Iran and Syria on Wednesday said they would unite against any challenges or threats to their nations' livelihoods, a move that could raise the stakes in the ongoing international dramas involving both countries. ... Observers said an alliance of any kind between the two nations wouldn't be good.

"They feel the ground shifting under them" as democracy begins to take root in neighboring Iraq, Robert McFarlane (search), who served as national security adviser to President Reagan, told FOX News.

"It's a very misguided effort, this idea of cooperation between Iran and Syria," McFarlane continued. "They've wreaked years and years of devastation to Lebanon and the sponsorship of terrorism."

Syria was invited into Lebanon in 1976 to quell that country's nascent civil war. The war did not end until 1990, and Syria has loosely controlled Lebanon ever since.

Iran has been the main provider of funding and weapons to Lebanese Hezbollah, the fundamentalist Shiite militia, terrorist group and political party that forced U.S. and French troops out of Beirut in 1983 and the Israeli army out of southern Lebanon during the 1990s.

"[Iran and Syria] have been joined for a long time in creating terrorism in the region," Air Force Lt. Gen. (Ret.) Tom McInerney told FOX News. "That shouldn't be any surprise to any of us, they've just now announced it publicly."

LCD screens are generally the most expensive part of a laptop computer.  They're also the most likely part to contain noticeable flaws in the form of the dreaded dead pixels.  Each notebook manufacturer has their own policy on how many dead pixels warrants a return and replacement.  The problem is, most people are not aware of this policy before they get their notebook and falsely assume that one dead pixel is good enough to ask for a replacement, but this is generally not the case.

...Sometimes it is quite obvious as to whether you have a dead pixel on your screen, but sometimes it might take a little while for you to notice.  It's best that you run a test on your screen right when you get your notebook to determine if you have dead pixels and then take the further step of deciding whether you want to try and return the laptop if there are an excessive amount of dead pixels.  Download a free application called Dead Pixel Buddy to test for dead pixels on your screen.  Please be sure to donate via PayPal to the developer of this application if you can spare the money!

The declaration first covers what appear to be legitimate rights, such as "the right to life, liberty and security of person," "the right to own property," and freedom of "thought" and "opinion." (The right to pursue happiness is absent, for reasons that will soon become obvious.) It then introduces a series of "economic rights," such as a person's "right" to work, paid holidays, protection against unemployment, social security, free education, and a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care. If people are entitled to these, who will be forced to provide them? Whose property will be seized to pay for them? [Glenn Woiceshyn, United Nations Declaration of Human Rights Destroys Individual Rights, Capitalism Magazine, December 11, 1998]