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Monday, October 25, 2004 |
Cassini's First Titan Flyby Tomorrow
Cassini's First Titan Flyby Tomorrow: "NASA's Cassini spacecraft will make its first close approach tomorrow to Titan, Saturn's largest moon. The spacecraft will skim within only 1,200 km (745 miles) of the moon's atmosphere, which should allow its radar to penetrate through its thick methane atmosphere and reveal details about its surface. Scientists have theories, but they really have no idea exactly what Cassini is going to discover; whether it's covered in ancient craters, or there are ongoing geologic processes that are reshaping its surface continuously. Cassini will also gather data about Huygens' potential landing site when it arrives at the moon in a couple of months."
(Via Universe Today.)
3:01:34 PM Permalink
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Bush Admin Allowed Tons Of Explosives In Iraq To Be Removed By Persons Unknown
Bush Admin Allowed Tons Of Explosives In Iraq To Be Removed By Persons Unknown: "No wonder Bush said our safety is "up in the air".
From the front page of Monday's NYT:
Huge Cache of Explosives Vanished From Site in Iraq The Iraqi interim government has warned the United States and international nuclear inspectors that nearly 380 tons of powerful conventional explosives - used to demolish buildings, produce missile warheads and detonate nuclear weapons - are missing from one of Iraq's most sensitive former military installations.
The huge facility, called Al Qaqaa, was supposed to be under American military control but is now a no-man's land, still picked over by looters as recently as Sunday. United Nations weapons inspectors had monitored the explosives for many years, but White House and Pentagon officials acknowledge that the explosives vanished after the American invasion last year.
The White House said President Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, was informed within the past month that the explosives were missing. It is unclear whether President Bush was informed. American officials have never publicly announced the disappearance, but beginning last week they answered questions about it posed by The New York Times and the CBS News program "60 Minutes."
Administration officials said yesterday that the Iraq Survey Group, the C.I.A. task force that searched for unconventional weapons, has been ordered to investigate the disappearance of the explosives.
American weapons experts say their immediate concern is that the explosives could be used in major bombing attacks against American or Iraqi forces: the explosives, mainly HMX and RDX, could be used to produce bombs strong enough to shatter airplanes or tear apart buildings. The bomb that brought down Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988 used less than a pound of the material of the type stolen from Al Qaqaa, and somewhat larger amounts were apparently used in the bombing of a housing complex in November 2003 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and the blasts in a Moscow apartment complex in September 1999 that killed nearly 300 people.
The willful incompetence is worthy of a high crime."
(Via Oliver Willis - Like Kryptonite To Stupid.)
1:55:44 PM Permalink
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Bush let Zarqawi go, More Evidence
Bush let Zarqawi go, More Evidence: "How many Iraqis and Americans have died at Zarqawi's hands?
From today's WSJ:
The Pentagon drew up detailed plans in June 2002, giving the administration
a series of options for a military strike on the camp Mr. Zarqawi was
running then in remote northeastern Iraq, according to generals who were
involved directly in planning the attack and several former White House
staffers. They said the camp, near the town of Khurmal, was known to contain
Mr. Zarqawi and his supporters as well as al Qaeda fighters, all of whom had
fled from Afghanistan. Intelligence indicated the camp was training recruits
and making poisons for attacks against the West.
Senior Pentagon officials who were involved in planning the attack said that
even by spring 2002 Mr. Zarqawi had been identified as a significant
terrorist target, based in part on intelligence that the camp he earlier ran
in Afghanistan had been attempting to make chemical weapons, and because he
was known as the head of a group that was plotting, and training for,
attacks against the West. He already was identified as the ringleader in
several failed terrorist plots against Israeli and European targets. In
addition, by late 2002, while the White House still was deliberating over
attacking the camp, Mr. Zarqawi was known to have been behind the October
2002 assassination of a senior American diplomat in Amman, Jordan.
But the raid on Mr. Zarqawi didn't take place. Months passed with no
approval of the plan from the White House, until word came down just weeks
before the March 19, 2003, start of the Iraq war that Mr. Bush had rejected
any strike on the camp until after an official outbreak of hostilities with
Iraq. Ultimately, the camp was hit just after the invasion of Iraq began. "
(Via Oliver Willis - Like Kryptonite To Stupid.)
1:54:53 PM Permalink
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Eric Von Schmidt
Mike sends me a link to this fine piece on Eric Von Schmidt who so famously taught Bob Dylan "Baby Let Me Follow You Down" on the green pastures of Harvard University.
1:47:54 PM Permalink
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High Performance MySQL
High Performance MySQL: "Many may have seen it on Slashdot yesterday - but Jeremy Zawodny has recently authored a new tome for the legions of MySQL fans. Zawodny, being employed by the fine folks at Yahoo, certainly has the real world practice and credentials for writing High Performance MySQL.
(Via SitePoint's Open Source Blog: Open Sourcery.)
There's maybe more heat than light in this SlashDot discussion, as seems to me to be often the case. And probably more theology than practical advice. Still, there's a lot of the latter.
8:45:25 AM Permalink
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© Copyright 2004 Steve Michel.
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