Witches in The Clear After 400 Years

Roy Pugh is East Lothian's leading authority on the hysteria surrounding alleged witchcraft which cost 81 people their lives in Prestonpans alone at the end of the 16th Century. Another 3500 were put to death across Scotland. He will preside at a formal Pardoning Ceremony at the Prestoungrange Gothenburg on Sunday October 31st when many descendants of those individuals will be present. The Pardons were officially declared by the Barons Courts of Prestoungrange & of Dolphinstoun at their Final Trinity Session Sitting on July 27th.

DIY Star Wars Masks

Trick or treat in your StarWars mask that you made yourself. All you need is a color printer.

NASA's Columbia Supercomputer is World's Fastest

Silicon Graphics (NYSE: SGI) with NASA today confirmed that NASA's new Intel® Itanium® 2 processor-based Columbia supercomputer is the most powerful computer in the world. Only days after NASA completed installation of Columbia—and using just 16 of Columbia's 20 installed systems—the new supercomputer achieved sustained performance of 42.7 trillion calculations per second (teraflops), eclipsing the performance of every supercomputer operating today.

Columbia's 16-system result easily tops Japan's famed Earth Simulator, rated at 35.86 teraflops, and IBM's recent in-house Blue Gene/L experiment, rated at 36.01 teraflops. Columbia's record results were achieved running the LINPACK benchmark on 8,192 of the NASA supercomputer's 10,240 processors. Columbia also achieved an 88 percent efficiency rating on the LINPACK benchmark, the highest efficiency rating ever attained in a LINPACK test on large systems.

Earth Simulator was conceived in July, 1996, construction began in February, 1999, and it reached 35.86 teraflops on May 3, 2003.

Blue Gene is an IBM supercomputing project dedicated to building a new family of supercomputers optimized for bandwidth, scalability and the ability to handle large amounts of data while consuming a fraction of the power and floor space required by today's fastest systems. The full Blue Gene/L machine is being built for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, and will have a peak speed of 360 teraflops. When completed in 2005, IBM expects Blue Gene/L to lead the Top500 supercomputer list.

Columbia was constructed using off-the-shelf equipment in less than four months, and it has been in use throughout it's contruction. It doesn't do Windows.

Home PCs Plagued With Problems

The study being released Monday by America Online and the National Cyber Security Alliance found that 77 percent of 326 adults in 12 states assured researchers in a telephone poll they were safe from online threats. Nearly as many people felt confident they were already protected specifically from viruses and hackers.

When experts visited those same homes to examine computers, they found two-thirds of adults using antivirus software that was not updated in at least seven days.

Two-thirds of the computer users also were not using any type of protective firewall program, and spyware was found on the computers of 80 percent of those in the study.

But this line tells it all:
The survey participants all were AOL subscribers.

TSA to Start Data Snoop; 54 Million Americans at Risk

To the Department of Homeland Security, you are no longer an American, you are a potential terrorist. Unless immediate action is taken by you, anyone who flew on any airline in the United States during the month of June 2004 will have a government dossier opened-up on them.

The Making of the Terror Myth

Much of the currently perceived threat from international terrorism, the series argues, "is a fantasy that has been exaggerated and distorted by politicians. It is a dark illusion that has spread unquestioned through governments around the world, the security services, and the international media." The series' explanation for this is even bolder: "In an age when all the grand ideas have lost credibility, fear of a phantom enemy is all the politicians have left to maintain their power."

I would also direct your attention to an article I blogged on 5 Aug. 2004 titled " Terror Alerts & GB2's Popularity".

BillyG Does "USA Today"

Bill Gates is interviewed in the October 13 issue of "USA Today".
Best Quote:

Q: Speaking of security, Internet Explorer has had well-publicized holes …

Gates: Understand those are cases where you are downloading third-party software.

There. Security has been your fault all along.

Patriot Act tour carried a hefty price tag

He may not have trashed any hotel rooms, but U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft spent over $200,000 of taxpayer money in a four-week, 31-city tour last year promoting the controversial USA PATRIOT Act, according to a report by Congressional auditors released Tuesday.

Isn't that special... The USA PATRIOT Act is the single most evil piece of legislation I've ever seen. It has nothing to do with patriotism and everything to do with the surveillance of our society and the removal of some basic rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. Follow the links from this story to learn more. Then, go over to Patriot II: The Sequel to see how this regime has plotted to erode the Constitution even further.

Sinclair Broadcasting's Election Interference

The next time our GOP friends charge the media with being liberal, remember this story. Sinclair Broadcast Group, a publicly-traded company with direct control over the programming of 62 TV stations around the country, is ordering its TV outlets to run an anti-Kerry piece of propaganda on the public’s television airwaves in the days leading up to the election.

It's one thing to release "Fahrenheit 911" to DVD in the final days before the election, yet it's quite another to commandeer the airwaves for political purposes. I think this is perhaps the largest example of corporate interference in the election process ever carried out in the light of day. I'm sure abuses of this scale generally occur behind closed doors.

The SANS Top 20 List

The vast majority of worms and other successful cyber attacks are made possible by vulnerabilities in a small number of common operating system services. Attackers are opportunistic. They take the easiest and most convenient route and exploit the best-known flaws with the most effective and widely available attack tools. They count on organizations not fixing the problems, and they often attack indiscriminately, scanning the Internet for any vulnerable systems. The easy and destructive spread of worms, such as Blaster, Slammer, and Code Red, can be traced directly to exploitation of unpatched vulnerabilities.

Every IT manager and UberGeek should have this bookmarked and be reading it often.

What's in your computer?

Bush's Mystery Bulge

I've known for nearly a decade that George was just a puppet -- I just didn't know who was pulling the strings. Looks like he's been caught wearing a wire.

Update     Click here to view a PhotoShop'd analysis.

George Lied

Quoting from the ISG report --

Saddam wanted to recreate Iraq’s WMD capability—which was essentially destroyed in 1991—after sanctions were removed and Iraq’s economy stabilized....

Desert Storm and subsequent UN resolutions and inspections brought many of Iraq’s delivery system programs to a halt....

Iraq Survey Group (ISG) discovered further evidence of the maturity and significance of the pre-1991 Iraqi Nuclear Program but found that Iraq’s ability to reconstitute a nuclear weapons program progressively decayed after that date....

Yeah, it goes on and on. George lied. There were no WMD -- none hidden, none shipped out of the country -- NONE. Oh sure, Saddam wanted to get his hands on some, but he wasn't even close. That didn't stop George from going to war specifically to stop Saddam and his WMD. A war that has cost us over 1100 American lives and over $200 billion tax dollars. A war that has cost them nearly 25,000 lives -- so many lives that they are no longer counting -- and each additional death swells the ranks of our terrorist enemies.

Still think you are safer now? Better think again.