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| DATE | 2004-03-29 |
| FROM | Ruben I Safir
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| SUBJECT | Subject: [hangout] 48 Hours on Vacation and the WHOLE WORLD CHANGES - We now have 2 moons like Tattoon in Starwars
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Date: Mon, 29 Mar 2004 01:33:14 -0500
From: Ruben I Safir
To: hangout-at-nylxs.com
Subject: [hangout] 48 Hours on Vacation and the WHOLE WORLD CHANGES - We now have 2 moons like Tattoon in Starwars
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Have you guys seen the news this weekend?
------------------------------
Nasa prototype breaks speed record
Matthew Taylor Monday March 29, 2004 The Guardian
The dream of building a passenger aircraft able to travel from London to
Sydney in a few hours came a step closer at the weekend when Nasa
successfully tested its experimental jet, the X-43A.
The 3.7 metre (12ft) prototype - part aeroplane and part spacecraft - is
thought to have reached speeds of about 5,000mph over the Pacific Ocean
on Saturday.
The unpiloted plane made an 11-second powered flight followed by a
six-minute glide, before plunging into the water 400 miles off the
Californian coast.
The X-43A is powered by an engine called a scramjet. Unlike conventional
turbojet engines that use a turbine-powered fan to compress air before
it is mixed with fuel, a scramjet relies on the speed of the engine
itself to compress the incoming air.
After the flight, the project's chief engineer, Griffin Corpening, said:
"It's a great way to end, certainly all the sweeter because of the
challenges we've had to step up to and overcome through the life of this
project."
Flight engineers confirmed that preliminary data had shown the X-43A had
reached a maximum speed of slightly over seven times the speed of sound
- 5,000mph. "It was fun all the way to mach 7," said Joel Sitz, project
manager at Nasa's Dryden Flight Research Centre.
It was the first time an "air-breathing" jet had travelled so fast. An
attempt to launch an identical plane in 2001 ended in failure after the
rocket employed to accelerate the plane veered off course and was
detonated.
----------------------------
Scrapping of Arab Summit Sparks Recriminations
By Daniel Williams Washington Post Foreign Service Monday, March 29,
2004; Page A15
TUNIS, March 28 -- Foreign ministers were hammering out a list of
political reforms in advance of an Arab League summit when their
Tunisian counterpart, Habib Ben Yahya, left the room and took a phone
call from the host president. He returned, participants said, and told
everyone to go to dinner.
"It's over," Yahya told the gathering late Saturday night. "There is no
summit."
The surprise cancellation of the long-awaited meeting on reform and
Middle East peace set off a round of recrimination and finger-pointing.
On Sunday, delegates expressed embarrassment and shock at the collapse,
which took place two days before the summit was set to begin in the
Tunisian capital.
"This was not our finest moment," the Arab League secretary general, Amr
Moussa, said.
Several participants complained that Tunisia's president, Zine Abidine
Ben Ali, had single-handedly sunk the effort in a fit of pique. He was
angry, they said, because his own reform proposals had been rejected and
because several countries had decided not to send their heads of state
to the summit.
Other participants said the exercise was already doomed: The countries
were far from agreeing on the scope of reforms or ways to implement
them.
"Many were hesitant in the first place, so things were always delicate,"
Nabil Shaath, the Palestinian foreign minister, said. "Weighty reform
proposals were just going to be used as doorstops anyway."
The Arab League, a 22-member organization dedicated to unity but
frequently at odds, is in a race against time. The Bush administration
hopes to gain support for a democratic reform initiative for the Middle
East at a meeting of the Group of Eight major industrialized nations
this summer. Arab leaders had expressly set out to preempt the proposal
with plans of their own in such areas as civil rights, women's rights
and economic modernization.
In Cairo, President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt quickly offered to host a new
summit, but no date was set. In a statement, Mubarak, who is scheduled
to visit Washington next month, expressed "astonishment and regret" at
the cancellation of summit. Jordan also offered to host a retry.
Arab societies have been debating the issue of democratization in recent
months, partly in the wake of a wave of terrorism around the world. The
war in Iraq has also upset the region, with some U.S. officials
suggesting that the lack of democracy in the Middle East itself
represents a danger.
The varied Arab response to this ferment was on vivid display at the
preparatory meetings for the summit on Friday and Saturday, participants
said. Syria and Saudi Arabia fought against the inclusion of the word
"democracy" in a summit paper that was to be ratified Monday. Egypt
ensured that no timetable or formula for implementation would be
attached.
Tunisian officials made a pitch to include language that explicitly
endorsed democracy and rejected "extremism, fanaticism and terrorism."
"Not only is the concept of democracy absent, so are other equally
important ones like civil society, dialogue of the civilizations, the
fight against terrorism," the government said in a statement issued to
explain the breakup of the meeting. The statement said that some
countries supported Tunisia's position, but others "unfortunately
opposed."
Shaath, the Palestinian delegate, said the Tunisian proposals had not
been discussed. "It would have opened a new can of worms," he said.
In any event, as the foreign ministers scurried to arrange for flights
home, many were perplexed by Ben Ali's cancellation of the summit. "I
don't understand why our brothers in Tunis decided to do this," said Abu
Bakr Qirbi, Yemen's foreign minister.
Moussa, the league's general secretary, said his request to meet with
Ali was rebuffed. "Our request could not be granted due to the fact that
it was too late for the president, who has been down with a bad cold,"
Moussa said.
The summit's demise torpedoed plans to revive a 2-year-old pan-Arab
peace proposal that offered Israel recognition in return for its
withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The league had also
planned to criticize Israel's prime minister, Ariel Sharon, for ordering
assassinations, including that of Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the founder and
spiritual leader of Hamas, which has asserted responsibility for
numerous suicide bombings and other attacks against civilians in Israel.
"Now the message we are sending is that Sharon can do what he wants,"
said Jean Obeid, Lebanon's foreign minister.
For the Palestinians, the truncated meeting had a more immediate
negative consequence. Past Arab League meetings have approved funding
for the cash-strapped Palestinian Authority. The league has pledged $760
million to the Palestinians, Shaath said, and he said he hoped that
governments would pay up anyway.
--------------------------------------
Clarke wants records opened By
Judy Keen, USA TODAY WASHINGTON \x{2014} Richard Clarke, the former
White House counterterrorism chief under attack by the Bush
administration over his criticism of its actions before Sept. 11, said
Sunday that all his private testimony and e-mail exchanges with his
former boss should be made public.
At the same time, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, Clarke's
former supervisor, said again Sunday that she will not testify in public
before the commission investigating the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In an
interview on CBS' 60 Minutes, Rice said, "I'm not going to say anything
in private that I wouldn't say in public. I'm legally bound to tell the
truth. I'm morally bound to tell the truth."
Republican Thomas Kean, a former governor of New Jersey who chairs the
9/11 commission, told Fox News Sunday that all 10 of the panel's members
want Rice to testify in public. She has been interviewed privately by
the commission for four hours. She says she won't talk under oath
because precedent prevents White House staffers from testifying about
their advice to a president.
"We think in a tragedy of this magnitude that those kind of legal
arguments are probably overridden," Kean said. But he said the panel
probably will not subpoena her.
------------------------------------------
Piracy injects a discordant
note
Mar 29 2004
Sion Barry, The Western Mail
THE music industry, it would seem, has become well and truly rattled
over the issue of online piracy.
So much so that, last week, the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) gave
the clear message that it would begin prosecuting the rebellious and
technologically proficient amongst us who download music from the
internet for free, rather than parting with hard-earned readies for the
sound of music.
Armed with a survey proving all manner of record-breaking facts, not
least of which being that 90% of people who download music from the
internet do so illegally, the BPI aimed to convince us that right was on
its side before unleashing its might to pursue internet offenders
through the criminal courts.
In fairness to the record industry however, nothing short of a molto
diminuendo has been taking place in record sales over the past few
years; record sales in the UK dropped from 52.5m in 2002 to 35.9m in
2003 and spending on singles last year was down an astonishing 59%.
And, worldwide, in only the first half of last year, sales of global
recorded music fell by 10.9% to £6.8bn.
Needless to say, and it's not hard to understand why, the finger of
blame has been firmly pointed at internet down-loaders when the BPI
estimated that, in this country, 8m people are downloading music from
the internet and 7.4m of those are using illegal peer-to-peer websites
mirroring the original king of free music download sites - Napster.
----------------------------------------------------------
Earth's
'quasi-moon' is wayward asteroid 09:15 28 March 04 Exclusive from New
Scientist Print Edition. Subscribe and get 4 free issues.
The Earth has only one true Moon, but astronomers have found that we
also have a "quasi-moon" - a travelling companion through space that is
circling the Earth while actually orbiting the Sun.
The object, the only quasi-moon discovered so far, is an asteroid called
2003 YN107 which circles the Sun in an orbit almost identical to
Earth's, but follows a corkscrew path that from time to time means that
it appears to orbit Earth.
Relative to Earth, the asteroid usually follows a horseshoe path that
sometimes lags behind us and is sometimes ahead. But since 1996 its path
has taken it round Earth, making it a quasi-satellite. This phase will
last until 2006.
The asteroid is probably a big chunk of debris from a lunar impact,
according to Paul Chodas, a specialist in asteroid orbits at NASA's Jet
Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Chodas and his colleagues
reported the discovery at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in
Houston, Texas, last week.
---------------------------------------------------
Linux fortunes
rising, but anxiety abounds
EU fine for Microsoft is helping software's development
By Matthew Fordahl, The Associated Press
SAN JOSE, Calif. -- It might have seemed to be the best possible week
for boosters of the Linux open-source operating system.
As their nemesis, Microsoft Corp., was getting sanctioned by Europe for
anticompetitive trespasses, computer giant Hewlett-Packard Co. gave
Linux a new vote of confidence, and the largest Linux distributor posted
strong financial results.
Yet uncertainty still surrounds the community-built software's ability
to chip away at Windows' dominance, particularly on desktop computers.
At face value, the Linux movement is helped by the European Commission's
decision to level the playing field. The commission fined Microsoft $613
million and ordered the company to share code with competitors so their
server software can run smoothly with Windows workstations.
But the action will probably end up giving little, if any, boost to
Linux or other competitors.
For one, Microsoft's appeal could take years - just as Linux is
beginning to be commercially marketed as a viable desktop operating
system for some businesses.
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Atlantis, reaches mythological proportions in the mind of the world - RI
Safir 1998
DRM is THEFT - We are the STAKEHOLDERS - RI Safir 2002
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