I doubt that they actually used it for "targeting" as stated in the article. If you plan something, you draw a map, or you take an existing map and mark the targets there. I doubt that there are any recent maps of South Iraq to buy in the bookstores. So the question was: "Where do we get a map to mark our targets?" And someone said: "Lets just print out the Google Earth for that." They would probably have drawn it from memory, if Google Earth didn't exist, or used an old map and updated the locations. But why bother?
That's like saying: The gas station was prone to burn down anyway because of all the fuel, it was just us smoking there that lightened it.
If not toppling Saddam Hussein in 1992 (when he had stocks full of WMDs and an army of half a million soldiers) and allowing him to put down the shiite insurgency made sense, because of the otherwise unavoidable civil war, why was it smart to topple him anyway in 2003 and ignore the risk of civil?
A lot of it has to do with the universality of the systems. No one expects a car which can not only drive you and your luggage from A to B, additionally mow your lawn, plant potatos, paint lines on the road, can store all types of cans and bottles without adapters (e.g. can and bottle cases), do the parking automatically, lift heavy loads up to three stories high and switches colors on the fly.
For each and every special use of a car, there are special cars, and most of them excel at exactly one task (additionally to bringing you from A to B, which some of them do actually pretty poorly). For each of the special uses you normally need an additional driver's license.
And modifying your car is verboten except for certified parts, and they should at best be fitted by a certified car station, and you easily lose your insurance if you don't follow the rules.
Using a computer doesn't have much penalty to you except for losing your data, which is immateriell. Computer breakdowns don't hurt your body, computer breakdowns don't set your property on fire, computer breakdowns don't risk the lifes of innocent bystanders. And where they could do, the computers are heavily protected, only authorized staff is allowed near them, the functions are reduced to the absolute minimum, and every change has to be thoroughly tested, certified, documented, the operators have to be educated, and playing around with them carries stiff penalties even if nothing happens.
Without the incentive from the user side to prevent user errors because of the missing personal danger and liability from the user side, there is also no incentive to actually design computer interfaces, to check functionality for their absolute necessity, and bloath in every aspect is the result. Computers are overly complex because they can. No one feels actually threatened by computer complexity. No user would install software on their own if they would risk losing huge sums of money in a case of error. No user would ignore error messages if their life would be depending on reading and understanding them.
If a user adds electric circutry and cables to his home power outlets, and the house burns down because of shortcuts, he is homeless and has no one to blame his error on. He actually can play around with power cables. Cables and sockets and tools are available at many stores, and opening up the wall and connect to the power cables is technically no problem. And if he does so incorrectly, and the big fire happens, all the electricians will grin and tell anecdotes about his inability and probably hand him a Darwin Award.
But computer users get away with using overly complex systems they don't understand, fiddling around with them without knowing what they are doing, and computer user magazines actually tell them that software can be evaluated by the number of functions and options it provides. If you want that to change, don't excuse the user for mistakes. Make them responsible for everything that happens with his computer, even if he is not the one who causes it (directly or indirectly).
Owning a cow makes you liable because of the harm your cow could do to the environment. Owning a computer gives you lots of excuses for you if your computer is part of a botnet, gets used to spread bombing instructions or phishing identities. As soon as your ass get spanked because of things happening through your computer, suddenly using a computer will become more easy, function lists get reduced to the necessary minimum, and support nightmares because of a clash between user will and computer complexity will be a thing of the past.
In recent tests from TV tech magazines, there was virtually no chain of equipment (disc player, sat receiver, digital settop box, hard disk recorder and TV set), that was able to play all HDTV content that was thrown at it. Not even equipment bought from the same brand was stable enough (Yes, a set of disc player, sat receiver, settop box and TV set from Sony was not able to play all Sony content).
Some mixed sets proved to be quite capable, but even using the next revision of the same device broke the chain again. Compatibility virtually does not exist. HDTV logo aside. Two component stuff works quite well (e.g. sat receiver + TV set), but as soon as you use more equipment, it breaks easily.
To put things straight and correct a little the notion of "making a living from your creations":
In Germany there is a special health insurance institution for artists, catering to the special needs of artists (like unregular payment, special orthopedic problems, need for time off etc.pp.), which basicly covers all artists, the name is "Künstlersozialkasse" (Artist's social insurance). According to their records about ~7500 people in Germany make enough from their Work of Arts to gain a living from them (that means they earn more than 30,000 EUR ~ US$40,000 a year from their artistic work).
But the copyright industry as a whole employs more than 200,000 people. So whose living are the artists actually making?
This makes sense from a mechanical, product, 'make things work' standpoint... but it doesn't really hold, for me, for works of art. So, by having short copyright I can take Harry Potter, chop it up a bit, put a couple of different names in it and make a new book out of it? How does that work? Because you are feed with cultural artefacts from your very first day on earth. Your mother singing lullabies to you, your grandma reading fairy tales to you, your friends telling you stories what happened or what they would like to happen.
Most of that stuff is in the public domain. And it is the very foundation you can build your Work of Art on. Work of Arts don't drop out of nothing, they are based on a huge cultural fundament you mostly got for free, because the society around you is nurturing you with associations, notations, languages, melodies, situations, relations...
Samuel Longhorne Clemens (also known as Mark Twain) once talked to the local priest: Your sermon today was magnificent! But I have a book at home which contains every word of it! The priest was very offended until Mark Twain showed him the book: the dictionary.
If you ever manage to create an appreciated Work of Art which doesn't need the free cultural environment of you and the admirers of the Work, you get my personal permission to enjoy the copyrights as long as you want.
So, both Galileo (or Copernicus) and the Church would be wrong in declaring that either model is correct, as the data did not overwhelmingly support either model over the other.
That was also the real base on the suit against Galileo Galilei. He was not being accused of telling that the Earth was revolving around the Sun. The Pope in 1630 actually allowed research into a non geocentric model, provided the results would be presented as theories and not as facts (sounds familiar?). Galileo Galilei was accused of claiming that he was definitely right, and everyone else was wrong. Given Galileo Galilei's temperament and his strong worded pamphlets a lot of people felt offended.
(And differently than today's people somehow caught in diverse anti-terror-fishnets, he was not subject to torture or coercion. He was not thrown in jail at all. He was in Rome residing in the Roman villa of the Medici family of Florence, whose teacher he was at that time, and in the conviction he got ordered not to teach anymore and stay at his home near Florence. For the loss of his employment he got paid a yearly sum directly from the Pope, and when he got finally sick he was allowed to move into the town of Florence to be near his doctor. Quite different than anything we normally hear about victims of the Inquisition!)
The life of electronic components doubles for every 10C reduction in temperature.
This is called van 't Hoff's rule, not to be confused with van 't Hoff equation, which describes the chemical equilibrium or van 't Hoff factor, describing the solulibility of salts. Yes, Jacobus Henricus van 't Hoff was a very productive chemist.
You don't know your code is secure. You just know that it handles certain test cases apparently correct.
(Ok... Silly examples like "while(TRUE);" are partially correct, because they never terminate, and thus you can't tell they handle the test cases incorrectly.)
It's like scientific theories. You will never know if a scientific theory is entirely correct. You just can point to the test cases you have thrown at the theory which it was able to handle, and to the results you got from using the theory. It still doesn't prove that the theory is correct, only that you were unable to poke holes in it until now.
So all you can do is check for known traps, border cases, predictable error conditions, and in general following the KISS principle to keep the number of test cases down. And keep all documentations for tests and checks you were doing as long as you are supporting the code.
I only had to chance it once (on Win98 if I remember correctly) and there it was just an regedit call. No reboot required. At this time Win98 was switching the DST about a month wrong in MET, and I had to correct that. There is also a Microsoft Utility called tzedit, which displays and modifies the time zone rules. To have it affect the displayed time, you can go in the Control Panel, choose Date & Time and hit Ok. Then it will refresh the timezone information according to the changes you made with the tzedit.exe utility.
But as someone already wrote in an earlier post: Set your servers to use NTP, either from your local nameservers or from *.pool.ntp.org and have it automatically adjust for DST.
Cambridge, East Anglia normally doesn't have cold winters. There is something called "Gulfstream" (while Cambridge, Mass. get's cold winters due to water down from Labrador...).
Better not. AMD's Fab30 and Fab36 are also there, and where would we be without Athlons and Opterons? (For mapping addicted: Dresden-Wilschdorf, Germany)
That's exactly what I am talking about. To pass the mustering of the opinion makers you have to reinterpret your past, you have to lie about it and you should never, ever admit that in the past you might have been wrong, because no one will believe you if you say that you have learned from your mistakes. You have to be perfect from birth, even if the perfection is retroactively fitted on your past.
I think the U.S. opinion makers are much too obsessed with what people have said in other times, in other circumstances and with other knowledge. The usus to pull out obscure sources from 25 years ago to bash it on people looks pretty pervert to me. It seems to me that they live under the presumption that
there are never any errors in judgement.
people should never admit errors in judgement.
people who ever err in judgement are bad to the cores and should be thrown out.
there are no new developments possible which change the circumstances in a way that an once perfectly reasonable judgement might now be rather problematic.
people are unable to learn from mistakes.
people are unable to learn from mistakes other people make.
people who admit that they got more experienced by making mistakes are at best liars, worse they are traitors.
The first West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer once said: "I don't care about my silly babble from yesterday." (The original german statement was: "Was interessiert mich mein dummes Geschwätz von gestern!")
Sometimes I guess this attitude would be healthy to some in the U.S..
Ok, so they're no good anymore, so what are they currently saying?
-Bring to justice a corrupt dictator
-Rebuild Iraq, hand over running to Iraquis and exit with dignity. Ok, so apparently the first one is done, and the other looks a long way off.
If you replace "brought to justice" with "was executed very fast after only a single aspect of his dictatorship was slightly touched", then I agree.
Yet commandeering someone to kill 148 people was surely already forbidden in the old iraqi law. Why not take the old laws and sentence Saddam Hussein according to them? Why artificially create new laws and enact them retroactively? If you want to prove that someone is bad and does illegal things, then start with looking at the laws in place when the suspected crime was done. He was a dictator after all, I am pretty sure that he didn't care if his actions were backed by a fresh law overriding the old ones.
Getting the Shiites to cheer for Saddam Husseins execution was easy. They would also have cheered for him being executed for stealing candy. Getting the Sunnites to agree that he was a criminal is the hard part, and the way the process was done this chance was completely flundered. In the end Saddam Hussein was executed, but not brought to justice.
I don't think it's "justice" if you create new laws afterwards and then tell people that they have run afoul of them. I know that this is very en vogue after 9/11, and suddenly "helping or being trained as a terrorist" is a criminal act, and it's up to the government to define case by case, what that means.
What was until 2001 some kind of strange adventure vacation with some preaching, some training in a shooting range and lots of comraderie, completely has changed, and now you get indefinitely hold in detention without access to a lawyer, even though you might have been there decades ago and maybe even left soon after arrival because the camp looked too suspicious to you.
What was an act of charity to some social organisations in the land of your roots, where you still have family ties now is "financing international terrorism" and also gets you in jail, even though you only wanted to help the creation of an elementary school in the village of your ancestors. And again it may be that it also puts you in jail retroactively for money you spend years ago.
There's no basic services, and peace and self-sufficiency seem decades away. But there are some things that have been achieved. To the US taxpayer, or family member of those serving, it may not look like a victory. But for some people, the war is a massive success:
-Stopped Iraq from selling oil in Euros, rather than US$ -Demonstrate acceptance of American people for a pre-emptive, internationally condemmed war. -Occupied countries and military bases on the western (Iraq) and Eastern (Afghanistan) borders of Iran -Increased military spending -Real life operations practice for US forces and test ground for new weapons technology -Re-building and resource extraction contracts handed out to US firms.
As far as I see stopping Iraq selling oil for Euros (which Iraq only announced and never did) didn't help the U.S. dollar if you just look at the exchange ratios. From the heydays of 2002, when the Euro traded for about 0.90 US$ we have a steep decline to today's ~1.30 US$. The whole US economy was devalued 30% during the last five years. To offset that you would need a yearly gross economy growth of about 6%, but the US economy achieved a maximum of about 4%. Calculated in Euros the US economy shrunk 2% a year.
Basicly what you are saying is that spending half a trillion of US$ a year to a very small part of the U.S. economy and the U.S. people is somehow a success. If you happen to be involved with either the companies or the people, I could agree. But wouldn't it be much more effective and cheaper if the money doesn't need to be laundered by a war but be sent directly? Ju
The most amazing aspect is a science project of then 14 year old Nathan Zohner in 1997. He wrote a pamphlet pointing out the dangers of DHMO, and set up a petition to have it banned. Then he asked his classmates to sign the petition. 43 signed immediately, six were undecided and only one actually detected that Nathan was talking about water. Nathan then published his findings as his ninth grade science project with the title "How gullible are we?"
We should also ban a substance from food where a single ounce already is deadly. But you can buy a substance like this in food stores in packages of a quarter pound and more: Sodiumchloride (NaCl), better known as SALT.
And we need to ban fruits whose main taste is provided by a substance (Furaneol and Methoxyfuraneol), which is deadly if taken in micrograms. Lets ban strawberry.
The funny thing is - when you KNOW someone is trying to drop your airplanes out of the air - and this isn't being paranoid - that big hole in the ground in New York supports the claim, then taking precautions to try and identify problem passengers BEFORE the plane takes off seems only prudent doesn't it? The problem is: The fiveteen people who were dropping planes out of the air were KNOWN BEFORE as problem passengers. So KNOWING BEFOREHAND doesn't help. Somehow people still seems to believe in Laplace's demon who knows the impulse and location of every particle in the world and thus can predict the future.
Look at the allknowing CIA and the bogus intelligence they had on Iraq. Look at the East German Staatssicherheitsdienst which was employing about 10% of East Germany's population to spy on and keep the other 90% in control. Yet the former East Germany was history within 33 days (counting from Oct 7 1989 to Nov 9 1989), because the government couldn't imagine how the actual situation in the country is. Knowing beforehand is snake oil. Hindsight is always 20/20.
Unlike Windows Vista, no one was selling machines with OS/2 pre-installed with a big OEM discount (IBM were trying to sell PCs, so they weren't really pushing other people to license OS/2).
This is not entirely true. In Germany one of the at the time largest vendor of PC equipment (Vobis Highscreen) was selling OS/2 3.0 preinstalled, and the other big one (Escom) at least offered OS/2 as optional bundle, if I remember correctly.
This gave OS/2 about 8 months head start to Windows 95, and even in 1998 there were still large corporations (Deutsche Bank comes to mind) with OS/2 as primary desktop. O.k. Deutsche Bank had IBM as primary IT supplier anyway (with the big irons being mainly RS/6000, replacing old VAXen), but still OS/2 was still alive four years later.
"Never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence".
I so hoped that George W. Bush would win the 2004 elections to make sure he is still president when the failure of his presidency becomes more clear. So no one can blame the ongoing breakdown in Iraq and the reappearing Taliban in Afghanistan to a liberal and weak Democrat administration which messes anything up the Bush Administration has started.
I was starting to wonder if the strategies of the Bush administration might just be based on complete incompetence and ignorance after them closing in on Iraq in connection to 9/11. I had a teacher who was in Iraq on a development project in the 1970ies with still some connections there, and according to her Iraq had a mainly agnostic government based on arabic-nationalist and socialist ideas (e.g. arabic nationalsocialism). Tariq Aziz, the former second man in Iraq, is a maronite christian, not a muslim after all. So all alleged connections to a fundamentalist muslim group were doubtfull at best. Saddam Hussein was trying to play the muslim card after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the demise of the Soviet Union, because Socialism was no longer fashionable, but with the Gulf War in 1992 the Muslim Card also failed because all neighboring states (both baathist/fascist like Syria and fundamentally islamic as Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Sheikdoms) were telling him off.
In the end Saddam Hussein seemed to me just a dictator which tried to cling on power with all means, and I guess he was completely unideologic except for the ideology that he was not to be toppled.
A big hint to the complete misinterpretation of the situation in Iraq was to me that the development of the war was so different from the predictions. The South, which was considered pro-intervention and expected to greet the U.S. troups with flowers and celebration, was fighting hard, and the Sunni Triangle, which was suspected to be strongly defended and determined for a last stand, was taken within the matter of days. When the toppling of Saddam's statue in Bagdad was mainly watched with lethargy by the people (compare the video footage with that of the Berlin Wall in 1989!) and only a U.S. tank managed to pull it down finally I knew: The invasion was utterly botched, and the Iraqi population was at best waiting how it would work out in the end. The plundering and looting in the following weeks might have finally tilted the balance against the U.S., and at this very moment I was sure that the cause of "bringing democracy to the Arab world" was lost.
It just took two hundred thousands dead Iraqis, the Abu Guraib scandal, the Guantanamo disaster and another three years of ongoing insurgence in Iraq to let the U.S. electorate figure out the same thing. And the Bush administration seems only to have changed course to avoid a complete election catastrophe in November 2006. So this movement seems not to be not based in a thinking process within the administation, but just a tactic maneuver to stay in power.
The article clearly states that the changed behaviour could be seen after infecting the mice with toxoplasmose and be reversed by treating the infection. So we have something that looks a lot more like a causation and less a pure correlation (with currently unknown relation).
Dual-headed miscreants are also common with amphibia (frogs, newts), not only with reptilia. But because amphibia are often prey to a lot of predators, the dual-heads don't survive very long. An interesting exception is the site of the Tchernobyl nuclear plant, where after the nuclear catastrophe in 1986 most of the predators have left, and now the nearby lake shows miscreated newts and frogs more often. It's not because of the background radiation (it's back to normal levels at least in the lake), but because of the lack of predators that those animals survive so often.
Slashdot Mirror
I doubt that they actually used it for "targeting" as stated in the article. If you plan something, you draw a map, or you take an existing map and mark the targets there. I doubt that there are any recent maps of South Iraq to buy in the bookstores. So the question was: "Where do we get a map to mark our targets?" And someone said: "Lets just print out the Google Earth for that." They would probably have drawn it from memory, if Google Earth didn't exist, or used an old map and updated the locations. But why bother?
That's like saying: The gas station was prone to burn down anyway because of all the fuel, it was just us smoking there that lightened it.
If not toppling Saddam Hussein in 1992 (when he had stocks full of WMDs and an army of half a million soldiers) and allowing him to put down the shiite insurgency made sense, because of the otherwise unavoidable civil war, why was it smart to topple him anyway in 2003 and ignore the risk of civil?
A lot of it has to do with the universality of the systems. No one expects a car which can not only drive you and your luggage from A to B, additionally mow your lawn, plant potatos, paint lines on the road, can store all types of cans and bottles without adapters (e.g. can and bottle cases), do the parking automatically, lift heavy loads up to three stories high and switches colors on the fly.
For each and every special use of a car, there are special cars, and most of them excel at exactly one task (additionally to bringing you from A to B, which some of them do actually pretty poorly). For each of the special uses you normally need an additional driver's license.
And modifying your car is verboten except for certified parts, and they should at best be fitted by a certified car station, and you easily lose your insurance if you don't follow the rules.
Using a computer doesn't have much penalty to you except for losing your data, which is immateriell. Computer breakdowns don't hurt your body, computer breakdowns don't set your property on fire, computer breakdowns don't risk the lifes of innocent bystanders. And where they could do, the computers are heavily protected, only authorized staff is allowed near them, the functions are reduced to the absolute minimum, and every change has to be thoroughly tested, certified, documented, the operators have to be educated, and playing around with them carries stiff penalties even if nothing happens.
Without the incentive from the user side to prevent user errors because of the missing personal danger and liability from the user side, there is also no incentive to actually design computer interfaces, to check functionality for their absolute necessity, and bloath in every aspect is the result. Computers are overly complex because they can. No one feels actually threatened by computer complexity. No user would install software on their own if they would risk losing huge sums of money in a case of error. No user would ignore error messages if their life would be depending on reading and understanding them.
If a user adds electric circutry and cables to his home power outlets, and the house burns down because of shortcuts, he is homeless and has no one to blame his error on. He actually can play around with power cables. Cables and sockets and tools are available at many stores, and opening up the wall and connect to the power cables is technically no problem. And if he does so incorrectly, and the big fire happens, all the electricians will grin and tell anecdotes about his inability and probably hand him a Darwin Award.
But computer users get away with using overly complex systems they don't understand, fiddling around with them without knowing what they are doing, and computer user magazines actually tell them that software can be evaluated by the number of functions and options it provides. If you want that to change, don't excuse the user for mistakes. Make them responsible for everything that happens with his computer, even if he is not the one who causes it (directly or indirectly).
Owning a cow makes you liable because of the harm your cow could do to the environment. Owning a computer gives you lots of excuses for you if your computer is part of a botnet, gets used to spread bombing instructions or phishing identities. As soon as your ass get spanked because of things happening through your computer, suddenly using a computer will become more easy, function lists get reduced to the necessary minimum, and support nightmares because of a clash between user will and computer complexity will be a thing of the past.
In recent tests from TV tech magazines, there was virtually no chain of equipment (disc player, sat receiver, digital settop box, hard disk recorder and TV set), that was able to play all HDTV content that was thrown at it. Not even equipment bought from the same brand was stable enough (Yes, a set of disc player, sat receiver, settop box and TV set from Sony was not able to play all Sony content).
Some mixed sets proved to be quite capable, but even using the next revision of the same device broke the chain again. Compatibility virtually does not exist. HDTV logo aside. Two component stuff works quite well (e.g. sat receiver + TV set), but as soon as you use more equipment, it breaks easily.
The executive summary was: HDTV is not ready yet.
To put things straight and correct a little the notion of "making a living from your creations":
In Germany there is a special health insurance institution for artists, catering to the special needs of artists (like unregular payment, special orthopedic problems, need for time off etc.pp.), which basicly covers all artists, the name is "Künstlersozialkasse" (Artist's social insurance). According to their records about ~7500 people in Germany make enough from their Work of Arts to gain a living from them (that means they earn more than 30,000 EUR ~ US$40,000 a year from their artistic work).
But the copyright industry as a whole employs more than 200,000 people. So whose living are the artists actually making?
Most of that stuff is in the public domain. And it is the very foundation you can build your Work of Art on. Work of Arts don't drop out of nothing, they are based on a huge cultural fundament you mostly got for free, because the society around you is nurturing you with associations, notations, languages, melodies, situations, relations...
Samuel Longhorne Clemens (also known as Mark Twain) once talked to the local priest: Your sermon today was magnificent! But I have a book at home which contains every word of it! The priest was very offended until Mark Twain showed him the book: the dictionary.
If you ever manage to create an appreciated Work of Art which doesn't need the free cultural environment of you and the admirers of the Work, you get my personal permission to enjoy the copyrights as long as you want.
That was also the real base on the suit against Galileo Galilei. He was not being accused of telling that the Earth was revolving around the Sun. The Pope in 1630 actually allowed research into a non geocentric model, provided the results would be presented as theories and not as facts (sounds familiar?). Galileo Galilei was accused of claiming that he was definitely right, and everyone else was wrong. Given Galileo Galilei's temperament and his strong worded pamphlets a lot of people felt offended.
(And differently than today's people somehow caught in diverse anti-terror-fishnets, he was not subject to torture or coercion. He was not thrown in jail at all. He was in Rome residing in the Roman villa of the Medici family of Florence, whose teacher he was at that time, and in the conviction he got ordered not to teach anymore and stay at his home near Florence. For the loss of his employment he got paid a yearly sum directly from the Pope, and when he got finally sick he was allowed to move into the town of Florence to be near his doctor. Quite different than anything we normally hear about victims of the Inquisition!)
This is called van 't Hoff's rule, not to be confused with van 't Hoff equation, which describes the chemical equilibrium or van 't Hoff factor, describing the solulibility of salts. Yes, Jacobus Henricus van 't Hoff was a very productive chemist.
If you look more closely on all the contents of http://127.0.0.1/ you will notice that all the stuff there can be somehow linked to you.
To add a infinite regess:
If you can't be sure you coded correctly in the first place, how can you be sure to at least write down the formal proof correctly?
(And scientific theories don't need to rely on inductive logic, as Karl R. Popper pointed out.)
You don't know your code is secure. You just know that it handles certain test cases apparently correct.
(Ok... Silly examples like "while(TRUE);" are partially correct, because they never terminate, and thus you can't tell they handle the test cases incorrectly.)
It's like scientific theories. You will never know if a scientific theory is entirely correct. You just can point to the test cases you have thrown at the theory which it was able to handle, and to the results you got from using the theory. It still doesn't prove that the theory is correct, only that you were unable to poke holes in it until now.
So all you can do is check for known traps, border cases, predictable error conditions, and in general following the KISS principle to keep the number of test cases down. And keep all documentations for tests and checks you were doing as long as you are supporting the code.
I only had to chance it once (on Win98 if I remember correctly) and there it was just an regedit call. No reboot required. At this time Win98 was switching the DST about a month wrong in MET, and I had to correct that. There is also a Microsoft Utility called tzedit, which displays and modifies the time zone rules. To have it affect the displayed time, you can go in the Control Panel, choose Date & Time and hit Ok. Then it will refresh the timezone information according to the changes you made with the tzedit.exe utility.
A more complete description of the necessary registry changes is at
Microsoft Knowledgebase 914387.
But as someone already wrote in an earlier post: Set your servers to use NTP, either from your local nameservers or from *.pool.ntp.org and have it automatically adjust for DST.
For someone living in Tyrolia (Austria), winters in Cambridge, East Anglia are rather warm and slightly rainy instead of cold :)
Cambridge, East Anglia normally doesn't have cold winters. There is something called "Gulfstream" (while Cambridge, Mass. get's cold winters due to water down from Labrador...).
Better not. AMD's Fab30 and Fab36 are also there, and where would we be without Athlons and Opterons? (For mapping addicted: Dresden-Wilschdorf, Germany)
That's exactly what I am talking about. To pass the mustering of the opinion makers you have to reinterpret your past, you have to lie about it and you should never, ever admit that in the past you might have been wrong, because no one will believe you if you say that you have learned from your mistakes. You have to be perfect from birth, even if the perfection is retroactively fitted on your past.
It seems to me that they live under the presumption that
The first West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer once said: "I don't care about my silly babble from yesterday." (The original german statement was: "Was interessiert mich mein dummes Geschwätz von gestern!")
Sometimes I guess this attitude would be healthy to some in the U.S..
Ok, so they're no good anymore, so what are they currently saying?
-Bring to justice a corrupt dictator
-Rebuild Iraq, hand over running to Iraquis and exit with dignity.
Ok, so apparently the first one is done, and the other looks a long way off.
If you replace "brought to justice" with "was executed very fast after only a single aspect of his dictatorship was slightly touched", then I agree.
Yet commandeering someone to kill 148 people was surely already forbidden in the old iraqi law. Why not take the old laws and sentence Saddam Hussein according to them? Why artificially create new laws and enact them retroactively? If you want to prove that someone is bad and does illegal things, then start with looking at the laws in place when the suspected crime was done. He was a dictator after all, I am pretty sure that he didn't care if his actions were backed by a fresh law overriding the old ones.
Getting the Shiites to cheer for Saddam Husseins execution was easy. They would also have cheered for him being executed for stealing candy. Getting the Sunnites to agree that he was a criminal is the hard part, and the way the process was done this chance was completely flundered. In the end Saddam Hussein was executed, but not brought to justice.
I don't think it's "justice" if you create new laws afterwards and then tell people that they have run afoul of them. I know that this is very en vogue after 9/11, and suddenly "helping or being trained as a terrorist" is a criminal act, and it's up to the government to define case by case, what that means.
What was until 2001 some kind of strange adventure vacation with some preaching, some training in a shooting range and lots of comraderie, completely has changed, and now you get indefinitely hold in detention without access to a lawyer, even though you might have been there decades ago and maybe even left soon after arrival because the camp looked too suspicious to you.
What was an act of charity to some social organisations in the land of your roots, where you still have family ties now is "financing international terrorism" and also gets you in jail, even though you only wanted to help the creation of an elementary school in the village of your ancestors. And again it may be that it also puts you in jail retroactively for money you spend years ago.
There's no basic services, and peace and self-sufficiency seem decades away. But there are some things that have been achieved. To the US taxpayer, or family member of those serving, it may not look like a victory. But for some people, the war is a massive success:
-Stopped Iraq from selling oil in Euros, rather than US$
-Demonstrate acceptance of American people for a pre-emptive, internationally condemmed war.
-Occupied countries and military bases on the western (Iraq) and Eastern (Afghanistan) borders of Iran
-Increased military spending
-Real life operations practice for US forces and test ground for new weapons technology
-Re-building and resource extraction contracts handed out to US firms.
As far as I see stopping Iraq selling oil for Euros (which Iraq only announced and never did) didn't help the U.S. dollar if you just look at the exchange ratios. From the heydays of 2002, when the Euro traded for about 0.90 US$ we have a steep decline to today's ~1.30 US$. The whole US economy was devalued 30% during the last five years. To offset that you would need a yearly gross economy growth of about 6%, but the US economy achieved a maximum of about 4%. Calculated in Euros the US economy shrunk 2% a year.
Basicly what you are saying is that spending half a trillion of US$ a year to a very small part of the U.S. economy and the U.S. people is somehow a success. If you happen to be involved with either the companies or the people, I could agree. But wouldn't it be much more effective and cheaper if the money doesn't need to be laundered by a war but be sent directly? Ju
The most amazing aspect is a science project of then 14 year old Nathan Zohner in 1997. He wrote a pamphlet pointing out the dangers of DHMO, and set up a petition to have it banned. Then he asked his classmates to sign the petition. 43 signed immediately, six were undecided and only one actually detected that Nathan was talking about water. Nathan then published his findings as his ninth grade science project with the title "How gullible are we?"
See also http://snopes.com/science/dhmo.asp.
Caffeine should be banned, as should be DHMO.
We should also ban a substance from food where a single ounce already is deadly. But you can buy a substance like this in food stores in packages of a quarter pound and more: Sodiumchloride (NaCl), better known as SALT.
And we need to ban fruits whose main taste is provided by a substance (Furaneol and Methoxyfuraneol), which is deadly if taken in micrograms. Lets ban strawberry.
Look at the allknowing CIA and the bogus intelligence they had on Iraq. Look at the East German Staatssicherheitsdienst which was employing about 10% of East Germany's population to spy on and keep the other 90% in control. Yet the former East Germany was history within 33 days (counting from Oct 7 1989 to Nov 9 1989), because the government couldn't imagine how the actual situation in the country is. Knowing beforehand is snake oil. Hindsight is always 20/20.
This is not entirely true. In Germany one of the at the time largest vendor of PC equipment (Vobis Highscreen) was selling OS/2 3.0 preinstalled, and the other big one (Escom) at least offered OS/2 as optional bundle, if I remember correctly.
This gave OS/2 about 8 months head start to Windows 95, and even in 1998 there were still large corporations (Deutsche Bank comes to mind) with OS/2 as primary desktop. O.k. Deutsche Bank had IBM as primary IT supplier anyway (with the big irons being mainly RS/6000, replacing old VAXen), but still OS/2 was still alive four years later.
"Never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence".
I so hoped that George W. Bush would win the 2004 elections to make sure he is still president when the failure of his presidency becomes more clear. So no one can blame the ongoing breakdown in Iraq and the reappearing Taliban in Afghanistan to a liberal and weak Democrat administration which messes anything up the Bush Administration has started.
I was starting to wonder if the strategies of the Bush administration might just be based on complete incompetence and ignorance after them closing in on Iraq in connection to 9/11. I had a teacher who was in Iraq on a development project in the 1970ies with still some connections there, and according to her Iraq had a mainly agnostic government based on arabic-nationalist and socialist ideas (e.g. arabic nationalsocialism). Tariq Aziz, the former second man in Iraq, is a maronite christian, not a muslim after all. So all alleged connections to a fundamentalist muslim group were doubtfull at best. Saddam Hussein was trying to play the muslim card after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the demise of the Soviet Union, because Socialism was no longer fashionable, but with the Gulf War in 1992 the Muslim Card also failed because all neighboring states (both baathist/fascist like Syria and fundamentally islamic as Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Sheikdoms) were telling him off.
In the end Saddam Hussein seemed to me just a dictator which tried to cling on power with all means, and I guess he was completely unideologic except for the ideology that he was not to be toppled.
A big hint to the complete misinterpretation of the situation in Iraq was to me that the development of the war was so different from the predictions. The South, which was considered pro-intervention and expected to greet the U.S. troups with flowers and celebration, was fighting hard, and the Sunni Triangle, which was suspected to be strongly defended and determined for a last stand, was taken within the matter of days. When the toppling of Saddam's statue in Bagdad was mainly watched with lethargy by the people (compare the video footage with that of the Berlin Wall in 1989!) and only a U.S. tank managed to pull it down finally I knew: The invasion was utterly botched, and the Iraqi population was at best waiting how it would work out in the end. The plundering and looting in the following weeks might have finally tilted the balance against the U.S., and at this very moment I was sure that the cause of "bringing democracy to the Arab world" was lost.
It just took two hundred thousands dead Iraqis, the Abu Guraib scandal, the Guantanamo disaster and another three years of ongoing insurgence in Iraq to let the U.S. electorate figure out the same thing. And the Bush administration seems only to have changed course to avoid a complete election catastrophe in November 2006. So this movement seems not to be not based in a thinking process within the administation, but just a tactic maneuver to stay in power.
Remember, kids! RTFA!
The article clearly states that the changed behaviour could be seen after infecting the mice with toxoplasmose and be reversed by treating the infection. So we have something that looks a lot more like a causation and less a pure correlation (with currently unknown relation).
Dual-headed miscreants are also common with amphibia (frogs, newts), not only with reptilia. But because amphibia are often prey to a lot of predators, the dual-heads don't survive very long. An interesting exception is the site of the Tchernobyl nuclear plant, where after the nuclear catastrophe in 1986 most of the predators have left, and now the nearby lake shows miscreated newts and frogs more often. It's not because of the background radiation (it's back to normal levels at least in the lake), but because of the lack of predators that those animals survive so often.