dignity."

"You just arrived. You're late. What took you so long? God help you become victorious. I want to say hello to Bush, to shake his hand. We came out of the grave." - liberated Iraqi

Listen to the experience of a former human shield in Iraq:

The human shields appealed to my anti-war stance, but by the time I had left Baghdad five weeks later my views had changed drastically.
...
I was shocked when I first met a pro-war Iraqi in Baghdad - a taxi driver taking me back to my hotel late at night. I explained that I was American and said, as we shields always did, "Bush bad, war bad, Iraq good". He looked at me with an expression of incredulity.

As he realised I was serious, he slowed down and started to speak in broken English about the evils of Saddam's regime. ... It scared the hell out of me.

dammit there is a space between the 0 and , but i cant remove it could you help by telling me how to post a clickable link??

Read This

The ABL is nothing compared to the ATL, the airborne tactical laser that can be equipped to a V-22 Osprey, or an AC-130 "son of Specter" AC-X gunship. Read more about it here and here (search for ATL)

Chinese restaurants serving breast milk on their menus.

Yay for free subscriptions.. here are some other sources for similar reportings that don't require evil subscriptions.

So sayeth The Straits Times:

>> Astronomer Gregory Henry of Tennessee State University said his analysis revealed that the
>> ''planet'' - one of several far-flung discoveries announced with great fanfare two years
>> ago - was actually a trick of light created by giant ''star spots'' on its sun's surface.

So it seems CNN and New Scientist were right.

Granted, IANAA, so I have no idea how likely that is. But remember...a hundred years ago, people probably didn't think human flight was all that likely either.

In slightly related news, NASA has lost contact with Contour, the Comet Nucleus Tour probe.

... that this book is poorly written. Direct translations from any language usually sound horrible. Chinese-English translations are particularly difficult because many language constructions in Chinese just don't have English equivalents. The same goes for English text simply translated into Chinese.

So while the article linked above mocks the book on the basis of its first sentence. I'd be curious to know if the author (who is seemingly a native English-speaker) has read the original Harry Potter books in their Chinese translation. Is this one really worse???

Frankly, I'd imagine that if this thing is selling as many copies as the author claims, it's either because it's well written, or because it's fooling a lot of people. And if it's fooling a lot of people, that probably means it's well written. Either that or Rowling needs to get some better English-Chinese translators....

> My only regret is that we don't have the medical technology to give me a womb so that I can bear this man's children.

Actually, we do.

It's worth pointing out that Creative has bought 3d labs, and Creative's CEO Sim Wong Hoo has every intention of taking 3d Labs out on an aggressive push into the consumer 3d market. See article.

There would be government laws to control time travel, he believes.

These early explorers were in many ways treated like lab animals, yet they soared trough the heavens like living gods: can you imagine what it was like being the first humyn to see the earth from space?

And yet, it is the fate of all pioneers for the trails they first blazed to be trod by myriad lesser souls. As the unspoiled lands explored by Lewis, Clark, and Sacajawea are now criss-crossed by highways, so the ethereal realm of the early astronauts is now a playground for billionaires.

Oh well, on to Mars, I suppose.

Singapore Civil Service considers switching to free Office Suites. Staroffice is a leading contender.

A 500mhz G4 (PPC 7400) can do 3084 MTOPS.
A 733mhz G4 (PPC 7450) can do 9406 MTOPS.

Straits Times in Singapore has a large section on the incidents today.

For the Thumb Drive, go here.
For a review of the Sony Memory Stick Reader, go here. Now, all you need to do, is to move the USB Ports to the front of the computers!

\\'ilson

---

Here's coverage of the story from Singapore's one and only Straitstimes:

http://straitstimes.asia1.com/sin /sin43_0710.html

http://web3.asia1.com.sg/ archive/st/5/sin/sin28_0709.html

Highlights include:

The bank offering a paltry S$1 (about US$0.60) compensation for every false deduction made - which as some victims point out, is hardly enough to cover the time and transport cost spent recouping the money.

And

The Minister of State exhorting citizens not to 'shun' cashless payments; it's not as if, he points out, that 'people's money was wrongly taken away.'

They called GNU "Gee Is Not Unix"! Had to write to the Straits Times of Singapore to get it right.

Also, my 'unofficial' take on parts of the Singapore Linux Conference and my mail to the newspaper is here on my web-site. Today (9th March) there's another article in the press about RMS's talk at the National University of Singapore. This time they got the GNU right (but still spelled Gnu) - duh? (Straits Times online only releases todays edition at 12 noon local time).

There's some coverage in the Singapore press here. Some interesting bits. Read what Stallman says when they show him software pirates at work.