UPDATE: Matt Robinson says I'm right, and that I'm full of crap too. Read! Read it I say! And whatever you do, don't read it!

When Tit-for-tat plays against itself, it plays fair for the entire game and maximizes output. When it plays against anyone who tosses in some cheating, it punishes it by cheating back and reduces the other guys unfair winnings.

No-one has ever found a way of defeating it.

He told me that it really made him angry. Month after month, year after year, Microsoft was constantly getting caught violating the trust of its customers. He was fed up. He was disgusted. He was ready…to…consider…. a…. Mac.

“Whoa” I said, “you what??” He said it again. He wanted to go to the Apple Store and look at the iMac and everything else in the store. “It's time to really consider a change” he said, “If the Mac can do what I need it to do then I want you to help me buy what I need.”
“Not a problem.” I said. “I won't push you though, I won't try and talk you into this, if you do it you do it on your own. I don't want you coming back to me and blaming me later if you find out you made a mistake.” He said that's exactly what he wanted to hear.

My friend confessed to me that a lot of PC users are worried about “Big Brother” and really want to move away from Windows. “All they need is the right excuse,” he said. “I intend to do whatever I can to convince my PC buddies to come to the Apple Store and see that there is an alternative. We don't have to put up with this crap anymore”.

The lioness puzzled wildlife experts, game watchers and villagers in Samburu after it struck a friendship with an oryx calf, escorting and protecting it around the game reserve for 15 days.

Tourists and game workers had watched in disbelief as the lioness and the tottery brown baby oryx walk side by side and lay down to rest with all the intimacy of a mother and calf.

She even permitted the calf's mother to nurse the baby before resuming her guardianship. Experts believe the lioness had bonded with the calf after both had been abandoned by their own kind.

The calf was eventually attacked and killed by a male lion while the lioness was napping. She howled in mourning for hours afterward before vanishing into the bush for a time.

"For two to three minutes there will be a massive surge of positive consciousness. It will be a moment to bring healing, a moment to bring peace," [Israeli psychic Uri Geller] said.

Asked how he would co-ordinate the meditations of his followers around the world, Geller said:

"I would appreciate everyone concentrating in GMT [Greenwich Mean Time], but if you can't do that, take a moment when you can ... The message is be positive, be optimistic and believe in yourself."

Bitter after being snubbed for membership in the "Axis of Evil," Libya, China, and Syria today announced they had formed the "Axis of Just as Evil," which they said would be way eviler than that stupid Iran-Iraq-North Korea axis President Bush warned of his State of the Union address.

Axis of Evil members, however, immediately dismissed the new axis as having, for starters, a really dumb name. "Right. They are Just as Evil... in their dreams!" declared North Korean leader Kim Jong-il.

"Everybody knows we're the best evils... best at being evil... we're the best."

Diplomats from Syria denied they were jealous over being excluded, although they conceded they did ask if they could join the Axis of Evil. "They told us it was full," said Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

"An Axis can't have more than three countries," explained Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. "This is not my rule, it's tradition. In World War II you had Germany, Italy, and Japan in the evil Axis. So you can only have three. And a secret handshake. Ours is wickedly cool."

International reaction to Bush's Axis of Evil declaration was swift, as within minutes, France surrendered.

Elsewhere, peer-conscious nations rushed to gain triumvirate status in what became a game of geopolitical chairs. Cuba, Sudan, and Serbia said they had formed the Axis of Somewhat Evil, forcing Somalia to join with Uganda and Myanmar in the Axis of Occasionally Evil, while Bulgaria, Indonesia and Russia established the Axis of Not So Much Evil Really As Just Generally Disagreeable.

With the criteria suddenly expanded and all the desirable clubs filling up, Sierra Leone, El Salvador, and Rwanda applied to be called the Axis of Countries That Aren't the Worst But Certainly Won't Be Asked to Host the Olympics; Canada, Mexico, and Australia formed the Axis of Nations That Are Actually Quite Nice But Secretly Have Nasty Thoughts About America, while Spain, Scotland, and New Zealand established the Axis of Countries That Be Allowed to Ask Sheep to Wear Lipstick. "That's not a threat, really, just something we like to do," said Scottish Executive First Minister Jack McConnell.

While wondering if the other nations of the world were serious, a cautious President Bush granted approval for most axis, although he rejected the establishment of the Axis of Countries Whose Names End in "Guay," accusing one of its members of filing a false application. Officials from Paraguay, Uruguay, and Chadguay denied the charges.

Italy, meanwhile, insisted it didn't want to join any axis, but privately,world leaders said that's only because no one asked them.

Shares in Be rose 2 cents, or 20 percent, in Nasdaq trading.

UPDATE: Matt Robinson informs me that "buckle" actually comes from the French word. Okay, okay-- I admit I didn't do the etymological research to make sure the example I had to hand was a good one. But the fact is that I could name a dozen others off the top of my head: cederóm, for instance, the word for "CD-ROM", or the weirdness of seeing "kitch" in a French sentence, as it was in another article in the same magazine (to say nothing of "sandwich"). And when the best translation they can do for a column called "Counter Culture" is "Le Challenge du Chef"... :)

I want a relaxing driving game. I want to start in New York and end up on the Santa Monica pier, and I want to stop at motels, watch local TV, step outside and hear the crickets before I go to bed. Flight sims give you this sense of real-time ordinary life; why not driving games?

In this instance, however, the keys to the exploit are actually hidden within the source code for the Hotmail login page. The code, visible to anyone knowledgeable enough to select "View Source" from the menu of their Web browser, reveals a "hidden" field that -- when populated with the desired username, saved as an HTML file and executed in a Web browser -- produces the targeted user's "secret question."

"Cisco Kid" -- the nickname for the hacker who helped to develop the exploit, said Microsoft simply has no good explanation for leaving something so central to authentication in plain text.

The space at the grocery checkout reserved for candy bars will be a void, and the void could be filled by anything... like more tabloids! And more tabloids leads to more rumors about celebrities, which leads to massive trouble for Hollywood. The lawsuits and bad blood would destroy the entertainment industry. All because you can't get a KitKat.

Telstra, which had previously said gloomily that it wouldn't any time soon be supporting Mac OS X on Australia's biggest Internet service, has relented and recently told anxious Mac users that it was training staff in OS X and would be up to speed by April.

The directive has already been agreed by Britain and other EU member states and will receive a second reading in parliament later this month.

The parliament wants to reduce the decibel limit of noise in the workplace to 83, the point at which workers have to wear hearing protection.

A single trumpet is said to play up to 130 decibels and the ABO fears that the directive would effectively silence performances.

Libby MacNamara, director of the ABO, told BBC News Online: "It will stop us playing any loud music whatsoever, affecting almost of all of the pieces played by orchestras."

...Candid talk from Apple's senior director of hardware, Greg Joswiak-- who, as his name indicates, also holds the enviable position of being the world's first sentient being cloned from the spliced DNA of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.

Are there ways to encourage people to buy original albums instead of doing downloads? Sure. Ironically, one of the best was lost in the transition from LP to CD: album art. There still is album art, but it isn't possible to do it well in 25 square inches. The old 12" album, especially if it had foldouts or multiple pages, could carry a lot of excess material over and above the material on the record itself. Two examples from the golden age of album art: Thick as a Brick, and Yessongs. But there may be other ways, such as holograms on the CDs.

The MPEG-4 licensing terms proposed by MPEG-LA (the largest group of MPEG-4 patent holders) includes royalty payments from companies, like Apple, who ship MPEG-4 codecs, as well as royalties from content providers who use MPEG-4 to stream video. Apple agrees with paying a reasonable royalty for including MPEG-4 codecs in QuickTime, but does not believe that MPEG-4 can be successful in the marketplace if content owners must also pay royalties in order to deliver their content using MPEG-4.

“MPEG-4 is the best format for streaming media on the web, and QuickTime 6 is the first complete MPEG-4 solution,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. “MPEG-4 is poised for great success once the licensing terms are modified to allow content providers to stream their content royalty-free.”

As long as music can be reduced to audio, it can be redigitized and converted into an unprotected MP3 which can be distributed online. No amount of digital protection can prevent that. So far most pirated music is digitally converted mostly because that is still easy. But if it is made impossible technologically, an analog redigitization won't be enough worse in quality to affect this. And any computer with a sound card sold in the last ten years is capable of doing this.

The music industry must go through a psychology change. The problem now is that they see pirated copies as representing lost revenue. They count up each copy as one they were not paid for.

The customers don't view it that way. To the customers when they buy the material, they also think of themselves as buying the ability to make some copies of it. They want to be able to play in on their stereo, but they also want to be able to make compilations of the music in the order they like, and they want to be able to copy their favorite tracks or even whole albums onto portable players. This is not viewed by the customers as being piracy; it's considered a value-add for the product itself. It is part of what they think they are buying.

As long as the industry doesn't see it from that point of view, they will continue to try to fight the future. No industry can ultimately survive if it thinks of its customers as enemies; ultimately the industry has to adopt the point of view of its customers and cater to their desires.

You cannot sell someone what you want them to have. You have to sell them what they want to buy.

The industry has to start thinking of the glass as half full. The copies stolen are not lost revenue; what they are is copies of ones where were bought. If the pirated copies did not exist then the purchased ones would not have been sold. The pirated copies are actually an indirect source of revenue.

There is no technical or technological solution to this, and also no legal one. When 50 million people break a law, it is the law itself which is suspect.

PowerMate: The Ultimate Assignable Controller

The PowerMate has a beautiful polished aluminum finish and an amazing feel. The brilliant blue LEDs give it a floating futuristic appearance. And the glowing base dims and brightens to reflect the volume level of your computer. And we did not stop there. We included all of the small things that customers have come to expect from us including a pulsating base when your computer is asleep and adjustable brightness level of the glowing base.

Yet another Microsoft Outlook exploit is on the loose... and this time the arrogance of the recommended solution is breathtaking. The problem is the built-in support for UUENCODED text within the body of a message. Prudent programmers will use a starting pattern such as

"\n\nbegin ([[:octal:]]+) ([^\n]+)\n"


and subsequently verify that each line has the expected format. Even checking only the first few lines (e.g., verifying that the first character correctly encodes the length of the rest of the line) essentially eliminates any chance of a false hit.

Sadly, it will surprise few people that Microsoft cuts straight to the heart of the matter. If your line starts with "begin " (possibly with two spaces), Outlook/Outlook Express WILL interpret the rest of the message as a UUENCODED attachment. It doesn't need a preceding blank line, nor a following octal number. It doesn't need subsequent lines that actually look like UUENCODED data.

There are some reports on slashdot that later versions of O/OE have discarded the "view source" command, with the effect that the rest of the message is permanently lost to the user. The use of this bug as a DOS attack on mailing lists that use a 'digest' approach is left as an exercisefor the reader.

Naturally, it hasn't taken long for the malware writers to jump on the bandwagon. All you need to do to get around the "strip executable attachment" killjoys is to put the malware right in the body of the message! Just start a line with "begin 666 www.myparty.yahoo.com" and you're off and running!

Microsoft's official position, at http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;q265230 , is stunning in it's feeble-mindedness simplicity. We, and by "we" I mean every person on the planet who may ever send a message to an O/OE victim user, or have a message forwarded to such users, are advised (with editorial comments) to:

* not start messages with the word "begin"

(actually, it's *any* line starting with the word "begin". And that's effectively a ban on the word "begin" for anyone using a mail agent with transparent line wrapping, e.g., the web mail portals that some ISPs are pushing.)

* capitalize the word "begin," even when used within a sentence. E.g., "We will Begin the new project when Bob returns from his vacation."

* Use a different word such as "start" or "commence." E.g., all training materials for new Visual Basic programmers shall henceforce refer to "start/end" loops instead of "begin/end" loops.

Microsoft's justification for suggesting a significant change to the English language instead of fixing their bug is given as:

"In a SMTP e-mail message, a file attachment that is encoded in UUencode format is defined when the word "begin" is followed by two spaces and then some data,..."

Needless to say there is no citation given for this "fact." That's probably related to the fact that UUENCODE was defined by UUCP, not SMTP, and that every encoder/decoder I have seen requires a leading blank line and a octal file permissions code.

But the damage is done - since malware is exploiting this bug we now get to put into place filters that don't just strip executable attachments or properly formatted UUENCODED blocks, we also have to strip *improperly* formatted UUENCODED blocks!

Bear Giles

Short of that I think I'll pass because former footsoldiers of the East German secret police dressed in sequin jumpsuits and doing triple-salkos is the very antithesis of my idea of entertainment and is it just me or is there something disturbingly reminiscent of the Nuremburg Rallies in those torchlit opening ceremonies? For sure the sight of all those glowing hopefuls being paraded around in their humiliating 'national costumes' with a 'Strength-Through-Joy' grin on their faces has a jumper-over-the-head factor of about 50. Those about to die of embarrassment, salute you!

I suppose it would be extravagantly churlish of me not to mention the transformation of Olympic events from taxpayer boondoggle to corporate sponsor-fest which, at least, has put a stop to the bankrupting of cities in which the spandex-circus was unfortunate enough to land. In those days they were not so much athletes as locusts in lycra, devastating a whole landscape before buggering off and leaving behind grand white-elephant stadia like monuments of a long lost race.

But corporatisation has had the unfortunate side-effect of morphing the games from dull and condescending expressions of post-war aspiration to multi-culti clappy-happy jamborees in which we are all supposed to enthusiastically join in North Korean style.

The rule for today.
Touch my tail, I shred your hand.
New rule tomorrow.

Grace personified
I leap into the window;
I meant to do that

Wanna go outside.
Oh, crap! Help! I got outside!
Let me back inside!

As dear Osama has spelled it out, the women and the children, the armed and unarmed, adult or embryo -- all are agents of the "great Satan" and therefore legitimate targets.

We can summarize these "rules" succinctly. Al-Qaeda can kill whom it likes, when it likes, for whatever reasons it likes, by any means and in any number it likes, while operating in stealth and secrecy among its target populations.

Given that this is a fair accounting of the group's modus operandi,on what grounds will anyone argue that these people are entitled to the protections of the Geneva Conventions or any other convention? They have no entitlements. They forfeited, by their actions, such entitlements. If they are being treated by those protocols, it is by the moral largesse of the U.S. military.

Suppose we're talking about software that is really good and people would be willing to purchase. What then? Well, see, another problem appears- people have limited budgets. A lot of people cannot afford to live by almighty rules that essentially say "I would rather use nothing than a stolen program". If you live by those rules, I have a sneaky suspicions you're also one of the people that can afford all their software, but I can assure you that a lot, nay, most people aren't that lucky. They have a limited budget and they don't want to suffer needlessly just because they don't have enough income to pay for all their software. And sometimes it's also the case of the product registration and payement being too much damn trouble to be worth it. Your average computer user, one that uses their computer for more than that one Office copy that is, is between 15 and 25 and less than half of those have credit cards or the ability to send checks.

It's been a long time since anyone with breasts actually competed in "Women's" gymnastics. In what is essentially a strength sport, women lose out in strength-to-weight ratio to girls and men. A man is stronger per weight than a boy, but a girl is stronger per weight than a woman. As a result, when you see the pictures of the Olympic gymnastic teams, it looks like a crime is being committed. You've got a whole lot of 13 and 14 year old girls with narrow hips and flat chests running around with men aged between 19 and 25 who are, leave us face it, quite virile. If they were out on the town together they'd all be arrested.

Why did Klebold and Harris shoot up Columbine high school? It's because they decided to do so. It's as simple as that. Who is responsible? They are. Since they're both dead, it's an unsatisfying answer. We want someone to blame, someone we can punish. But sometimes you can't get what you want.

Is it possible to prevent that kind of thing from happening again? Yes, but the price is too high. Klebold and Harris and John Walker Lindh are statistical outliers, and when a society is as big and varied as ours is, one in a million is damned well a long way from the center of the bell curve. The only way to prevent that kind of thing is by completely regimenting society in ways I could never accept. Millions of people play violent video games and then go about their lives as normal people; violent games do not make people violent. Millions of people listen to heavy rock music; there are many people whose parents break up or come out, or who adopt strange religions. Nearly everyone's parents screw up one way or another. Ultimately each of us has to play the hand that life deals us, and do the best we can with it. If we screw up, we have to accept responsibility for ourselves. And when others screw up, we have to let them, or force them, to take responsibility for themselves.

Let's touch base on each of the items and why they are cool. The G4 Processor (which can be had up to the 667Mhz speed now and that model has a 133Mhz bus speed to compliment it farther) is pretty fast for a 550. Being a PC person for the last ten years I have to say I was thinking to myself... 550Mhz? What are they thinking, I have a 2 Gigahert PC.

When I fired it up and tried things out it wasn't slow at all. In fact the 1 Megabyte of L2 Cache, which runs at the speed of the processor provides a huge buffer of high speed, short term memory to the CPU. It makes a world of difference when you are doing things and the benchmarks where off the chart when I compared it to an INTEL 550Mhz Processor or an ATHLON 550Mhz Processor.

In fact I had to compare it to a 1Ghz PC Processor to get a good comparison. That impressed the heck out of me.

...

3/3 stars. Apple does make a better mousetrap.

None of the photos I've seen do the new iMac justice. It's hard to take a picture of a white computer with a clear frame around the screen and make it look good. It is especially difficult to do this against a white background, as Apple is prone to do. They had the same problem with the iPod, which people thought was much larger than it is because they had seen it only on a billboard. Now, they didn't think it was that big, but...

If you are trying to show off the iMac base--about the size of a big salad bowl turned upside down--it's hard to have the monitor in a normal position. This is probably why the best pictures of the new iMac, such as they are, have been taken from the side. That shows off the arm that connects the screen to the base rather nicely.

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If people in Cairo wear Levis, if people in Kuala Lumpur wear Nikes, if people in Kabul watch Schwarzenegger movies, if people in Bangalore watch Baywatch, if people in Kinshasa listen to rock music, it's because they like it.

We don't have to actively spread our culture to the world; it is seductive. Cultural competition is darwinian; and one culture can replace another quite easily. It happens because of a billion individual choices by a billion people, not as the acts of a few. We don't have to actively spread our culture, because it is spreading on its own. And so are our political ideals.

Ideas and attitudes are the most dangerous things we humans have ever created. Wars have been fought over them. And the most dangerous ideas in history are secularism, and self determination. The idea that religion should be an individual thing but never a governmental thing, and that individuals should be permitted to decide for themselves how they want to live without asking permission from their neighbors or the local priest, threaten the old order more than guns or bombs.

One way to tell how confident someone is in their ideals is to see whether they're willing to let you hear what their opposition has to say. If one side says "Read both sides" and the other side says "You should only listen to us because their ideas are too dangerous for you to experience", then you can be sure that the second guy knows his idea will lose. Censorship is the intellectual equivalent of protectionism. It uses the law to protect ideas which cannot survive on their own.

Inside the camera is a Foveon-developed imager head that incorporates 3 sensors and a color separating prism. The prism is designed so that light entering it is split into red, green and blue components and then focused on each of three 2Kx2K CMOS sensors. Using a prism greatly enhances the system's ability to capture color that is purer than that captured by single-chip single-shot cameras using mosaic filters to create a color image. Further, by placing sensors on each of the 3 prism exit faces, the color of each point in the subject is sampled by three pixels (one red, one green and one blue).

The alternative color mosaic filter method that is used in all other one shot digital cameras, samples the color using only one pixel and guesses at what the other two might be.

And yet they could not simply reproduce their fathers’ mental world. They were part modern British too, with many of the same debased tastes as their white contemporaries. They would listen to the same music, eat the same fast food, play the same games. (One sign of the acculturation of Asian youth is the adoption of body-piercing and tattooing, the latter despite the natural unsuitability of Asian skin for it.) They would be attracted by the same baubles, such as mobile phones and designer trainers; but they would feel guilty about their lack of cultural purity. From guilty desire and surreptitious identification it is but a short step to insensate hatred and rage; and perhaps it is not entirely coincidental that the three most rabidly anti-Yankee Latin American countries — Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela — are those in which the most baseball is played.

So all Asif and Shafiq ever knew of Western civilisation was Tipton and its discontents. And they were deliberately kept from any deeper knowledge of our civilisation by the kind of ideological self-hatred that has been so strong a current of British (and Western) intellectual life for the last three or more decades, that precludes any pedagogic affirmation of the Western tradition. This self-hatred explains in part the kind of hatred (and contempt) that the Asifs and Shafiqs of Britain, of whom I suspect there are uncomfortably many, must feel. Not only does the ideological self-hatred of Western intellectuals prevent the likes of Asif and Shafiq from learning anything of the Western tradition, other than Radio One and McDonald’s, but it actually supplies them with the tropes with which to justify their pre-existing anger and violence.

Needless to say, the self-hatred of Western intellectuals is not genuine or sincere: they do not really want to beat our supermarkets into souks, as swords into ploughshares (though I must say that, from the human point of view, I personally do prefer souks to supermarkets). Rather, the intellectual’s expression of self-hatred is directed at other Western intellectuals, to prove the self-hater’s broadness of mind, moral superiority and lack of prejudice, and thus earn the approval of his peers. It isn’t only rebellious youth who experience peer pressure; and anyone who pointed out, for example, that for a very long time now the Western medical tradition has been incomparably superior to all other medical traditions in the world combined and multiplied a thousandfold, would forfeit approval, even though what he said was true, and obviously so.

If you find yourself incapable of writing a column which isn't a rehash and reordering of some or all of the following themes, you, my friend, have nothing of substance to say:

1) You have an uncontrollable urge to nakedly display your scientific and political ignorance by invoking Kyoto as unassailable evidence of America's selfish, childish refusal to behave like a responsible member of the world community. (You don't know carbon dioxide from Carmen Electra, but you do know how those Americans are...)

"For technology lovers (and I fully admit to being one), this rapid advancement of new chips is exciting. From a gamer perspective, though, it's not quite the big deal nVidia would like you to believe. Yes, the more advanced graphics are nice, but the gaming hardware and gaming software industries are out of synch. While the GeForce 4 offers some tremendous features, there won't be any games on the market utilizing those for likely a year or more. As it stands, only a small handful of games take advantage of what the GeForce 3 has to offer."

The more Americans find out more about Wahhabism, the Saudi royal family, the Dickensian Pakistani street, the Iranian mullahs, what Mr. Arafat really says in Arabic, Afghani warlords, the public parades of future Hamas murderers in Lebanon, and the Pravda-like nature of al Jazeera — the more they are shocked to learn that the multiculturalists, not the traditionalists in our schools, were the great deceivers. How ironic that multiculturalism demanded romance — not reason, parochialism — not inquisitiveness, and prejudice — not impartiality.

The rejection of a multiracial society united by a common adherence to Western values has formed the canon of our educational system for the last two decades. We were to embrace a "mosaic" of unassimilated special-interest groups rather than the blend of the melting pot. But throughout this war we have seen the horrific wages of nations that are not really nations at all, but simply tribes of competing ethnicities, religions, and races whose traditions promote private agendas, rather than freedom and tolerance.

If we didn't learn from the horror in Bosnia and Kosovo, then at least we should have seen in Afghanistan, Somalia, the Congo, and elsewhere these last few years that wherever people give allegiance to skin color, religion, language, and tribe first, and the common culture second — corpses pile up.

The United States is made up of people whose ancestors hated Europe. They came here to get away from what Europe stood for; they came here because they wanted something different. And they were resolved not to let this nation become another Europe, because they'd seen the worst Europe had to offer.

...

Some of them revolted against European domination and created a nation built on a different philosophy. Others came later and joined it because they liked what it stood for. The most patriotic Americans have always been its first generation immigrants.

...

It is no wonder that the Europeans are bewildered by the US, and vaguely frustrated. They expect the US to be New Germany, or New France, or New England. But even New England isn't actually; Boston is not New London, and New Hampshire isn't Hampshire recreated on American soil. New York bears no resemblance to York. New Jersey is nothing like Jersey. Those are only names; the reality is that America is now alien.

Recently in New Delhi, a monkey boarded a bus and "pretended to read a newspaper for the entire hour-long ride." If this doesn't seem odd to you, chances are you'll be the first victim once they organize their super monkey army.

The iPod pins the meter on both the Geekness and Quality scales: 5 Geekheads for each. The Geek factor on this thing is so high. When I take it out of my pocket, it turns heads. It looks cool, and works cooler, whether transferring files or just zipping through the menus to find an album or song to listen to. I love music, and being able to have all the music on CDs I was never able to listen to because I didn't have the CD or the CD player with me is awesome. I'm rediscovering a lot of overlooked music, too, from Elvis Costello's Spike to The Strokes' This Is It. On the Quality side, the unit is solidly put together, is reliable and easy to use, and sounds tremendous.

• Printed on the side was a mini-story entitled "Caring For Those who Grow Our Coffee", describing how Starbucks sponsors a children's program in Kenya called "Pied Crow". I couldn't read all of it, because of the...
• Insulating sleeve made of rough cardboard, wrapped around about 1/3 of the cup.
• On the sleeve was printed, "This insulating sleeve is made from 60% post-consumer recycled materials, and represents 45% of the material that would have been used by a second paper cup."
• Both the sleeve and the cup itself had a message reading, "Careful-- The beverage you are about to enjoy is extremely hot!"

A couple of years ago, the only Mac people in my workplace were "Mac people." They were identified by their sad eyes and the lack of spring in their step.

These days -- and I'm talking about a Fortune 500 company -- the "Mac people" are managers and highflyers telling their colleagues about their digital movies and DVD burning. These people are the decision makers. They aren't zealots -- they just recognize good technology.

According to a write-through on InfoSatellite.com, Intel has said it will longer support FireWire. The report quotes Alastair McKeeman, Intel's European manager, as saying that the technology would be relegated to a small, specialized segment of the market within two to three years whereas USB 2.0 - the pluggable interface standard it is supporting - will quickly come to dominate.

While not essential for Apple, low power consumption is important for all of the other manufacturers who use G4s. At 1GHz, the 7455 typically dissipates about 20W of heat. At 600MHz, this drops to around 10W. To compare, a 1GHz AMD Athlon typically dissipates around 50W of heat.

Hiker reminds me:

The decay set in long before Last Crusade, my friend. The decay was in full swing by Temple of Doom. In my very humble opinion that movie is MUCH worse than Episode I. Why? Four reasons:

1: The special effects are lousy, lacking the seamlessness of Raiders.
2: The story makes no godamn sense whatsoever. It's one disconnected event leading to another until the budget ran out.
3: Irritating racist charicature for a child sidekick.
4: Irritating and whiny love interest that I seriously wanted to kill before the end of her opening song number.

Too true... too true.

The iMac has hardly any standard PC ports. It has USB and something called Firewire, but there's no way I can plug in my parallel printer. There are also no PCI slots, so how am I expected to use my IEEE 1394 card? Apple has screwed up here, big-time.

Marjan was ready.

He carried memories of an Afghanistan where life was primitive but good. He was once a cute and beautiful cub and all was right with the world.

He suffered poverty and maltreatment, and finally lost the sunlight and blue skies when a vengeful warrior stole his sight.

Through it all he clung to Omar, his elderly keeper, who also remembered the way things used to be. This giant was a kitten in Omar's arms, rubbing and nuzzling him with what was left of his once-beautiful face.

And Marjan kept waiting.

The Afghan war came and went, the Taliban were driven out, and visitors began to flock back to the zoo and the museum. Life returned to Kabul. Marjan's story circled the globe, and the peoples of the world started an outpouring of generosity to rebuild the shattered remnants of the Kabul Zoo.

Marjan was a king, and like a good king, he brought salvation in time of hardship, and prosperity in time of famine. Now Marjan was ready. For 25 years he waited till his work was done. And now that he had fulfilled his destiny, he laid down and slept.

Go into the light, Marjan. You opened our eyes, and now it is your turn to see.

-- John Burkitt

Another school shooting occurred last week and the headlines were everywhere the same, from Australia to Nigeria. This time the shooting occurred at a university, the Appalachian Law School. As usual, there were calls for more gun control.

Yet in this age of "gun-free school zones," one fact was missing from virtually all the news coverage: The attack was stopped by two students who had guns in their cars.

The fast responses of two male students, Mikael Gross, 34, and Tracy Bridges, 25, undoubtedly saved multiple lives.

Mikael was outside the law school and just returning from lunch when Peter Odighizuwa started his attack. Tracy was in a classroom waiting for class to start.

When the shots rang out, utter chaos erupted. Mikael said, "People were running everywhere. They were jumping behind cars, running out in front of traffic, trying to get away."

Mikael and Tracy did something quite different: Both immediately ran to their cars and got their guns. Mikael had to run about 100 yards to get to his car. Along with Ted Besen (who was unarmed), they approached Peter from different sides.

As Tracy explained it, "I aimed my gun at him, and Peter tossed his gun down. Ted approached Peter, and Peter hit Ted in the jaw. Ted pushed him back and we all jumped on."

What is so remarkable is that out of 280 separate news stories (from a computerized Nexis-Lexis search) in the week after the event, just four stories mentioned that the students who stopped the attack had guns.

Only two local newspapers (the Richmond Times-Dispatch and the Charlotte Observer) mentioned that the students actually pointed their guns at the attacker.

Much more typical was the scenario described by the Washington Post, where the heroes had simply "helped subdue" the killer. The New York Times noted only that the attacker was "tackled by fellow students."

Most in the media who discussed how the attack was stopped said: "students overpowered a gunman," "students ended the rampage by tackling him," "the gunman was tackled by four male students before being arrested," or "Students ended the rampage by confronting and then tackling the gunman, who dropped his weapon."

In all, 72 stories described how the attacker was stopped without mentioning that the student heroes had guns.

I don't know if you saw last night's Fox Sports LA sportscast, but they did a segment of the Lakers on the road and they showed Shaquille O'Neal working out in the gym and using his iPod, and he goes on to rave about it. Then they showed 2 Laker players, Sumaki Walker and Jelani McCoy take a limo and go to the Apple Store at the Mall of America where they purchased two iPods. If Apple's ad agency is smart, they'll sign Shaq up today to do a major spot for the iPod.

Eric Corwin

Incident description: Kid fell on rock and cracked his coconut.
Cause: Roughhousing
Injuries that resulted: Cracked coconut
Measures taken to insure that it would not happen again: Had a talk with the lad, moved rock

Incident description: Scout jumped off bridge
Cause: Jumping off
Injuries that resulted: Broken legs
Measures taken to insure that it would not happen again: Told scouts not to jump off bridge in the future

Incident description: Camp truck ran off road
Cause: Truck was stuck in gear
Injuries that resulted: none
Measures taken to insure that it would not happen again: Welded steel re-bar to transmission to replace stick.

Incident description: Camper fell on stairs
Cause: Stairs were muddy, running
Injuries that resulted: hit his noggin
Measures taken to insure that it would not happen again: Kicked him out of swim area.

Incident description: Staff member bitten by snake
Cause: snake
Injuries that resulted: snake bite
Measures taken to insure that it would not happen again: killed the snake

Incident description: Kid hit in the head by a rock
Cause: flying rock
Injuries that resulted: head injury
Measures taken to insure that it would not happen again: Asked scouts not to throw rocks

After leaving the courthouse his father, Frank Lindh, told reporters, "John loves America. We love America. John did not do anything against America. John did not take up arms against America. He never meant to harm any American, and he never did harm any American. John is innocent of these charges."

Here are some actual logged maintenance complaints and problems, known as
"squawks," submitted by QUANTAS pilots and the solution recorded by
maintenance engineers. By the way Quantas is the only major airline that has
never had an accident.

P = The problem logged by the pilot.
S = The solution and action taken by the engineers.

P: Left inside main tire almost needs replacement.
S: Almost replaced left inside main tire.

P: Test flight OK, except autoland very rough.
S: Autoland not installed on this aircraft.

P: No. 2 propeller seeping prop fluid.
S: No. 2 propeller seepage normal. Nos. 1, 3 and 4 propellers lack normal
seepage.

P: Something loose in cockpit.
S: Something tightened in cockpit.

P: Dead bugs on windshield.
S: Live bugs on backorder.

P: Autopilot in altitude-hold mode produces a 200-fpm descent.
S: Cannot reproduce problem on ground.

P: Evidence of leak on right main landing gear.
S: Evidence removed.

P: DME volume unbelievably loud.
S: DME volume set to more believable level.

P: Friction locks cause throttle levers to stick.
S: That's what they're there for!

P: IFF inoperative.
S: IFF inoperative in OFF mode.

P: Suspected crack in windscreen.
S: Suspect you're right.

P: Number 3 engine missing.
S: Engine found on right wing after brief search.

P: Aircraft handles funny.
S: Aircraft warned to straighten up, fly right, and be serious.

P: Target radar hums.
S: Reprogrammed target radar with words.

P: Mouse in cockpit.
S: Cat installed.

And it seems absurd that Apple didn't use a wireless keyboard and mouse.

Microsoft is an illegal monopoly and I don't trust them with my data.

He believed the family making 100K a year had a moral obligation to give the money to those who did not, and wanted to use the power of the state to enforce his morals. (Or, as the parlance has it, “shove them down our throats,” although you never hear that phrase used when the shover robot belongs to the Right-Thinking Side.)

In a demonstration for Reuters, a prototype -- roughly the size of a dishwasher -- was run for around 10 minutes using four 12-volt car batteries as an initial power source.

Emitting a steady motorized hum, the machine powered three 100-watt light bulbs for the duration.

A multimeter reading of the batteries' voltage before the device started up showed a total of 48.9 volts. When it was switched off, a second reading showed 51.2 volts, indicating that, somehow, they had been reimbursed.

The machine went on to run for around two hours while photographs were taken, with no diminution in the brightness of the light bulbs, which remained lit during a short power cut.

"The draw on the batteries was estimated at more than 4.5 kilowatts. With any existing technology the batteries would have been drained flat in one and a half minutes," the inventor said.

And in other medical news, there's still no cure for Cancer or HIV.