Every day the news gets worse... What started as a few thousand, has now grown to an official 125,000 people dead because of the Tsunami.

It should have a name by now, don't you think? Something to hate? Soemthing to fear?

In the India Times, the accusations of misreporting the number of dead and missing are forthright. The quote helpless officails who simply do not have any numbers on file, and report what they have though they know it to be a fraction of reality.

The Red Cross is quoted in that article of suggesting that there might be a million souls lost.

In another article, Indonesia is reported of similar misreporting; that they are simply not capable of calculating the numbers.

Many of you know that Fort Lauderdale is one of the yachting capitals of the world; my businesses, my family are well entrenched in the Yachting community. An e-mail was forwarded to me, originating from someone yachting in Thailand at the time. I will share it with you now, with only the names removed.

Horror stories abound here at the moment, so please excuse my apparent callousness in this article.

A telephone call from my friend XXXXXXX in Reback Marina, Langkawi told us of some tragedies in Malaysia. To enter Reback Marina one has to negotiate a rock lined breakwater channel with a dogleg. XXXX had just completed a 15 month restoration of his beautiful 60' Alden yacht and was relaxing in his cockpit in the marina when he noticed the tide receding... .rapidly. The boat bumped the bottom. He heard a roar and saw a gray wall of water, he estimated at 15 foot, come racing around the dogleg towards him. He describes it as an undulating waterfall. It lifted the floating dock off its pilings and along with the 8 yachts tied to it, surfed into the next row of yachts which in turn surfed into the next row. Then the entire contents of the marina raced out of the channel at 15 knots stopped and raced in again. XXXX ended up on the seawall at the far side of the manna. The floating dock he was tied to had inverted and the barnacles had destroyed his topsides, his caprail was gone and all stanchions, he sustained massive damage from other boats but he got her floating and exited the marina where he is anchored. He said the noise was the most significant thing. People screaming boats grinding together, masts coming down, vessels careening into the breakwater at 15 knots and the roar of the water. Reback Marina is a disaster with 49 yachts sunk and the remaining 3 floating but seriously damaged. Telaga Harbour Marina is no longer with 5 boats sunk and all the others damaged. Both marinas we have fond memories of. Here the body count still rises. Another friend of ours was having a house built at Patong beach by 12 workmen. One of them went to the store to purchase a pack of cigarettes and the tide went out. The 11 others ran down to the beach to catch the hundreds of floundering fish and the first wave caught them. They all perished.

Phi Phi Don is two grand cliff faced islands with a narrow spit of sand joining them. The strip is loaded with tourist stuff and backpacker hotels. The wave entered the west bay and removed everything off the spit of land. 600 people were on the island at the time, all perished. An aerial photo showed the sea littered with bodies and debris.

So many lost their lives in Khau Lan, only one mile to the north of the bay we are in, that they are burning them on the beach.

Patong Beach two miles north is indescribable. A number of the beachfront stores had basement shopping centers and all were full of tourists and vendors. All perished when the area flooded. The streets near the ocean are piled high with cars, motorcycles, busses, boats, bits of buildings, uprooted palm trees and store merchandise.

We have been helping clear up the mess here in Nai Ham and every couple of hours a body is dug out of the beach. The mess and carnage is beyond belief, so many people are homeless and a number of Carolyn's students are gone along with their parents. There are hundreds of worse stories. It is all so sad.

I am being inundated with requests by insurance companies to do damage surveys but all understand that what we are doing at the moment is more important. Nevertheless, we will return to Boat Lagoon Marina on Sunday and get to work.

It seems that we are making more and more progress on trying to identify Near Earth Objects before they become potential threats. We'll probably hear more about these things now that we are actively looking for them, registering them in our warning system.

2029, April 13 an Asteroid named 2004 MN4 of around 400 meters is predicted to pass near Earth, according to a recent discovery. The Asteroid orbits the sun once every 324 days. If an impact occurs, 2004 MN4 will yield approx. 1600 megatons of energy.

NASA’s Near Earth Object Program (NEOP) is unable to verify the flyby distance and say that there is a possibility of the Asteroid colliding with Earth. According the NASA, the probability of impact is 1:60 (one in sixty). Further more the impact predictability could reduce or even get eliminated, as and when new data are received.

With a discovery of a new asteroid or comet, predictions for where the object will be in a month or decade are unknown. For the majority of objects, the initial calculations are sufficient to show that they will not make any close passes by the Earth within the next century. However, for some objects, close approaches and possible collisions with the Earth cannot be completely ruled out.

The Torino Scale utilizes numbers that range from 0 to 10, where 0 indicates an object has a zero or negligibly small chance of collision with the Earth. (Zero is also used to categorize any object that is too small to penetrate the Earth's atmosphere intact, in the event that a collision does occur.) Where as Level 10 indicates that a collision is almost certain, and the impacting object is so large that it is capable of causing a global climatic disaster.

The Asteroid named 2004 MN4 has been assigned level 4 [A close encounter, with 1% or greater chance of a collision capable of causing regional devastation.], the first Asteroid to get this level rating. Roy Tucker, David Tholen and Fabrizio Bernardi of NASA discovered the 2004 MN4 Asteroid in June 19, 2004, from Kitt Peak – Arizona.

NASA would be monitoring the Asteroid and new telescopic observations may lead to reassignment to Level 0 where the likelihood of a collision is zero.

It just goes to show you, we have no idea what the future will look like. It also shows you how creative humans can be. Trying to resolve issues of power generation, scientists in England have created a robot that can produce electricity, albeit in very small amounts at the moment, by...

...eating flies

Fly-eating robot powers itself

(CNN) -- Scientists at the University of the West of England (UWE) have designed a robot that does not require batteries or electricity to power itself.

Instead, it generates energy by catching and eating houseflies.

Dr Chris Melhuish and his Bristol-based team hope the robot, called EcoBot II, will one day be sent into zones too dangerous for humans, potentially proving invaluable in military, security and industrial areas.

Melhuish, who is director of the Intelligent Autonomous Systems Lab at the UWE, told CNN that the EcoBot II was a result of a quest for an intelligent robot that could function without human supervision.

"That means they need energy. It is one thing to have a robot getting its energy from a household socket, or maybe from the factory floor, but it is another thing when the robot goes outside buildings," he said.

"Of course, there is solar energy outside. Little robots can use solar energy to move about. But mostly, if there is not a lot of solar energy about, you have to give robots batteries -- which eventually run out."

The EcoBot II powers itself in much the same way as animals feed themselves to get their energy, he said.

At this stage, EcoBot II is a "proof-of-concept" robot and travels only at roughly 10 centimeters per hour.

But the self-sustaining robot had the potential to be used in conditions that were not suitable for humans, said Melhuish.

"In the future, I think we are going to want robots to go to places that we don't want to go. In order to do that, it's unlikely that these robots are going to have sufficient energy to carry out their tasks," he said.

The EcoBot II uses human sewage as bait to catch the insects. It then digests the flies, before their exoskeletons are turned into electricity, which enables the robot to function.

Bacteria in the sewage eats the flies' soft tissues, which releases enzymes that break down the hardened shell.

Sugar molecules released from the broken-down shell are then absorbed and used as energy by the bacteria.

"The robot then has the energy to carry out some example tasks which in this case include moving towards light, measuring temperature. It has a temperature sensor. It could be anything, but we have chosen temperature," Melhuish said.

"Then it transmits that temperature information over a radio link to a base station a couple of meters away and it does that all using the energy from insect or plant material."

Some people just don't get it. If we don't move as one nation, we're going to get rolled.

When the Army of Ansar al Sunna - a group tied to al Qaeda - attacks an American base near Mosul it should be apparent that Iraq is the front line in the War on Terrorism.

When Christian churches are bombed - as they were on the same day and in the same part of Iraq - and Shia mosques in Karbala and Najaf are targeted as well, it should be clear that the bombers are waging a most unholy war.

When Iraqi election workers are shot dead in the streets, as they were last weekend, the murderers' hatred for democracy ought to be obvious.

Yet somehow the debate goes on about whether those fighting us are really enemies of freedom, about whether or not it is imperative they be defeated.

We need to recapture the National Spirit we had when fighting Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan. In those days, we even had Hollywood behind the effort. Who can forget people like Mickey Rooney or Glen Miller putting on uniforms themselves, and in a later decade even Elvis? Where did Rosie the Riveter go?

When did we lose that kind of National Pride? Was it the Sixties?

History will view this war not as a war of tanks and guns, missiles or stealth planes, but a war of wills. We are not geared to fight this klind of war, not with our Main Stream Media and people like Michael Moore taking salvos at our rear flanks while the Terrorists strike from the front.

Then, too, there are those who do not defend the killers but argue that the continuing carnage proves the United States can't overcome this foe. If that's true, we might as well convert the Pentagon into condominiums.

What need is there for a multi-billion dollar defense establishment designed to roll back an attack by the Soviet Union? What's the point of a military machine that can topple Saddam Hussein in a few weeks but has to give Iraq back to his cronies a few years later?

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, much criticized of late, appears to understand this. A few days ago, he frankly acknowledged the urgent need to "develop a military designed to meet the challenges of this era."

The military we have now, he explained, "is, in many ways, still organized, trained and best equipped for the more conventional challenges of the past century, when wars were conducted largely between large navies, armies and air forces."

Our current enemies, by contrast, are fighting an "unconventional" war. The combatants who attacked the Forward Operating Base Marez outside Mosul were not attempting to win a battle in the conventional sense; they did not hope to seize the camp any more than the suicide-terrorists who attacked on 9/11 planned to station tanks in New York and Washington.

Instead, the goal of terrorists is simply to slaughter and, of course, terrorize. By so doing, they mean to destroy our will to fight. Lose the will to fight and, by definition, you have been defeated - no matter how high-tech your weaponry, no matter how many troops you have riding in armored Humvees.

Read the entire article over at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.

The way things are going, this seems more possible than not.

I can't wait to see how they plan to implement this. I already use the internet as my primary research tool, but to imagine large portions of public libraries online thanks to a collusion between Google and Oxford University, Harvard, the University of Michigan and the New York Public Library... It's like a dream come true.

Well... for geeks like me, anyway...

Google Turns a New Page in Library Project

Google, the operator of the world's most popular Internet search service, announced an agreement yesterday with Oxford University and some of the leading U.S. research libraries to begin converting their holdings into digital files that would be freely searchable over the Web.

It may be only a step on a long road toward the long-predicted global virtual library. But the collaboration of Google and research institutions that also include Harvard, the University of Michigan, Stanford and the New York Public Library is a major stride in an ambitious Internet effort by various parties.

The goal is to expand the Web beyond its current valuable, if eclectic, body of material and create a digital card catalog and searchable library for the world's books, scholarly papers and special collections.

Democracy and Information

Google, newly wealthy from its stock offering last summer, has agreed to underwrite the projects announced yesterday while also adding its own technical capabilities to the task of scanning and digitizing tens of thousands a pages a day at each library.

Although Google executives declined to comment on its technology or the cost of the undertaking, others involved estimate the figure at US$10 for each of the more than 15 million books and other documents covered in the agreements. Librarians involved predict that the project could take at least a decade.

Because the Google agreements are not exclusive, the agreements are almost certain to touch off a race with other major Internet search providers like Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN) Latest News about Amazon.com, Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) Latest News about Microsoft and Yahoo (Nasdaq: YHOO) Latest News about Yahoo. Like Google, they may seek the right to offer online access to library materials in return for selling advertising, while libraries would receive corporate help in digitizing their collections for their own institutional uses.

"Within two decades, most of the world's knowledge will be digitized and available, one hopes, for free reading on the Internet, just as there is free reading in libraries today," said Michael Keller, Stanford's head librarian.

The Google effort and others like it that are already under way, including projects by the Library of Congress to put selections of its best holdings online, are part of a trend that would potentially democratize access to information that has long been available to only a small and elite group of students and scholars.

On Monday night, the Library of Congress and a group of international libraries from the United States, Canada, Egypt, China and the Netherlands announced a new plan to create a publicly available digital archive of 1 million books on the Internet. The group said it planned to have 70,000 volumes online by next April.

Read the entire article for even more info...

From the recent conviction that handed down 9 year sentences recently to AOL spammers... to this new verdict that puts the hacker who broke into the Lowe's credit card database on ice for 9 years... it certainly looks as if the Government is finally getting serious about setting some precedents. It's about time. Crime is crime, and we need some clear defenitions as we enter the information age.

Lowe's Hardware Hacker Gets Nine Years

CHARLOTTE, N.C. - One of three Michigan men who hacked into the national computer system of Lowe's hardware stores and tried to steal customers' credit card information was sentenced Wednesday to nine years in federal prison.

The government said it is the longest prison term ever handed down in a computer crime case in the United States.

Brian Salcedo of Whitmore Lake, Mich., pleaded guilty in August to conspiracy and other hacking charges.

Salcedo's sentence, imposed by U.S. District Judge Lacy Thornburg, exceeds that given to the hacker Kevin Mitnick, who spent more than 5 1/2 years behind bars, according to a Justice Department (news - web sites) Web site that tracks cyber-crime prosecutions.

"I think the massive amount of potential loss that these defendants could have imposed was astounding, so that's what caused us to seek a substantial sentence against Mr. Salcedo," federal prosecutor Matthew Martens said.

Two other men are awaiting sentencing in the Lowe's case. One of them, Adam Timmins, became one of the first people convicted of "wardriving," in which hackers go around with an antenna, searching for vulnerable wireless Internet connections.

Prosecutors said the three men tapped into the wireless network of a Lowe's store in Southfield, Mich., used that connection to enter the chain's central computer system in North Wilkesboro, N.C., and installed a program to capture credit card information.

Lowe's officials said the men did not obtain any such information.

The case was prosecuted in Charlotte because it is home to an FBI cyber-crime task force.

Mitnick led the FBI on a three-year manhunt that ended in 1995 and is said to have cost companies millions of dollars by stealing their software and altering computer information. Victims included Motorola, Novell, Nokia and Sun Microsystems.

U.S. Justice Department computer intrusion cases: http://www.cybercrime.gov/cccases.html

I thought I would share with you a recent exchange I had with a liberally-minded internet friend of mine.

He began like this, with a letter to a small group of carbon copy opinion-wielders like myself and my friend Pat Hurley:

A while back I made note of "wasteful government programs" and had forwarded an article highlighting how wasteful military spending really is (John McCain seems to think so too) and someone replied with the comment that at least "America has something to show for it.".......Well it appears that some of our soldiers will take issue with that. Let me get this right.......We spend billion and billions of taxpayers money and give some of these corporations "blank checks" and many of our soldiers feel they don't even have basics they need. Where is all that taxpayer money going?

To which, I replied...

As it turns out, the soldiers were coached by a reporter, and even the veracity of the claims is now in question. As a veteran of Desert Storm, Mogadishu/Somalia and Bosnia/Herzegovina, let me tell you how creative we are. At one point, we made our own washing machine for greasy uniforms out of a 50 gallon drum, some copper tubing and powered it off the 600 pound auxiliary stream drains and an LP air line. It certainly wasn’t newsworthy of the media back home: SAILORS USE REFUSE TO WASH CLOTHES, WHERE ARE OUR TAXPAYER DOLLARS GOING?

You can read the reporter’s article that coached the soldiers here:

Even his own article is less inflammatory and acidic than the mainstream media who went for this like a pit bull on a bone.

None of the troop choppers I ever flew in were armored and the hull of the helo-carrier that I slept in was a half inch thick in most places. A cheap missile would make a good sized hole.

But you know, that didn’t make the news either, not when we took small arms fire and mortars from the beaches in Mogadishu, nor when we traversed the minefields of the Adriatic. It’s a tough job, and we volunteered to do it.

Whiny civilians... quit yer bitchin’ and quit inciting my fellow vets to question their chain of command. We have a job to do. Let us do it. The US Marine Corps are lethal wearing only underwear and brandishing only bare fists. That’s the winning attitude. Inspire decay within the ranks and we’ll fall apart, accomplish nothing.

It disgusts me to see whiny liberals say how much they support the troops while at the same time applaud the cowards who refused to run supplies through the desert, complaining that it was “too dangerous”. That kind of supporting the troops will get people killed, cripple our military.

And in response, he penned:

Michael,

I’m sure even if some of the soldiers were “coached” they wouldn’t have said what they did if it weren’t true. Retired general Tommy Franks was on Fox last night and he acknowledged that the military is deficient in many regards. This simply should NEVER be….given our military budget! And at the same time John McCain has expressed that the Pentagon has done a poor job in its accounting of military spending. My point is simply, this highlights the kind of waste, inefficiency and ineffectiveness that Republicans vow to rid Government of. Yet…..

Although I agree with him on some points, I am no lover of the wasted dollar let alone a billion or so of them... It was not the point I was making with respect to this incident. I concluded:

The fact of the matter is that we don’t know what was true and what was not. All, some, any of it. The soldiers, if they were told that these things were true, would have been incensed on the spot and would have enjoyed “sticking it to the brass”. I know I would have.

My point is, stop fomenting rebellion in the military. It is a taut spring under the best of conditions. You want to change things? Want to cut out the pork? Do it at home through your elected officials. Stop killing our troops, making their job harder, just for the sake of some fiery (and possible false) headlines that drive your ratings up so you can charge more for your advertising.

Testing the waters to combine the worlds largest digital network with Nextel's radio network sounds awfulling interesting to ME.

Report: Sprint/Nextel reach tentative $36B deal

By Dan Meyer
Dec 10, 2004
A Wall Street Journal report Friday afternoon citing sources on both sides indicated No. 3 Sprint Corp. and No. 5 Nextel Communications Inc. had reached a tentative agreement on an all-stock $36 billion deal. According to the report, Sprint would pay around 1.3 shares for each Nextel share plus a small cash consideration that would value the deal at more than $36 billion. Sprint Chief Executive Officer Gary Forsee would become CEO of the new operation with current Nextel CEO Tim Donahue assuming the chairman position. Both companies would also share board positions.

Analysts noted that Nextel, which is the last remaining independent nationwide wireless operator, would have the most to gain from the deal and would thus likely have to cede final ownership to Sprint for a deal to be completed.

Neither Sprint nor Nextel would comment on the report, though reports indicated that the deal could be announced as early as next week.

"Like everybody else, we do continue to evaluate our strategic opportunities," said Sprint Chief Financial Officer Bob Dellinger at a Credit Suisse First Boston conference this week. "That's appropriate for all businesses, and we continue to do that."

SG Cowen & Co. telecommunications industry analyst Tom Watts, who has been speculating on a possible deal between Sprint and Nextel since earlier this year, put the possibility of an agreement being reached at more than 70 percent.

One source noted rumors of the deal could have been a test balloon sent up by both companies to gauge investor reaction or a move by Nextel to place pressure on other industry players to begin merger talks. Sprint's stock was up more than 8 percent Thursday following the report, while Nextel's stock increased more than 6 percent.

Now I think I "have" seen it all.

Grandfather's Ghost Auctioned on EBay

HOBART, Ind. — A woman's effort to assuage her 6-year-old son's fears of his grandfather's ghost by selling it on eBay (search) has drawn more than 34 bids with a top offer of $78.

Mary Anderson said she placed her father's "ghost" on the online auction site after her son, Collin, said he was afraid the ghost would return someday. Anderson said Collin has avoided going anywhere in the house alone since his grandfather died last year.

...snip...

Anderson makes one special request of the winner bidder: "I would like to ask you to write a letter after you've received the cane (and the ghost) to my son letting him know that he's there with you and you're getting along great."