Core Dump

We have run out of troops and money, the rest of the world has run out of patience with our stupidity, and the upper regions of the Bush administration may be crumbling under pressure of a prosecutor’s investigations and eroding public support.

Bush administration neocons such as Wolfowitz, Perle, Feith, Libby, along with their cheerleaders at Fox "News", the Weekly Standard, Wall Street Journal editorial page, National Review, and the New York Times’ Judith Miller will go down in history as the architects and enablers of the greatest strategic blunder in American history. The neocon dream of conquering the Middle East for Israel and destroying Islam as a force is now in history’s trash heap of failed adventures along with such miscalculations as Hitler’s march into Russia and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

Yeah. That’s the only explicitly political song we ever wrote. And the story behind that was that I was having a serious argument with Dick Cheney at that point, who I’d help get elected and been a pretty good congressman for the stuff that I was interested in, which was environmental stuff. We’d helped stop acid rain in the Wind River Mountains and passed the Wyoming Wilderness Act together and worked out a lot of the necessary compromises. He fished on my ranch and…we were co-conspirators.

But then he got into this obsession with the Russians and this conviction that we had a clash of cultures that had to be resolved by whatever means, and so he helped base the MX Missile in Wyoming. The original idea of the MX Missile was that it was a second-strike, retaliatory weapon that could not be taken out by a first strike because it would be running around on a vast railroad system kind of like a gigantic shell game, so the Russians wouldn’t know where the MX’s were. And the MX itself is an extremely destructive instrument. It has ten warheads, each one of which delivers 550 kilotons of explosive energy. And just for purposes of comparison, the bomb that completely leveled Hiroshima and took out half a million people in a second had only seventeen kilotons to give you some idea. So you can to the math. That’s just one missile. And the plan was to base 100 of them. And Dick was instrumental in seeing to it that they were not based in the original basing formula, which made them explicitly second strike, but that they were basically first strike weapons. They were completely naked and stationary and they were all put on launch on warning. And had all of those missiles gone, because some cloud of geese flew over a radar in Greenland, that would’ve been the end of all like on the planet. And I got so freaked out that somebody was so determined to win a political battle that he was literally willing to endanger all the life on planet Earth, that I felt like I had to say something…so I wrote that song. And like I say, I owe Dick a lot for that song.

Mark Taylor, the executive director of the Open Source Consortium, said on Friday said this is such a basic concept that he would not have been surprised to see it posted as a fictional patent on a technology site.

"I would have expected to see something like this suggested by one of our more immature community members as a joke on Slashdot, and probably would have chuckled at the absurdity of the notion. We now appear to be living in a world where even the most laughable paranoid fantasies about commercially controlling simple social concepts are being outdone in the real world by well-funded armies of lawyers on behalf of some of the most powerful companies on the planet," said Taylor.

Pakistan, with a crushing defense burden, only spends 1.7% of gross domestic product on education (compared to 4.3% in India and 5% in the United States). An estimated 15,000 religious schools provide free room and board to some 700,000 Pakistani boys (ages six to 16) where they are taught to read and write in Urdu and Arabic and recite the Holy Koran by heart. No other disciplines are taught, but students are indoctrinated with anti-American, anti-Israeli and anti-Indian propaganda, and encouraged to engage in jihad to defeat a "global conspiracy to destroy Islam". These schools supplied thousands of recruits for the Taliban militia in Afghanistan and are still being used to recruit militants to fight the US-led forces and Afghan troops in that country.

This book does what it sets out to do, that is to equip engineers and scientists with the skills to communicate clearly and effectively through a written medium; whether that be a website, an email or a report. I recommend this book to everyone, from organizers to doers. Organizers like to write about what should be happening, and doers, while they may tend to shy away from writing, are often asked to write about what they've done for the organizers. This book covers that full circle.

Under the enlightened despotism of its Crown Prince and CEO, 56-year-old Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, the Rhode-Island-sized Emirate of Dubai has become the new global icon of imagineered urbanism. Although often compared to Las Vegas, Orlando, Hong Kong or Singapore, the sheikhdom is more like their collective summation: a pastiche of the big, the bad, and the ugly. It is not just a hybrid but a chimera: the offspring of the lascivious coupling of the cyclopean fantasies of Barnum, Eiffel, Disney, Spielberg, Jerde, Wynn, and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.

All abbreviations are called acronyms. Don't let anyone tell you differently. Anyone who tries to argue this point is just being pedantic. Blow them off. Any term with at least two words must be assigned an acronym, and it must be defined in parenthesis, even if you'll never use the term again. Don't worry if you've already used an acronym for something else—the readers will know what you mean. Remind your readers what an acronym stands for at random intervals. If you're not sure how often you should insert these reminders, just define the acronym every time you use it.

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (WCAG 2.0) covers a wide range of issues and recommendations for making Web content more accessible. This document contains principles, guidelines, success criteria, benefits, and examples that define and explain the requirements for making Web-based information and applications accessible. "Accessible" means to a wide range of people with disabilities, including blindness and low vision, deafness and hearing loss, learning difficulties, cognitive limitations, limited movement, speech difficulties, and others. Following these guidelines will also make your Web content more accessible to the vast majority of users, including older users. It will also enable people to access Web content using many different devices - including a wide variety of assistive technology.

By separating content from presentation, providing content templates and pre-written skins, Forrest is unequalled at enabling content producers to get their message out fast. This separation of concerns makes Forrest excellent to publish project documentation (notably software projects), intranets, and home pages, and anything else you can think of.

After the eXist database engine is started, you begin by navigating your browser to its HTML interface. You’ll swear you’ve been forwarded to the eXist home page, but it’s actually a kind of “live documentation” eXist hosts through its Web server. Very nice. For example, one tutorial automatically downloads and installs external documents at the click of a button, then demonstrates XQuery queries on the installed documents. The tutorial even provides a text box in which you enter and test your own queries, a feature I found so handy that I’ve begun using it to experiment with XQuery.

Fubon said that the trader was unfamiliar with new computer systems and will be fired. The company will also examine its procedures of placing orders, it said.