/i*one entry from a new collection*i/
      Americans, when relating to Europe have always had two modes, both of which are always in action even though one or the other appears more dominant. The first is as Europe's kid brother. It is attributted to Will Rogers ". . . America has never lost a war or won a peace conference . . ." (Said before the Vietnam War.) The second mode is with independent values and a different morality than Europe. American's value self-reliance and independence above a social welfare standard.
      Both modes are always in play even if one seems dominant in particular Americans (say Presidents.) Bill Clinton's need to be loved forced him into the first mode when dealing with Europe. George W. Bush political powerbase demands he play the second. But neither is without the opposite mode.

I have to admit that I am exasperated about the amount of grief in the media and from foreign type friends of mine (bloody Kiwis!) over the USA not finding any WMDs in Iraq yet.

        Let me put it this way: I'll play the previous Iraq government in a game of hide and seek and here are the ground rules.
                1) I need to hide 60 liters of biotoxins (more than enough to kill the population of Europe and the USA). That's approximately the volume of 15 carry-on bags (what my ex-wife travels with.)
                2) I also have to hide 5 nuclear weapons, roughly 5 more carry-ons.
                3) Thanks to the French, Russians and Germans, I have excellent radar and know exactly when your low-level surveillance satelittes are overhead. Ditto your surveillance planes.
                4) I have an area the size of California, with the population of New York to hide these 20 carry-ons in. I have near absolute power over all aspects of construction, administration and economics.
                5) I have $5 billion to excavate tunnels with, hide sites, buy potemkin materials and move these 20 bags around.
                6) You have four months to find one bag.
Go !!

One thing I have been seeing a lot of talk on Slashdot about has been the satelitte imagery of Iraq. What one heck of a lot of people fail to comprehend is that there are two types of spy satelittes: geosynchronous and low-orbit ones.

When we hear talk of counting the hairs on someone's head or the like from orbit, it means from the latter. The problem is, nobody has more than a few (max 30) of these up at any one time and they constantly are falling back to Earth. That means they can't offer continuous coverage and when they are overhead can be plotted quite accurately. Recall the scene of IRA terrorists rushing into tents to be replaced by Libyans in the Libyan desert in "Clear and Present Danger". That was because a low-orbit satelitte was passing overhead.

Geosynch satelittes orbit much further out and are semi-permanent. They can continuosly watch one area, say Iraq, and keep a building under general surveillance, but not produce high detail pictures. They are great for where armies are or general activity level but they can easily be fooled at say following a single truck.

Normal intelligence gathering involves using the geosynchs to target the low-orbits, occasionally re-tasking them into different orbits with different peak observation times to catch the ground-bound bad guys off guard. Again, "Clear and Present Danger."

All this writing about statistical translation is intruguing (sp) to me. It is in reality, right up my alley. My first master's thesis was on a specific topic in mechanical translation (MT). Specifically, interlinguas. I proposed using a dynamic one which was built up by reading text (aka processing Rosetta stones.) My second master's thesis was on a grammatical model of medieval Chinese, again based on stats, which could be utilized for MT. (Of course, who needs to translate Tang dynasty Chinese nowdays?) My third masters (yes, I am a glutton for punishment) was in stats.
      Now that I am a professional programmer, I can visualize how difficult it would be to put all of this together and actually get reasonable text out.
      I am befuddled why MT efforts have been so dismal. I mean, we've been working at it for nearly 60 years (my first advisor gave me the minutes from a 1951 meeting he attended where several people said 3 or 4 years of work already.) And our most succesful effort is a blind statistical one from USC (mentioned in Slashdot's Romancing the Rosetta Stone.) Stats will take you a long way, particularly with relatively straightforward (grammar-wise) English-Chinese translations. However, the best this effort can ever do is the average of all input human translators. And there are language pairs, English to Inuktatuk (Greenlandic Eskimo) or English to Basque, where this type of approach would just wilt on the fine.