Slashdot Mirror
Space Technology to Conquer Everest
Roland Piquepaille writes "These days, the European Space Agency (ESA) is busy sharing its space technologies. Last week, in "Space technology hits the slopes," it said that the ski maker Rossignol hopes to beat the world speed skiing record of 250 km/h by using skis stabilized by a mechanism developed for ESA's Rosetta spacecraft. And today, the ESA announced that a satellite-based Health Monitoring Kit developed by the Canadian company March Networks and co-funded by ESA, will help climbers to escalate Everest. Of course, this kind of technology can be applied at lower altitudes. This overview contains other details and references about the March Networks Health Monitoring Kit."
you are sick. go cut your dick off.
A warmonger. A crackpot fundamentalist. A fanatic and a fool who has only the barest grasp of the killing power of the forces under his command.
His name is George W Bush and his main battle plan is to set the world on fire.
September 11 was a crime against humanity but from Afghanistan to Iraq, and now in Israel, Bush has blazed a purposeless trail of destruction and multiplied the dangers of terrorism a thousand-fold.
The War Against Terror has turned into a war of terror in Iraq as American troops butcher their way through the civilian population in pursuit of an enemy that grows stronger daily with each dead Iraqi civilian.
And in Israel Bush has overnight primed the entire region for a new cycle of slaughter by backing Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's illegal land-grab of Palestinian territory and offering the Arabs nothing in return only despair.
Bush seems determined to unite the entire Arab world against the West. Already the mass murderer Osama bin Laden has gleefully vowed to avenge the Israeli assassination of Palestinian Hamas leader Sheikh Yassin.
After September 11 Bush promised to fight terror. But the only promise Bush has kept is the promise of more terror, more terrorist atrocities, like the Madrid bombings, to come.
As the American President Bush is supposed to protect democracy and make the world a safer place.
Bush is supposed to be the leader of the free world, a man who directly follows in the footsteps of such great statesmen as John F Kennedy, who saved the world from nuclear catastrophe during the Cuban missile crisis.
But airhead Bush is no Kennedy.
WATCHING Bush stumble through a live press conference, even when he knows the questions, is like watching a stranded goldfish gasping for air.
Bush is not just out of his depth, he is out of his element.
If it was not so truly frightening you could almost feel sorry for him.
If I was an American I would be ashamed. Ashamed that the greatest nation on earth is so badly led. Ashamed that their commander-in-chief is without purpose squandering the lives of his men, and Iraqi civilians.
And ashamed too of a President who sends men to their death but does not have the courage to attend one single funeral of the 700 US soldiers killed in Iraq.
Iraq and Israel might seem far away but every time you fill up your car you are taking part in the politics of the Middle East. The world economy still runs on petrol and that oil still largely comes from the Arab world.
If anything should ever happen to that flow of oil - civil war in Saudi Arabia or meltdown in Iraq - we would all know about it very quickly by the US$100 a barrel price tag and the three-hour queue down at your local petrol station.
The war against Islamic fundamentalism, the hunt for Osama bin Laden, is a battle for the future of the world. It is a war the West cannot afford to lose. And it is a war in which the clueless Bush is blindly leading us all towards disaster.
As if the quagmire in Iraq was not bad enough, Bush has turned his destructive attention to the other regional hot-spot, Israel.
At the White House Bush summarily dismissed 50 years of Palestinian claims for an Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories. Israeli settlements in the West Bank, all illegal under international law, were the "new realities" that the Palestinians would just have to accept, he said.
A couple of months ago I was standing next to one of those realities, an eight-foot high concrete wall, on the outskirts of Jerusalem in the small Arab village of Abu Dis.
Abu Dis is seven miles from the centre of Jerusalem and straddles the 3000-year-old pilgrim road to Jericho. Jesus Christ himself probably walked along the same road on his way into Jerusalem.
But last summer Ariel Sharon decided Abu Dis was no longer part of East Jerusalem and erected an eight-foot high concrete barrier across the middle of the road, cutting the residents of