War in Iraq != War on Terrorism

June 22, 2004 D. H. McKee
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Politics

The American public has yet to fully discern and perceive the war in Iraq and the war in Afghanistan as two different national policy objectives since the 911 Commission found no "collaborative relationship" between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda terrorists, according to recent polling data posing the question to the American public.
Most Americans believe al-Qaeda may have worked alongside the regime of Saddam Hussein, according to a poll by Harris Interactive. Sixty-nine per cent of respondents believe the deposed Iraqi leader supported the terrorist network, while 22 per cent disagree.
A Pew Research Center poll, however, showed recently that Americans are beginning to decouple the war in Iraq from the war on terrorism -- a belief that could be aided by the commission's dismissal of cooperation between Iraq and the al Qaeda international terror organization.
Last week President George W. Bush said that his administration "never said that the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated between Saddam and the al-Qaeda terrorist network.
The Presidential Commission members charged with the investigation the 9/11 attacks appearing on Sunday morning talk shows have asked Vice President Dick Cheney to provide any evidence he has showing a strong link between Iraq and the al-Qaida terrorist network as he and the President have time-and-again asserted throughout the early stages of the Iraqi War effort.

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Private Rocket Plane Makes Historic Space Flight

June 22, 2004 D. H. McKee
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Sci-Tech

The privately funded rocket plane SpaceShipOne flew to outer space and into history books on Monday as the world's first commercial manned space flight.
The distinctive white rocket plane was released from a larger plane called the White Knight and ignited its rocket engine to enter space 62 miles above the earth.
Against the backdrop of a clear blue sky, it landed safely back at a runway in the Mojave Desert in California, about 100 miles north of Los Angeles.
"The colors were pretty staggering from up there," said pilot Michael Melvill, who also earned his wings, officially, as an astronaut. "It was almost a religious experience."
Melvill said he could see the black expanse of outer space, the curvature of the earth and a broad swathe of the Southern California coast during his three and half minutes just beyond earth's atmosphere.

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Bradbury: Change ‘Fahrenheit’ title

June 22, 2004 D. H. McKee
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Film

Ray Bradbury is demanding an apology from filmmaker Michael Moore for lifting the title from his classic science-fiction novel "Fahrenheit 451" without permission and wants the new documentary "Fahrenheit 9/11" to be renamed.
"He didn't ask my permission," Bradbury, 83, told The Associated Press on Friday. "That's not his novel, that's not his title, so he shouldn't have done it."
The 1953 novel, widely considered Bradbury's masterpiece, portrays an ugly futuristic society in which firemen burn homes and libraries in order to destroy the books inside and keep people from thinking independently.

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Harvard man loses 3,000 weblogs

June 18, 2004 D. H. McKee
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Hacking, Web

Eccentric software developer Dave Winer has removed access to 3,000 weblogs hosted by the company he founded Userland at weblogs.com, without giving any prior notice. Bloggers have been told that if they ask nicely, they may have their data back next month. Winer blamed a computer for his decision. This strange story grows stranger, however. Winer made the announcement after the fact, in a rare audio mumble: third parties had to provide their own transcriptions. The change didn't affect friends and paid subscribers, and Winer has admitted he's continuing in the hosting business - he's simply moving locations. "The DNS service provider just can't handle the number of different domains under weblogs.com," said Winer. "We had to put them all in one place, and they had to be on one of my servers. Lawrence and I moved the sites over, and when we put the sites on the machine the performance of the machine became incredibly bad." Network administrators tell us his excuse holds little water. Netcraft reports that Weblogs.com is running Windows 2000 - not many people's first choice for BIND - but even so, it should be able to cope with what is a trivial load. "Either his hardware can't cope with the traffic, or his Win2K has some kind of resource limitation issue, or he's got something mis-configured," a sysadmin told us.

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Annan raps U.S. on global court

June 18, 2004 D. H. McKee
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Politics

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan has rebuked the United States for trying to get another exemption from prosecution by the new International Criminal Court and urged the Security Council to oppose the measure.
He is expected to press his case at a luncheon with council ambassadors on Friday. And next week more than 40 nations are scheduled to debate the measure in a public meeting, at which time U.S. abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan is bound to be mentioned.
"The blanket exemption is wrong. It is of dubious judicial value and I don't think it should be encouraged by the council," Annan told reporters on Thursday.
Annan has opposed the measure in past years but used particularly harsh language this time, noting the human rights scandal in U.S.-run prisons in Iraq.

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Scientists ‘teleport’ atomic particles

June 18, 2004 D. H. McKee
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Sci-Tech

US researchers have sent atoms through space without movement, which could mean faster data transfer in the computers of the future
Teleportation -- "sending" atoms, or at least their properties, through space without any physical movement -- is possible, according to scientists at the National Institute for Standards and Technologies.
In a paper published in the journal Nature, NIST scientists say they were able to transfer the quantum state, or list of active properties, of one beryllium atom to another. The quantum state describes such physical characteristics as energy, motion and magnetic field.

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‘Third sex’ get their own restroom

June 18, 2004 D. H. McKee
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Sex

Transvestites and transsexuals at a private Thai college have been given their own restroom after being humiliated by classmates, a school administrator revealed.
Chiang Mai Technology College has designated a "pink lotus" bathroom for use by about 15 of its 1,500 students after the group encountered difficulties using male and female bathrooms. "We are not supporting them to become transvestites or gay, we merely wanted to solve their problems and make them happy when they are at college," Thodsaporn Promprakai, the assistant director for students affairs, told AFP.

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Regular sex helps students

June 17, 2004 D. H. McKee
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Sex

A German sociologist Werner Habermehl says regular sex can help university students pass exams and get better grades.
Habermehl from the University of Hamburg said he and his team had tested students before and after sex.
They found that regular sexual activity significantly increased mental capability, but they found celibate students found it harder to make the grade.

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Danish company gives staff free internet porn

June 17, 2004 D. H. McKee
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Sex

A Danish IT company has given all its employees free subscriptions to internet pornography sites.
LL Media in Nordjylland introduced the idea to stop staff accessing adult material at work.
The company's director, Levi Nielsen, believes access to porn is a natural fringe benefit, like a free phone or a company car.

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Democrats Warm To ‘Fahrenheit 9/11’

June 17, 2004 D. H. McKee
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Film

After more than a week of round-the-clock Reaganolotry, New York was so ready for the rollout of Michael Moore's Bush-bashing movie. I mean really, really ready. There was such demand to get into a small screening at the Beekman Theatre on Monday night that executive producer and host Harvey Weinstein moved the celebrity crowd to the thousand-seat Ziegfeld Theatre. This was a canny PR move. There was only a one-week frenzy window between Gippermania and the pending Clinton memoir, and Weinstein flew right through it.
Disney's refusal to distribute "Fahrenheit 9/11" was a perfect ploy to dramatize one of Moore's favorite themes, the suffocating power of big media. Attempted suppression is a promotional must these days. Bill O'Reilly's lawsuit put Al Franken on the bestseller list. The distributors who ran away from Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" made him a miracle worker at the box office. Now we have the Moore/Disney psychodrama. We have gone from the marketing Calvary of Christ to Michael Moore's Messiah complex.

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