Pre-War information was clearly distorted, hyped and fabricated. Here are just a few points that plainly illustrate this:

Point: 10 days after 9/11 the President’s Daily Security Briefing stated there was: “few credible links between Iraq and Al Qaeda. Later CIA reports said the same thing. Yet, for three years after receiving the initial President’s Daily Security Briefing the administration officials continued to say that there were important connections between Iraq and Al Qaeda to the point where nearly half the country believed it.

Point: Mohammed Atta never met in Prague with Iraq officials — he was in fact in Virginia Beach at the time. In fact, the CIA and FBI told the Bush administration most certainly did not take place. Yet, Dick Cheney frequently claimed this as a connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda for years after being debriefed to the contrary.

Point: Iraq never sought fissile material in Africa, or as far as we know anywhere else during the Bush Administration. Yet, Dick Cheney and other members of the Bush administration, including G.W., continued to proclaim the truth of this for more than a year after Ambassador Joseph Wilson proved this to be untrue. Oddly enough, it was the Vice-President’s office who asked this to be validated and had sent Ambassador Wilson to Africa and received for validation: “absolutely untrue, provably so.” However, in speeches throughout the country the administration continued to claim it to be true. They even included this outright lie in the State of the Union Address.

Point: The administration continued to assert the Iraqis had mobile factories that could make biological weapons long after they knew this not to be the case. The Iraqi defector codenamed: ‘Curveball’ was discredited and this was known by the Whitehouse, as is corroborated in writing.

Point: The Whitehouse continued to claim Iraq had provided Al Qaeda with chemical and biological weapons training even after they knew this to be untrue. The Defense Intillegence Agency informed the Whitehouse that the source of that information was almost certainly lying.

Need I go on? Dishonest and reprehensible indeed Dick.

Think it cant be done? Think again!

Britney Gallivan has solved the Paper Folding Problem. This well known challenge was to fold paper in half more than seven or eight times, using paper of any size or shape.

…

The exact limit for single direction folding case was derived. It is based on the accumulative limiting effects induced by each and every fold in the folding process. Considering the intricacy of the problem the equation has a relatively simple form.

For the single direction folding case the exact limiting equation is:

where L is the minimum possible length of the material, t is material thickness, and n is the number of folds possible in one direction.

L and t need to be expressed using the same units.

More details here [Wolfram].

Starwars.com

In Southern California, George Lucas Beats Dead Horse

The power of the Force meets the power of the Allspark with a new assortment of Star Wars vehicles from Hasbro that are actually robots in disguise. Star Wars Transformers combine the classic characters and vehicles from a galaxy far, far away and transforms them into mighty mechs with seamless Star Wars alt-modes. This first wave of unique crossover toys includes four ‘bots, with a mix of good and evil to wage shapeshifting battles among your other Star Wars or Transformer toys. Each figure also comes with a miniature pilot.

Darth Megatron

Optimus Kenobi

Luke Starscream

This has now gone too far. This is an outrage. This is wrong. This is just plain awful. Next year we will also see the arrival of Cabbage Patch Vader, and Leia Kid Sister.

I have had my PPC-6700 for about a week now. In the beginning I was a tad disappointed; specifically with Outlook Mobile. Let me start by stating that there is no push mail unless you are using MS Exchange ’03. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you won’t care. That aside my problem with Outlook was that I originally had the device synching with my Laptop/Desktop Outlook. This meant that it created it’s own set of directories for the synched Outlook. Then in order for me to send/receive email using my usual MindTouch POP3 account I had to setup another account, which meant that it created another set of the usual Outlook directories. Get ready for this, I couldn’t even reply to emails that were synched from the Laptop/Desktop Outlook client. So, I would synch, run out of the office and couldn’t reply to the emails that were synched. Incredibly lame! Well, Steve resolved the problem for me by altering my behavior in a very simple way: don’t synch email. I leave email on the server, and receive email on my device from the previous three days. Very obvious, very simple. Leave it to Steve to point out that which is right in front of my face. Sure, no push email, but I’m satisfied with email now.

A big complaint of mine is that copy/paste is very limited. Not at all like my Treo. It should be pervasive throughout the OS. It isn’t. It seems to only be available in selected apps and the clipboard is not persistent between apps. This makes for providing a WEP key a real pain the ass, let me tell you. Especially when you roam between more than six different wifi networks. Another complaint is speed. I could do without some of the eye candy if the damn device would be a tad more responsive. When I am in a pissy mood and want to make a phone call to bitch someone out I want it dialing: NOW. It seems like it always lags when I am in a pissy mood and want to bitch someone out. Maybe this has something to do with the frequency of my pissy moods…I don’t know. Another point: the device tries to think for me. Often it does things (e.g. – flight mode) and I have no idea why. Slowly I am learning that it mostly has to do with holding down buttons (inadvertently) for a certain quanta at which time the button performs a different behavior than if you just tap it. Very poor design if you ask me. UeX 101: provide a system that is predictable and simple. Don’t get smart with it because users typically are not smart (myself included); more importantly, users are not going to have the same ‘smarts’ as you, the engineer. What the engineer deems as an obvious ‘smart’ move involving ‘thinking’ by the system based on the behavior of the user is almost always a bad idea. This should never be done without informing the user and giving them opt-out for the event and all future instances of it. Another huge complaint with my new PPC-6700 is that my Treo was WAY better designed for dialing a contact. The Treo was S-I-M-P-L-E. With the PPC-6700 I have to use the keyboard to get it done, which means sliding the keys out (see photo), which rotates the display (lags), and banging out a full name. The Treo would take two letters: last, first — much better design. Another complaint: I sure would like to be able to toggle through all the open apps and be able to quickly close those I no longer care to be open (in an attempt to diminish the lagginess of the OS).

What do I like about the device, now that I have bashed it extensively? EV-DO screams compared to the old Sprint data network. The display is gorgeous. I am absolutely in love with the ability to quickly and easily capture voice notes. I’m really digging audio books on the device (I liked this on my Treo too, but I constantly had issues with my Treo [I went through four in as many years]). Umm… I think there are other things. OH! The keyboard is awesome! It’s very easy to bang out a lot of text.

As an aside, who the hell named this thing? PPC-6700? I mean c’mon! Oh, SunNimubus looks surprisingly good on this device. It’s at least legible.

I’m currently scrounging for cool apps. I did find: Virtual Earth for PPC, which is pretty cool; although, I won’t get into the usabilty problems of this app here. I’ve not gotten into the dev environ setup or other apps, but I’ll now promise that in the near future I’ll follow up on both topics.

New York Times

After falling for two years, the share of income going to the richest slice of Americans – the top tenth of 1 percent – grew significantly in 2003 while the share going to 99 percent of Americans fell, tax data released yesterday showed.

At the same time, the effective income tax rates paid by the top tenth of 1 percent fell sharply, declining at more than 10 times the rate reduction for middle-class taxpayers, the new report, by the Internal Revenue Service, showed.

Financial Times

The virus responsible for the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, which killed an estimated 50m people worldwide, has been reconstructed by genetic engineering in a high-security US laboratory.

Preliminary studies show that it is an avian flu virus that mutated to spread quickly between people just as many experts fear will happen soon with the current H5N1 strain of bird flu in Asia. Details of the project are published today in the journals Science and Nature. The US National Institutes of Health approved the research, despite its apparent risk, because it will help scientists find new treatments for the most dangerous types of flu.

BBC NEWS

Most office workers find computer jargon as difficult to understand as a foreign language, a survey suggests.

Three quarters of workers waste more than an hour a week deciphering what a technical term means, the poll found.

Terms such as jpeg, javascript and cookies are among the problem words highlighted by firm Computer People.

Get the hell out of here, an hour a week! Please. Here let me show you something, Google: “define:bullshit”.

Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone From Yahoo! News

Yahoo starts reporting.

One of the world’s most respected war correspondents, Kevin Sites has spent the past five years covering global war and disaster for several national TV networks. Now he joins Yahoo! News to provide a unique, multimedia perspective on some of the world’s most troubled and dangerous places.

This is the same dude who ignited a firestorm for reporting the killing of an unarmed Iraqi in Fallujah by an American soldier.

When Yahoo isn’t assisting in the persecution of political dissidents in China it seems they are breaking new ground in news reporting it seems.

The Kevin Sites Blog has some interesting bytes.

Undeniable evidence that Pirates Are Cool:

As a correlary, this also can be attributed to a decline in grog consumption.
And as we all know, grog contains one or more of the following:

• kerosene
• propylene glycol
• sulphuric acid
• artificial sweeteners
• red dye no2
• rum
• acetone
• battery acid
• scumm
• axle grease
• and/or pepperoni

Hattiesburg American

Shortly after Hurricane Katrina roared through South Mississippi knocking out electricity and communication systems, the White House ordered power restored to a pipeline that sends fuel to the Northeast.

That order – to restart two power substations in Collins that serve Colonial Pipeline Co. – delayed efforts by at least 24 hours to restore power to two rural hospitals and a number of water systems in the Pine Belt.

Good to know we have our priorities straight.