Pangloss

That's what I was going to suggest, renaming iexplore.exe. It should be fine except that any program that uses it will be kaput. It's worth a shot.

This is rapidly turning into a fascinating example of the need for caution in reporting. As you may have heard, Newsweek reported last week that an anonymous senior official told them that guards at Guantanamo had tried to intimidate prisoners by flushing the Koran down the toilet. The administration and the Pentagon reacted angrily to the assertions, which came with no proof of any kind. But the damage was done, and dozens are dead in demonstrations in the Middle East as a direct result of this story being reported. Newsweek today said it might have erred in running the story. That's huge. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/15/international/asia/15cnd-afghan.html?ex=1273809600&en=eba1cc00582319f4&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss Interesting bits:

That's a good example, but one of the things that I think has happened in the past few years is that Americans are paying a lot more attention to this stuff. The rising popularity of Fox News, Air America, The Daily Show, and of course the big political stories such as the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, have really raised awareness of political issues in general in this country. I'm hopeful that this will make it a lot harder to do this sort of thing. Of course the flip side of that coin is that the spin doctoring has gotten a lot worse, and with any major issue you see the talking heads come out of the woodwork to support this or oppose that, and obscure the truth. But I'll take that over the complete absence of information, I suppose.

You might want to check out Solaris 10. It's more or less designed for that sort of thing, and it has the benefit of not being Microsoft OR Linux. And it's free. http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/

Illuminati Settlers of Catan Game of Thrones Cosmic Encounter (sigh) Does anybody even remember that "games" doesn't always mean "computer games"?

I think there was a blurb about it on Slashdot yesterday, talking about Jolene Blalock's complaints.

I did. Both eps were okay, but the second one was the more interesting of the two. The fact that cast members are making public statements denouncing the story of the second episode is (IMO) indicative of the problem Star Trek was having in general, and a good reminder of why it's been shut down. It just wasn't working.

Wow. Did it at least buy you dinner first?? That's pretty sweet. The government hasn't done me since April 15th. Bonus!

Lol, is that you Syntax? Yes, if you're saying that there's no evidence of a government drug war conspiracy because you see no evidence that any bank has been convicted of laundering, that would be a straw man fallacy, because the bank conviction issue is peripheral to the main point. The polite thing to do would be to say something along the lines of "well I'd like to see evidence of those alleged banking convictions, but let me get back to your main point..." and proceed to refute him on substance from there. Personally I would just call it "nit picking", but either way I'm left at a loss for what your (LongStranger's) point is at the moment. I don't happen to agree with Phi's conspriatorial leanings, but I don't see any eggregious wrongs in his statements that need addressing (much less sniping about). He's just expressing his opinion. (shrug)

Happy birthday!

It doesn't seem to cast a shadow. High-altitude object, perhaps? Weather balloon?

It looks like a plume of smoke over a house fire. It's oddly symmetrical, but that could just be due to the local conditions. Actually, I think it must be something on the camera itself. A spot where it connects to an outer window on the satellite or airplane that took the picture, perhaps. The lighting on the object is wrong -- it's front-lit, and the rest of the terrain is top-lit.

Oh cool, that's a nice forum feature. Thanks for passing that on, I had no idea.

Former conservative (now a kind of centrist Democrat) Arianna Huffington has started a new blog/news site called the Huffington Post, which might be interesting to follow because of guest blog entries and articles by celebs. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/

Yes. I'm a little confused, wasn't this guy a professor of mathematics? Are you guys basically saying he's a crank, but he's a crank at a fairly advanced mathematical level? I'm afraid I really know very little about higher math.

A bit earlier, perhaps. Most historians date the invention of the modern nation-state from the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. A good reference on this is Daniel Philpott's "Revolutions in Sovereignty" (Princeton Press, 2001), an interesting book which takes the position that revolutions are the vehicle for the formation of a nation-state.

http://www.manilatimes.net/national/2005/may/05/yehey/top_stories/20050505top4.html Looks like an error was found in Wiles' solution.

What about all the people who worked for a company that didn't have a pension plan? And does anybody in their right mind think that bailing out pension plans for companies who are floundering is going to act as a *deterrent* of some kind? United stands to save over $600 million with this move, and it's only $1.1 billion in the red -- that's half the company's debt. Investors and management are *overjoyed* about this news. Why the heck won't they just do the same thing NEXT time? I understand where you're coming from, but can we (as a society) at least dig a LITTLE beneath the surface emotions here before we leap onto a bandwagon that's going to make the savings and loan crisis look like a quick trip to Publix?

This United Airlines pension plan bailout really bugs me. I don't have a problem with temporary assistance, perhaps, and in theory that's what's going to happen here -- they'll be expected to rebuild their pension plan once they work out their problems. But the whole idea seems really dangerous to me. For one thing, that scribbling noise we're all hearing is the sound of every lawyer at every Fortune 500 company making notes on how to dump its pension plan on the American taxpayer as soon as humanly possible. Which really begs the question of what the point of this is at all. When did pension plans become a god-given right? That's the part that really gets me -- this idea that pensions are some kind of guarantee, and therefore they should be backed by the government. As if that actually makes some kind of sense. What are these people thinking? Why would this sound like a good idea to anybody? Pension plans are a company benefit. That's it, nothing more. If the company isn't doing well, guess what? You don't get your pension anymore! Hello, where's the mystery here? Now I realize that some pension plans are based on external investment and some companies have tapped into those funds in unethical manner. Absolutely, victims of that kind of abuse need to be helped. That's what the pension bailout agency was set up for. But note: It was NOT set up to save companies that are going through financial difficulties! This strikes me as a really bad, bad precedent.

http://www.space.com/spacenews/businessmonday_050509.html Basically he needs $400 million, which is less than the cost of one shuttle launch. It'll be a vehicle that can lift four people to earth orbit, go to the ISS or meet up with a moon-bound CEV once that NASA plan gets underway, or do something else. Each launch will cost only $20 million. And he can have it ready for first launch by 2008.

They're cute, they're cuddly and they're easy to please!

Spoken like a true capitalist!

Nope. But let's be fair -- either Americans die from an overdose because of "personal choice" or they die of an overdose because of the war -- not both. If it's the latter, then they were forced to use those drugs and had no choice whatsoever, in which case drugs are wrong and need to be stopped. (That seems a little ridiculous to me, but at least it would be consistent.) OTOH, if it's a personal choice, then the source is irrelevent to the cause of death.

Unfortunately I think your analysis is just a bit too conjectural. There's just no way to know if that's the case at all -- whether large corporations will produce an overall environment of unfair advantages, or whether government regulation is the only way to stop it. So I applaud your interest and concern, and I certainly can't say that you're wrong, but I'm just not sure we can draw that kind of conclusion based on the facts currently in evidence. And I'm not just being equivocal (not to put words in your mouth, but some observers might understandably think so). A big chunk of my reasoning here is that we've got a long history in this country of drawing vast economic conclusions based on scanty evidence, making sweeping changes in how we do things, and then having to pay a price for our mistakes for decades afterwards. Let me be clear: I think the concern you're expressing is incredibly important. I'd be a happy man if everyone in America woke up tomorrow and decided to make this our top priority. And I absolutely agree about the negative influence of money on politics -- IMO there's no question about that. But anti-mergers legislation would clearly have a significant impact on the economy. If a corporation has a tool available to it that will allow it to become more profitable (or to become profitable at all), and that tool is suddenly taken away artificially (through regulation), but it's still available to corporations in other countries, the disparity could cause a loss in our position in the global economy. In other words, a decline that's worse than the one you fear from the mergers themselves. The days of experimenting with our economy as if it were an isolated sandbox are long over, I'm afraid.