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Showing posts from June 13, 2004
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The Lastest American hostage (Paul Johnson) is dead. He was beheaded as promised. His parents must be proud that their government stuck so strongly to its "we don't negotiate with terrorists" policy.
This is it : Burt Rutan is making his bid for the X-Prize on monday. Spaceship One is going for 3 minutes at 62 miles to shatter the records and claim the prize money! History in the making......
I stumbled across two websites today whilst google searching for something totally unrelated. I was looking for a picture of an A380 airbus in Lufthansa colours, and one of the sites which showed up was Joe Vialls site . Specifically the page about the Concorde crash. I got reading and it linked in to another site called whatreallyhappened.com . Now both these sites have a definite conspiracy theory bent to them, but they are fascinating to read if only for the provoking questions they raise. Some of the "proof" they have is also fairly good - stuff like the seismic event at the base of the Trade Centre towers 8 seconds before the collapse started. Stuff about the non-existant 757 that hit the pentagon (was it actually an F-16 or a missile?). In turn, I followed a link to another site with more provocative reading called Cosmic Penguin. With the upcoming Farenheit 9/11 movie about to be released, I think these three websites should be scoured and read from top to bottom t
More goodies from the 9/11 commission. It seems that NORAD are claiming they were not ready for an attack of this sort. And appearently, Dick Cheney relayed orders from EL Busho authorizing the Air Force to shoot down hijacked jetliners that morning, but those orders appear to have been too late and were never relayed to fighter pilots. Air Force officers "expressed considerable confusion over the nature and effect of the order." Now wait a minute. I thought the whole purpose of chain-of-command and military training was that officers and conscripts followed orders. It couldn't be, could it, that these people are actually human, and given an order to shoot down civilian airlines, were questioning the sanity of the commander-in-chief? Surely not. The American military is a well-oiled, well trained fighting machine, right? Right?
El Busho insisted today that Saddam Hussein had a relationship with al-Qaeda but said his administration never asserted that the former Iraqi president had a role in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Bush, you f*cking liar. Let's go back to September 26th last year shall we? From ABC : President Bush appeared in the Rose Garden today with members of Congress who support him on Iraq and accused Iraqi President Saddam Hussein of essentially the same crime he charged the Taliban with: harboring al Qaeda terrorists. "The regime has long-standing and continuing ties to terrorist organizations. And there are al Qaeda terrorists inside Iraq," he said. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said "Iraq and al Qaeda have discussed safe haven opportunities in Iraq, reciprocal nonaggression discussions." From USA Today : Within weeks of the Sept. 11 terror attacks, the president and his most influential advisers set a goal of toppling Saddam — if possible by coup or exile
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Wired have a good article here today about the travesty of the G4-TechTV "merger" (read hostile takeover). Seems I'm not the only pissed off with ComCast. Again. Click the cartoon for the full-sized version:
The scientific brains in the UK and the US have developer quantum-entaglement teleportation protocols that can be succesfully reproduced over and over today. ie. they can transfer data from one atom to another without wires. The goal is to ultimately develop quantum computers that transfer qubits of data instantaneously. The question is, of course, which manufacturer is going to volunteer to put themselves out of business if this happens? I mean if you buy a quantum processor, which by default is the fastest any processor can be, you'd never need an upgrade again. Just think. Windoze could blue-screen and reboot almost instantly. With Quantum entanglement, it ought to be instant but I'm sure Gates's cronies will find a way to slow it down so it's just enough to annoy the living crap out of the users.
There's one in the eye for the RIAA and Hollywood. The Beeb are about the enforce "liberal licensing" and allow anyone to download, mix and re-use any of the programs in their archive - free. Yes, f-r-e-e. Are you listening RIAA?
The 9/11 commission reported today that there was no credible evidence of a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq. This much we knew from the start, but that means that in an ideal world, there are now sufficient grounds for impeachment of El Busho. He lied about Iraq. He lied about WMD. He lied about the reason for going to war. He made the United Nations look like fools claiming the US would go it alone, then came begging for help when he screwed everything up. If they impeached Clinton for having sex and lying about it, then El Busho should be given the death sentence by that scale of punishment.
Lunch today saw me witness a truly atrocious event. At Burger King I ordered my lunch and the woman behind the till screwed up the order. The till wouldn't tell her how much change to give, so the guy she was training suggested they use a calculator. Then she couldn't figure out how to calculate my discount - 10% of $5.00. Quite apart from the fact that you can do that in your head, the trainee showed her twice how to do it on the calculator, both times coming up with the same answer, and both times she told him it was wrong. So then she got out a pen and paper and tried to figure it out like that, and still couldn't get the right answer (50¢ obviously). To get this far had already taken 5 minutes. In the end, the trainee overruled his supervisor and just gave me the 50¢ change. So then I went to collect my lunch. And I waited, and waited, and waited, and waited. Eventually, I asked the guy at the handout counter where it was. Turns out it had been put out while I was sti
Dang! A major failure at Akamai- the world's biggest content provider, towed down the world's four biggest websites in one go today. MSN, google, microsoft and yahoo all stopped working for two hours. Akamai carry 15% of the Net's traffic. Companies pay it to seamlessly host their website content so files that appear to be at www.microsoft.com are, in reality, hosted at www.microsoft.akamai.net. Ironically, one of Akamai's main selling pitches for its technology is that it prevents there from being a single point of failure. Outsourcing content to a specialist like Akamai enables companies to concentrate on content rather than have to install their own infrastructure to deal with such things as denial-of-service attacks. But the concept appears to be rather like the Titanic - founded on the belief that Akamai is unsinkable. Hence, in this case, when one site failed, four others went with it.
Farenheit 9/11 is even "Moore" of a must-see film. From a review : The most indelible moment is President Bush's reaction to hearing on the morning of September 11, 2001, that the first plane has crashed into the World Trade Center. Bush was reading to a grade school class in Florida at that moment. Instead of jumping up and leaving, he instead sat in front of the class, with an unfortunate look of confusion, for nearly 11 minutes. Moore obtained the footage from a teacher at the school who videotaped the morning program. There Bush sits, with no access to his advisers, while New York is being viciously attacked. I guarantee you that no one who sees this film forgets this episode.
It seems that the 42% of people who still support El Busho might well be under the influence of the tin-foil hats and the big "COMPLY" transmitter atop the White House. On Fark today, people are discussing what they consider to be a "weird" link to a review of Farenheit9/11. So many of them are taking the view that Moore is a liar, and that there's no point in seeing the film. If they'd unplug from the Republican brainwashing machine for a minute they might see the light. One chap posted that he wouldn't see F9/11 "even if my life depended on it." The curious thing is, of course, that his life might well depend on it. With El Busho's warmongering past, and his leanings towards invading Iran, Syria and North Korea, if the election doesn't go Kerry's way in November, a third world war would very much make your life depend on it. Of course that assumes El Busho doesn't rig the election again.
In the unlikely event that any of you are avid readers of my site, you'll notice I've chosen a new template today. I thought it was time for an update. I've kept a copy of the old template for safekeeping though.
Brilliant! You know what I'd like to see? I'd like to introduce petrol taxes that would be proportional to the weight of the vehicle being filled. At filling stations, a scale implanted under each fill-up point would be hooked to the pump, and the price per gallon could be adjusted accordingly. Farmers, truckers and the like would of course be exempt. Soccer moms and SUVs, of course, would not. Motorbikes would be eligible for a discount because they pollute less and weigh less, so damage the environment and road less. MMmmmmmmmm. NirvanaCo Petrol.......