April 21, 2003
Here we go
Burt Rutan is about to become to spaceflight what Henry Ford was to Automobiles. In this article from Aviation Week his newest design is described as "an affordable spaceship"
bq. The spaceship should have enough performance to meet the X-Prize, a privately funded competition requiring that three people be taken to 100 km. and that the ship repeat the flight within two weeks (www.xprize.org). But Rutan is focused beyond the X-Prize. "The big message is not to reach the X-Prize, but to show that space tourism is affordable."
bq. An undisclosed customer is funding the program, and this includes multiple flights to 100 km. A rough estimate by Aviation Week & Space Technology is that the program will cost $20-30 million. The customer may be revealed when the craft reaches space, Rutan said. Captive carry of the spaceship will occur "very soon," signifying it is ready for gliding flight. "I would like to do a manned spaceflight before the Wright Brothers' anniversary," he said.
Woohoo sign me up!
April 17, 2003
Glenn Reynolds rocks
I don't usually link to the Instaman but this entry, well, rocks- bq. WHAT WOULD BUGS BUNNY DO? Reader Shawn Lavasseur emails: bq. It's Ironic that with the early buzz about "Shock & Awe" and the MOAB bomb, that the real big military technological advancement shown in this war is not the bomb with a bigger bang, but a bomb with no bang at all, the "Concrete Bomb", a GPS guided bomb meant to smash into things, but not explode. bq. Or as I prefer to call it the ACME Guided Anvil. bq. Yes. I hope it produces the standard Warner-Brothers whistling sound as it falls. bq. UPDATE: Reader George Walton emails: bq. Reminds me of an Albert Einstein remark: He didn't know what weapons would be used to fight World War III, but he know what would be used for WW IV -- rocks. bq. A really smart man! bq. And really smart rocks. Um- Indeed.April 16, 2003
Our Tax Dollars at Work
Sean Carter over at CommonConservative writes bq. Dear Mr. President: bq. After our successful liberation of the Iraqi people, can you please turn our troops on the Georgia State House? Georgia’s legislators are guilty of “crimes against intelligence.” In addition, I believe they are currently passing laws of mass destruction. As the world’s last remaining superpower, we must do something! bq. Now, I will admit that a military attack on the Georgia State House may seem drastic but trust me, it’s long overdue. For centuries, legislators in this state have been passing laws that can be, at best, described as stupid. For instance, there is a law currently in force in Georgia that makes it illegal to carry an ice cream cone in your back pocket on Sunday. This is just plain dumb. After all, everyone knows that the best place to carry an ice cream cone is your front pocket. Besides, if you can’t carry an ice cream cone in your back pocket on Sunday, what’s the point of buying ice cream in the first place? What indeed. When this bunch of morons is in session, no one in the state of Georgia is safe... Read it all hereApril 15, 2003
Me as Villian
So which LOTR Villain are you? Hmm??
made by Michelle at EmptySpace.
OWWW! Turn it down!
I know it's a little late, but I thought this one was funny. Not sure if they're pro or anti, but who cares?
a hat tip to Ken Layne for the link
Bush's "Blunder"
Lee Harris writes here about the terrible chance George Bush took in Iraq- bq. The war was a way of shouting to the Arab street: "This is what Saddam Hussein was really like. This is the man you made a hero. This is the person you marched for-the person you hailed. Look at him closely and see the magnitude of your folly." bq. It is a searing truth, and one that will cause immense grief and pain as all disillusionment must do. And yet, it is precisely out of this grief and pain that the Arab mind might begin to find its way back to reality-a transformation that, in the long run, will benefit it even more than it will benefit us. bq. And that is why Bush risked his political prestige in the pursuit of a metaphor that might well have dangerously backfired on him. He took this risk because he knew that it was the only way that the Iraqi people could bear the heavy dose of reality that had to be administered to them as the price of their freedom. We may not even like the new society the Iraqis set up, but if they do not threaten us, should we care? One can hope, of course, they end up with the freedom we take for granted, but it will be mainly up to them. All we can do is lead by example and try to help. Via Tech Central StationApril 14, 2003
Reverse Astronomy
No, this isn't a new globular cluster. This is London, England, seen at night from the International Space Station. Tres cool.
TotalFinalityElf
Professor Bunyip has some interesting info on his site, to whit: bq. The Western oil company with the closest ties to the late Saddam is France's TotalFinaElf. That's not the curious fact, that's just business as usual in the Fifth Republic. This is the curious fact: As Diane wrote in February and again last week, "Total's biggest shareholder is Montreal's Paul Desmarais, whose youngest son is married to Prime Minister Jean Chrétien's daughter." bq. Let's see if I've got this straight: TotalFinaElf's largest shareholder is a subsidiary of Montreal's Power Corp, whose co-chief executive is Jean Chrétien's son-in-law, Andre Desmarais. Mr. Desmarais' brother, Paul Desmarais Jr., sits on the Total board. bq. For months, the anti-war crowd has insisted that "it's all about oil," that the only reason the Iraqi people were being "liberated" was so that the second biggest oil reserves in the world could be annexed in perpetuity by Dick Cheney and Halliburton and the rest of Bush's Texas oilpatch gang. Instead, it turns out that, if it is all about oil, then the principal North American beneficiary of the continued enslavement of the Iraqi people is the family of the Canadian Prime Minister -- that's to say, his daughter, France Chrétien, and his grandchildren. Read it here. It's all about the oiiiiiilllll.April 11, 2003
Peace Pins
I thought these were just cool as hell and immediately bought some for my family. Here's how you can-
bq. I've been doing a little side project, "Peace Through Superior Firepower" pins to counter the brain-dead protesters that are siding with Saddam. They're $2/ea and can be ordered at www.dvdtracker.com/pins. Portions of the proceeds from these pins will be used to purchase care packages through Operation Military Pride.
Visit the site- lots of neat stuff on A-10's and the like.
UPDATE: Well, it's been a week now, still no pins. He DID get my money though, so that's a start...
April 10, 2003
And The Beat Goes On
bq. Samantha Sheppard, 28, from Plymouth, a soldier with the 2nd Light Tank Regiment, smiles as she receives a flower from an Iraqi man during a patrol on the streets of east Basra, southern Iraq, April 2003. (AP Photo/Jon Mills/Pool)
Yep we're just there for the oil. We have liberated a great and noble people, and they now have a CHANCE to make something greater out of it. The next few weeks are crucial- we're not the police force, we're the liberators, and the Iraqis will have to grab the steering wheel real soon now. I hurt for the civilians that have been hurt in this process, but we tried as hard as we could to make it as light a war as we could. Overall we suceeded, but someone who had a bomb dropped on his house will probably always hate us, and I can't blame them. All we can do is prove, by our actions, that we truly are liberators and not opressors; we want them to succeed because it is in our best interests that they do.
God Bless our troops- and God Bless the USA
April 09, 2003
Saddam Falls
Iraqi citizens, with the aid of the U.S. military, pull down this huge statue of Saddam. I have never been so proud to be an American.
April 08, 2003
Go Dawgs
Yeah yeah, I stole this from Glenn Reynolds, but, hey, this IS a Georgia blog so...
BTW I attended Tech myself, for a while.
April 03, 2003
This really doesn't need a caption does it...
Courtesy Like I Said- You can't make this stuff up
Um, here we go. Via Sgt. Stryker bq. The Qok of Umm Qsar It was my last night in Umm Qsar. It was about 11pm, most of the building was dark. The only electricity was from a few generators that had been brought by other units. It also meant there were only one or two places where you could do things like charge your cell phone or edit video tape. bq. My phone was charging, and I went to pick it up before I went to bed. As I picked it up and unplugged it from the charger, I noticed a black blob next to it in the darkness. bq. I picked it up and realized it was a camera case. bq. A very nice camera. A Nikon 885 to be exact. I fumbled with the controls in the dark, and figured out how to get it into picture review mode. bq. Oh, I know these guys. It's the ABC news crew from 20/20 (see previous posting about them). Looks like they did the base tour today. They're posing in front of Saddam (same picture I posed in front of), eating an MRE that they somehow liberated from the military (they all say government property, not for resale on the bag), and various other pictures from around the port. bq. There's about 10 of those. Looks like they're having fun. bq. Ack! bq. There's a woodie! My eyes! I'm blind! God love the blogosphere. Read it allStir the Pot
OK, I can't help myself. The Buck Stops Here. bq. The New York Times writes that many pro-choice parents are discovering that their children are pro-life. While of course this is excellent news, if more than anecdotal, they overlook another likely contributing factor to the pro-life views of 18-29 year olds. Hmm. Life works in mysterious ways (to preserve itself) doesn't it. Finish it hereTradeoffs
I knew there was a reason I kept looking at Jane Galt even through the lean times- bq. You can imagine that if you were falsely told you had AIDS, you'd be pretty mad. It would be horrifying to suffer through a week or more of thinking you had a debilitating and ultimately fatal disease. However, you have to trade this off against the effects on people who got false negatives if the test were not biased to produce every possible positive. The effects of not getting timely medical treatment are much worse than the effects of thinking you have a disease that you don't, and so even if the latter number is much smaller, we will work much harder to protect them than the former. bq. On the other hand, what about a pregnancy test? The costs of false negatives are obviously non-zero, but the costs of false positives are also high, in terms of social and emotional disruption, whether you are a worried teenager or a thirty-something couple desperate for a baby. Moreover, someone with a false negative is probably going to find out that they were pregnant in time. Given that most people taking a pregnancy test are not, in fact, pregnant, if you bias the test too heavily towards false positives, you're going to produce a lot of psychic pain for the benefit of a very few people. bq. I don't know how we should weight false positives and false negatives in a pregnancy test. My point is that it's not a simple question of one being better than the other. bq. So in warfare. We will not correctly judge the need for every conflict -- only history can do that, and only that over long years. But we should recognize that we are making a tradeoff. Coming away from the all-positive (imperialist occupation of the entire world) and all-negative (isolationist or pacifist) extremes, there is going to be some tradeoff. If we try to strike early, before things become very dangerous, we will invade some countries where it is unnecessary or counterproductive. If we wait until the threat is more certain, we will have fewer conflicts, but they will be bigger and more destructive. Once again, as I read voices in the ether I am more convinced we are on the right path. A hard path indeed (the hardest part is yet to come) but one that we have rightly chosen- and history will judge us kindly. Read it allOklahoma City Redux
For those of you who remember, there was a huge controversy a while back about possible Iraqi involvement in the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building. The man accused of helping Timothy McVeigh, one Hussain al-Hussaini, sued the reporter who dug up the story (then KFOR reporter Jayna Davis), loudly proclaiming he was a victim of "racial profiling" and "racism" Now lookee here-
bq. The U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeals has dismissed a lawsuit filed against a former Oklahoma City television reporter after finding that "defendants did not recklessly disregard the truth" in reporting on an Iraqi soldier's alleged involvement in the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Building.
bq. In short, says former KFOR reporter Jayna Davis, the appeals court "affirmed U.S. District Judge Timothy Leonard's November 17, 1999, ruling, which upheld as 'undisputed' all 50 statements of fact and opinion which set forth on the court record implicating former Iraqi soldier Hussain al-Hussaini in the 1995 bombing. …"
Well well well. Wonder what our troops are going to find in all those Iraqi records sure to become public?
April 01, 2003
RWB BSOD
From BBSpot cometh:
bq. Qatar - A Microsoft spokesman announced today at Central Command in the desert of Qatar, that Microsoft recently helped the allied war effort by donating 100,000 fully licensed copies of Windows 95 to the current Iraqi regime.
bq. Unbeknownst to the Iraqis, this "gift" from Microsoft is part of the psychological warfare and infrastructure destruction campaign of the allied forces, called Operation Red, White and Blue Screen of Death.
bq. The copies of Windows 95 were standard copies of the software with only one devious change.
bq. Microsoft's VP of Marketing Marie Bixby explained, "All the instability, and bugs that came with the original version are still there, but as part of the psychological operations of the war, we modified the infamous Blue Screen of Death to the more patriotic red, white and blue. General Protection Fault will be marching all over the Iraqi regime, and he'll be waving Old Glory."
bq. "We have been very careful not to destroy any critical infrastructure in Iraq," said Brigadier General Victor Hanlon. "But that is about to change. Windows 95 will destroy the information technology infrastructure of Iraq almost immediately. Microsoft even modified their license agreement to allow Iraqis to copy the software onto multiple computers without further licensing requirements."
Be sure to read it all :-)
via Geek Press