I don’t blame them.
This kind of thing is amusing when you read about it happening half way round the world, but I don’t think I’d like crowds of naked hikers strolling around my neighbourhood.
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I installed the Windows 7 beta on my home computer last night.
It’s a fairly complex machine with four internal drives, a permanently connected external backup drive, Nvidia graphics card, headphones, two printers, ethernet and wireless network connections, webcam, etc.
I was upgrading from the 64 bit version of Vista Home Premium. The upgrade went without a hitch, and all my devices (the ones I have checked so far) seem to have been recognised and appropriate drivers installed.
I had tried an earlier version of the Internet Explorer 8 beta and then removed it – it was confusing and buggy. But the version bundled with Windows 7 seems clean and stable. It can suggest websites you might enjoy based on your browsing history. I’ll be interested to see what it comes up with.
Windows 7 seems to load more quickly than Vista when it was first installed. I didn’t have any of the driver or BSOD problems I had early on with Vista 64. It is visually attractive, and seems stable, though I haven’t done anything especially demanding with it yet. I will load up World of Warcraft and Crysis over the weekend, and see what it can do.
I’ll keep you informed!
He’ll be pulled into line, of course, but he’s right.
No alternative to military tribunals is in place, so their shutdown could see cases like this being transferred to civil courts which are not equipped to deal with them, or delayed indefinitely.
Politically motivated delays won’t serve the cause of justice for the suspects, for families of the Cole or other terror victims, or for the American public.
About 20% of all cancers are caused by virus infections. For example, most cervical cancers are caused by the sexually transmitted HPV (Human Papilloma Virus). Gardasil, commonly but inaccurately called a cervical cancer vaccine, prevents infection with common forms of HPV.
Scientists in South Australia are hoping to develop ‘A viable platform technology that will form the basis of a vaccine that would not only prevent, but could cure a range of chronic viruses even after they’ve become established in the body.’
This would help to prevent not only HPV and cervical cancer, but other cancers such as liver cancer, which can be caused by hepatitis infection.
Let’s hope it works.
Andrew Bolt points out that while Climate Change Minister Penny Wong was claiming that the recent heatwave in southern Australia was proof of global warming, most of Australia actually had below average temperatures for this time of year.
I know a couple of months of cooler than average temperatures don’t prove the world is getting cooler. Nor do a couple of days of hotter than average temperatures prove the world is getting warmer.
See earlier entries for more on perky Penny’s panicky plans.
No surprise, given how strong the FBI audio tape evidence semed to be.
Illinois senators ‘found Mr Blagojevich guilty of engaging in a lengthy pattern of pay-to-play politics in which he traded campaign donations for political favors and tried to swap his ability to pick Mr Obama’s replacement for a cabinet post, ambassadorship or high-paying job for himself or his spouse.’ Amongst other things, prosecutors say ‘tapes show Mr Blagojevich pressuring a racetrack owner for a hefty campaign donation in exchange for help passing favorable legislation.’
Two notable things about this. First, Blagojevich genuinely seems baffled by what has happened, and unable to comprehend that he has done anything wrong. He claimed that senators from both sides had been involved in all of the projects and processes now being described as corrupt. They didn’t seem to like that.
And second, five of the past nine Illinois governors have been indicted or arrested for fraud or bribery. Mr Blagojevich’s predecessor is serving a six-and-a-half year sentence for fraud and racketeering.
Interesting place.
Might be better than the astonishing mess that is being rammed through the complexities of US legislative processes as I write.
Of course homeopathy is complete bunk. There is not a shred of reliable, tested evidence that it works. So how is it that in at least two instances, the Spanish Flu Epidemic of the early 1990s, and the London cholera epidemic of 1854, homeopathic hospitals had markedly better recovery rates than standard hospitals?
The answer is that many of the traditional treatments for those diseases, bleeding, purging, etc, were actively harmful. The homeopathic remedies did nothing. Nothing was better.
Ditto for economic stimulus proposals. The traditional treatment amongst liberals for a slowing economy is to take money from some people and give it to other people, and encourage them to spend it. This is actively harmful, because the people from whom the money is taken are in large part those who are employing others, making useful products, or providing useful services. Penalising these people and organisations is massively counter-productive, to the point of outright stupidity.
Like it or not, every working economy depends on profitable businesses. The way to stimulate economic activity is to encourage those who are productive through tax cuts, by making it easier to employ people, and by reducing the costs of doing business, including compliance costs. If governments can’t do something useful, they should at least have the decency to do nothing. Nothing would be better.
Roger Kimball reports some interesting stimulus (as opposed to porkulus) proposals from Rush Limbaugh. The difference is, his suggestions might actually work.
Israel closed its crossings into Gaza on Tuesday after a bomb attack on the Israel-Gaza border killed an Israeli soldier. The crossings were later re-opened, allowing 174 trucks of food and other aid into Gaza on Wednesday, and 149 on Thursday.
But the crossing from Egypt at Rafah remains closed, with some two dozen aid trucks waiting to go through. Local Egytian officials say they do not know why.
It is obvious to everyone that controlled border crossings need to be open to allow aid into Gaza. Hamas launches attacks on border crossings, and steals aid and sells it to the highest bidder, yet Israel keeps its crossings open and allows hundreds of aid trucks through. But directions from high in the Egyptian government command that the Rafah crossing should be closed. Why?
Egypt doesn’t want Hamas in control of Gaza any more than Israel does. As long as Hamas is in charge, there will be no peace with Israel, and no lasting reconstruction or building of infrastructure. The best outcome for the people of Gaza, and for neighbouring nations like Israel and Egypt, is a change of regime. This cannot be imposed – it has to come from the Palestinian people.
There is no doubt many wish for change. But with stories like this, of Hamas torturing and murdering anyone who opposes them, it will take a huge amount of courage from a few, or a massive popular rebellion from the people of Gaza for that change to come. Perhaps Egypt is hoping that frustration and desperation as people wait for aid, along with the manifest mismanagement and aggression of Hamas, will be a sufficient driver to motivate such a rebellion.
It is hard not to share Jennifer Marohasy’s frustration at at the mainstream media’s failure to report this:
‘a wide-ranging survey of glacier conditions across south eastern Greenland, indicates that glacier melt has slowed significantly and that it would be wrong to attribute the higher rates of melt prior to 2005 to global warming or to extrapolate the higher melt rates of a few years ago into the future.’
But unlike Jennifer, while disappointed, I’m not surprised.
This is an important story because the whole ‘Oh my God, the ice is melting, the seas are rising, please give us lots of money’ campaign is based on the alleged melting of Greenland’s glaciers and ice sheet. Ice in the Arctic is floating, so even if that melts in an unusual way it will have no effect on sea level. As I have noted before, a rise from -45 degrees to -40 degrees in Antarctica is not going to melt a lot of ice, and anyway, except for the Antarctic Peninsula, Antarctica is stable or even cooling. So the Greenland ice sheet melting story was vital to to the anthropogenic global warming scare campaign.
For the mainstream media to print such a story would be to acknowledge they had been wrong, and that there really was nothing to worry about. And they won’t do that. Alarming climate headlines will persist for a few more years.
Headlines like the one on this rankly dishonest story: Scientists Say Glaciers Melting Fast. This is based on studies by the grandly titled World Glacier Monitoring Service. They monitor 80 glaciers around the world. Cool. But there are about 160, 000 glaciers in the world, some two thirds of them in Antarctica. So this claim is based on a study over the last thirty years (nothing in geological time) of one half of one tenth of one percent of the world’s glaciers. And even then, the headline belies comments from one of the scientists involved that coastal glaciers in Norway thickened during the study, and that the overall rate of loss in studied glaciers had slowed from the previous year.
Eventually, when it is simply not possible to ignore the fact that the world is not getting any warmer, and that there never was any reason to believe the minor and perfectly normal variation in temperature over the last 100 years had any relation to human produced CO2, the mainstream media will find some new potential disaster, and begin demanding that politicians take immediate action to save us from it.
For the common sense of ordinary people.
Penny Wong, The Australian Federal Minister for Climate Change, says three hot days at her place prove global warming is real. And what’s more, no one is going to convince her otherwise, and she’s going ahead with emission controls, even if it wrecks the economy, because that’s the responsible thing to do.
Fortunately, the people Penny is supposed to represent have a considerably better grasp of the situation than she does (something she would no doubt regard as a worrying sign of a lack of appropriate education – more funding, please). In a poll run by The Australian (not a paper noted for its conservative views), 67% answered ‘NO’ to the question ‘Are heatwaves in Victoria and South Australia evidence of Global Warming?’
Obama tries to enter the Oval Office through a window.
To be fair, those look like they could be French doors, and he’s only just moved in. It sometimes takes me a few weeks to remember where the light switches are when I move house.
It is not the trivial mistake by a man in a new house that makes this worth mentioning, but the difference in the way the media has reported this – that is, not at all – and the delerious gloating that greeted President Bush’s trying to open a locked door when on a visit to China, in a building he’d never been to before.
‘The CIA’s station chief at its sensitive post in Algeria is under investigation by the U.S. Justice Department for allegedly raping at least two Muslim women who claim he laced their drinks with a knock-out drug.’
It appears there may be video tape of the alleged offences.
If this is true there will be massive trouble in the Islamic world. And if it is not true there will still be trouble, because there will be accusations of cover-ups and of the US protecting its own.
The fact that the accused Andrew Warren is himself a Muslim may moderate the rage a little. Or perhaps not – Al Jazeera’s version of the story is a straight lift from the ABC, except that it doesn’t mention Warren’s faith.
But of course. I wondered how long this would take. Federal Climate Change Minister Penny Wong says the current heatwave is a sign of global warming.
It doesn’t matter that we have had a cooler than usual Summer, that world temperatures have been trending down for the last ten years, that much of the Northern hemisphere is covered with unseasonal snow and ice.
There have been three hot days where Penny lives, so the argument’s over, baby!
In the lead up to the release of Windows Vista in January 2007, some 19 million computers were sold in the US with labels saying they were ‘Vista Capable.’ A distinction was made between ‘Vista Capable’ and ‘Vista Premium Ready.’ Computers which were ‘Vista Premium Ready’ were required to have more memory and better graphics peformance to enable them to run the aero interface. ‘Vista Capable’ meant the computer would run Vista Home Basic.
But now a class-action lawsuit has been filed demanding Microsoft pay the cost of upgrading plaintiffs’ PCs, on the basis that consumers were duped into paying higher prices for ‘Vista Capable’ PCs, when many of those computers are only powerful enough to run Windows Vista Home Basic.
But, duh, that’s what the label meant. That’s why there was another label for computers that were ‘Vista Premium Ready.’ If you wanted a computer that would run Home Premium, why didn’t you cough up for one in the first place?
‘Vista Home Basic is key to the lawsuit, which alleges that Microsoft’s Vista Capable program inflated the prices of PCs that could run only that edition and enticed users into buying machines that could not be later upgraded to any other version of Vista. Home Basic, the plaintiffs have contended, is not the “real” Vista, in large part because it lacks the Aero user interface.’
This is outright harassment. Even if Microsoft wins, it will still cost them millions to defend this action, not only in direct costs, but in diverting resources to providing documents, etc required by the court. And if the plaintiffs win, you have to wonder why any large business would continue to operate in the US, when this kind of vexatious and opportunistic litigation is a constant threat.
via Instapundit, this call for a taxpayer march in Washington.
But as a reader notes, taxpayers are generally too busy in their jobs, or running their businesses, to attend protest meetings. The ability freely and frequently to attend protest gatherings is the privilege of those who are tax recipients rather than those who are tax payers.
Qohel Author Peter Wales
