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New York Times article (Original government document) about a proposal to increase the limitation on exports from 195 MTOPS to 1.5 GTOPS. I can't be certain, but since the fastest supercomputer in 1979 (when the original restriction was enacted) was 250 MFLOPS, I would guess that 1 TOP is approximately equivalent to 1 FLOP. While you may be correct that the current definition according to United States export restrictions is 1 TFLOPS, it is pretty clear that the definition has changed over time.

Microsoft has had a lot to say about Vista and the market has been listening.

Gobsmacked. That's what the Brits call it when something jaw-dropping happens and you can't think of anything to say. Microsoft's blockbuster quarterly results kind of fall into that territory for me. The cash river keeps on flowing

Someone out there - or 88 million someones - bought a copy of Vista, 28 million of them in the last two months. This brought $4.14 billion in revenue in the quarter, making the Vista doom mongers look a tad silly. Sales of high-end Vista SKUs were the most popular. Vista helps Microsoft's quarterly profits rise 23 per cent"

Microsoft's chief financial officer said the company "outperformed expectations pretty much across the board." But it was led by robust performance of the company's PC software products. Sales in the Windows group rose 25 percent to more than $4.14 billion, while its Office division reported a 20 percent increase in sales to $4.11 billion. ...Growth was highest, he added, in international and consumer markets. ... Microsoft also sold a higher mix of its premium-priced versions of Windows and Office than a year earlier. And Mr. Liddell said the company's anti-piracy efforts were particularly successful, increasing desktop software sales by as much as 5 percent from a year earlier. Microsoft Earnings Send Stock Soaring

The company reported "robust demand" for Windows Vista, Office 2007, Windows Server, and SQL server. The combined revenue of Microsoft's client, business, and server and tools divisions grew by more than 20%. Revenue in the company's video game division soared by 91%, driven primarily by the success of the launch of Halo 3.
Microsoft said Vista sales have been increasing since the release of the Windows operating system to consumers in January. "Customer demand for Windows Vista this quarter continued to build with double-digit growth in multi-year agreements by businesses and with the vast majority of consumers purchasing premium editions," said Kevin Johnson, president of the Platform and Services Division at Microsoft.
A strong global PC market helped sales of Windows Vista and Office 2007 considerably. PC shipments worldwide grew by 15.5% in the third quarter, according to IDC. Much of the growth occurred outside the United States, where PC shipments increased by only 4.7%.
Chris Liddell, CFO for Microsoft, said sales growth was strongest in the international markets, such as Brazil, China and Russia. The fact that Windows sales grew faster than the PC market was an indication that customers were upgrading their PCs to Vista, and also buying the premium edition. Three quarters of Microsoft's customers bought the more expensive version. Microsoft Earnings Boosted By Windows Vista, Office, Halo

The more expensive versions of Vista and a new Office 2007 package also are spurring a larger than usual number of customers to renew three-year licensing agreements, according to Bellini, Institutional Investor magazine's top-rated software analyst. Microsoft earnigns expected to rise

It is so sad to see Russia turn in this direction. My father is Russian and I have spent much time there. I did not believe him when he said that Russia will turn back to Soviet style country after Putin was elected. Now this seems to have come true.

If you are a fan of 1984, do watch this video by the NYTimes: The Putin Generation

This is SO much like the book. Distorting reality (Stalin being a great leader), rewriting history (Kasparov being US Citizen), hate week (creating Hate against US). Completely surreal. Would not want to live in a place like that. Makes me very sad, because Russia is such a beautiful place and most everyday people are so warm.

He's probably better known these days as the guy who writes the "Fake Steve Jobs" blog. He wrote it anonymously for more than a year, picking up a not-inconsiderable audience (including both the real Steve Jobs and Bill Gates), until his identity was uncovered this past summer. Forbes rolled writing FSJ into his portfolio, and he has a Fake Steve book coming out this month.

A good place to mine from? Lists of people who donate to Islamic Non-Profits who then forward those donations on to known terrorist organizations.

Is there any way to get off the Watch List?

The New York Times quotes it here: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/25/science/25jacobson.html?ex=1351051200&en=e4cb25d3a3117e03&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss as coming from http://evolution-facts.org/

A quick google search on "packet switching" reveals several people involved in the development of packet switching, and Larry Roberts is not one of them. He, in fact, supports Leonard Kleinrock. That last article on packet switching may actually be one of the more interesting ones, as it is written by someone that was involved in yet another application external to ARPANet.

Google is your friend...

http://mashable.com/2007/07/11/myspace-losing-to-facebook/

"While MySpace still holds the lead overall, Facebook has increased its number of US visitors under the age of 18 (about 2.5 times), while MySpace has dropped about 30% for the same age group"

or:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/03/business/03online.html?ex=1306987200&en=50eeef6343012d1c&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

"For big, slow-moving corporations, this presents a problem. When Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation acquired the community site MySpace nearly a year ago, the site was at the height of its popularity. But now there are indications that the teenagers who made MySpace cool may be moving on to other things." The whole story is worth reading as well...

And as others have said, Bebo, Twitter, etc are coming along as well.

I was (still am) irritated that companies in the west quite frequently make money by selling arms to dictatorships that use those arms to stay in power against the wishes of the people who live under their rule. Companies like BAe Systems make huge profits by selling to countries like Indonesia who have an appalling human rights record. I know you can always make the argument that if we don't someone else will but that still doesn't make it any less morally wrong.

I am especially against schemes like the Export Credit Guarantee Department which underwrite these sales so that if the people in said country manage to oust the dictator from power before payment has been made then British taxpayers money is used to pay the bill and then the cost (plus interest) is added to the countries national debt.

In this manner the people who get rid of the dictator end up paying for the weapons that were used to suppress them. I think that if a western company is willing to do business with a country that is on the brink of collapse it should do so at its own risk.

One example is various companies supplying Saddam Hussein with arms (and the Falluja 2 chemical weapons plant) shortly before he invaded Kuwait.

Here are some links:
http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/51/040.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,908426,00.html

Although these links only mention British involvement President Reagan was also a supporter of Saddam when he was fighting Iran so American companies were also involved. Here is an interesting photo of Saddam and Reagan shaking hands, not that it proves anything by itself:

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB82/

Here are some other random links:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A52241-2002Dec29?language=printer
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=990CE0DC123DF936A35751C0A963958260
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/12/31/world/main534798.shtml

Hughes beat them to it by 9 years. Yeah, a private company.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C07E7D7143EF933A05757C0A96E958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=print
Kind of cool how they saved a satellite by sending it to the moon. Or if you don't want to count it as Hughes, count it as a Russia-US-Kazakhstan-Hong Kong moon orbiter. And in that sense, this is the second time China is sending an orbiter.

At a minimum, we know that Saddam Hussein's government supported terrorism by paying "bonuses" of up to $25,000 to the families of Palestinian homicide bombers. How do we know this? Tariq Aziz, Hussein's own deputy prime minister, was stunningly candid about the Baathist government's underwriting of terrorist killings in Israel.

"President Saddam Hussein has recently told the head of the Palestinian political office, Faroq al-Kaddoumi, his decision to raise the sum granted to each family of the martyrs of the Palestinian uprising to $25,000 instead of $10,000."

It also has copies of canceled checks that were sent to the families of suicide bombers, along with a certificate of appreciation that was sent to families of the "martyrs".

I know what you are thinking, "These are Palestinian terrorists. They don't count." Well, first I bid you tell that to the families of those murdered for going out to eat. Next, let me point you to another quote:

After escaping Italian police in October 1985 following the Achille Lauro hijacking (thanks to his Iraqi diplomatic passport), Abu Abbas finally ended up in Baghdad in 1994, where he lived comfortably as one of Saddam Hussein's guests. U.S. soldiers caught Abbas in Iraq in April 2003. This time, he did not get away. He died last March 9, in American custody, reportedly of natural causes.

That hijacking was NOT in Israel, but on a cruise ship on the high seas.

I know what's next, "But what about Al Qaeda?"

This is Abu Musab al Zarqawi. After running an al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan, he found his way to Baathist Baghdad, where he reportedly checked into Olympic Hospital, an elite facility run by the late Uday Hussein, son of the captured tyrant. Zarqawi is believed to have received medical treatment for a leg injury sustained while dodging American GIs who toppled the Taliban. He convalesced in Baghdad for some two months. Once he was back on his foot, Zarqawi then opened an Ansar al-Islam terrorist training camp in northern Iraq. Zarqawi is thought to be behind the October 28, 2002 assassination of this man, Lawrence Foley:

Even the courts agree:

Thus, there is abundant and undeniable evidence that Saddam Hussein provided money, diplomatic services, shelter, medical care, and training to terrorists of every stripe, including those complicit in the 1993 WTC bombing and -- according to a Clinton-appointed federal judge -- the September 11 attacks. The Iraqi dictator aided al-Qaeda and other global terrorists who murdered Americans, both at home and abroad.

Maybe you'd prefer a different link. Maybe from a source that is known to be more left of center. How about The New York Times?

Well armed and financed by both Iraq and Iran, this affiliate of Al Qaeda has since provided a haven for bin Laden followers exfiltrating from Afghanistan. They tried to assassinate an articulate Kurdish leader, Barham Salih, killing several bodyguards, but their target escaped and several killers were captured. Our National Security Council members did not learn about this bloody engagement, one of them told me a week afterwar

http://www.slate.com/id/33569/entry/33571/

http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/

It may or may not be the 100% approved Microsoft Certified Correct Way Of Doing Things,

If you don't like what Microsoft is doing then go to Apple or Linux. (Which it appears many people are in fact doing.

I haven't owned an apple computer since a the IIc days. I've been considering making the switch recently. My only hold back is that I like having a good selection of games, and Apple isn't there yet. Perhaps with the number of users switching though publishers will start making more available.

Can you point to Greenpeace taking any of the communist governments to task for their appalling environmental record?

How about any peep of protest when Saddam Hussein ordered the burning of the Kuwaiti oil fields?

Reminds me of the collision between a private jet an a Jumbo in Brazil, that downed the Jumbo. An author that writes for the NYTimes was in the private jet, he wrote a chilling article about it, where he mentioned that they didn't even see the Jumbo, and according to calculations, they passed each other at 500 mph.

There's a story about this in The New York Times this morning (free reg required). It begins:

Several major research libraries have rebuffed offers from Google and Microsoft to scan their books into computer databases, saying they are put off by restrictions these companies want to place on the new digital collections.

The research libraries, including a large consortium in the Boston area, are instead signing on with the Open Content Alliance, a nonprofit effort aimed at making their materials broadly available.

The opposition between the Open Content Alliance and Google may not be as much as it seems at first glance. From the NYT article:

Adam Smith, project management director of Google Book Search, noted that the company's deals with libraries were not exclusive. "We're excited that the O.C.A. has signed more libraries, and we hope they sign many more," Mr. Smith said.

It looks like Google will digitize the collection for free in exchange for exclusive rights to offering searches of the digital data, but the libraries don't give up rights to have someone else digitize the stuff again and do with it as they see fit. So they can go with Google for now if they want and the O.C.A. later as they have the resources. This seems pretty reasonable to me. I don't know what the deal Microsoft is offering looks like, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's much more restrictive.

The Libraries Shun Deals to Place Books on Web story in The New York Times covers the subject fairly well.

A (thin) coating of oil on the surface of the water would reduce evaporation and smooth the water, making the hurricane turn away from the oil (since it goes faster over smooth water.) Who knows if it works at the scale desired, but it may be no worse than spreading "black particles from the manufacture of tires!" An experiment on this topic was done in 1891 by Rear Admiral Cavelier de Cuverville from a ship in a cyclone.

Actually it does happen all the time. It's called personal jurisdiction. Look it up. If the court finds that the site had the "minimum contacts" in the US, then they'd have jurisdiction over them. Do you not think that the U.S. should be able to target people who illegally import goods to the U.S.? Why should we prejudice our own citizens who are harmed by those outside the U.S. if those that did the harm were purposely targeting Americans? How do you think the victims of bombings that took place outside the U.S. were able to sue Osama bin Laden in a U.S. court? (yes, kind of a pointless suit on other grounds) Every country does have laws like this. Why do you think the U.S. was able to have that British hacker who hacked in the DOD systems a couple years back?

In fact, it's happening a lot write now in Britain where people who don't like books that are written about them are suing the author in court in Britain for defamation, even though the book was never sold and never intended to be sold in Britain. The people bringing the suit simply go to Amazon and buy a few copies. Read about it here.

The reason I said "it depends on how the site works" is because the Supreme Court has already looked at the issue of personal jurisdiction and websites in the Pavlovich case, the guy who made the LiVid website that dealt with DeCSS and DVDs with Linux. There was no jurisdiction in that case but the court said if the website was more interactive and targeted people in California then there would have been. So, if this site had targeted Americans, then yes, they could have had PJ in the U.S.

With all that said, i think it's pretty shitty to do that to this guy.

http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2006/04/25/business/20060425_SEATS_GRAPHIC.html

The media companies love standards when it suits them, such as when it limits the technology companies power (as in music DRM or content filtering). However, when the standards become, well, too standard, they want their own proprietary formats. NBC pulls out of ITunes because they didn't like the standard pricing. Sony tweaks its DVD's because it doesn't like the standard DRM (and I rented a coaster from Blockbuster recently, thanks Sony).

Viacom says "we believe in following the consumers". The real quote was "We believe in following the consumers as long as it pleases us. Otherwise fuck the consumers."

I do not just think that. And yes, for the moment this is not going to happen in (most of) America.

muslims inside england use terror to avoid evolution in biology lessons :
http://forums.muslimvillage.net/index.php?showtopic=37975

in france:
http://islamineurope.blogspot.com/2007/02/france-muslim-anti-evolutionist.html

This is in Turkey, the most moderate muslim nation existing (where both islamists and atheists massacre eachother, creating a balance) :
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/17/science/17book.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

If you thought Christians are trouble when it concerns evolution, you're in for a rude awakening. Christians don't kill you. Don't threaten you. And they don't gang up on your family just because you don't "respect" creationism. Muslims do.

At the start of the day, Democrats were confident that the measure would gain approval in the House despite a veto threat from President Bush. But after an afternoon of partisan sniping, Democratic leaders put off that vote because of a competing measure from Republicans that on its face asked lawmakers to declare where they stood on stopping Osama bin Laden from attacking the United States again.

The Republican measure declared that nothing in the broader bill should be construed as prohibiting intelligence officials from conducting the surveillance needed to prevent Mr. bin Laden or Al Qaeda "from attacking the United States." Had it passed, it threatened to derail the Democratic measure altogether.

Democrats denounced the Republicans' poison pill on Mr. bin Laden as a cynical political ploy and "a cheap shot." But Democratic leaders realized that they were at risk of losing the votes of a contingent of more moderate Democrats who did not want to be left vulnerable for voting against a resolution to stop Al Qaeda, officials said. So the leaders pulled the measure, promising to take it up again next week once they could solidify support.

The Republican maneuver "would have killed the bill, and we couldn't risk that," said a senior Democratic aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal leadership deliberations. "We thought we'd be able to defeat it, but it became clear that we couldn't."

The episode revealed, once again, fault lines within the Democratic Party over how to tackle national security questions without appearing "soft" on terrorism in the face of Republican criticism.

But really, most Chinese are pretty much politically apathetic. The common worker has no time to even think about politics, having to work 14 hours a day just to feed their family. The bloggers are a minority, and the democracy movement here is just too small and unorganized to do anything. But people are in fact scared of saying anything bad about the CCP - every time I try to bring politics up with a taxi driver or whoever they just stop speaking to me. This lack of freedom of speech contributes to make people more complacent, as they don't even know about the Tiananmen protests or the truth of China's role in Tibet.

But hey, it's damn fun being here as a student!

It isn't that common, but the Capitol actually has a jail cell that could be used. Today, though, the person is referred to the DA who is required to convene a grand jury.

In 1983 an EPA official was sentenced to 6 months in jail, 5 years probation and a $10,000 fine.

Short history of NY Times articles here.

About Brazil: Someone ought to stop the iggerunt comments with some facts:

1) Do you have billboards in your city? Sao Paulo, Brazil, one of the biggest cities in the world does not. Sao Paulo is more advanced than most cities in that way.

2) Officials from New York City visited Curitiba, Brazil to learn how to run a city.

3) Brazilians seem much happier than people in the U.S., even though people in the U.S., on average, have more money.

4) It is not correct to call Brazil part of "Latin America". Brazilians are part of a very different culture than the Spanish-speaking countries. (Brazilians speak Portuguese.)

5) I know this will seem strange to men in the U.S., but women in Brazil generally like men and generally treat them well.

6) At least 50% of the men from the U.S. I have known who have visited Brazil have very quickly found a woman they wanted to marry. Don't do that. Take your time and do the work. It takes a long time and a lot of effort to build a marriage-quality relationship, even with a very nice woman.

7) Brazilians like jokes. Often a Brazilian takes advantage of, or begins to laugh about, a humorous situation in less than 500 milliseconds.

8) The Brazilian government is far from perfect, but is much less corrupt than the U.S. government. How many Iraqi civilians has the president of each country killed? George W. Bush: 1,000,000. Lula: 0. How many countries has each country invaded or bombed for oil or weapons or other profits since the end of the 2nd World War: United States: 24. Brazil: 0.

And I forgot to post a link to this article

IIRC, Michael Jackson purchased the publishing rights to the songs, which controls royalties on covers made by other artists, usage in ads, etc. The copyrights on the original Beatles' audio recordings, which determines online availability, are still under control of record labels. (And the earliest Beatles' recording copyrights were set to expire soon in the UK unless that got the Mickey Mouse treatment since I last checked).

Actually, microwave beam energy from ground to air successfully powered the flight of a small plane back in the 80's. So have laser beams a bit more recently. Tesla was working on beaming energy directly to houses a neighborhood at a time using towers back when he was alive. The main reason Tesla historians claim that never happened was that the investors wanted to meter the power.

BTW, using focusing EM radiation for use as a power source is what solar power and radio reception do already. This is a refinement and scale-up of what Marconi did, not some radically new idea in getting power from one place to another. We just have never seen it done on this scale. Instead of enough power to carry a voice or data signal there's talking about megawatts, but the idea isn't exactly brand new.

As for vulnerability, I'd bet it's actually quite a bit harder to knock out a power station in geosynchronous orbit than to knock out a solar farm or wind farm on terra firma. EMP or fuel-air explosives just require one plane or one ICBM. EMP could be done from the ground with some effect. It'd be a bit more of an undertaking to do the same thing 22,500 miles up.

Actually, microwave beam energy from ground to air successfully powered the flight of a small plane back in the 80's. So have laser beams a bit more recently. Tesla was working on beaming energy directly to houses a neighborhood at a time using towers back when he was alive. The main reason Tesla historians claim that never happened was that the investors wanted to meter the power.

BTW, using focusing EM radiation for use as a power source is what solar power and radio reception do already. This is a refinement and scale-up of what Marconi did, not some radically new idea in getting power from one place to another. We just have never seen it done on this scale. Instead of enough power to carry a voice or data signal there's talking about megawatts, but the idea isn't exactly brand new.

As for vulnerability, I'd bet it's actually quite a bit harder to knock out a power station in geosynchronous orbit than to knock out a solar farm or wind farm on terra firma. EMP or fuel-air explosives just require one plane or one ICBM. EMP could be done from the ground with some effect. It'd be a bit more of an undertaking to do the same thing 22,500 miles up.

You can almost hear the sound of the vacuum created by bloggers thinking that their words matter when the people with control don't even know how to read the tubes.

And yet Josh Marshall and his blog Talking Points Memo managed to break the U.S. attorney firing scandal -- a scandal that ultimately led to the removal of the Attorney General, the highest law enforcement officer in the U.S. This despite the fact that the AG's boss hardly knows how to read, much less to read the "tubes".

I'm not saying that all blogs can have this kind of impact. TPM succeeded because they did the hard work of unearthing the story and keeping it alive when nobody else cared about it; most bloggers do it for fun and don't have that level of commitment. But it's silly to make sweeping generalizations dismissing the impact blogs can have when the evidence to the contrary is all around us.

It has been tested Booyah!?... and the Russians seem to have found a much simpler and more efficient solution.

Like their diamond production technology this one just never hit the market... How cool would it be if Putin had a permanent spotlight!

Anyway set it up over the pacific or perpendicular to the sun and beam the light to where it's needed... Possible future use... blocking out the sun to keep those hot summer days at 30-40kelvin.

Probably won't save the day but might...

Performance increases are flatlining? Since when? That would imply innovation is decreasing, and that would be incorrect. Do you even know what you're talking about? I seem to recall an individual from IBM that has a method to completely re-engineer storage as we know it and increase it 100 fold. Not Linear. Nvidia (and previously ATI) in their high competition moments have doubled the speeds of their graphics cards every 6-12 months. Video game systems increase exceedingly more than double their processing capacity per 2-4 year generations. The PS3 can handle 55.3 billion operations , where the Ps2 could only handle 6.5 billion operations.

People do indeed pay for processing power, thats what money is. Things are getting better, and faster, and cheaper, as they always have in the first place. You still have to spend on average 400-700$ for a decent up to date PC, and 700-1000 for a medium gaming rig, and 1500 for a real gaming rig, and 3 grand for an insane gaming rig. That hasn't changed one bit in probably 8 years now. Paying less than those amounts is similar to comparing buying a new but inexpensive car (like a civic) versus buying a 10-20 year old thing to just "get around town"(like an 87 or 97 buick/cadillac).

Windows will be gone in 10 to 15 years hopefully, things will continue get better at that point.

http://jumpmath.org/about/myth-of-ability

John Mighton, a math PhD and award winning playwright, founded a math tutoring program called Jump Math. It has been very successful with all kinds of student. In particular, it has worked for adult learners in jail. "The Myth of Ability" gives the basic philosophy of the program. Once you have read it, you will have the clues you need to direct your own math learning program.

Almost all the things we think about as intelligence are a result of pattern recognition. We really don't work by logic. Master level chess players, for instance, don't work out positions by logic. They can't work out moves much farther ahead than non-experts. What makes them experts is that they have studied thousands of games and they recognize situations when they see them. The way they got to be experts was by 'deliberate practice'. That's how you are going to learn math. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/07/magazine/07wwln_freak.html?_r=1&n=Top%2FFeatures%2FMagazine%2FColumns%2FFreakonomics&oref=slogin

Once you understand the underlying principles of how we learn and once you understand that the effort required will almost certainly lead to success, you will be much more likely to put forth the effort required.

The best part:

At the end of Pogue's retraction/correction article he has the following text:

* Last week's Times column can be found at: http://tinyurl.com/3aew5y

Tinyurl? Is this new? Did I miss some major strategic partnership announcement?

Look at the concerted smear campaign against Rush Limbaugh right now. Totally contrived, and yet even Congress is wasting time with it.

No, what's contrived is the reponse of Limbaugh apologists who try to put his remarks into a different context, try to make his "phony soliders" remark refer to guys scamming VA benefits, rather than to soliders who express views against the war (such as the members of the 82nd Airborne who wrote the New York Times op-ed a few weeks ago).

Read the transcript and it's pitifully obvious what Limbaugh meant: anyone who disagrees with him about Iraq is a "phony solider".

I agree, however, that it's ridiculous that Congress is wasting time with this. Limbaugh's an idiot, and anyone who still takes him seriously is beyond hope.

Excellent point. I just wanted to mention that Clinton had three assassination attempts in his first year. To quote the New York Times "Since Mr. Clinton moved to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, the White House has come under assault by a small plane that crashed under the President's bedroom last September and a deranged gunman who was recently convicted of trying to assassinate the President a month later when he fired shots that struck the building but did not injure anyone. In December, the mansion was struck by bullets fired from somewhere to the south, but investigators never determined if they were aimed at the White House." (link). He was the one who closed the road (see the congressional record here.
These kind of things don't make it into the mass media, you have to dig for them (it would upset people, after all.)

"It is a question of war and peace," Mr. Egeland, now director of the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs in Oslo, told the Associated Press. "We're already seeing the first climate wars, in the Sahel belt of Africa." He said nomads and herders are in conflict with farmers because the changing climate has brought drought and a shortage of fertile lands.

Congratulations to the recipients.

Nobel Peace Prize was disgraced, when Yassir Arafat and Mikhail Gorbachev received theirs. The latter caused Andrei Sakharov's wife Elena to try to get her husband's name crossed out in disgust.

Al Gore is joining a good company, indeed. I wonder, what Henry Kissinger would be thinking about this new club-member.

The Clinton Administration never submitted the protocol to the Senate for ratification.

This is a challenge that requires a 100% effort; ours, and the rest of the world's. The world's second-largest emitter of greenhouse gases is the People's Republic of China. Yet, China was entirely exempted from the requirements of the Kyoto Protocol. India and Germany are among the top emitters. Yet, India was also exempt from Kyoto ... America's unwillingness to embrace a flawed treaty should not be read by our friends and allies as any abdication of responsibility. To the contrary, my administration is committed to a leadership role on the issue of climate change ... Our approach must be consistent with the long-term goal of stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere."[69]

This is one of those times when not living in an earlly primary state is nice. Not being in a swing sate also help. They only want my money, not my vote. Is that the way it is supposed to work?

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/09/top-democrats-pull-from-michigan/#more-2664

On the other hand, I'm thinking about moving to New Hampshire where my vote might actually be worth something. I might even join the Free State Project.

This is one of those times when not living in an earlly primary state is nice. Not being in a swing sate also help. They only want my money, not my vote. Is that the way it is supposed to work?

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/09/top-democrats-pull-from-michigan/#more-2664

On the other hand, I'm thinking about moving to New Hampshire where my vote might actually be worth something. I might even join the Free State Project.

> I hope she brings Fox the same integrity and good business sense that she brought to HP.

I'm sure we will.

Now we'll finally get the answer to the question "Which is harder? Running a first rate company into the ground, or being a Bush economic policy apologist?"

For those of you keeping score at home, in this corner, we have the person who helped bring down HP's stock by more than 50% and missed earnings targets. In the other corner, we have the economic policy that turned $250 billion budget surpluses under Clinton into $300 billion budget deficit in just two years!

Sounds like a perfect match.