Microsoft has officially named it's
grand, not bland, in new OS -- Vista. The new OS, not to be released until late 2006, is being touted as easier to personalize, we will see. Just thought some might be interested.
On Friday, the Redmond, Wash., company officially crowned the upcoming version of its Windows operating system as ``Vista,'' a brand it hopes conjures an image of a sweeping view into the digital world.
The company is working to build a buzz around its long-delayed new Windows version, formerly known as Longhorn, which won't hit the store shelves until fall 2006. The company will release a beta version of Vista on Aug. 3 to various communities of software developers.
[...]
The Windows Vista title was created after more than eight months of review by focus groups and Microsoft customers, said Greg Sullivan, group product manager for the Windows client division. The operating system is being designed to give computer users new tools to manage and access the increasing amount of e-mail, digital photos and other material stored on their PCs and networks, he said.
NOTE: Link requires registration try
Bug me not!
Google launch an enhancement to Google Maps -- Hybrid -- check it out!
CNN.com - 'Suspect shot' on London Tube
Most cable networks or say on the television that the shooting is "confirmed" but it is NOT "confirmed" he was a suspected "suicide bomber"; however, local British networks are reporting him to be a suspected "suicide bomber"... If true, it appears the British aren't playing -- wonder what the "appeaser" in America would/will say.
LONDON, England (CNN) -- Police in London say they have shot a man at a subway station, the day after four apparently failed attempts to repeat the carnage of the July 7 blasts, according to The Associated Press.
There were unconfirmed media reports that the person shot at Stockwell station -- close to the Oval, one of four sites targeted by suspected bombers on Thursday -- was a suspected suicide bomber.
The Australian: Full text: Blair & HowardThe
Prime Minister of Australia answered the "are we to blame for terrorist" with truth -- if only the left would listen and learn...
Question:
Do you feel in any sense that you have put people in this position, do you feel that in a sense your policies may have put people in this position?
Prime Minister:
Well I think I have said to you before, that I feel that people who are responsible for doing these things are the people who do them.
Question:
To both Prime Ministers, what was your immediate reaction on hearing that some incidents had occurred, was it here we go again? And do incidents like this, coming just 14 days after the horrific attacks, suggest that the war against terror is being lost on the streets? And yesterday an Australian bomb victim of July 7 linked the bombings to Iraq. Does that suggest that the propaganda war against terrorists is also being lost?
Mr Howard:
Could I start by saying the Prime Minister and I were having a discussion when we heard about it, and my first reaction was to get some more information, and I really don't want to add to what the Prime Minister has said. It is a matter for the police and a matter for the British authorities to talk in detail about what has happened here. Could I just say very directly, Paul, on the issue of the policies of my government, and indeed the policies of the British and American government on Iraq, that the first point of reference is that once a country allows its foreign policy to be determined by terrorism, it has given the game away, to use the vernacular. And no Australian government that I lead will ever have policies determined by terrorism or terrorist threats, and no self-respecting government of any political stripe in Australia would allow that to happen.
Can I remind you that the murder of 88 Australians in Bali took place before the operation in Iraq; and could I remind you that the 11 September occurred before the operation in Iraq; can I also remind you that the very first occasion that Bin Laden specifically referred to Australia was in the context of Australia's involvement in liberating the people of East Timor.
Are people, by implication, suggesting that we shouldn't have done that? When a group claimed responsibility on the website for the attacks on 7 July, they talked about British policy, not just in Iraq, but in Afghanistan. Are people suggesting we shouldn't be in Afghanistan?
When Sergio de Melo was murdered in Iraq, a brave man, a distinguished international diplomat, immensely respected for his work in the United Nations, when al Queda gloated about that they referred specifically to the role that de Melo had carried out in East Timor because he was the United Nations administrator in East Timor. Now I don't know the mind of the terrorist, by definition you can't put yourself in the mind of a successful suicide bomber, I can only look at objective facts, and the objective facts are as I have cited. The objective evidence is that Australia was a terrorist target long before the operation in Iraq, and indeed all the evidence, as distinct from the suppositions, suggest to me that this is about hatred of a way of life, this is about the perverted use of the principles of a great world religion that at its root preaches peace and cooperation, and I think we lose sight of the challenge we have if we allow ourselves to see these attacks in the context of particular circumstances, rather than the abuse through a perverted ideology of people and their murder.
Prime Minister:
I agree 100% with that.
Just providing snippets and links of the first reports....
London Tube stations evacuated - CNNLONDON, England (CNN) -- Three London Underground stations have been evacuated following reports of incidents of trains.
Emergency service also reported an incident on a bus in Hackney, in east London, Scotland Yard told CNN Thursday. No casualties have yet been reported in any of the incidents.
One Underground passenger told Sky TV a traveler's rucksack had exploded on a train. The report has not been confirmed
London Underground Evacuated - Fox NewsThe London Underground station was evacuated at 1:25 p.m. Thursday afternoon in London after smoke was seen coming from the train, Sky News has reported.
"The entire area has been closed off," Simon Marks.
Emergency officials were said to be attending incidents at three stations, the Associated Press has reported.
Police say incidents were reported at Oval, Warren Street and Shepherds Bush Underground stations.
Man files for Social Security, gets arrested in '71 slaying
This guy got a surprise when he went to get his social security benefits -- it does beg the question, if his Social Security was flagged and supposedly he was working under it and paying into Social Security, why was he not traced and apprehended earlier?
As Luis Vega entered his golden years, he did what many seniors do -- applied to the U.S. government for benefits.
The process came to a halt when an investigator for the Social Security Administration found a problem with his paperwork -- a 34-year-old murder warrant.
Vega, 65 and living in New York, has been wanted in Chicago since 1971 for a shooting at a South Side bar that killed a man and wounded another, Chicago Police said. When Vega applied for his benefits, he used the same Social Security number he did when he was living in Chicago 30 years earlier.
CNN.com - James Doohan, 'Star Trek's' Scotty, deadAlthough I am not a "
Trekkie", a devout Star Trek fan appearing in many cases to have lost all grips on reality (joking), I did enjoy the Star Trek series and it's contribution to our "pop culture" in our younger days... Farewell Mr. Doohan and God's speed to the "Final Frontier".
LOS ANGELES, California (AP) -- James Doohan, the burly chief engineer of the Starship Enterprise in the original 'Star Trek' TV series and motion pictures who responded to the apocryphal command 'Beam me up, Scotty,' died early Wednesday. He was 85.
Doohan died at 5:30 a.m. (1330 GMT) at his Redmond, Washington, home with his wife of 28 years, Wende, at his side, Los Angeles agent and longtime friend Steve Stevens said. The cause of death was pneumonia and Alzheimer's disease, he said.
The Canadian-born Doohan fought in World War II and was wounded during the D-Day invasion, according to the StarTrek.com Web site. He was enjoying a busy career as a character actor when he auditioned for a role as an engineer in a new space adventure on NBC in 1966. A master of dialects from his early years in radio, he tried seven different accents.
'The producers asked me which one I preferred,' Doohan recalled 30 years later. 'I believed the Scot voice was the most commanding. So I told them, 'If this character is going to be an engineer, you'd better make him a Scotsman.
Wonder if a
15 year old boy could win a curfew battle in the United States? I thought this was interesting especially with the "Supreme Court" question in the air and having heard Justices (
Ruth Bader Ginsburg) foolishly (my opinion) refer to European decisions in justifying his own. Some excerpts:
A 15-year-old boy has won a landmark High Court challenge to the legality of child curfew zones used to tackle anti-social behaviour.
The teenager said the use of dispersal zones in Richmond, south-west London, breached his rights under the European Convention on Human Rights.
Remember I mentioned
Chinese Thirst for Oil Comes to America, well I have an update. It appears that Chevron has upped it's bid -- though not as high as China Unocal is in favor of it...
PHILADELPHIA/SINGAPORE (Reuters) - U.S. oil producer Unocal Corp. (NYSE:UCL - news) endorsed a sweetened $17 billion takeover offer from Chevron Corp., preferring it to a higher bid from China's state-run CNOOC Ltd. (0883.HK). (Reuters
With the United States soon to reenter space I thought some would find this interesting... (just click on the picture to be taken to Google Moon.
President Bush nominates John G. Roberts, Jr... I am going to research Judge Roberts some more but at first blush I have no problem with the nominee -- in fact, my first reaction would be that this is a good pick. (Some excerpts from Fox News)
Roberts, 50, is a conservative who currently sits on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. A former clerk to Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, his name has been floated for months as a possible Bush selection for the high court.
Bush announced the nomination to the American public at 9 p.m. EDT - with Roberts appearing alongside the president.
Speaking from the East Room, Bush said Roberts is "widely admired for his intellect, his sound judgment and personal decency.
"The decisions of the Supreme Court affect the life of every American. And so a nominee to that court must be a person of superb credentials and the highest integrity, a person who will faithfully apply the Constitution and keep our founding promise of equal justice under law," Bush said.
"I have found such a person in Judge John Roberts. And tonight I am honored to announce that I am nominating him to serve as associate justice of the Supreme Court."
Roberts, who will have to re-sell himself to the Judiciary panel that voted for him 16-3 in 2003, said that he was honored to be nominated.
"Thank you very much. It is both an honor and very humbling to be nominated to serve on the Supreme Court. Before I became a judge, my law practice consisted largely of arguing cases before the court. That experience left me with a profound appreciation for the role of the court in our constitutional democracy and a deep regard for the court as an institution," Roberts said.
"I always got a lump in my throat whenever I walked up those marble steps to argue a case before the court, and I don't think it was just from the nerves," he added.
John G. Roberts Jr. (Google News) --
About John G. Roberts Jr.
USATODAY.com - North Korea talks to resume July 26Let us see if these talks happen. I do believe with the concessions South Korea made (i.e. electricity, food, etc.) they will be held -- what will be interesting is how long they (North Korea) stay.
SEOUL (AP) - South Korea said Tuesday that North Korea will resume nuclear disarmament talks on July 26 after a 13-month boycott, with diplomats from five nations stepping up pressure on Pyongyang to scrap its nuclear weapons program.
Retired Gen. Westmoreland dead at 91 of natural causes. Notice the opening paragraph from the Associated Press:
COLUMBIA, S.C. - Retired Gen. William Westmoreland, who commanded U.S. forces during the Vietnam War from 1964 to 1968 and advocated a strong military buildup at a time when American casualties were mounting, has died.
Do the words in bold sound like a final "shot" at the man? I think it might drive home what he said the the Associated Press in 1985:
“I have no apologies, no regrets. I gave my very best efforts,” Westmoreland told The Associated Press in 1985. “I’ve been hung in effigy. I’ve been spat upon. You just have to let those things bounce off.”
What do you think? I believe what he has continually stated since retiring and know that many Vietnam Veterans feel the same way -- not putting it as politely as General Westmoreland:
“It’s not that we lost the war militarily. The fact is, we as a nation did not make good our commitment to the South Vietnamese.”
A couple of weeks ago I commented on President Bush naming former Tennessee Senator Fred Thompson to "shepherd " his Supreme Court nominee (
here) -- thinking Fred might steal the show. Now,
McCain Suggests former TN Senator as New Justice , what do you know about that. I am not sure one way or the other -- an actor in the Whitehouse worked out pretty well.
WASHINGTON - Top Senate Democrats floated the names of potential candidates for the Supreme Court yesterday in a meeting with President Bush, describing them as the types of nominees who could avoid a fierce confirmation battle.
Later, during the Republican senators' weekly private lunch, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said he had recommended former Sen. Fred Thompson of Tennessee for nomination in a conversation with Deputy White House Chief of Staff Karl Rove, Knight Ridder News Service reported. Thompson, a Tennessee Republican who plays a chief prosecutor on TV's Law and Order series, was chosen by Bush to help him shepherd his eventual nominee through the Senate.
Though some might not find this interesting -- I being a Volunteer do find the fact
Tennessee adds Air Force, Cal to future schedule very interesting. I remember the 1971 Sugar Bowl and having followed Air Force quite a bit in the 1980, think this is an interesting addition to the schedule.
KNOXVILLE, Tenn. -- Tennessee will open the 2006 and 2007 seasons against California and play Air Force in 2006 for the first time since the 1971 Sugar Bowl, the Volunteers announced Monday.
Tennessee will play seven of 12 regular-season games at home in Neyland Stadium each year, including four straight to begin 2006 and a pair of three-game homestands in 2007.
Buffalo News - Legacy of MacArthur stirs clash at memorialSouth Korean protesters clash -- proMacArthur/proAmerica supporters carried the US flag in support... How nice to see the US flag used by protester as a symbol of
GOOD in a foreign country
The dispute erupted when a small group of anti-MacArthur demonstrators marched at a MacArthur war memorial in the western city of Incheon, site of the general's 1950s landing. Thousands of MacArthur supporters confronted the protesters in Freedom Park, pelting them with objects and shouting insults. Police were present, and no injuries were reported.
UPDATE More information from The Korean Times
Victor Davis Hanson makes some interesting observation about Democrats in his column
The New Reactionaries. Mr. Hanson points to the fact that negativism -- the democrats current creed has never accomplished anything and offers some good advice.
We've seen such infantile negativism before, and it leads nowhere. The Republicans of 1964 were a red-hot bunch - out of power, hard-right and on the wrong side of civil rights. In the 12 years of the Reagan and George Bush Sr. administrations, Democrats were no better, resorting to demonizing Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas. More recently, many Republicans descended into a mindless, obsessive hatred of Bill Clinton.
But the current Democratic furor and obstructionism are unprecedented and obviously self-defeating. How can we make sense of the Democrats' behavior?"
[...]
The Democrats should focus on new issues and faces and promote national optimism and an overdue return to a more inclusive broader-based populism. Instead, the leading members of the party — who have become the new reactionaries in American political life — choose to fixate on John Bolton and try to ankle-bite a wartime president working to bring democracy to the Middle East.
Apparently, the liberal opposition thinks sarcasm and negativism can reverse the larger political tide of the last three decades. Good luck.
Plame security breach? It just ain't so, Joe
I really have not commented on the Rove issue because "I could careless" -- well maybe that is a bit harsh but the "issues" seems to be to be a small fish in a very "big pond"... Mark Steyn articulates some of my observations -- in ways the "Rove issues" is simply liberal "smoke and mirrors" to hide the true liar.
This controversy began, you'll recall, because Wilson objected to a line in the president's State of the Union speech that British intelligence had discovered that Iraq had been trying to acquire ''yellowcake'' -- i.e., weaponized uranium -- from Africa. This assertion made Bush, in Wilson's incisive analysis, a ''liar'' and Cheney a ''lying sonofabitch.''
In fact, the only lying sonafabitch turned out to be Yellowcake Joe. Just about everybody on the face of the earth except Wilson, the White House press corps and the moveon.org crowd accepts that Saddam was indeed trying to acquire uranium from Africa. Don't take my word for it; it's the conclusion of the Senate intelligence report, Lord Butler's report in the United Kingdom, MI6, French intelligence, other European services -- and, come to that, the original CIA report based on Joe Wilson's own briefing to them. Why Yellowcake Joe then wrote an article for the New York Times misrepresenting what he'd been told by senior figures from Major Wanke's regime in Niger is known only to him.
As I wrote in this space a year ago, an ambassador, in Sir Henry Wootton's famous dictum, is a good man sent abroad to lie for his country; this ambassador came home to lie to his. What we have here is, in effect, the old standby plot of lame Hollywood conspiracy thrillers: rogue elements within the CIA attempting to destabilize the elected government. If the left's view of the world is now so insanely upside-down that that's the side they want to be on, good for them. But ''leaking'' the name of Wilson's wife and promoter within the CIA didn't ''endanger her life'' or ''compromise her mission.'' Au contraire, exposing the nature of this fraudulent, compromised mission might conceivab"
Even more important!
Here's the thing: They're still pulling body parts from London's Tube tunnels. Too far away for you? No local angle? OK, how about this? Magdy el-Nashar. He's a 33-year old Egyptian arrested Friday morning in Cairo, and thought to be what they call a ''little emir'' -- i.e., the head honcho in the local terrorist cell, the one who fires up the suicide bombers. Until his timely disappearance, he was a biochemist studying at Leeds University and it's in his apartment the London bombs were made. Previously he was at North Carolina State University.
Now what was people were saying about Tiger going down because of his swing change or his marriage -- or was it he had lost interest... Well guess not! British Open number two -- major number two this year -- and ten majors over all...
Possible link between London bomber, al-Qaeda groups, who would have thunk it... Of course, I am joking -- the real news would be if there was indeed no connection. Here are some excerpts form the
USA Today article:
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (AP) � Authorities in Pakistan are looking into a connection between one of the London suicide bombers and two al-Qaeda-linked militant groups here, including a man arrested for a 2002 attack on a church near the U.S. Embassy, two senior intelligence officials said Friday.
