[Quote:]

New research suggests German and Dutch people have more in common than cold weather and a Germanic language – the northern neighbours are also the most intelligent people in Europe.

Both countries score 107 in the league table of European IQs drawn up by Professor Richard Lynn of the University of Ulster, the Times reported on Monday.

The ‘British Isles’, in contrast, comes 8th in the ranking, with a score 100. The British newspaper takes some comfort from the fact France, its traditional rival, is in 19th place on 94.

42

The Riemann zeta-function ζ(s) is defined for any complex number s with real part > 1 by the Dirichlet series:

(Source)

[Quote:]

We’re left with this nagging feeling, however, that the overwhelming reason why we see so much “bad news” coming out of Iraq is that, in spite of a halting start-and-stop sort of progress toward democratic institutions, things are not going well on the ground. (As the New York Times noted last week, both the number of insurgents, the number of foreign terrorists and the daily number of attacks by those groups more than tripled from February, 2004 to February of this year. And during that period, both oil and electricity production in Iraq have dwindled, as has household fuel availability. Which is why Bagdhad is darker than it was two years ago.)

We’ll leave you with an example of the kind of story Massing longs for, but be warned: It isn’t encouraging. It comes from ABC News and it goes like this: The other day: in search of a “good story,” Jake Tapper visited the set of a popular sitcom, “Me and Layla” filming in the streets of Baghdad and starring the “Iraqi Danny Devito.” Tapper was going to focus on the head of the entertainment company producing the show, a man named Hamid, in an attempt to highlight those “who are trying to make the Iraqi people laugh.” Just as the ABC crew was taping a segment showing the sitcom being filmed, Tapper captured the director running to take an urgent phone call. Hamid, the man who had greenlighted “Me and Layla” and arranged for ABC to do the story, had just been assassinated.

[Quote:]

The heartland turned vicious this week when an Oklahoma town threatened to call in the FBI because its web site was hacked by Linux maker Cent OS. Problem is CentOS didn’t hack Tuttle’s web site at all. The city’s hosting provider had simply botched a web server.

This tale kicked off yesterday when Tuttle’s city manager Jerry Taylor fired off an angry message to the CentOS staff. Taylor had popped onto the city’s web site and found the standard Apache server configuration boilerplate that appears with a new web server installation. Taylor seemed to confuse this with a potential hack attack on the bustling town’s IT infrastructure.

“Who gave you permission to invade my website and block me and anyone else from accessing it???,” Taylor wrote to CentOS. “Please remove your software immediately before I report it to government officials!! I am the City Manager of Tuttle, Oklahoma.”

[..]

To see the full transcript of the web server war, travel over here. It’s classic reading.

[Quote:]

The steady banter is punctured only by the occasional grunts and yelps of pain from behind the curtains along the right wall, where physical therapists — physical terrorists, the soldiers call them — push patients to the breaking point, stretching muscles that haven’t moved in months, manipulating limbs still gouged and raw. But soldiers who end up here consider themselves the lucky ones. Others are still in comas or so severely brain damaged they will never recognize their own children. Plenty never made it home at all. If you were missing a leg, there was someone nearby missing both. If you were missing two legs, there was someone missing an arm, too. The injuries at Walter Reed were so profound that a single amputation below the knee was often dismissed as an inconvenience.

“There’s always someone worse,” the soldiers say.

For Michael, on this day, that someone was the sickly new guy. As he leaned on his two canes, standing next to Carrie, Michael noticed the ends of the young man’s mangled stumps. They were misshapen and lumpy, like heads of cauliflower. Michael recognized the rogue bone growth — HO, they called it, for heterotopic ossification. Michael had it on his stumps, too. Almost every amputee did. But this guy’s HO was like nothing Michael had seen. It seemed to be pushing up through his skin grafts.

Michael looked again at the young man’s face. Suddenly, his stomach dropped. The frail, battered soldier was from his own unit in Iraq.

on a side note, the photographer is a Pulitzer price winner

[Quote:]

Hong Kong is number one on my list for many reasons: Hong Kong has a whopping 43 buildings over 200 metres tall, 30 of which were built in the year 2000 or later!!! It also boasts four of the 15 tallest buildings in the world… that’s all in one city! Hong Kong’s skyline shows a large selection of distinct sky-reaching towers, with beautiful night lighting and reflection. This city exemplifies the post-modern skyscraper and skyline. Finally, the mountain backdrop makes this skyline (as you can clearly see) the greatest on the planet!

[Quote:]

A confidential memo of a two-hour meeting between President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair on Jan. 31, 2003, makes clear that the White House was bent on attacking Iraq two months later no matter what, according to The New York Times on Monday based on its review of the document.

Bush made clear to Blair that he was determined to invade Iraq without the second United Nation resolution, “or even if international arms inspectors failed to find unconventional weapons,�? writes Don Van Natta, Jr., after examining the memo written about the meeting written by Blair’s top foreign policy adviser David Manning.

[..]

“The memo also shows that the president and the prime minister acknowledged that no unconventional weapons had been found inside Iraq,�? The Times relates. “Faced with the possibility of not finding any before the planned invasion, Bush talked about several ways to provoke a confrontation, including a proposal to paint a United States surveillance plane in the colors of the United Nations in hopes of drawing fire, or assassinating Mr. Hussein.�?

[President Gerald R. Ford's Executive Order 11905:]

(g) Prohibition of Assassination. No employee of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination.

Surely that’s ground for impeachment?

[Quote:]

The career of Russian President Vladimir Putin was built at least in part on a lie, according to US researchers.
A new study of an economics thesis written by Mr Putin in the mid-1990s has revealed that large chunks of it were copied from an American text.

Mr Putin was labelled a plagiarist at the weekend after a pair of researchers at the Brookings Institution, a Washington DC think tank, established that the President’s academic credentials were based on a dissertation he had lifted in part verbatim from the Russian translation of a management study written by two professors at the University of Pittsburgh in 1978.

According to the Kremlin’s official biography, Mr Putin, 53, obtained a PhD in economics from the St Petersburg Mining Institute in 1997. But the US researchers also established that his thesis was for a lesser degree that would not have entitled him to a full doctorate.

—George W. Bush, after meeting Russian President Vladimir Putin, June 16, 2001:

[Quote:]

“I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy….I was able to get a sense of his soul.”

[Quote:]

Mohannad al-Azawi had just finished sprinkling food in his bird cages at his pet shop in south Baghdad, when three carloads of gunmen pulled up.

In front of a crowd, he was grabbed by his shirt and driven off.

Mr. Azawi was among the few Sunni Arabs on the block, and, according to witnesses, when a Shiite friend tried to intervene, a gunman stuck a pistol to his head and said, “You want us to blow your brains out, too?”

Mr. Azawi’s body was found the next morning at a sewage treatment plant. A slight man who raised nightingales, he had been hogtied, drilled with power tools and shot.

In the last month, hundreds of men have been kidnapped, tortured and executed in Baghdad. As Iraqi and American leaders struggle to avert a civil war, the bodies keep piling up. The city’s homicide rate has tripled from 11 to 33 a day, military officials said. The period from March 7 to March 21 was typically brutal: at least 191 corpses, many mutilated, surfaced in garbage bins, drainage ditches, minibuses and pickup trucks.

[..]

What frightens Iraqis most about these gangland-style killings is the impunity. According to reports filed by family members and more than a dozen interviews, many men were taken in daylight, in public, with witnesses all around. Few cases, if any, have been investigated.

[Quote:]

When Congress established Medicare Part D, the new prescription drug benefit, in 2002, it promised American seniors and American taxpayers that it would lower drug costs.

Then-Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson said that private insurance company drugs plans “are going to be able to purchase in bulk with the pharmaceutical companies and hold down prices.�?

I and others in Congress argued that the federal government would save seniors and taxpayers much more if Medicare could negotiate directly with the pharmaceutical companies.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist told us that “competition through the private sector is a more effective means to hold down prices.�?

Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Mark McClellan continues to argue that “the drug plans are negotiating aggressive discounts that are being passed along to beneficiaries and taxpayers.�?

I decided to find out whether or not these claims are true.

I asked the Democratic staff of the House Government Reform Committee to investigate.

As I suspected, the facts don’t agree with the Administration’s rosy statements.

Here’s what we found.

The drug prices offered here in Southern Maine by the ten leading private insurance plans for the ten prescription drugs with the highest sales are, on average:

• Almost 80 percent higher than the prices the federal government negotiates for the Veterans Administration;

• More than 60 percent higher than what consumers pay in Canadian pharmacies; and

• More than 5 percent higher than what they cost when purchased from a reliable Internet dealer.

Why is this bad for Maine seniors who now receive the Medicare Part D benefit?

Because their out-of-pocket costs are higher and the purchasing power of the benefit is lower than they should be.

Because they will reach the so-called “donut hole�? sooner.

That’s the gap, between $2,250 and $5,100 in drug expenditures, where seniors are responsible for 100 percent of the cost of their prescription drugs.

So, what’s the government doing about this problem?

[Quote:]

Citing increased concerns about the quality of drugs entering the United States from Canada, federal authorities have stepped up seizures of the prescriptions and sent strongly worded legal warnings to consumers, including some in Massachusetts, who have ordered the discounted drugs.

“What we’re trying to do is protect the public from unsafe medications,” said Lynn Hollinger, spokeswoman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection. “It was a growing problem we felt was of concern to the American public.”

The government crackdown marks a shift in policy for the Bush administration, which has rarely acted against individuals who buy drugs from Canada, reports The Boston Sunday Globe.

The stricter enforcement policy began Nov. 17, and applies only to mail-order shipments, not to U.S. citizens who cross into Canada to pick up their drugs, Hollinger said.

If you really believe Canadian medicine is somehow of a lower quality, I’ve got some prime real estate in Florida for sale for you.

(via)

[Quote:]

A typical microwave oven consumes more electricity powering its digital clock than it does heating food.

[Quote:]

Microsoft employees writing to an anonymous blog are calling for the heads of high-level company executives — including Steve Ballmer and Jim Allchin — after the double delay debacle this week when the Redmond, Wash. developer shoved its two most profitable products into 2007.

On the Mini-Microsoft blog, which is maintained by someone who identifies himself as a Microsoft employee and goes by the nickname “Who da’Punk,” an entry tagged “Vista 2007. Fire the leadership now!” has accumulated over 325 comments from in- and outsiders.

One of those comments attracted my attention:

Talk around the vending machines in legal is that the delay has nothing to do with coding, slipped schedules or anything else. That’s why very few heads will actually roll and most will simply shuffle positions. Actual reasons have to do with no product, NONE, shipping until after the mess with the EU is cleaned up.

[..]

At 25-40% annual compounded growth rates for Linux servers, the last thing that’s going to happen is for the EU to be able to do what US-Justice failed to do, which is force disclosure of MS server protocols so competitors can copy MS’s IP and gain market share in the market segment on MS’s dime. Samba has never been 100% compatible and that’s the way its going to stay, come hell or high water. Regardless of how much time/delay it takes, Samba and Vista will never be as interoperable as Samba is with PDC, AD, AS currently.

[..]

And remember, any large migrations you get a whiff of, you know where to report them, get details and do it. A single 6 digit desktop migration has repercussions far and wide on many other customers and partners (and media), and we are staring at over a dozen of them and have been unsuccessful in turning any of them around so far.

Over a dozen companies with more than 100,000 desktops migrating away from windows?

*blink*

Woa.