Saddam Hussein thought he had chemical weapons, and definitely wanted them.

George Bush said he had chemical weapons.

Most of the worlds intelligence agencies, including the CIA, were quietly saying they were no chemical weapons. Some of these agencies had their results taken out of context by their superiors.

If I run outside my house, stark naked, on a city street, carrying a fake gun, screaming "I have a gun!!!" The police will probably shoot me. After a while, that was what happened to Saddam Hussein.

Cars from the mid-70's to mid-80's will easily outperform cars from today in terms of real-life fuel economy, when cars with similar EPA ratings are compared. Real-life fuel economy has been declining for a long time now.

The reason for this is that modern emission controls have made it possible to put large engines inside vehicles and still meet the CAFE fuel economy ratings. People *like* large engines. They like the acceleration. They like massive vehicles like the Ford Excursion. The statistics have been long available, the average American car has been growing in size for a long-time.

Cars from the 70's and 80's were underpowered. This forced people to save on gas in real-life conditions by not letting them accelerate hard (which uses lots of gas), and often by limiting the cars top speed. Cars use a great deal of gas when they accelerate hard, and go faster than 55 mph.

While attempting its first overseas deployment to the Kadena Air Base in Okinawa, Japan, on 11 February 2007, six F-22s of 27th Fighter Squadron flying from Hickam AFB, Hawaii, experienced multiple system failures while crossing the International Date Line (or 180th meridian of longitude) caused by software errors.[230][231][232] The fighters were able to return to Hawaii by following tanker aircraft.

From wikipedia. The references are:
230 "F-22 Squadron Shot Down by the International Date Line." Defense Industry Daily, 1 March 2007. Retrieved: 31 August 2011.
231 "This Week at War". CNN, 24 February 2007.
232 Johnson, Maj. Dani. "Raptors arrive at Kadena." US Air Force, 19 February 2007. Retrieved: 9 May 2010.

It's tough to reliably detect low-level background repetitive noise without detecting all sorts of nearby domestic appliances, car engines, and such. In the modern city, we live with *alot* of noise.

Now, if the problem is to detect jet engines in rural areas featuring mountainous terrain, then I think I know what the point of this project is.

In Canada, taking one year off at reduced salary with the birth of a child is pretty normal. I think school teachers even have a way to take two or three years off, some of which are without pay. With certain limitations, you even have the right to return to your old job when it is all over.

Somehow, i suspect British Telecom was smart enough to get the US version of this patent, and software patents are fair game in the US.

It took me a bit to try and figure out what that joke was about. However, once I did, I laughed, hard.

Wish I had mod points. I have seen the exact same graph as "what you need to do to become a tenured professor."

As a career strategy, aiming to be a tenured professor is a very bad idea, because almost everyone that tries must fail. It's great for the few that make it, but they are the exceptions.

This technology will not significantly affect memory latency, because DRAM latency is almost entirely driven by the row and column address selection inside the DRAM. The additional controller chip will likely increase average latency. However, this affect will be lessened because the higher bandwidth memory controllers will fill the processors cache more quickly. Also, the new DRAM chips will likely be fabricated on a denser manufacturing process, with many parallel columns, which will result in a minor improvement in speed.

All told, this new technology will not change the fact that modern CPU's spend about 50% of their clock cycles waiting for data.

The contradiction that many people noticed in my religious school was this: Adam and Eve had two sons, Cain and Abel. Cain killed Abel, meaning one son was left. Then, to quote from Chapter 4:

4:16 So Cain went out from the Lord’s presence and lived in the land of Nod, east of Eden. 4:17 Cain made love to his wife, and she became pregnant and gave birth to Enoch. Cain was then building a city, and he named it after his son Enoch.

If Adam and Eve were the first two people, and they had only one surviving son, then where did the city of people, the wife, and the land of Nod come from?

Criminals are stupid. Long prison sentences are pointless because criminals lack the intellectual skills to figure out that they will be caught. If a criminal lacks the intellectual ability to avoid doing crimes because they will get caught, how can they possibly appreciate the deterrent value of a long prison sentence?

If you break the statistics down by type of crime, then you find that a huge percentage of criminals are addicts with and without FAS, and have no effective decision making capability. These people chronically make the same minor mistakes, largely harm themselves, and justice should be about managing the harm they do to society at the minimum social cost.

Some people are sociopaths. The higher functioning sociopaths have learned to call their lawyer before doing anything truly evil. As a result, they can hold down careers in business, and manage to not commit crimes. These people are the "boss from hell", and a relatively few cause a great many stories.

Some people are truly sick. Believe it or not, the justice system is surprisingly efficient at locking up serial killers for life. However, a serial killer will not be deterred by a long prison sentence. Serial killers experience an uncontrollable desire to kill. Lacking self-control, prison time for serial killers is simply about keeping them off the streets.

Long prison sentences are only effective for a small population of criminals that the justice system will lock up for a long-time anyway. Everyone else is either too stupid to know the difference, or smart enough to stay out of jail. Deterrence only works against rational people who would not commit the crime anyway.

This used to be done, back in the early dails of email and usenet. If someone was sending spam, someone else would send their server 10,000 email messages and knock if off line.

It doesn't really work anymore:
a) Users are dumb - they don't even know their account/computer has been compromised, and might not care even if it has.
b) One mail server serves millions of users. That means millions of people pay the price for the actions of one bozo.
c) Revenge mails look like spam. It gets the sender blacklisted.

With a sufficiently small sample size, 100% accuracy is easy to achieve. Confidence limits on the other hand ...

Canonical appears to be developing in the same way as Corel did. They develop one program that was good (CorelDraw/Ubuntu), and then decide they have the software development smarts to sell a complete O/S and application stack. At one point, Corel was developing both Corel Linux and the Corel Office Suite to compete with Microsoft. The result was a whole bunch of hastily written software that failed to work properly. It was a disaster.

Canonical seems to be just losing focus, and drowining in the resulting plethora of projects. What was the point of Unity if not to enter the mobile space?

The resulting mess is a real shame. I think Linux Mint proves that Ubuntu could be great.