There clearly is one medical system for the rich and another for everyone else. It is also true that most of the time you get as much justice as you can pay for, or equivalently, as much injustice as you can afford; does the name OJ Simpson ring a bell? And the Koch brothers in Wisconsin are trying to show that you can buy an entire state.
Freedom for the rich, slavery for the rest. So much for the "home of the free".
I don't know if Siemens was involved, but I doubt it. I believe that the US and Israel were involved. I also think that Saudi Arabia was involved.
Specifically, I think the Saudis found out much of the specific information about how the Siemens devices were used and how the system was configured. This was key information that an Arab government would be more likely to get then the US or even Israel. The worm was exclusively targeted at a very specific configuration, which is why it has not caused a lot of trouble in other organizations.
The Saudi monarchy is scared spitless of Iranian expansion in the region. They don't want an Iranian nuclear weapon because it will give the current Iranian regime more political credibility in the Islamic world. If they can help derail Iran's weapons program without any political cost to themselves they would jump at the chance. I think they oppose Iran right now as much as Israel does and for similar reasons.
Nice to know your crystal ball is functioning perfectly. I know that everyone in China is relieved to know that there will never be a Chernobyl/Fukushima accident in all the reactors that are going to be built in China.
I'm sure that China will avoid the same organizational flaw where the people running the nuclear plans for profit are identical with the people who are making decisions about cost and safety. In Japan, after working at the electric utility TEPCO many managers went to work for NISA, the Japanese government Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency. Given how the Communist Party dominates all political and economic planning activities, all the regulators will call the shots, and safety will never be compromised to meet production schedules and profit goals.
One analyst, Willy Lam, a Senior Fellow at The Jamestown Foundation, indicated that CCP's pervasive control over political and economic resources has resulted in the absence of meaningful systematic checks and balances. "Institutions that could provide some oversight over party and government authorities - for example, the legislature, the courts or the media - are tightly controlled by CCP apparatchiks." A Beijing-based consultancy, Dragonomics, concurred that "the problem was rooted in the Communist Party’s continued involvement in pricing control, company management and the flow of information". Independent regulation was lacking or ineffective as local industries' were so intertwined with local officialdom.
The Times noted that while one child in 20 in Shanghai may have kidney damage as a result of drinking contaminated formula milk, on the other hand, "like the emperors of old, the new communist elite enjoy the finest produce from all over China, sourced by a high-security government department."
This is already happening for high paid executives
The practice of financing executive compensation using corporate-owned life insurance policies remain controversial. On the one hand, observers in the insurance industry note that "businesses enjoy tax-deferred growth of the inside buildup of the [life insurance] policy’s cash value, tax-free withdrawals and loans, and income tax-free death benefits to [corporate] beneficiaries." On the other hand, critics frowned upon the use of "janitor's insurance" to collect tax-free death benefits from insurance policies covering retirees and current and former non-key employees that companies rely on as informal pension funds for company executives. To thwart the abuse and reduce the attractiveness of corporate-owned life insurance policies, changes in tax treatment of corporate-owned insurance life insurance policies are under consideration for non-key personnel. These changes would repeal "the exception from the pro rata interest expense disallowance rule for [life insurance] contracts covering employees, officers or directors, other than 20% owners of a business that is the owner or beneficiary of the contracts."
So hugh corporations take out life insurance policies to fund the retirement pay of high level executive, and then when the execs die the companies get the money back tax free. And they also get to deduct the life insurance payments from their taxes. When they don't pay taxes, guess who foots the bills? Just another legal way of stealing money.
Is is better to have one big launch vehicle (man rated), or is it more cost effective (and safer) to use multiple launches and then leave from earth orbit? Although the Saturn V worked using 60's technology, things have changed a lot since then. Maybe a different approach would be better now.
Of course, just like the first race for the moon, much of this is about national pride, so maybe the Chinese want the biggest booster just for bragging rights. Some things never change.
Here are some running FPGA projects that are Arduino related:
http://papilio.cc/ Home of the Papilio FPGA board, which has a similar intent to the Arduino. It currently supports a stack CPU and an AVR emulating CPU. The AVR CPU supports the Arduino tool chain. Here is another site for projects with this board.
http://gadgetforge.gadgetfactory.net/gf/. You can get it for $US 50 or 75, depending on the FPGA size.
The Gameduino http://excamera.com/sphinx/gameduino/ is an Arduino shield with an FPGA that supports sprite graphics for old school game play. The FPGA code includes a Forth engine that runs as 50 MHZ. Programming is done on both the Arduino and the FPGA board.
Growing hot chili is results from a combination of the genetics of the plants, soil conditions, sunlight, temperature and water/humidity. If other peppers are not hot in your garden then it is likely that the naga jolokia will also not reach it's flavor potential. Try fertilizers and keeping the plant from being cool at night. Hot peppers need a minimum number of days of sunlight to set their fruit, and if they don't get it the pods will not mature. Find growers in your local area and ask what they do.
Yes, my post was a troll and the responses have completely missed the point. In order to make it clear, I'll be as literal as possible, since there seems to be much confusion over my sarcastic style.
The original phrase I was objecting to was "Nukular" hysteria. The clear intent of the phrase was to cast anyone worried about nuclear power as being so ignorant that they could and should be ignored. This is an ad hominem attack http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem. Instead of acknowledging that there are serious concerns, you set up a 'straw man' to make fun of. This is intellectually dishonest.
When I suggested going to Fukushima or Chernobyl I was not being literal, I was being sarcastic. My intent was to contrast your snide remarks with the real situation faced by people with the triple threat of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear radiation. Your ad hominem attack also denigrates those in real peril, even if you do not wish to admit it.
When I talked about being in the natural environment in Fukushima, I was pointing out that you have no personal concern about radioactive contamination in your day to day environment. There are millions of people who are faced with this uncertainty every day, and millions more who are now worried about eating contaminated food. Some of this is over reaction, but a lot of it is not. By you standard, they are all 'hysterical'.
What you call hysteria is a completely natural response when the public is lied to in a crisis. Both TEPCO and the Japanese government have denied the danger since the reactors were damaged. Their statements to the public have been continually wrong. In the USA the NRC has an similar problem. The US now says that the evacuation zone at Fukushkma should be 50 miles. Meanwhile, NRC planning for similar events in the US sets evacuation zones at 10 miles.
I was contrasting the simplistic name calling of the original post with the current real world crisis. I think the term 'blowhard' was accurate. After reading the responses, I would amend it to 'smug hypocritical blowhard', which is think is more to the point. I hope this clears things up for you.
Move to Fukushima. Now. Since you seem to believe that any fear of radiation is, to use your phrase, "Nukular" hysteria.
Put your money where your mouth is. You could buy a place really cheep, because a lot of people are going to be moving out.
Or just go for a visit. I suggest you camp outside, as close to the 20 km nuclear plant exclusion zone as you can get. Take a swim in the ocean. Spend a lot of time outdoors. Drink water from streams or rain water. Eat local produce and fish. Since they can't sell this stuff, they might give it to you for free.
You could also relocate to Chernobyl. There are a few hundred stubborn/stupid people who are staying there. I think you would fit right in.
Post a reply that you want to go and I'll start raising funds for you trip. I would guess that a lot of people would pitch in a few bucks. It would be an inexpensive way for the rest of us to have some fun. If you don't accept the offer, you are a blowhard and hypocrite. If you do go you will increase your chances of dying, and the average intelligence of the human race will increase. It's a win/win.
Ignoring the Commodore issue, is this an interesting form factor? A computer integrated in a case that contains the keyboard with USB ports and an HDMI port for display? The power supply could be an external brick to keep the cost down.
Would this sell if it cost less then sub-notebooks or note-pad systems? It would be portable in a different way, in that you would still have an external monitor or TV screen. I really don't know. What does Slashdot think? (Always a risky question to ask I know...)
Go to http://cultnews.net/. Reporting on cults you've never even heard of, all over the world. As a plus, they also follow cult films and actors, so you can hear about William Shatner as well. Enjoy!
I think everyone is missing the point by talking about finding a hack or paying a fee. If the NYT want to get out of the business of publishing on the open web I support their decision. I will not longer read anything they publish, free or not.
Unless you are in the greater New York area you don't need the NYT. They consider themselves the "journal of record", but in the real world they are just another mainstream media news outlet, and there is nothing special about their coverage.
I can find everything I need to know without them. For international news I can go to English language sites of the regions that are closest to the story. The same goes for events in the US. Why read the NYT about the situation in Japan when you can go to Japanese sources and the Wikipedia?
I have found that both British news and Al Jazeera are as good, or even better then any US based new organization when it comes to international reporting. All US based news is dumbed down for the domestic market. And US mainstream media are incapable of honest reporting about right wing loonies because they are afraid of loosing viewers. This is one reason the birtherism and the fake controversy about Obama's citizenship is still makes big headlines.
So if the NYT doesn't want me to look at their stuff it's no big loss. I look forward to reading about their bankruptcy in other news forums.
Who would ever want to hook a bunch off different computers together. It's a lot cheaper and more reliable to ship 9 track mag tapes if you need to move real data, or just lease some lines from the phone company,
Even though the Slashdot Pundits dismiss this as useless, obviously the user community it supports thinks it is a big success. The claim is that Condor is in the to 40 supercomputers and it costs 10 times less then getting the same results using other hardware. Not too shabby.
It's likely that one of the reasons that this is so useful is the the SPE/Cell processors are good at the kind of image processing that the USAF is interested in. They are doing a lot of work in the Fourier domain, which is common for radar processing, so the Cell streaming 64 bit floating point architecture is well suited to the task.
From the article:
As impressive as the Condor is, it won’t be for long. Barnell envisions integrating smartphone processors into high-performance computing, putting the power of a Condor into a small surveillance drone the size of your fist, something weighing less than a pound and using the energy of a standard light bulb.
This translates to "We're going to use ARM processors as soon as possible".
These researchers see the value in leveraging commercial technology for cost effective high performance computing. If you want good performance per watt driven by a big commercial market the ARM is the way to go. There are GPUs that work with the ARM architecture, as well as ARM vector processing units. I would guess that they plan to use the upcoming generation of 64 bit ARM processors as soon as they are available. They might even start with current generation 32 bit dual CPU 2GHz hardware.
Just because the ARM is not as cool as CUDA doesn't make it useless. IBM has announce that it will not do a next gen PS3/Cell processor, so the USAF funding that effort by itself would be costly and have long lead times. ARM CPUs are only going to get cheaper, faster and be very power efficient. It's the obvious next step.
You are an idiot. Do you have any idea how much time and effort goes into producing a proposal like this? This is the result of years of effort by a significant number of people. It is literally impossible that NASA, or any governmental agency, could initiate a project like this as a response to a situation that is less then two weeks old.
Your mindless trashing of NASA is revolting. The people at NASA are dedicated professionals. I doubt you have the qualifications to mow the lawn at a NASA facility, given the shear ignorance of your statement. I assume that you trash talk you betters because you are both stupid and vile. You are most likely incapable of tying you own shoes, so your only response is to slander people who have real accomplishments.
"Something unexpected will always go wrong" is the key.
Engineering get better through failure. This is why cars, airplanes, household electricity, etc. are safe. Engineers do the best they can with the existing experience base, and then see what happens. Over a long enough period of time, and enough failures, safe and cost effective results can be produced.
How many Level 5 nuclear events will it take to achieve an acceptable level of safety? The only way to answer this question is to keep on building real world nuclear reactors and see what happens. After this event I am not very comfortable with that answer.
Most of the pro-nuclear support here is really a form of Technocracy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technocracy. The short version is "if you just let the technical types make all the important decisions then we wouldn't have all these problems, and things would run well."
Talking about the Fukushima situation, this takes the form "if they just had a better emergency backup" or "use a pebble bed reactor" or "thorium" or some other technical solution. Those are simplistic answers to complex system problems. If it was that easy then the Fukushima system would not have failed, because a cost effective backup power system able to withstand the actual tsunami could have been build.
Japan is the one place in the world a tsunami should not have had this consequence. They have earthquakes and tsunamis, they have a very sophisticated technical society, and a great fear of the bad effects of nuclear radiation. But they failed.
The failure was not a technical problem, it was a system problem. With all the planning and prevention measures, they did not see the result of a combination of failures at the system level. This is exactly the kind of problem that is easy to see after it happens, but is hard to predict before it occurs. You cannot plan your way out of a problem you cannot see. This is where hard lessons are learned through painful real world experience.
At this point, we might be a lot better off putting resources towards other power sources then nuclear. If we build wind farms, harvest ocean power, or build large solar power plants we will also experience serious failures, but we won't be faced with problems that will last for tens of thousands of years. We will just take our bad experiences and make things better one failure at a time.
Online sources want to sell the same info to you as many times as they can. Obsolescence is part of their business plan.
For example, Harper-Collens has put a limit on how many times a library can use a copy of an ebook
http://ebooks.dreamwidth.org/32051.html The book can only be circulated 26 times before the DRM license runs out.
This is outrageous and stupid. If possible, boycott all their products.
Not really. The series is about characters in a video game.
So the fanboys don't care what it's about; they'll love it not mater what, and talk about how cool the technology is, and endlessly discuss if the motion capture and rendering details. It's kind of like going to a golf game and talking about nothing but who made the golf balls, clubs and shoes while not caring about the score.
No actual entertainment will take place. Nothing to see here, move along.
The Chandra x-ray satellite can measure the spectrum of x-rays emitted by the neutron star, which is relatively close, only 330 light years away. From this they can infer the temperature. Over the last ten years they have seen the roughly 4% temperature drop.
According to the two teams of scientists who analyzed the Chandra x-ray data to determine the cooling rate, these observations provide strong evidence for superfluidity in neutron-star cores. Indeed, the onset of neutron superfluidity opens a new channel for neutrino emission from the continuous breaking and formation of neutron pairs.
The energy is leaving the star via neutrino emission, which in turn is a result of the neutron superfluid inside the neutron star. That's the important discovery.
This is very interesting physics, because there is no way to produce these conditions in the lab, or anywhere outside a neutron star.
Of course you could just read the abstract and get all this information yourself, but this is Slashdot so knoledge takes a back seat to bad jokes and uninformed opinion.
Slashdot Mirror
Freedom for the rich, slavery for the rest. So much for the "home of the free".
Specifically, I think the Saudis found out much of the specific information about how the Siemens devices were used and how the system was configured. This was key information that an Arab government would be more likely to get then the US or even Israel. The worm was exclusively targeted at a very specific configuration, which is why it has not caused a lot of trouble in other organizations.
The Saudi monarchy is scared spitless of Iranian expansion in the region. They don't want an Iranian nuclear weapon because it will give the current Iranian regime more political credibility in the Islamic world. If they can help derail Iran's weapons program without any political cost to themselves they would jump at the chance. I think they oppose Iran right now as much as Israel does and for similar reasons.
I'm sure that China will avoid the same organizational flaw where the people running the nuclear plans for profit are identical with the people who are making decisions about cost and safety. In Japan, after working at the electric utility TEPCO many managers went to work for NISA, the Japanese government Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency. Given how the Communist Party dominates all political and economic planning activities, all the regulators will call the shots, and safety will never be compromised to meet production schedules and profit goals.
If you don't want to take my word for it, just ask all the people in China who were poisoned by melamine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal.
What could possibly go wrong?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_pay#United_States
So hugh corporations take out life insurance policies to fund the retirement pay of high level executive, and then when the execs die the companies get the money back tax free. And they also get to deduct the life insurance payments from their taxes. When they don't pay taxes, guess who foots the bills? Just another legal way of stealing money.
Of course, just like the first race for the moon, much of this is about national pride, so maybe the Chinese want the biggest booster just for bragging rights. Some things never change.
http://papilio.cc/ Home of the Papilio FPGA board, which has a similar intent to the Arduino. It currently supports a stack CPU and an AVR emulating CPU. The AVR CPU supports the Arduino tool chain. Here is another site for projects with this board. http://gadgetforge.gadgetfactory.net/gf/. You can get it for $US 50 or 75, depending on the FPGA size.
The Gameduino http://excamera.com/sphinx/gameduino/ is an Arduino shield with an FPGA that supports sprite graphics for old school game play. The FPGA code includes a Forth engine that runs as 50 MHZ. Programming is done on both the Arduino and the FPGA board.
Growing hot chili is results from a combination of the genetics of the plants, soil conditions, sunlight, temperature and water/humidity. If other peppers are not hot in your garden then it is likely that the naga jolokia will also not reach it's flavor potential. Try fertilizers and keeping the plant from being cool at night. Hot peppers need a minimum number of days of sunlight to set their fruit, and if they don't get it the pods will not mature. Find growers in your local area and ask what they do.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyro_Gearloose
The original phrase I was objecting to was "Nukular" hysteria. The clear intent of the phrase was to cast anyone worried about nuclear power as being so ignorant that they could and should be ignored. This is an ad hominem attack http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem. Instead of acknowledging that there are serious concerns, you set up a 'straw man' to make fun of. This is intellectually dishonest.
When I suggested going to Fukushima or Chernobyl I was not being literal, I was being sarcastic. My intent was to contrast your snide remarks with the real situation faced by people with the triple threat of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear radiation. Your ad hominem attack also denigrates those in real peril, even if you do not wish to admit it.
When I talked about being in the natural environment in Fukushima, I was pointing out that you have no personal concern about radioactive contamination in your day to day environment. There are millions of people who are faced with this uncertainty every day, and millions more who are now worried about eating contaminated food. Some of this is over reaction, but a lot of it is not. By you standard, they are all 'hysterical'.
What you call hysteria is a completely natural response when the public is lied to in a crisis. Both TEPCO and the Japanese government have denied the danger since the reactors were damaged. Their statements to the public have been continually wrong. In the USA the NRC has an similar problem. The US now says that the evacuation zone at Fukushkma should be 50 miles. Meanwhile, NRC planning for similar events in the US sets evacuation zones at 10 miles.
I was contrasting the simplistic name calling of the original post with the current real world crisis. I think the term 'blowhard' was accurate. After reading the responses, I would amend it to 'smug hypocritical blowhard', which is think is more to the point. I hope this clears things up for you.
Put your money where your mouth is. You could buy a place really cheep, because a lot of people are going to be moving out.
Or just go for a visit. I suggest you camp outside, as close to the 20 km nuclear plant exclusion zone as you can get. Take a swim in the ocean. Spend a lot of time outdoors. Drink water from streams or rain water. Eat local produce and fish. Since they can't sell this stuff, they might give it to you for free.
You could also relocate to Chernobyl. There are a few hundred stubborn/stupid people who are staying there. I think you would fit right in.
Post a reply that you want to go and I'll start raising funds for you trip. I would guess that a lot of people would pitch in a few bucks. It would be an inexpensive way for the rest of us to have some fun. If you don't accept the offer, you are a blowhard and hypocrite. If you do go you will increase your chances of dying, and the average intelligence of the human race will increase. It's a win/win.
Would this sell if it cost less then sub-notebooks or note-pad systems? It would be portable in a different way, in that you would still have an external monitor or TV screen. I really don't know. What does Slashdot think? (Always a risky question to ask I know...)
Go to http://cultnews.net/. Reporting on cults you've never even heard of, all over the world. As a plus, they also follow cult films and actors, so you can hear about William Shatner as well. Enjoy!
Summertime
Unless you are in the greater New York area you don't need the NYT. They consider themselves the "journal of record", but in the real world they are just another mainstream media news outlet, and there is nothing special about their coverage.
I can find everything I need to know without them. For international news I can go to English language sites of the regions that are closest to the story. The same goes for events in the US. Why read the NYT about the situation in Japan when you can go to Japanese sources and the Wikipedia?
I have found that both British news and Al Jazeera are as good, or even better then any US based new organization when it comes to international reporting. All US based news is dumbed down for the domestic market. And US mainstream media are incapable of honest reporting about right wing loonies because they are afraid of loosing viewers. This is one reason the birtherism and the fake controversy about Obama's citizenship is still makes big headlines.
So if the NYT doesn't want me to look at their stuff it's no big loss. I look forward to reading about their bankruptcy in other news forums.
Who would ever want to hook a bunch off different computers together. It's a lot cheaper and more reliable to ship 9 track mag tapes if you need to move real data, or just lease some lines from the phone company,
Even though the Slashdot Pundits dismiss this as useless, obviously the user community it supports thinks it is a big success. The claim is that Condor is in the to 40 supercomputers and it costs 10 times less then getting the same results using other hardware. Not too shabby.
It's likely that one of the reasons that this is so useful is the the SPE/Cell processors are good at the kind of image processing that the USAF is interested in. They are doing a lot of work in the Fourier domain, which is common for radar processing, so the Cell streaming 64 bit floating point architecture is well suited to the task.
From the article:
This translates to "We're going to use ARM processors as soon as possible".
These researchers see the value in leveraging commercial technology for cost effective high performance computing. If you want good performance per watt driven by a big commercial market the ARM is the way to go. There are GPUs that work with the ARM architecture, as well as ARM vector processing units. I would guess that they plan to use the upcoming generation of 64 bit ARM processors as soon as they are available. They might even start with current generation 32 bit dual CPU 2GHz hardware.
Just because the ARM is not as cool as CUDA doesn't make it useless. IBM has announce that it will not do a next gen PS3/Cell processor, so the USAF funding that effort by itself would be costly and have long lead times. ARM CPUs are only going to get cheaper, faster and be very power efficient. It's the obvious next step.
Your mindless trashing of NASA is revolting. The people at NASA are dedicated professionals. I doubt you have the qualifications to mow the lawn at a NASA facility, given the shear ignorance of your statement. I assume that you trash talk you betters because you are both stupid and vile. You are most likely incapable of tying you own shoes, so your only response is to slander people who have real accomplishments.
Engineering get better through failure. This is why cars, airplanes, household electricity, etc. are safe. Engineers do the best they can with the existing experience base, and then see what happens. Over a long enough period of time, and enough failures, safe and cost effective results can be produced.
How many Level 5 nuclear events will it take to achieve an acceptable level of safety? The only way to answer this question is to keep on building real world nuclear reactors and see what happens. After this event I am not very comfortable with that answer.
Most of the pro-nuclear support here is really a form of Technocracy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technocracy. The short version is "if you just let the technical types make all the important decisions then we wouldn't have all these problems, and things would run well."
Talking about the Fukushima situation, this takes the form "if they just had a better emergency backup" or "use a pebble bed reactor" or "thorium" or some other technical solution. Those are simplistic answers to complex system problems. If it was that easy then the Fukushima system would not have failed, because a cost effective backup power system able to withstand the actual tsunami could have been build.
Japan is the one place in the world a tsunami should not have had this consequence. They have earthquakes and tsunamis, they have a very sophisticated technical society, and a great fear of the bad effects of nuclear radiation. But they failed.
The failure was not a technical problem, it was a system problem. With all the planning and prevention measures, they did not see the result of a combination of failures at the system level. This is exactly the kind of problem that is easy to see after it happens, but is hard to predict before it occurs. You cannot plan your way out of a problem you cannot see. This is where hard lessons are learned through painful real world experience.
At this point, we might be a lot better off putting resources towards other power sources then nuclear. If we build wind farms, harvest ocean power, or build large solar power plants we will also experience serious failures, but we won't be faced with problems that will last for tens of thousands of years. We will just take our bad experiences and make things better one failure at a time.
For example, Harper-Collens has put a limit on how many times a library can use a copy of an ebook http://ebooks.dreamwidth.org/32051.html The book can only be circulated 26 times before the DRM license runs out.
This is outrageous and stupid. If possible, boycott all their products.
So the fanboys don't care what it's about; they'll love it not mater what, and talk about how cool the technology is, and endlessly discuss if the motion capture and rendering details. It's kind of like going to a golf game and talking about nothing but who made the golf balls, clubs and shoes while not caring about the score.
No actual entertainment will take place. Nothing to see here, move along.
http://www.space.com/11034-x37b-secret-space-plane-launch-scrubbed-weather.html
When there is a quantum computer will you promise to never post on Slashdot again?
The energy is leaving the star via neutrino emission, which in turn is a result of the neutron superfluid inside the neutron star. That's the important discovery.
This is very interesting physics, because there is no way to produce these conditions in the lab, or anywhere outside a neutron star.
Of course you could just read the abstract and get all this information yourself, but this is Slashdot so knoledge takes a back seat to bad jokes and uninformed opinion.
That is why there is, in fact, no such thing as Wikipedia. The WikiMedia system does not exist either. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia#Software_and_hardware
In a similar fashion there is no VM ZEND engine. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zend_Engine
And I hate to break it to you, but there is no Santa Clause.
Could you replace "Iraq" with "Libya" and send this back in time to George Bush and let him know that invading Iraq is not such a good idea?