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.