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]

A review of the research literature concerning the environmental consequences of increased levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide leads to the conclusion that increases during the 20th Century have produced no deleterious effects upon global weather, climate, or temperature. Increased carbon dioxide has, however, markedly increased plant growth rates. Predictions of harmful climatic effects due to future increases in minor greenhouse gases like CO2 are in error and do not conform to current experimental knowledge. [This lecture is ideal for anyone] who is concerned over the hysteria generated by the current misinformation about Global Warming.

• Over four billion Web pages, each an average of 10KB, all fully indexed.
• Up to 2,000 PCs in a cluster.
• Over 30 clusters.
• 104 interface languages including Klingon and Tagalog.
• One petabyte of data in a cluster -- so much that hard disk error rates of 10-15 begin to be a real issue.
• Sustained transfer rates of 2Gbps in a cluster.
• An expectation that two machines will fail every day in each of the larger clusters.
• No complete system failure since February 2000.

When Arthur C. Clarke said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, he was alluding to the trick of hiding the complexity of the job from the audience, or the user. Nobody hides the complexity of the job better than Google does; so long as we have a connection to the Internet, the Google search page is there day and night, every day of the year, and it is not just there, but it returns results. Google recognises that the returns are not always perfect, and there are still issues there -- more on those later -- but when you understand the complexity of the system behind that Web page you may be able to forgive the imperfections. You may even agree that what Google achieves is nothing short of sorcery. ["The magic that makes Google tick", 02 December 2004]

To love a person is selfish because it means that you value that particular person, that he or she makes your life better, that he or she is an intense source of joy--to you.

...It is regularly asserted that love should be unconditional, and that we should "love everyone as a brother." We see this view advocated by the "non-judgmental" grade-school teacher who tells his class that whoever brings a Valentine's Day card for one student must bring cards for everyone. We see it in the appalling dictum of "Hate the sin, but love the sinner"--which would have us condemn death camps but send Hitler a box of Godiva chocolates. Most people would agree that having sex with a person one despises is debased. Yet somehow, when the same underlying idea is applied to love, people consider it noble.

Love is far too precious to be offered indiscriminately. It is above all in the area of love that egalitarianism ought to be repudiated. Love represents an exalted exchange--a spiritual exchange--between two people, for the purpose of mutual benefit.

You love someone because he or she is a value--a selfish value to you, as determined by your standards--just as you are a value to him or her.

The United States reaffirmed its opposition to two-way talks with North Korea on its nuclear weapons program after the communist state on Friday again demanded bilateral discussions. ... North Korea stunned the world Thursday when it publicly admitted to having nuclear weapons and announced it was withdrawing from the multilateral negotiations.

North Korea's hostile weekend reaction to last week's six-way talks on its nuclear program was an initial response and probably a negotiating ploy, South Korea said on Monday. [...] It is not yet clear whether Pyongyang has officially reneged on that agreement or is using past tactics that mix bluster and brinkmanship with gradual steps forward.

"The North Koreans' post-conference verbal offensive was nothing but a stupid repeat of their habitual negotiating strategy," the Korea Herald said in an editorial. [Emphasis added]