| Another unnamed source coming via Haaretz claiming that Iran is only 6 month away from a nuclear bomb! Funny that this has been 6 month since 2005 and still not managed to get pass that majic 6 month! From 2005: http://www.propagandamatrix.com/articles/september2005/200905sixmonths.htm From 2008: http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/archives/iran-6-months-away-from-nuclear-weapons Iran will "know how to" make a nuclear bomb in 6 month: http://www.newser.com/story/43170/iran-boosts-uranium-stockpile.html 2005: Iran is six months away from having the knowledge to build a nuclear bomb, Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom says From one of "iran-opposition" sites And my favorite site is this one: http://www.iranwatch.org/ourpubs/articles/iranucleartimetable.html They have a time table with exact date of when IRI will be able to make a bomb! Very very 'accurate' if you do not question the accuracy of their claims :) http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1100387.html Iran is capable of assembling an atomic bomb within six months, German intelligence analysts told the German weekly newsmagazine Stern. "If they want to, they will be able to set off a uranium bomb within six months," an analyst with Germany's intelligence service, Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), told the magazine.
"Nobody would have thought this possible some years ago," an intelligence official told Stern. The UN Security Council has imposed three sets of sanctions on Tehran for defying its demands to suspend uranium enrichment. Some analysts say Iran may be close to having the required material for producing a bomb, but most say the weaponization process would then take one to two years due to technical and political hurdles. "Weaponizing" enrichment would not escape the notice of UN nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), unless it was done at a secret location. Until now there have been no indications of any such covert diversion, a point made by the IAEA's incoming director-general shortly after his election earlier this month. Current IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei has said it is his "gut feeling" that Iran is seeking at least the capability to build nuclear weapons, in order to protect itself from perceived regional and U.S. threats. Libyan leader: Peaceful nuclear program should be encouraged Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi says Iran should be encouraged to pursue its nuclear program as long as it is for peaceful purposes. Gadhafi was addressing Wednesday's opening session of a summit of the Non-Aligned Movement at the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheik. The 118-nation group includes Iran. He said it is "unjust" to stop Iran from enriching uranium for peaceful purposes, but that it must not be allowed to develop nuclear weapons. The United States and Israel say Iran is seeking to acquire nuclear weapons. Iran denies the charge, saying its program is for generating power. Libya in 2003 abandoned its own program to develop nuclear and chemical weapons. |
20090715
New Propaganda: Germany believes Iran could have nuclear bomb within 6 months'
20090708
Good and free timing diagram program/site!
Hi guys,
I am not sure if I send this to you earlier but this is a good site for creating timing diagram for your designs for test and documentation. It is free to use but you need to register in order to access it.
http://www.timingtool.com/tt_lite
Best regards,
/Farhad
20090707
Re: [hoi] -- It won't be easy (re: attacking Iran)
| Here you have an interesting blog about the issue that a friend of mine sent me on Facebook: http://angrybear.blogspot.com/2009/07/joe-biden-map-office-is-calling.html The article is OK, but the interesting part is the comments (even thought the exadurate the payload of the Eitan that is around 1000 Kg): The Eitan payload is not negligible at at. If some Eitans are used to refuel the others, an Eitan can carry a 2,000+ Kg bomb. Israel has the technology to deply those accurately from 40,000 feet. A simple GPS gudiance system would do. A simple calculation would allow launching the weapons so that they hit the target almost simultaneously. Furthermore, since these planes are unmanned and also manufactured in Israel, Israel has the capability to send tens or hundreds of them on one critical mission. In addition, Israel may not have an aircraft carrier, but UAVs can be launched from much more smaller ships. Israel could launch a wave of UAVs at Iran from a few "merchant" ships in the Indian Ocean. Here you can find more info about the Eitan:The simplest form of argument is to ignore completely any evidence that does not fit your theory. The Times is a repected newspaper that doesn't publish on a whim. Of course the Israeli government would deny it. They do not want to compromise the Saudis. Israel is playing a delicate game with Iran and people like you. If Iran is not convinced Israel can attack, Israel will eventually have to attack. That is why there was a leak to the Times. It is interesting that basically the same arguments that were put forward before Israel bombed the Iraqi reactor are put forward now. People never learn. ----------------- First, my whole point is that you do not even need to fly over Saudi Arabia or Iraq to attack Iran. Second, how would Iran know over which countries the Israeli planes flew to get to it? Again, you are underestimating Israel and its electronic warfare capabilities. Israel attacked the nuclear plant inside Syria without the Syrian radars even picking up the planes. Both Israel and Saudi would deny that Israeli planes flew over Saudi. How would the Iranians or anybody else prove it? A coordinated attack of a about 50 manned aircraft and hundreds of UAVs will bring down the Iranian nuclear effort. Of course, only after Israel attacks you will believe. Thank goodness that the Arabs think like you and have always understimated Israel and its capabilities. The downside is that people like you undemine Israel's deterrnece and therefore make war much more likely. ------------- Cordesman, the so called expert, does not even mention the Eitan in his report. He only mentions UAVs in defense contexts against ballistic missiles. His report lacks any imagination. Furthermore, we are talking large numbers of UAVs and serious electronic warfare. This is not something the Iranians can handle, especially with the UAVs flying at 40,000 feet. Nobody thought Israel would beat the Arab armies in 6 days, free its hostages in Entebe or bomb the Iraqi reactor. It was also lack of imagination that led to 9/11. Everybody thought that Bin-Laden could do it or would do it. Israel has also committed the sin of lack of imagination, with 1973 being a prime example. Here are the facts: 1) Israel is only second to the US in electronic warfare with Israel selling such systems to India, Australia and even China if not for a US veto. 2) Israel was the first to perfect the use of UAVs in battle and exports tons of them per year. The Eitan can fly to iran and back without any problems. 3) Israel has been planning for an attack on Iran for years. 4) There are reports from respectable newspapers that the Saudis are on board. 5) Israel successfully attacked an advanced Russian system in Syria without the system ever detecting its planes. It is clear to me that all you need to employ is a little imagination to see that Israel can strike effectively at Iran. Do you think Israel will publish all the capabilitis of its UAVs? Or agreements it has with other neighbors of Iran (not Saudis)? Use your imagination. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAI_Eitan And this from Paris Air Show 2007: http://defense-update.com/events/2007/summary/parisairshow07uav.htm
The Watchkeeper UAV built by Elbit Systems and Thales for the British forces is also maturing. In recent months, the WK-450 (now designated Hermes 450B) was reshaped to accommodate specific British requirements. Its fuselage diameter grew by 30 cm, allowing more space and payload capacity adding 200 pounds for more fuel and systems. The WK-450 was displayed at the Thales outdoor exhibit, where visitors could also see the ground control segment. Some of the advanced applications developed for the system were also displayed. Elbit Systems also unveiled Hermes's big brother - the new Hermes 900. It is currently under development, with first flight expected in late 2007.
--- On Tue, 7/7/09, David Heckadon <davidheckadon@yahoo.com> wrote:
|
Designed as a top tier tactical UAV, Hermes 900 will assume many of the missions of MALE platforms, while retaining the ground support and commonality of current Hermes tactical UAV units. With a typical payload capacity of 300 kg, Hermes 900 can easily carry multiple payloads as well as external stores. Elbit did not elaborate on the types of such stores, but among the items that could be considered are suitable guided weapons, cargo dispensers or air-deployable mini UAVs (a concept first utilized by the Finder UAV).20090706
This is not a JOKE: Ryanair to make passengers stand
Ryanair to make passengers stand
Ryanair is considering proposals to make some of its customers stand during flights.
By Ben Leach
Published: 7:00AM BST 06 Jul 2009
Michael O'Leary, the chief executive of Ryanair, plans to make some passengers stand
The low-cost airline would charge passengers less on "bar stools" with seat belts around their waists.
Michael O'Leary, the chief executive, has already held talks with US plane manufacturer Boeing about designing an aircraft with standing room.
He is now seeking approval from the Irish Aviation Authority before ordering a new fleet of carriers, according to The Sun.
A Ryanair spokesman told the newspaper: "If they approve it, we'll be doing it."
Mr O'Leary is reported to have got the idea from the Chinese airline Spring, which has put forward similar plans. It estimates space could be made for up to 50 per cent more passengers and costs could be cut by 20 per cent.
It is not the first time Ryanair has come up with a controversial proposal for cutting costs. Earlier this year Mr O'Leary suggested passengers could be charged £1 to use the on-board lavatories.
In an interview on BBC television he said that the low-cost airline was looking at the possibility of installing a coin slot on the lavatory door so that "people might actually have to spend a pound to spend a penny."
Mr O'Leary also considered introducing a "fat tax" for overweight passengers.
Cordialement,
Farhad ABDOLIAN
Farhad ABDOLIAN
Centre de Design
Ingénieur Hardware Senior
| EASII IC SAS | |
| 1240, Route des Dolines | |
| Buropolis 2 | Tel : 04 89 82 73 11 |
| 06560 Valbonne – Sophia Antipolis | Fax : 04 89 82 73 12 |
20090630
Between Tel Aviv and Tehran by Uri Avnery,
Between Tel Aviv and Tehran by Uri Avnery, June 30, 2009 Hundreds of thousands of Iranian citizens pour into the streets in order to protest against their government! What a wonderful sight! Gideon Levy wrote in Ha'aretz that he envies the Iranians. And indeed, anyone who tries these days to get Israelis in any numbers into the streets could die of envy. It is very difficult to get even hundreds of people to protest against the evil deeds or policies of our government – and not because everybody supports it. At the height of the war against Gaza, half a year ago, it was not easy to mobilize ten thousand protesters. Only once a year does the peace camp succeed in bringing a hundred thousand people to the square – and then only to commemorate the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. The atmosphere in Israel is a mixture of indifference, fatigue, and a "loss of the belief in the ability to change reality," as a Supreme Court justice put it this week. A very dramatic change is needed in order to get masses of people to demonstrate for peace. For Mir-Hossein Mousavi hundreds of thousands have demonstrated, and hundreds of thousands have demonstrated for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. That says something about the people and about the regime. Can anyone imagine a hundred thousand people gathering in Cairo's Tahrir Square to protest against the official election results? The police would open fire before a thousand had assembled there. Would even a thousand people be allowed to demonstrate in Amman against His Majesty? The very idea is absurd. Some years ago, the Saudi security forces in Mecca opened fire on unruly pilgrims. In Saudi Arabia, there are never protests against election results – simply because there are no elections. In Iran, however, there are elections, and how! They are more frequent than elections in the U.S., and Iranian presidents change more often than American ones. Indeed, the very protests and riots show how seriously the citizens there treat election results. Of course, the Iranian regime is not democratic in the way we understand democracy. There is a supreme guide who fixes the rules of the game. Religious bodies rule out candidates they do not like. Parliament cannot adopt laws that contradict religious law. And the laws of God are unchangeable – at most, their interpretation can change. All this is not entirely foreign to Israelis. From the very beginning the religious camp has been trying to turn Israel into a religious state, in which religious law (called Halakha) would be above the civil law. Laws "revealed" thousands of years ago and regarded as unchangeable would take precedence over laws enacted by the democratically elected Knesset. To understand Iran, we have only to look at one of the important Israeli parties: Shas. They, too, have a supreme guide, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, who decides everything. He appoints the party leadership, he selects the party's Knesset candidates, he directs the party faction how to vote on every single issue. There are no elections in Shas. And in comparison with the frequent outbursts of Rabbi Ovadia, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a model of moderation. Elections differ from country to country. It is very difficult to compare the fairness of elections in one country with those in another. At one end of the scale were the elections in the good old Soviet Union. There it was joked that a voter entered the ballot room, received a closed envelope from an official, and was politely requested to put it into the ballot box. "What, can't I know who I am voting for?" the voter demanded. The official was shocked. "Of course not! In the Soviet Union we have secret elections!" At the other end of the scale there should stand that bastion of democracy, the USA. But in elections there, only nine years ago, the results were decided by the Supreme Court. The losers, who had voted for Al Gore, are convinced to this very day that the results were fraudulent. In Saudi Arabia, Syria, Jordan, and now, apparently, also in Egypt, rule is passed from father to son or from brother to brother. A family affair. Our own elections are clean, more or less, even if after every election people claim that in the Orthodox Jewish quarters the dead also voted. Three and a half million inhabitants of the occupied Palestinian territories also held democratic elections in 2006, which former president Jimmy Carter described as exemplary, but Israel, the U.S., and Europe refused to accept the results, because they did not like them. So it seems that democracy is a matter of geography. Were the election results in Iran falsified? Practically none of us – in Tel Aviv, Washington, or London – can know. We have no idea, because none of us – and that includes the chiefs of all intelligence agencies – really knows what is happening in that country. We can only try to apply our common sense, based on the little information we have. Clearly, hundreds of thousands of voters honestly believe that the results were faked. Otherwise, they would not have taken to the streets. But this is quite normal among losers. During the intoxication of an election campaign, every party believes that it is about to win. When this does not happen, it is quite sure that the results are forged. Some time ago, Germany's excellent 3Sat television channel broadcast an arresting report about Tehran. The crew drove through the main street from the North of the city to the South, stopping frequently along the way, entering people's homes, visiting mosques and nightclubs. I learned that Tehran is largely similar to Tel Aviv at least in one respect: in the North there reside the rich and the well-to-do, in the South the poor and underprivileged. The Northerners imitate the U.S., go to prestigious universities, and dance in the clubs. The women are liberated. The Southerners stick to tradition, revere the ayatollahs or the rabbis, and detest the shameless and corrupt North. Mousavi is the candidate of the North, Ahmadinejad of the South. The villages and small towns – which we call the "periphery" – identify with the South and are alienated from the North. In Tel Aviv, the South voted for Likud, Shas, and the other right-wing parties. The North voted for Labor and Kadima. In our elections, a few months ago, the Right thus won a resounding victory. It seems that something very similar happened in Iran. It is reasonable to assume that Ahmadinejad genuinely won. The sole Western outfit that conducted a serious public opinion poll in Iran prior to the elections came up with figures that proved very close to the official results. It is hard to imagine huge forgeries, concerning many millions of votes, when thousands of polling station personnel are involved. In other words: it is entirely plausible that Ahmadinejad really won. If there were forgeries – and there is no reason to believe that there were not – they probably did not reach proportions that could sway the end result. There is a simple test for the success of a revolution: has the revolutionary spirit penetrated the army? Since the French Revolution, no revolution has succeeded when the army was steadfast in support of the existing regime. Both the 1917 February and October revolutions in Russia succeeded because the army was in a state of dissolution. In 1918, much the same happened in Germany. Mussolini and Hitler took great pains not to challenge the army, and came to power with its support. In many revolutions, the decisive moment arrives when the crowds in the street confront the soldiers and policemen, and the question arises: will they open fire on their own people? When the soldiers refuse, the revolution wins. When they shoot, that is the end of the matter. When Boris Yeltsin climbed on the tank, the solders refused to shoot and he won. The Berlin Wall fell because one East German police officer refused at the decisive moment to give the order to open fire. In Iran, Khomeini won when, in the final test, the soldiers of the shah refused to shoot. That did not happen this time. The security forces were ready to shoot. They were not infected by the revolutionary spirit. The way it looks now, that was the end of the affair. I am not an admirer of Ahmadinejad. Mousavi appeals to me much more. I do not like leaders who are in direct contact with God, who make speeches to the masses from a balcony, who use demagogic and provocative language, who ride on the waves of hatred and fear. His denial of the Holocaust – an idiotic exercise in itself – only adds to Ahmadinejad's image as a primitive or cynical leader. No doubt, he is a sworn enemy of the state of Israel or – as he prefers to call it – the "Zionist regime." Even if he did not promise to wipe it out himself, as erroneously reported, but only expressed his belief that it would "disappear from the map," this does not set my mind at rest. It is an open question whether Mousavi, if elected, would have made a difference as far as we are concerned. Would Iran have abandoned its efforts to produce nuclear weapons? Would it have reduced its support of the Palestinian resistance? The answer is negative. It is an open secret that our leaders hoped that Ahmadinejad would win, exacerbate the hatred of the Western world against himself, and make reconciliation with America more difficult. All through the crisis, Barack Obama has behaved with admirable restraint. American and Western public opinion, as well as the supporters of the Israeli government, called upon him to raise his voice, identify with the protesters, wear a green tie in their honor, condemn the ayatollahs and Ahmadinejad in no uncertain terms. But except for minimal criticism, he did not do so, displaying both wisdom and political courage. Iran is what it is. The U.S. must negotiate with it, for its own sake and for our sake, too. Only this way – if at all – is it possible to prevent or hold up its development of nuclear weapons. And if we are condemned to live under the shadow of an Iranian nuclear bomb, in a classic situation of a balance of terror, it would be better if the bomb were in the hands of an Iranian leadership that keeps up a dialogue with the American president. And of course, it would be good for us if – before reaching that point – we could achieve, with the friendly support of Obama, full peace with the Palestinian people, thus removing the main justification for Iran's hostility toward Israel. The revolt of the Northerners in Iran will remain, so it seems, a passing episode. It may, hopefully, have an impact in the long run, beneath the surface. But in the meantime, it makes no sense to deny the victory of the Iranian denier. |
Unscientific observation of 'iranian' twitters!
| I have been on twitter for a very long time and was very surprised that many of the so called Iranian twitters pupped up and got 1000s of followers in a very short time so I did an unscientific follow up on them based on the time they twitts and what they say, I tried to contact them and only managed to get in touch with only 2, one in the US who is living in the UK right now (not in the list) and the second one was Gita who was quoted as being in Iran by many ppl sicne she was twitting in Farsi. This is as I said highly innaccurate but interesting to observe for the next time since most of these so called Iranian tiwitters start sending messages between 9:30 A.M European time and 11 or 12 pm european time, and others start writing around 11:30 EU time and end up around 3-4 A.M EU time which does not make sense for a person who lives in Iran unless they have a very odd sleeping hours. Cheers, /Farhad http://twitter.com/madyar Always gets on around noon EU time, very active, sends 100s of twits per day. http://twitter.com/persiankiwi Highly reported by media, ALWAYS sends messages in EU time, probably in the UK http://twitter.com/mousavi1388 Probably in Iran, but mostly repeats what others have sent, LOTS of rumers comes from himm highly inaccurate reporting, source of the 'mousave under house arrest' news http://twitter.com/IranElect Started recently, definitely in the US (east coast) http://twitter.com/iran09 Hard to say, he twits all the time, always from his computer using FireFox, and pretends he is actually THERE! http://twitter.com/Gita She is one of the few who actually responds to ppl. She admitted she does is not living in Iran "right now" but that "she lives in Iran" caught her when she said that she had called her relatives "in Iran" to check things out in Farsi but said differently in English! http://twitter.com/StopAhmadi One of the most famous ones, his time of sending is like the US east coast ALWAYS, never responds to people and acts like he is sitting in the head quarter of Mousavim lots of BS, but lots of good news too, mostly repeated from others. |
شخصیت های کشور: ابراهيم نبوي
ابراهيم نبوي در این ماه اتفاقات مهمی رخ داد که باعث شد تعدادی از شخصیت های کشور از چیزی که قبلا بودند، خواسته و ناخواسته تبدیل به چیزی بشوند که نبودند. سید محمد خاتمی: یک فیلسوف اصلاح طلب که همه بخاطر او به موسوی رای دادند، تبدیل شد به یک فیلسوف اصلاح طلب که همه بخاطر موسوی دوستش دارند. مهدی کروبی: یک نامزد لر شجاع که اصلاح طلب بود، تبدیل شد به رئیس دیده بان حقوق بشر و رئیس سازمان زنان ایران و پس از انتخابات در شلوغی خیابانها گم شد. محسن رضایی: یک سردار متخصص استراتژی و کارشناس فدرالیسم که در عرض 24 ساعت تبدیل به قهرمان ملی شد و آنچنان مورد توجه قرار گرفت که یادش رفت قبل از انتخابات انصراف بدهد، در نتیجه بعد از انتخابات از قهرمانی ملی اعلام انصراف کرده و سالم به پایگاه خود بازگشت. محمود احمدی نژاد: یک قهرمان بین المللی در عرصه خارجی و یک رئیس جمهور بدنام بی عرضه در عرصه داخلی که در عرض یک هفته تبدیل به یک جنایتکار جنگی در عرصه جهانی و یک کودتاچی بدنام بی عرضه دروغگو در عرصه داخلی شد. اکبر هاشمی رفسنجانی: یک سوپرمن که قرار بود وارد اتاقش بشود و کت و شلوارش را دربیاورد و به نجات همه بپردازد، وی وارد اتاق شد و با گذشت سه هفته هنوز از آن خارج نشده است. اکبر ناطق نوری: یک رئیس دفتر رهبری که از سوی یک نامزد محبوب رهبری متهم به فساد مالی شد. وی از آن تاریخ از خانه خارج شده و هنوز مراجعه نکرده است. علی لاریجانی: شخصیت هشتم حکومت جمهوری اسلامی که به دلیل حذف نابهنگام پنج شخصیت دیگر، تبدیل به شخصیت سوم حکومت شد. وی در حالی که داشت می دوید از همه تندروها عقب ماند و به مدت یک هفته تبدیل به یک شخصیت میانه رو شد. محمد علی ابطحی: یک شخصیت روحانی اینترنتی دوست داشتنی میانه رو و معتدل که به دلیل انقلابیگری دیگران دستگیر و از صحنه مبارزات دیلیت شد. عطاء الله مهاجرانی: راست ترین نیروی اپوزیسیون در طول تاریخ که قرار بود چپ ترین نیروی پوزیسیون بعدی بشود، ولی در اثر یک تصادف نابهنگام تبدیل به رهبر معترضین شد. شیرین عبادی: مهم ترین شخصیت بین المللی ایرانی که اخیرا متوجه شده است انتخاباتی در ایران صورت گرفته است. محسن مخملباف: یک فیلمساز معتبر بین المللی که بیست سال از سیاست جدا شد و از ده روز قبل، روزی یک سال عقب ماندگی اش را جبران می کند. غلامحسین کرباسچی: یک شهردار اسبق که ده سال مشغول زیباسازی شهر تهران بود و بشکلی موفقیت آمیز همین پروژه زیباسازی را در مورد شیخ اصلاحات انجام داد و او را از یک کوهستان بی آب و علف تبدیل به یک چشم انداز دیدنی کرده و مجددا به همین اتهام زندانی شد. صادق محصولی: یک وزیر میلیاردر که به دلیل عدم آشنایی با مقدمات ریاضیات حاصل جمع اعداد را قبل از انجام چهار عمل اصلی به عنوان نتیجه انتخابات اعلام کرد. او ترجیح داد به جای چهار عمل اصلی ریاضی( منها، جمع، ضرب و تقسیم) از چهار عمل اصلی فیزیکی( زدن، انداختن، سقوط و شتاب دادن) استفاده کند. فاطمه رجبی: همسر سخنگوی دولت که تا یک ماه قبل کسانی را که به طرف صاحبش حمله می کردند گاز می گرفت، وی در ماه گذشته اصولا گاز می گیرد، دلیل خاصی هم ندارد. میرحسین موسوی: یک نخست وزیر سابق که بیست سال نقاشی می کرد و حرف نزد، نزد، نزد، نزد، نزد، نزد، اممممما حالا که آمد حرف بزند، آی زد!!!! سید علی خامنه ای: یک رهبر متوسط و معمولی که هیچ وقت نه خیلی چپ زده بود نه خیلی راست، نه خیلی کند رفته بود، نه خیلی تند، نه خیلی مورد توجه بود، نه خیلی مورد بی احترامی، و سرانجام تصمیم گرفت حرف آخرش را بزند، اما دستپاچه شد و آخرین حرفش را زد. حزب الله: گروهی از آدمهایی که پیراهنشان را روی شلوارشان می انداختند و به مردم اخم می کردند، سرانجام آنان دست شان را زیر پیراهن شان بردند و اسلحه های شان را کشیدند. مردم ایران: هفتاد میلیون نفر که سی سال بود رفته بودند توی خانه و بیرون نمی آمدند، حالا سی روز است که از خانه بیرون آمدند و دیگر توی خانه نمی روند. |
20090628
Bon Jovi Sings in Farsi (baa man baash - Stand By me )!
| http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdAnRB_Truw I don't like Bon Jovi or Andy at all, but it is interesting that he sings in Farsi! Cheers, /Farhad |
20090624
Nice GNU based schematic and PCB CAD program!
This is an interesting CAD program, with some really good examples:
http://www.lis.inpg.fr/realise_au_lis/kicad/
Kicad has been developed for years. It becomes a multilingual, cross-platform and complete independent EDA tool, follows GPLv2 license. It is a set of software tools with a project manager:
- eeschema: Schematic Capture;
- PCBnew: Board Editor with 3D viewer, requires open source Wings3D as 3D modeler;
- Gerbview: GERBER viewer;
- CVPCB: footprint selector;
- Kicad: project manager.
And library generator
http://kicad.rohrbacher.net/quicklib.php
Some info and comments:
http://dev.emcelettronica.com/kicad-free-and-open-source-eda-tool
20090623
Zimbabwean Nightmare Of Neglect Continues In South Africa
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20090622
FYI: Bush sanctions 'black ops' against Iran
Do you remember this?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1552784/Bush-sanctions-black-ops-against-Iran.html
Bush sanctions 'black ops' against Iran
President George W Bush has given the CIA approval to launch covert "black" operations to achieve regime change in
Mr Bush has signed an official document endorsing CIA plans for a propaganda and disinformation campaign intended to destabilise, and eventually topple, the theocratic rule of the mullahs.
Under the plan, pressure will be brought to bear on the Iranian economy by manipulating the country's currency and international financial transactions.
Details have also emerged of a covert scheme to sabotage the Iranian nuclear programme, which United Nations nuclear watchdogs said last week could lead to a bomb within three years.
Security officials in Washington have disclosed that Teheran has been sold defective parts on the black market in a bid to delay and disrupt its uranium enrichment programme, the precursor to building a nuclear weapon.
A security source in the US told The Sunday Telegraph that the presidential directive, known as a "non-lethal presidential finding", would give the CIA the right to collect intelligence on home soil, an area that is usually the preserve of the FBI, from the many Iranian exiles and emigrés within the US.
"Iranians in America have links with their families at home, and they are a good two-way source of information," he said.
The CIA will also be allowed to supply communications equipment which would enable opposition groups in Iran to work together and bypass internet censorship by the clerical regime.
The plans, which significantly increase American pressure on Iran, were leaked just days before a meeting in Iraq tomorrow between the US ambassador, Ryan Crocker, and his Iranian counterpart.
Tensions have been raised by Iran's seizure of what the US regards as a series of "hostages" in recent weeks. Three academics who hold dual Iranian-American citizenship are being held, accused of working to undermine the Iranian government or of spying.
An Iranian-American reporter with Radio Free Europe, who was visiting Iran, has had her passport seized. Another Iranian American, businessman Ali Shakeri, was believed to have been detained as he tried to leave Teheran last week.
The US responded with a show of force by the navy, sending nine warships, including two aircraft carriers, into the Persian Gulf.
Authorisation of the new CIA mission, which will not be allowed to use lethal force, appears to suggest that President Bush has, for the time being, ruled out military action against Iran.
Bruce Riedel, until six months ago the senior CIA official who dealt with Iran, said: "Vice-President [Dick] Cheney helped to lead the side favouring a military strike, but I think they have concluded that a military strike has more downsides than upsides."
However, the CIA is giving arms-length support, supplying money and weapons, to an Iranian militant group, Jundullah, which has conducted raids into Iran from bases in Pakistan.
Iranian officials say they captured 10 members of Jundullah last weekend, carrying $500,000 in cash along with "maps of sensitive areas" and "modern spy equipment".
Mark Fitzpatrick, a former senior State Department official now with the International Institute for Strategic Studies, said industrial sabotage was the favoured way to combat Iran's nuclear programme "without military action, without fingerprints on the operation."
He added: "One way to sabotage a programme is to make minor modifications in some of the components Iran obtains on the black market."
Components and blueprints obtained by Iranian intelligence agents in Europe, and shipped home using the diplomatic bag from the Iranian consulate in Frankfurt, have been blamed for an explosion that destroyed 50 nuclear centrifuges at the Natanz nuclear plant last year.
The White House National Security Council and CIA refused to comment on intelligence matters.
Ants inhabit 'world without sex' :(
This is too funny not to spread, specially the last part that says that the ants have learned “not to operate under the usual constraints of sexual reproduction” J
Ants inhabit 'world without sex'
| By Victoria Gill |
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These ants do not need males |
An Amazonian ant has dispensed with sex and developed into an all-female species, researchers have found.
The ants reproduce via cloning - the queen ants copy themselves to produce genetically identical daughters.
This species - the first ever to be shown to reproduce entirely without sex - cultivates a garden of fungus, which also reproduces asexually.
The finding of the ants' "world without sex" is published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
Anna Himler, the biologist from the University of Arizona who led the research, told BBC News that the team used a battery of tests to verify their findings.
Unusual evolution
By "fingerprinting" DNA of the ant species - Mycocepurus smithii - they found them all to be clones of the colony's queen.
And when they dissected the female insects, they found them to be physically incapable of mating, as an essential part of their reproductive system known as the "mussel organ" had degenerated.
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Anna Himler |
Asexual reproduction of males from unfertilised eggs is a normal part of some insect reproduction, but asexual reproduction of females is "exceedingly rare in ants", wrote the researchers.
"In social insects, there are a number of different types of reproduction," explained Dr Himler. "But this species has evolved its own unusual mode."
She and her colleagues do not know exactly why this particular species has become fully asexual, and how long ago the phenomenon evolved.
They are carrying out further genetic experiments, which will enable them to estimate how long ago the evolutionary change occurred.
No sex please
There are advantages to life without sex, Dr Himler explained.
"It avoids the energetic cost of producing males, and doubles the number of reproductive females produced each generation from 50% to 100% of the offspring."
But combining genetic material in sexual reproduction gives future generations many more advantages.
"If we're more diverse, we're more resistant to parasites and disease," explained Laurent Keller, an expert in social insects from the University of Lausanne.
"In a colony of clones, if one ant is susceptible to a parasite, they will all be susceptible. So if you're asexual, you normally don't last very long.
"But in ants we're seeing more and more reports of unusual methods of reproduction," added Professor Keller, who was not involved in this study.
He also points out that social insects, like ants, may be particularly well suited to this type of reproduction because it enables the queen to control the caste and sex of all the offspring in her colony.
The first farmers
Dr Himler's interest in Mycocepurus smithii was originally sparked not by their unusually biased sex ratio, but by their ability to cultivate crops.
"Ants discovered farming long before we did - they have been cultivating fungus gardens for an estimated 80 million years.
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More interested in gardening than sex |
"They collect plant material, insect faeces and even dead insects from the forest floor and feed it to their crops," she said.
Many different species of ant - including the famous leafcutter ants - cultivate fungi, relying on it for nutrition.
But this particular species is able to grow "a greater number of crops than other ant species", she explained.
"When we started to study this species more closely, we just weren't finding any males. That's when we started to look at them in a different way."
Since the fungus crop reproduces asexually, Dr Himler thinks it might give the ants some kind of advantage "not to operate under the usual constraints of sexual reproduction".
"There is certainly more work to be done in this system," she added. "We're quite excited about the direction this research might take us, and its implications."
20090620
چیز آقای موسوی و چیز آقای احمدی نژادینا
| http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0pORyyeXds Probably made by Rajavi's group, but it is funny! |
20090618
NPR : Which Tweets From Iran Are True?
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2009/06/which_tweats_from_iran_are_tru.html?ft=1&f=103943429
Which Tweets From Iran Are True?
By Frank James
Many media organizations, present company included, have turned to social networking sites, including Twitter in the search for first-hand information on what's happening in Iran, especially since Iranian authorities have greatly restricted what foreign journalists there can report on and have stopped renewing journalists' visas.
But who can tell what's reliable and what isn't on Twitter? It's impossible to know even if what you're reading was actually written by people in Tehran or elsewhere in Iran, especially since there's a movement for as many people in the Twittersphere to use the Iranian capital as their location a là "I'm Spartacus" to make it harder for Iranian censors to stop tweets that are actually from Iran.
The unintended consequence of that move was to make it even harder for the non-Iranian censors to figure out what's really from Iran and what isn't. For instance, how do we know that Gabhan is really in Tehran and not, say, spoofing from Johannesburg?
And even if he's in Iran, how do we know his information is credible? It's even possible that some of the tweets are coming from Iranian authorities or foreign intelligence agencies issuing disinformation.
One function of mainstream media journalism is to disseminate information we've determined to be reliable. It's not easy to do and we journalists make mistakes in vetting "facts," witness much of the important reportage leading to the Iraq War. We're human.
But the reliance on Twitter and Facebook is essentially throwing the doors open to everything and anything.
All of which makes Jon Stewart's satirical riff last night on CNN's use of social-networking sites not only very funny but trenchant too.
| Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | ||||
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This isn't meant to denigrate the social-networking sites. Clearly, they are making it impossible for Iranian authorities to accomplish their goal of keeping the world ignorant of what's happening there.
But much of the information coming across those sites requires some heavy caveat emptor. We have to assume a lot of the information we're seeing on Twitter is true. We just don't know which part of the Twitter flow is and which isn't.
20090614
Juan Cole: Stealing the Iranian Election
Informed Comment: Stealing the Iranian ElectionTop Pieces of Evidence that the Iranian Presidential Election Was Stolen 1. It is claimed that Ahmadinejad won the city of Tabriz with 57%. His main opponent, Mir Hossein Mousavi, is an Azeri from Azerbaijan province, of which Tabriz is the capital. Mousavi, according to such polls as exist in Iran and widespread anecdotal evidence, did better in cities and is popular in Azerbaijan. Certainly, his rallies there were very well attended. So for an Azeri urban center to go so heavily for Ahmadinejad just makes no sense. In past elections, Azeris voted disproportionately for even minor presidential candidates who hailed from that province. 2. Ahmadinejad is claimed to have taken Tehran by over 50%. Again, he is not popular in the cities, even, as he claims, in the poor neighborhoods, in part because his policies have produced high inflation and high unemployment. That he should have won Tehran is so unlikely as to raise real questions about these numbers. [Ahmadinejad is widely thought only to have won Tehran in 2005 because the pro-reform groups were discouraged and stayed home rather than voting.) 3. It is claimed that cleric Mehdi Karoubi, the other reformist candidate, received 320,000 votes, and that he did poorly in Iran's western provinces, even losing in Luristan. He is a Lur and is popular in the west, including in Kurdistan. Karoubi received 17 percent of the vote in the first round of presidential elections in 2005. While it is possible that his support has substantially declined since then, it is hard to believe that he would get less than one percent of the vote. Moreover, he should have at least done well in the west, which he did not. 4. Mohsen Rezaie, who polled very badly and seems not to have been at all popular, is alleged to have received 670,000 votes, twice as much as Karoubi. 5. Ahmadinejad's numbers were fairly standard across Iran's provinces. In past elections there have been substantial ethnic and provincial variations. 6. The Electoral Commission is supposed to wait three days before certifying the results of the election, at which point they are to inform Khamenei of the results, and he signs off on the process. The three-day delay is intended to allow charges of irregularities to be adjudicated. In this case, Khamenei immediately approved the alleged results. I am aware of the difficulties of catching history on the run. Some explanation may emerge for Ahmadinejad's upset that does not involve fraud. For instance, it is possible that he has gotten the credit for spreading around a lot of oil money in the form of favors to his constituencies, but somehow managed to escape the blame for the resultant high inflation. But just as a first reaction, this post-election situation looks to me like a crime scene. And here is how I would reconstruct the crime. As the real numbers started coming into the Interior Ministry late on Friday, it became clear that Mousavi was winning. Mousavi's spokesman abroad, filmmaker Mohsen Makhbalbaf, alleges that the ministry even contacted Mousavi's camp and said it would begin preparing the population for this victory. The ministry must have informed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who has had a feud with Mousavi for over 30 years, who found this outcome unsupportable. And, apparently, he and other top leaders had been so confident of an Ahmadinejad win that they had made no contingency plans for what to do if he looked as though he would lose. They therefore sent blanket instructions to the Electoral Commission to falsify the vote counts. This clumsy cover-up then produced the incredible result of an Ahmadinejad landlside in Tabriz and Isfahan and Tehran. The reason for which Rezaie and Karoubi had to be assigned such implausibly low totals was to make sure Ahmadinejad got over 51% of the vote and thus avoid a run-off between him and Mousavi next Friday, which would have given the Mousavi camp a chance to attempt to rally the public and forestall further tampering with the election. This scenario accounts for all known anomalies and is consistent with what we know of the major players. More in my column, just out, in Salon.com: "Ahmadinejad reelected under cloud of fraud," where I argue that the outcome of the presidential elections does not and should not affect Obama's policies toward that country-- they are the right policies and should be followed through on regardless. The public demonstrations against the result don't appear to be that big. In the past decade, reformers have always backed down in Iran when challenged by hardliners, in part because no one wants to relive the horrible Great Terror of the 1980s after the revolution, when faction-fighting produced blood in the streets. Mousavi is still from that generation. My own guess is that you have to get a leadership born after the revolution, who does not remember it and its sanguinary aftermath, before you get people willing to push back hard against the rightwingers. So, there are protests against an allegedly stolen election. The Basij paramilitary thugs and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards will break some heads. Unless there has been a sea change in Iran, the theocrats may well get away with this soft coup for the moment. But the regime's legitimacy will take a critical hit, and its ultimate demise may have been hastened, over the next decade or two. What I've said is full of speculation and informed guesses. I'd be glad to be proved wrong on several of these points. Maybe I will be. PS: Here's the data: So here is what Interior Minister Sadeq Mahsouli said Saturday about the outcome of the Iranian presidential elections: "Of 39,165,191 votes counted (85 percent), Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won the election with 24,527,516 (62.63 percent)." He announced that Mir-Hossein Mousavi came in second with 13,216,411 votes (33.75 percent). Mohsen Rezaei got 678,240 votes (1.73 percent) Mehdi Karroubi with 333,635 votes (0.85 percent). He put the void ballots at 409,389 (1.04 percent). |
Is Ahmadinejad the Iranian Hafizollah Amin?
| Ever since the day this idiot came into power, his way of acting, his bold stupid words and his arrogant behavior inside and outside of Iran reminded me of another "revolutionary" leader in our recent history. Amin, who was a radical "communist" enforced radical secular changes into Afghanistan in the 70s, killing and imprisoning many mullahs or religious elders all around Afghanistan and paved the way for the Mujahedin and CIA's propaganda machine to use him as an example of the evil intention of the Soviet to destroy Islam, the outcome of Amin's action was the Soviet invasion that was the tipping point needed for the sick empire to collaps. Amin, was nothing but a CIA stoog who did what he was told to fulfill the long time dream of Berzinskey, George Bush and his radical gang inside the CIA to make Soviet suffer for the defeat and humiliation they faced in Vietnam. http://www.afghanland.com/history/amin.html http://www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp?entity=haizullah_amin_1 In Iran, the scenario seems to be the same, the stoog is acting in accordance to the need of the foreign powers to create a perfect image of Iran as Evil, unpredictable and dangerous to teh world. His so called re-election and the demonstration we see in Iran may be the last draw in the game and it will be the "needed" push that many Iran strategists were talking about when they were asking about removal of Iran's "danger" from their map. Maybe the 300 million dollars that Bush left asside for "change" in Iran, was not to be used by the opposition, but to be spent on idiot IRI activists who wanted their "beloved" leader to be re-elected. I know it is far-fetched, but possible! Cheers, /Farhad |
20090608
FYI: Complete Software CD for educational use
This is part of the UNESCO supported activity to create a free, safe and solid SW for educational purposes. You can download the SW at their site at: http://edubuntu.org/
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20090605
10 second of your time and Save the children will get 25 cents!
Just visit the page and click on their link, Intel will donate 25 cents to Save the Children for every click you make
http://www.smallthingschallenge.com/?view=thankyou&d=y
20090603
Reminder: Farhad invited you to join Facebook...
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20090529
France Opens Its First Military Base In Persian Gulf
By Lisa Bryant, VOA, Paris
French President Nicolas Sarkozy has inaugurated France's first military base in the Persian Gulf region at a time of heightened political sensitivities in the volatile Middle East - and as France seeks to expand its presence in the region.
Based in the Emirates state of Abu Dhabi, the French base amounts to France's first new military base overseas in 50 years. It has been dubbed the Camp of Peace, and it is expected to host up to 500 troops on three separate sites.
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The base's opening comes amid ongoing international concern about Iran's nuclear ambitions. But as he inaugurated it in Abu Dhabi on Tuesday, French President Nicolas Sarkozy said it targeted no country.
Rather, Mr. Sarkozy said, the base marked France's long-term engagement towards its friends, including the United Arab Emirates. If anything were to happen to France's friends in the region, he said, Paris would be on their side.
The French government says the base will help support its troops deployed in the Indian Ocean but also serve to reinforce bilateral military cooperation. But the base also gives France a strategic military presence in the region - alongside the United States and Britain which also have bases in Persian Gulf.
France also hopes to strike lucrative deals to supply the United Arab Emirates with civilian nuclear technology as well as military aircraft.
While the French base is a first in the Persian Gulf region, France has a sizable military presence in Africa, with bases in West and Central Africa as well as in Djibouti, in East Africa.
France is also a key player in a number of UN and NATO operations, with more than 3,000 troops stationed in Afghanistan.
20090519
Check out my photos on Facebook
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Amnesty International : Shocking violence in Sri Lanka
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20090514
Fw: The torture testimony that Cheney is trying to drown out
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Tell-a-friend!20090513
BIOS Maker Aims to Retake the PC : Phoenix Technologies is pushing its pint-size OS as a complement to Windows.
BIOS Maker Aims to Retake the PC
http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/22643/
Phoenix Technologies is pushing its pint-size OS as a complement to Windows.
By Robert Lemos
Typically, PC users do not give the low-level software on their computers a second thought. Known as the basic input-output system, or BIOS, this software plays an extremely important role in the way that computers work--checking and preparing hardware when a machine is switched on--but most people don't even know it's there.
California-based Phoenix Technologies--the largest provider of BIOS software to computer makers--has tired of being invisible. Building on the virtualization technology more common to high-power workstations and data centers, the company has revamped its BIOS software to offer features that people tend to associate with a full-blown operating system: the ability to access more peripherals, such as disks and mouses, and networking and wireless communications.
Earlier this year,
"Our standard here, when we want to see how the PC should work, is to look at smart phones," he says. "Those are on almost all the time, they don't boot very often, and they are instant-on."
The core system software, as the company now calls its BIOS, builds on Linux operating system software and virtualization technology. Virtualization software started out as a way for users of one operating system, such as Windows XP, to run another operating system, such as Mac OS X or Linux, in a virtual environment. But as the technology has evolved, developers have recognized other advantages, aside from interoperability. By creating a virtualized layer of software, known as a hypervisor, between a computer's hardware and the operating system, for example, data can be transparently checked for viruses and other malicious software. In the business world, a single big server or a cluster of computers can run virtualized systems so that resources can be divvied up among customers.
Yet the technology has not found much use in consumer products. Now every PC and laptop shipped with
The most visible selling point for the slimmed-down operating system is speed. Because it does not carry the weight of numerous drivers, utility software, and add-ons, HyperSpace taxes the processor and memory far less than does Windows,
The software can be used in two other ways. As a nod to netbook manufacturers,
The company has worked hard to get the technology right, and the CEO says that the user experience, and not the engineering, is the most important part. "If you don't get the experience right, the fact that you created the world's coolest technology doesn't matter,"
After
Even with those ambitious plans, however, convincing consumers to adopt a new environment will be hard, says analyst Enderle. "This platform could be a native platform for the netbook, but I think it needs to mature a bit before many people will take it as it stands alone."
Boot time: HyperSpace, developed by Phoenix Technologies, is sold as an add-on that consumers can install and as a product that PC manufacturers can bundle with systems.
Office suite: The BIOS software runs a variety of common applications, including a Web browser, a media player, and office productivity software.
Browse away: With the software’s fast boot-up times and instant-on capability, consumers can get to their favorite sites quickly.
User friendly: HyperSpace features its own user interface.
20090505
Would you publish an article with this title on your paper: "It's time lily-livered Europe stood up to Jewish bigots"?
Dear Sir or Madam,
I am a fan of The First post and have been following the paper since it’s early days.
I was shocked and surprised then I received your daily update this morning. The article by Ms. Hirsi where she warns about the danger of Europe “falling” into the hand of the “evil” Muslims who “do not share” the same view as “us” was a reminder of the articles I read about the Evil Jews destroying the life of the “good Germans” from the history books.
I really wonder if the FirstPost would dare to publish an article with similar text? How about just changing the word Muslim to Jew, Islam to Judaism etc to see how offending this so called “opinion” of Ms. Hisri is.
I have done the work for you and wonder if you can see my point, I have changed the text slightly keeping it as close as possible to the original article to highlight the disgusting “logic” used in this article.
As an Iranian who was forced into exile over 25 years ago I know the danger of fanatic Islam. I lost several of my best friends during the 80s who were killed by the regime in
The extreme and dangerous picture that Ms. Hirsi and her likes are putting in front of us is nothing other than the image the fascists of
I believe the FirstPost owes an apology to it’s readers to publish such a nonsense.
Best regards,
/
PS. Here is the modified article by Ms. Hirsi:
(the original of the article can be found on the following link)
In 2006, I had a debate with Menachim Hertzel , the author of Western Jews and the future of Judaism.
In the hypothetical event of a war between
Mr Hertzel has dual citizenship. He’s an Israeli by birth and a Swiss by naturalisation. His response was one of rage on different levels. Above all I think he was outraged that one should ask such a question. He refused to answer.
Mr Hertzel, like many other Jews, may have two or more citizenships. From all that he expresses both in person and on paper, it is clear that his loyalty, above all, is to Judaism. I do not doubt that he would die for Judaism, like most Jews, and that’s his prerogative. But what European countries have done is give citizenship to individuals who feel no obligation to share in their societies for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer and in the event of a catastrophe, sacrifice themselves.
No debate is more explosive than the debate on the future of Judaism in
In this way, they evade one of the chief criteria of citizenship. Political allegiance to the constitution of your country is the minimum requirement. It is this state of affairs that makes Christopher Caldwell’s book Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration and the West (
This absence of mind, which
In March this year, the French intellectual Pascal Bruckner and I spoke about
This seems to be reassuring. But would these agnostic and unpracticing Jews, if push came to shove, die for Judaism or for
The numbers and insights that
Take the debate on freedom of expression. In 1989 and afterwards, the provocations in the name of Judaism were greeted with a confident, “No way! This is
Two decades later, Europeans are not so sure about the values of freedom of expression. Most members of the media engage in self-censorship. Textbooks in schools and universities have been adapted in such a way as not to offend Jew sentiment. And legislation to punish ‘blasphemy’, if not passed, has been considered in most countries - or old laws that were never used are being revived.
Today, in the name of Judaism, Mosques are vandalised
Take anti-Muslims in
The sensitivity and guilt Europeans feel about the War-in-Iraq is comparable to the sensitivity and guilt that Americans feel towards black Americans. A decade or two ago, it was unthinkable for Muslims to be slandered openly and be targeted for no other reason than their Muslim.
Today, in the name of Judaism, Mosques are vandalised. There are open denials of the War-in-Iraq. There is an active network of Jew organisations lobbying to curtail or even get rid of
Take the history of women’s liberation in
Women’s shelters have adapted their curriculum - instead of teaching the women who come to them how to become self-reliant, the shelters facilitate prayer rooms and employ mediators from the Jewish community. All this mediation serves only one purpose - that is, to return the woman to the circumstances of abuse she left.
Here is a system, which was a tool to emancipate, that has been completely transformed to serve the Jew purpose of obedience. If the wife obeys, then the husband no longer needs to beat her. The matter is settled.
The same applies to gays. Ten years ago, it would have been unthinkable that anti-gay sentiment would pass without condemnation. In
To be on the safe side in certain neighbourhoods in
Jews try to abolish freedom of expression using the vocabulary of freedom
The terrifying paradox about these developments is that Jew immigrants were admitted into European borders on the basis of universal rights and freedoms that a large number of them now trample on, while others perhaps watch passively, or seek to defend only the image of Judaism.
Even worse, those who lobby to abolish freedom of expression and to discriminate against Muslims, women and gays do so while using the vocabulary of freedom and through the institutions of parliament and the courts that were designed to protect the rights of all.
American observers like Caldwell, Bruce Bawer, Walter Laqeur and many others who go to Europe and write candidly about these things can return to America, where they can write on another topic, keep their jobs and their social networks.
Europeans who do the same thing as
In reality, if
European would escape into an obscure mesh of conscientious objection. All that Judaism has to do is walk into the vacuum
20090430
Simple way to help the children of Ghana
| Hello folks, I friend of us has set up a non-profit organization on the US to help the orphanages in Ghana (and maybe in the future, other parts of the world). http://www.orphansheroes.org/ They are desperately need help to keep up with the increased food prices and inflation to be able to feed those childrends and keep them in school. You can help by changing the search setting of your web browser to http://www.goodsearch.com by following some simple tasks. It will not cost you anything, and will not interrupt your daily work, but everytime you search the web, Orphan's Heroes organization will receive 1 cent, if you make 500 searches a month they receive $5 which means they feed one child for one week. If 100 people do the same, they will be able to feed a whole orphanage for one month, if 1000 people do the same, they can pay for the school and material of those childrens as well. It is as simple as that.  Your 10 minutes of work to change the setting of your browser can make a HUGE difference in the lives of those kids. Thanks in advance for your help, Cheers, /Farhad
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20090417
Lisa & Farhad Abdolian has invited you to join Kiva!
Hello!
Hi!
I just made a loan to someone in Philippines using a revolutionary new website called Kiva (www.kiva.org).
You can go to Kiva's website and lend to someone across the globe who needs a loan for their business - like raising goats, selling vegetables at market or making bricks. Each loan has a picture of the entrepreneur, a description of their business and how they plan to use the loan so you know exactly how your money is being spent - and you get updates letting you know how the entrepreneur is going.
The best part is, when the entrepreneur pays back their loan you get your money back - and Kiva's loans are managed by microfinance institutions on the ground who have a lot of experience doing this, so you can trust that your money is being handled responsibly.
I just made a loan to an entrepreneur named Nemia Medida in Philippines. They still need another $125.00 to complete their loan request of $275.00 (you can loan as little as $25.00!). Help me get this entrepreneur off the ground by clicking on the link below to make a loan to Nemia Medida too:
http://www.kiva.org/app.php?page=businesses&action=about&id=102391
It's finally easy to actually do something about poverty - using Kiva I know exactly who my money is loaned to and what they're using it for. And most of all, I know that I'm helping them build a
sustainable business that will provide income to feed, clothe, house and educate their family long after my loan is paid back.
Join me in changing the world - one loan at a time.
Thanks!
---------------------------------------------------------
What others are saying about www.Kiva.org:
'Revolutionising how donors and lenders in the US are connecting with small entrepreneurs in developing countries.'
-- BBC
'If you've got 25 bucks, a PC and a PayPal account, you've now got the wherewithal to be an international financier.'
-- CNN Money
'Smaller investors can make loans of as little as $25 to specific individual entrepreneurs through a service launched last fall by Kiva.org.'
-- The Wall Street Journal
'An inexpensive feel-good investment opportunity...All loaned funds go directly to the applicants, and most loans are repaid in full.'
-- Entrepreneur Magazine
Check it out!
https://www.kiva.org/app.php?page=register&_isc=9ebcd556-7c7f-102c-9865-7ae612a60d4d&_te=inu
20090416
FW: "law and Logic"read till end
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20090414
Fw: [hoi] -- Re: Realpolitik for Iran
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20090413
Tomgram: Roane Carey, Will Israel Attack Iran?
Tomgram: Roane Carey, Will Israel Attack Iran?Sometimes, reading about the Middle East, or at least about Israel, Iran, and nuclear weapons, feels like your most basic broken-record phenomenon. As New York Times op-ed columnist Roger Cohen reminded readers recently, there's nothing new about Israeli predictions that Iranian "madmen" -- or rather, as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the head of a rather extreme new government, put it recently, "a messianic apocalyptic cult" -- would soon have nuclear weapons in their hands. The charges and predictions of the imminent arrival of the Iranian bomb go back well into the 1990s and yet, despite Iran's growing nuclear enrichment program, we still don't know what the true predilections of its leaders are on the basic issue of weaponization. (They might, for instance, be planning to opt for the Japan "solution," not weaponizing, but simply being capable of doing so relatively quickly.) The other part of that broken-record phenomenon concerns Israel's nuclear arsenal, which I wrote about at TomDispatch back in 2003, since which time remarkably little has changed. One of the genuinely strange aspects of just about anything you can read here in the U.S. on nuclear weapons and the Middle East is this: all fear and much print (and TV time) is focused on whether the Iranians may someday, in the near or far future, get a nuclear weapon; that is, we're focused on a weapon that doesn't yet exist and, for all we know, may never exist. In the meantime, just about no mention is ever made of Israel's massive nuclear arsenal, which includes city-busting weapons, and leaves that tiny country as perhaps the fifth largest nuclear power on the planet. In addition, at least some of its nuclear weapons are on submarines in the Mediterranean, which means that the country is invulnerable to the madness of a take-out first strike by any other nation. This is simply reality. The Israelis have long taken a position in which, as Jonathan Schell once put the matter, "They won't confirm or deny that they have [nuclear weapons], but they have this curious phrase: 'We will not introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East.' Evidently, in some abstruse way, possessing them is not introducing them." Our media has, in essence, accepted the Israeli approach to its arsenal as if it were a reasonable reportorial stance on the subject. It's from within this distinctly unbalanced world of heightened fear and silence that we read of both the dangers of the Iranian bomb and responses to it, which is in itself, simply put, dangerous. Recently, warnings from Israel about possible future attacks on Iran have multiplied. Roane Carey, managing editor of the Nation magazine and co-editor of The Other Israel, is in Israel at the moment on a journalism fellowship at the Chaim Herzog Center for Middle East Studies and Diplomacy. As his first piece for this site, I asked him to offer an assessment from that country of just how dangerous the most recent warnings and threats actually are. Tom
Copyright 2009 Roane Carey |
20090410
Good English abbreviation: BOHICA
This is an acronym that can be used often in today’s economy J
1 BOHICA acronym, although pronounced as if it is a single word, for "
Commonly used around the workplace when getting repeatedly fucked by the work center supervisor. Very commonly used within the military, specifically the navy and FFG-22.
2 (Office Space reference)
Bill Lumburgh asking Peter Gibbons to work on Saturday is a perfect example of getting fucked by the supervisor.
Lumbergh asking Peter to come in on Sunday is even more fucked up. Peter should have yelled "BOHICA!" and walked out of the office.
3. BOHICA Acronym: Bend Over Here it Comes Again. Often associated as the 3rd and highest level of something gone very wrong.
Level 1) SNAFU Situation
Level 2) FUBAR Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition.
Level 3) BOHICA Bend Over Here it Comes Again.
"I've already been chewed out by the customer, my boss and now my wife found out. It's a friggin' BOHICA".
4. Bend over, here it come again. Military slang.
The Navy screwed me twice this month, but BOHICA.
5. BOHICA
That act of getting shafted by your unit, common reference to homosexual act of bending over and grabbing your ankles for insertion of object/s into your anus, usually painfully and without pleasure.
Look guys, the 726th shut down the porta-johns for some stupid ass reason, BOHICA!
6. BOHICA An acronym for "bend over, here it comes again". Refers to getting screwed over by the same means twice.
Dan, your car broke down again! BOHICA!
20090409
Mixing Real and Virtual Controls : A Microsoft project lets a touch screen control other hardware.
I am not such a big fan of MS products, but this project sounds like fun!
Halo effect: This
Credit: Microsoft Research
Mixing Real and Virtual Controls
http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/22411/?nlid=1936&a=f
A Microsoft project lets a touch screen control other hardware.
By Kate Greene
Large touch-screen tables have emerged as a useful way for several people to collaborate on projects like video editing or graphic design, but often these tasks require fine controls that can be difficult to simulate on a touch surface with limited resolution. When a person needs precision, it may be best to use a physical controller instead, says Dan Morris, a researcher at Microsoft.
Morris and his colleagues have developed software for touch-screen surfaces that allows physical controls to be added to them. In addition, the software lets people define the functions that each knob, button, and slider on a controller will perform.
The researchers' system, called Ensemble, was presented on Monday at the Computer-Human Interaction (CHI 2009) Conference in
The idea of incorporating traditional input devices like mouses or keyboards with a touch display is not new, but the Microsoft researchers show with Ensemble that it's possible to make hardware do more than a single specified task.
Cameras within the Ensemble table detect a special tag on the bottom of each audio control box to recognize each box and determine its position on the surface. The software then produces an "aura" around each device, including touch-surface controls like "play," "pause," and "stop," and virtual sliders that correspond to physical knobs on the box.
A person can then edit a music track, for example, using both the physical device and the touch-surface controls. The virtual sliders can be used to zoom in on the audio waveform of a track, or to go to a different location on the waveform by panning. The physical knobs on the box perform the same function but offer much finer control. The system also allows a person to change the function of the knobs to, say, control the volume of a trumpet track instead.
"It's a software mechanism for telling the hardware what to do," says Morris. He explains that once a person has mapped different functions onto the controller, she's able to save it for later or pass it along to someone else who has a similar role in the editing process.
The paper, presented at CHI 2009 by Rebecca Fiebrink, a graduate student at
Robert Jacob, a professor of electrical engineering at
Jacob, who chaired the session in which the paper was presented, acknowledges that bridging the gap between physical and digital objects can be challenging. "It's a difficult problem with no general solutions, but rather individual interesting designs," he says. "Ideally, you want the benefits of the digital without giving up those of the physical."
While Ensemble was designed for sound editing, its underlying technology could find other applications in graphics, gaming, and visual design, says Morris. "It could be used in scenarios where you want people to collaborate on a surface as a group," he says, but where the resolution of touch surface limits the precision of the virtual controls.
Copyright Technology Review 2009.
20090408
DAMN those doctors, they are taking away every good things in life as dangerous for our health :(
Oral sex linked to throat cancer
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/6639461.stm
|
Scientists looked at tissue samples from patients |
A virus contracted through oral sex is the cause of some throat cancers, say US scientists.
HPV infection was found to be a much stronger risk factor than tobacco or alcohol use, the
The New England Journal of Medicine study said the risk was almost nine times higher for people who reported oral sex with more than six partners.
But experts said a larger study was needed to confirm the findings.
HPV infection is the cause of the majority of cervical cancers, and 80% of sexually active women can expect to have an HPV infection at some point in their lives.
|
|
Dr Gypsyamber D'Souza, study author |
The Johns Hopkins study took blood and saliva from 100 men and women newly diagnosed with oropharyngeal cancer which affects the throat, tonsils and back of the tongue.
They also asked questions about sex practices and other risk factors for the disease, such as family history.
Those who had evidence of prior oral HPV infection had a 32-fold increased risk of throat cancer.
HPV16 - one of the most common cancer-causing strains of the virus - was present in the tumours of 72% of cancer patients in the study.
Risk factors
There was no added risk for people infected with HPV who also smoked and drank alcohol, suggesting the virus itself is driving the risk of the cancer.
Oral sex was said to be the main mode of transmission of HPV but the researchers said mouth-to-mouth transmission, for example through kissing, could not be ruled out.
Most HPV infections clear with little or no symptoms but a small percentage of people who acquired high-risk strains may develop a cancer, the researchers added.
Study author Dr Gypsyamber D'Souza said: "It is important for health care providers to know that people without the traditional risk factors of tobacco and alcohol use can nevertheless be at risk of oropharyngeal cancer."
Co-researcher Dr Maura Gillison said previous research by the team had suggested there was a strong link.
But she added: "People should be reassured that oropharyngeal cancer is relatively uncommon and the overwhelming majority of people with an oral HPV infection probably will not get throat cancer."
A vaccine which protects against cervical cancer caused by HPV strains 6, 11, 16 and 18, and also against genital warts is available and the researchers said the study provided a rationale for vaccinating both girls and boys.
But whether the vaccine would protect against oral HPV infection is not yet known.
Dr Julie Sharp, science information officer at Cancer Research
"As this was a small study, further research is needed to confirm these observations."
"We know that after age, the main causes of mouth cancer are smoking or chewing tobacco or betel nut, and drinking too much alcohol."
20090406
EU becoming the new Stasi state-DDR's last leader Eric Honecker is laughing in his grave
Details of user e-mails, website visits and net phone calls will be stored by internet service providers (ISPs) from Monday under an EU directive. The plans were drawn up in the wake of the London bombings in 2005. ISPs and telecoms firms have resisted the proposals while some countries in the EU are contesting the directive. Jim Killock, executive director of the Open Rights Group, said it was a "crazy directive" with potentially dangerous repercussions for citizens. All ISPs in the European Union will have to store the records for a year. An EU directive which requires telecoms firms to hold on to telephone records for 12 months is already in force. The data stored does not include the content of e-mails and websites, nor a recording of a net phone call, but is used to determine connections between individuals. Authorities can get access to the stored records with a warrant. Governments across the EU have now started to implement the directive into their own national legislation. The UK Home Office, responsible for matters of policing and national security, said the measure had "effective safeguards" in place. ISPs across Europe have complained about the extra costs involved in maintaining the records. The UK government has agreed to reimburse ISPs for the cost of retaining the data. Mr Killock said the directive was passed only by "stretching the law". The EU passed it by "saying it was a commercial matter and not a police matter", he explained. "Because of that they got it through on a simple vote, rather than needing unanimity, which is required for policing matters," he said. Sense of shock He added: "It was introduced in the wake of the London bombings when there was a sense of shock in Europe. It was used to push people in a particular direction." Sweden has decided to ignore the directive completely while there is a challenge going through the German courts at present. "Hopefully, we can see some sort of challenge to this directive," said Mr Killock. In a statement, the Home Office said it was implementing the directive because it was the government's priority to "protect public safety and national security". It added: "Communications data is the where and when of the communication and plays a vital part in a wide range of criminal investigations and prevention of terrorist attacks, as well as contributing to public safety more generally. "Without communications data resolving crimes such as the Rhys Jones murder would be very difficult if not impossible. "Access to communications data is governed by the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (Ripa) which ensures that effective safeguards are in place and that the data can only be accessed when it is necessary and proportionate to do so." |
20090403
Fw: جوکهای انقلابی
: جوکهای انقلابی
2- 3- 4-
شيخي را پرسيدند اسلام چيست؟
|
20090319
Liquid Battery Offers Promising Solar Energy Storage Technique
Liquid Battery Offers Promising Solar Energy Storage TechniqueMarch 6th, 2009 by Lisa Zyga The all-liquid battery: discharged (left), charging (middle), and charged (right). Molten magnesium (blue) is the top electrode, in the middle is the electrolyte (green), and molten antimony (yellow) is the bottom electrode. Image credit: Arthur Mount. (PhysOrg.com) -- One of the biggest challenges currently facing large-scale solar energy technology is finding an effective way to store the energy, which is essential for using the electricity at night or on cloudy days. Recently, researchers from MIT have designed a new kind of battery that, unlike conventional batteries, is made of all-liquid active materials. Donald Sadoway, a materials chemistry professor at MIT, and his team have fabricated prototypes of the liquid battery, and have demonstrated that the materials can quickly absorb large amounts of electricity, as required for solar energy storage. "No one had been able to get their arms around the problem of energy storage on a massive scale for the power grid," says Sadoway. "We're literally looking at a battery capable of storing the grid." The battery consists of three layers of liquids: two electrode liquids on the top and bottom (electrodes are usually solid in conventional batteries), and an electrolyte liquid in the middle. In the researchers' first prototype, the electrodes were molten metals - magnesium on the top and antimony on the bottom - while the electrolyte was a molten salt such as sodium sulfide. In later prototypes, the researchers investigated using other materials for improved performance. Since each liquid has a different density, the liquids automatically form the three distinct layers. When charging, the solid container holding the liquids collects electrons from exterior solar panels or another power supply, and later, for discharging, the container carries the electrons away to the electrical grid to be used as electricity. As electrons flow into the battery cell, magnesium ions in the electrolyte gain electrons and form magnesium metal, rising to form the upper molten magnesium electrode. At the same time, antimony ions in the electrolyte lose electrons, and sink to form the lower molten antimony electrode. At this point, the battery is fully charged, since the battery has thick electrode layers and a small layer of electrolyte. To discharge the electrical current, the process is reversed, and the metal atoms become ions again. As Sadoway explained in a recent article in MIT's Technology Review, the liquid battery is a promising candidate for solar energy storage for several reasons. For one thing, it costs less than a third of the cost of today's batteries, since the materials are inexpensive and the design allows for simple manufacturing. Further, the liquid battery has a longer lifetime than conventional batteries, since there are no solid active materials to degrade. The liquid battery is also useful in a wide range of locations compared with other proposed solar storage methods, such as pumping water. Most importantly, the liquid battery's electrodes can operate at electrical currents tens of times higher than any previous battery, making it capable of quickly absorbing large amounts of electricity. The researchers hope to commercialize the liquid battery in the next five years. As Sadoway explained, connecting the batteries into a giant battery pack to supply electricity for New York City would require nearly 60,000 square meters of land. Such a battery pack could store energy from enormous solar farms, which would replace today's power plants and transmission lines as they become old. |
20090317
On the road to Fascism in Australia: Banned hyperlinks could cost you $11,000 a day
|
20090316
Safe P2P software for all :)
| They call it the nightmare of the Hollywood and the RIAA :) http://oneswarm.cs.washington.edu/ |
20090313
20090225
The Nation Magazine News: Nationalizing Banks, Slumdog Subtext and More
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Common Dreams: News & Views | 02.24.09
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20090224
Fw: Breaking research finds US weapons in Gaza
FYI
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20090220
Watch many international TV stations on your computer!
| Hi Guys, This is an interesting applicaiton for those of you who wants to watch alternative news channels such as ITN, Al-Jazeera english, DW, etc on your PC for free you can download a small application from this site and have access to all those channels: http://www.livestation.com Hope you find it useful, cheers, /Farhad |
20090218
Doctors Without Boarder: Beyond Cholera: Zimbabwe's Worsening Crises
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20090119
Fwd: ' Sex ' Farangi vs. ' Sex' Irani
' Sex ' Farangi:> Ahh
> Oh
> Yes
> Oh
> Baby
> Come
> Huuummm
> Fuck me
> OOOHHH
> ................
> Thanks!
>
>
> >' Sex' Irani:> Yavash
> Akh
> Hosh !! Heyvooon
> Muhamo kandi
> Boo midi
> Jerr khord!!
> Vahshi
> Bi shour, raft too koonam
20090114
Jewish leader calls for "eradiction" of all Palestinians and carpet bombing of Gaza
Can you just imagine if these words had come out of a prominent religious leader in Iran? how do you think the world would react on it? Don't you think EVER single muslim leader and every single religious figure would be asked to condemn this?
And for your information No, this is not propaganda or a sick joke, the source is Jerusalem Post:
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1180527966693&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FPrinter
And for your information No, this is not propaganda or a sick joke, the source is Jerusalem Post:
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1180527966693&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FPrinter
According to Jewish war ethics, wrote Eliyahu, an entire city holds collective responsibility for the immoral behavior of individuals. In Gaza, the entire populace is responsible because they do nothing to stop the firing of Kassam rockets.
The former chief rabbi also said it was forbidden to risk the lives of Jews in Sderot or the lives of IDF soldiers for fear of injuring or killing Palestinian noncombatants living in Gaza.
Eliyahu could not be reached for an interview. However, Eliyahu's son, Shmuel Eliyahu, who is chief rabbi of Safed, said his father opposed a ground troop incursion into Gaza that would endanger IDF soldiers. Rather, he advocated carpet bombing the general area from which the Kassams were launched, regardless of the price in Palestinian life.
"If they don't stop after we kill 100, then we must kill a thousand," said Shmuel Eliyahu. "And if they do not stop after 1,000 then we must kill 10,000. If they still don't stop we must kill 100,000, even a million. Whatever it takes to make them stop."
In the letter, Eliyahu quoted from Psalms. "I will pursue my enemies and apprehend them and I will not desist until I have eradicated them."
20081217
20081213
Say 'no thanks' to traditional holiday presents this year
Doctors Without Borders
Executive Director
Doctors Without Borders/MSF USA
© 2008 MSF All rights reserved.333 7th Avenue, 2nd Floor, New York, NY 10001-5004 | Phone: 212-679-6800
Make a donation: Toll-free at 1-888-392-0392 24 hours a day, 7 days a week | Donate Online
20081209
Fwd: FW: Farshid Amin song for Obama
I am neither a supporter of Obama or like those Iranians who suck up to him as if he is the messiah and will bring peace and prosperity to the world. But I thought maybe some of you find this interesting.
Iranian composer Farshid Amin has writen a great song called "change" which was performed at a gala for Barack Obama two weeks ago. Lionel Richie and The Pointer Sisters also submitted songs but Farshid's was chosen. He has been invited to perform the song on election night at the Democratic Victory Gala in Orange County . He is the first Iranian singer ever to perform on election night.
Please watch the clip and pass it to all your friends who want a positive change.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vaibPD0658c
20081203
Fwd: Farsi books online
Hi,
This is a site with a lot of links to where you can find Farsi books online.
Also, this site has a lot of historical documents about the Iranian opposition group's history and publications:
20081128
This is really cool! Electrically-driven Minis in Berlin!
BMW, Vattenfall field test e-mobiles in
By Christoph Hammerschmidt 
Automotive Design Europe
(11/25/2008 11:56 AM EST)
Vattenfall will install publicly accessible "energy dispensers". BMW will provide the vehicles for the test — 50 electrically-driven Minis. The vehicles are part of a fleet of electrical cars currently deployed in similar tests worldwide. The car vendor hopes to gather cognitions in the field of electromobility. The trial focuses on suitability for daily use and user acceptance. The insights gathered will be used for future e-car volume production, the company said.
The cars will be equipped with a 150-kw electric motor which gives the vehicles a maximum speed of 152 km/h. The driving range of the lithium-ion battery equipped vehicles will be 250 km — significantly more than electrical cars used to have up to now.
The project will be accompanied by scientists from the Technical Universities of
With 50 vehicles participating, the project is much smaller than a similar one announced recently by the Nissan-Renault and the Portuguese government in
20081126
US government debt guaranees will be more than 7.8 Thousand Billion Dollars!
http://bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=arEE1iClqDrk&refer=home
The
The unprecedented pledge of funds includes $3.18 trillion already tapped by financial institutions in the biggest response to an economic emergency since the New Deal of the 1930s, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The commitment dwarfs the plan approved by lawmakers, the Treasury Department’s $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program. Federal Reserve lending last week was 1,900 times the weekly average for the three years before the crisis.
When Congress approved the TARP on Oct. 3, Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson acknowledged the need for transparency and oversight. Now, as regulators commit far more money while refusing to disclose loan recipients or reveal the collateral they are taking in return, some Congress members are calling for the Fed to be reined in.
“Whether it’s lending or spending, it’s tax dollars that are going out the window and we end up holding collateral we don’t know anything about,” said Congressman Scott Garrett, a New Jersey Republican who serves on the House Financial Services Committee. “The time has come that we consider what sort of limitations we should be placing on the Fed so that authority returns to elected officials as opposed to appointed ones.”
Too Big to Fail
Bloomberg News tabulated data from the Fed, Treasury and Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and interviewed regulatory officials, economists and academic researchers to gauge the full extent of the government’s rescue effort.
The bailout includes a Fed program to buy as much as $2.4 trillion in short-term notes, called commercial paper, that companies use to pay bills, begun Oct. 27, and $1.4 trillion from the FDIC to guarantee bank-to-bank loans, started Oct. 14.
William Poole, former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of
‘Credit Risk’
The government committed $29 billion to help engineer the takeover in March of Bear Stearns Cos. by New York-based JPMorgan Chase & Co. and $122.8 billion in addition to TARP allocations to bail out New York-based American International Group Inc., once the world’s largest insurer.
Citigroup received $306 billion of government guarantees for troubled mortgages and toxic assets. The Treasury Department also will inject $20 billion into the bank after its stock fell 60 percent last week.
“No question there is some credit risk there,”
Congressman Darrell Issa, a California Republican on the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said risk is lurking in the programs that
“The thing that people don’t understand is it’s not how likely that the exposure becomes a reality, but what if it does?” Issa said. “There’s no transparency to it so who’s to say they’re right?”
The worst financial crisis in two generations has erased $23 trillion, or 38 percent, of the value of the world’s companies and brought down three of the biggest Wall Street firms.
Markets Down
The Dow Jones Industrial Average through Friday is down 38 percent since the beginning of the year and 43 percent from its peak on Oct. 9, 2007. The S&P 500 fell 45 percent from the beginning of the year through Friday and 49 percent from its peak on Oct. 9, 2007. The Nikkei 225 Index has fallen 46 percent from the beginning of the year through Friday and 57 percent from its most recent peak of 18,261.98 on July 9, 2007. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. is down 78 percent, to $53.31, on Friday from its peak of $247.92 on Oct. 31, 2007, and 75 percent this year.
Regulators hope the rescue will contain the damage and keep banks providing the credit that is the lifeblood of the
Most of the spending programs are run out of the New York Fed, whose president, Timothy Geithner, is said to be President- elect Barack Obama’s choice to be Treasury Secretary.
‘They Got Snookered’
The money that’s been pledged is equivalent to $24,000 for every man, woman and child in the country. It’s nine times what the
“It’s unprecedented,” said Bob Eisenbeis, chief monetary economist at Vineland, New Jersey-based Cumberland Advisors Inc. and an economist for the Atlanta Fed for 10 years until January. “The backlash has begun already. Congress is taking a lot of hits from their constituents because they got snookered on the TARP big time. There’s a lot of supposedly smart people who look to be totally incompetent and it’s all going to fall on the taxpayer.”
President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal of the 1930s, when almost 10,000 banks failed and there was no mechanism to bolster them with cash, is the only rival to the government’s current response. The savings and loan bailout of the 1990s cost $209.5 billion in inflation-adjusted numbers, of which $173 billion came from taxpayers, according to a July 1996 report by the U.S. General Accounting Office, now called the Government Accountability Office.
‘Worst Crisis’
The 1979
The commitment of public money is appropriate to the peril, said Ethan Harris, co-head of
“This is the worst capital markets crisis in modern history,” Harris said. “So you have the biggest intervention in modern history.”
Bloomberg has requested details of Fed lending under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act and filed a federal lawsuit against the central bank Nov. 7 seeking to force disclosure of borrower banks and their collateral.
Collateral is an asset pledged to a lender in the event a loan payment isn’t made.
‘That’s Counterproductive’
“Some have asked us to reveal the names of the banks that are borrowing, how much they are borrowing, what collateral they are posting,” Bernanke said Nov. 18 to the House Financial Services Committee. “We think that’s counterproductive.”
The Fed should account for the collateral it takes in exchange for loans to banks, said Paul Kasriel, chief economist at Chicago-based Northern Trust Corp. and a former research economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of
“There is a lack of transparency here and, given that the Fed is taking on a huge amount of credit risk now, it would seem to me as a taxpayer there should be more transparency,” Kasriel said.
Bernanke’s Fed is responsible for $4.74 trillion of pledges, or 61 percent of the total commitment of $7.76 trillion, based on data compiled by Bloomberg concerning
“Too often the public is focused on the wrong piece of that number, the $700 billion that Congress approved,” said J.D. Foster, a former staff member of the Council of Economic Advisers who is now a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation in
Fed Rescue Efforts
The Fed’s rescue attempts began last December with the creation of the Term Auction Facility to allow lending to dealers for collateral. After Bear Stearns’s collapse in March, the central bank started making direct loans to securities firms at the same discount rate it charges commercial banks, which take customer deposits.
In the three years before the crisis, such average weekly borrowing by banks was $48 million, according to the central bank. Last week it was $91.5 billion.
The failure of a second securities firm, Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., in September, led to the creation of the Commercial Paper Funding Facility and the Money Market Investor Funding Facility, or MMIFF. The two programs, which have pledged $2.3 trillion, are designed to restore calm in the money markets, which deal in certificates of deposit, commercial paper and Treasury bills.
Lehman Failure
“Money markets seized up after Lehman failed,” said Neal Soss, chief economist at Credit Suisse Group in New York and a former aide to Fed chief Paul Volcker. “Lehman failing made a lot of subsequent actions necessary.”
The FDIC, chaired by Sheila Bair, is contributing 20 percent of total rescue commitments. The FDIC’s $1.4 trillion in guarantees will amount to a bank subsidy of as much as $54 billion over three years, or $18 billion a year, because borrowers will pay a lower interest rate than they would on the open market, according to Raghu Sundurum and Viral Acharya of New York University and the London Business School.
Congress and the Treasury have ponied up $892 billion in TARP and other funding, or 11.5 percent.
The Federal Housing Administration, overseen by Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Steven Preston, was given the authority to guarantee $300 billion of mortgages, or about 4 percent of the total commitment, with its Hope for Homeowners program, designed to keep distressed borrowers from foreclosure.
Federal Guarantees
Most of the federal guarantees reduce interest rates on loans to banks and securities firms, which would create a subsidy of at least $6.6 billion annually for the financial industry, according to data compiled by Bloomberg comparing rates charged by the Fed against market interest currently paid by banks.
Not included in the calculation of pledged funds is an FDIC proposal to prevent foreclosures by guaranteeing modifications on $444 billion in mortgages at an expected cost of $24.4 billion to be paid from the TARP, according to FDIC spokesman David Barr. The Treasury Department hasn’t approved the program.
Bernanke and Paulson, former chief executive officer of Goldman Sachs, have also promised as much as $200 billion to shore up nationalized mortgage finance companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, a pledge that hasn’t been allocated to any agency. The FDIC arranged for $139 billion in loan guarantees for General Electric Co.’s finance unit.
Automakers Struggle
The tally doesn’t include money to General Motors Corp., Ford Motor Co. and Chrysler LLC. Obama has said he favors financial assistance to keep them from collapse.
Paulson told the House Financial Services Committee Nov. 18 that the $250 billion already allocated to banks through the TARP is an investment, not an expenditure.
“I think it would be extraordinarily unusual if the government did not get that money back and more,” Paulson said.
In his Nov. 18 testimony, Bernanke told the House Financial Services Committee that the central bank wouldn’t lose money.
“We take collateral, we haircut it, it is a short-term loan, it is very safe, we have never lost a penny in these various lending programs,” he said.
A haircut refers to the practice of lending less money than the collateral’s current market value.
Requiring the Fed to disclose loan recipients might set off panic, said David Tobin, principal of New York-based loan-sale consultants and investment bank Mission Capital Advisors LLC.
‘Mark to Market’
“If you mark to market today, the banking system is bankrupt,” Tobin said. “So what do you do? You try to keep it going as best you can.”
“Mark to market” means adjusting the value of an asset, such as a mortgage-backed security, to reflect current prices.
Some of the bailout assistance could come from tax breaks in the future. The Treasury Department changed the tax code on Sept. 30 to allow banks to expand the deductions on the losses banks they were buying, according to Robert Willens, a former Lehman Brothers tax and accounting analyst who teaches at
Wells Fargo & Co., which is buying Charlotte, North Carolina-based Wachovia Corp., will be able to deduct $22 billion, Willens said. Adding in other banks, the code change will cost $29 billion, he said.
“The rule is now popularly known among tax lawyers as the ‘Wells Fargo Notice,’” Willens said.
The regulation was changed to make it easier for healthy banks to buy troubled ones, said Treasury Department spokesman Andrew DeSouza.
House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank said he was angry that banks used the money for acquisitions.
“The only purpose for this money is to lend,” said Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat. “It’s not for dividends, it’s not for purchases of new banks, it’s not for bonuses. There better be a showing of increased lending roughly in the amount of the capital infusions” or Congress may not approve the second half of the TARP money.
To contact the reporters on this story: Mark Pittman in New York at mpittman@bloomberg.net; Bob Ivry in New York at bivry@bloomberg.net.
Last Updated: November 24, 2008 13:26 EST
20081120
Fwd: Urgent action: Protect the people of the DRC
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| No excuse, No delay- Protect the civilians in the Democratic Republic of Congo | |
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20081114
Program and teps to remove invisible mallware and spyware from your slow PC!
Hi guys,
As I told some of you, I had some strange problems with my PC so I tried to use an online anti-virus to see if there was something wrong with my PC. This is the web site I was trying to contact and was blocked by my PC (the virus was blocking it):
http://www.kaspersky.com/kos/eng/partner/default/languages/english/check.html?n=1226680184135
I tried to search the internet to find some information about it and found out that the problem was due to a program that hides itself from both the anti-virus and anti-spyware programs and it is installing itself on the PC via corrupt JPEG files through a stupid bug in Microsoft Windows that gives total control of the operating system to a routine inside the JPEG image if the image cause a line-data-over-run exeption (or something like it, I don’t remember exactly).
Then this is how I solved the problem by first closed all the applications including the anti-virus and anti-spyware that I had. Also, turned off all other un-necessary programs I was using (Ctrl-Alt-Delete and killed all the tasks I did not wanted to use, can be dangerous if you do not know what you are doing) then ran the Hijackthis.exe
http://www.majorgeeks.com/download3155.html
You can ask for experts on MajorGeeks or other online sites to help you get rid of the programs that load into memory on startup. Then download and run ComboFix, to make sure you will not have any problem, save the file as “Combo-Fix.exe” (exactly this) and no blocking virus or worm will be able to prevent it from running.
Download ComboFix from one of these locations:
Link 1 (http://download.bleepingcomputer.com/sUBs/ComboFix.exe )
Link 2 (http://www.forospyware.com/sUBs/ComboFix.exe )
Link 3 (http://subs.geekstogo.com/ComboFix.exe )
* IMPORTANT !!! Save ComboFix.exe to your Desktop
Disable your AntiVirus and AntiSpyware applications, usually via a right click on the System Tray icon. They may otherwise interfere with our tools
Double click on ComboFix.exe & follow the prompts.
As part of it's process, ComboFix will check to see if the Microsoft Windows Recovery Console is installed. With malware infections being as they are today, it's strongly recommended to have this pre-installed on your machine before doing any malware removal. It will allow you to boot up into a special recovery/repair mode that will allow us to more easily help you should your computer have a problem after an attempted removal of malware.
Follow the prompts to allow ComboFix to download and install the Microsoft Windows Recovery Console, and when prompted, agree to the End-User License Agreement to install the Microsoft Windows Recovery Console.
**Please note: If the Microsoft Windows Recovery Console is already installed, ComboFix will continue it's malware removal procedures.
Once the Microsoft Windows Recovery Console is installed using ComboFix, you should see the following message:
Click on Yes, to continue scanning for malware.
For me, it took 3 re-boots to clean up my PC, so it may take one or 2 for most of you.
The PC was about 3 times faster after following these steps!
Here are some additional utilities that will enhance your safety
MVPS Hosts file (http://mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm) <= The MVPS Hosts file replaces your current HOSTS file with one containing well know ad sites etc. Basically, this prevents your computer from connecting to those sites by redirecting them to 127.0.0.1 which is your local computer. See also a hosts file tutorial here (http://malwareremoval.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=22187)
GOOD LUCK!