Israel Attacks UN Aid Convoy

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Israel says it was never authorised, the UN says it was.

Either way it is a breach of article 9 of the 1864 Geneva Convention for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded and Sick in Armies in the Field to attack aid workers bearing the Red Cross symbol.

Art. 9. The personnel charged exclusively with the removal, transportation, and treatment of the sick and wounded, as well as with the administration of sanitary formations and establishments, and the chaplains attached to armies, shall be respected and protected under all circumstances. If they fall into the hands of the enemy they shall not be considered as prisoners of war.

Art. 20. The personnel protected in virtue of the first paragraph of Article 9, and Articles 10 and 11, will wear attached to the left arm a brassard bearing a red cross on a white ground, which will be issued and stamped by competent military authority, and accompanied by a certificate of identity in the case of persons attached to the sanitary service of armies who do not have military uniform.

Intel, AMD and ATI

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Interesting article about the whole AMD+ATI deal at InfoWorld, including speculation that open sourcing the specs for the ATI graphics drivers once more (which mysteriously closed around the time ATI got the X-Box contract from Microsoft) could help AMD+ATI in the market place; especially given that Intel are already doing so..

I also wonder whether we’re suddenly going to see Intel pressure Apple to shift from ATI to nVidia..

SBS: Insight: Understanding Autism

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Well tonight the SBS Insight program “Understanding Autism” was on tonight, and Donna and myself were on talking about how we live with Donna’s autism.

One question I didn’t get to ask was going to be this:

Why, if we hear that people with autism react so very differently to different treatments with one helping one child and then for another child it has no effect (or makes things worse), do we continue to assume that there is just one thing called autism ?

Some children improve on gluten free diets, some don’t. Some improve on cassein free diets, some don’t. Some respond well to ABA, some become phobic because of it. Some are intolerant to salycliates, some have no problem with them. Etc, etc, etc..

To me, as a physicist, it makes sense when you change different variables on the same thing and it reacts differently then it usually is not the same thing!

So, to me, it makes good sense that there are multiple underlying issues (multiple autisms) that are causing symptoms that look similar.

A final plug – Donna mentioned the website we built almost a year ago now for people on the spectrum to advertise their employment skills to the world – it is called auties.org – go visit and hire someone with autism!

The Parable of the Tulsa

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In the beginning was the Xeon, and it was 32-bit.

Then Intel moved over the face of the Xeon and created Nocona, which was 64-bit, and Intel thought it was, well, OK.

So Intel took Nocona and added more L2 cache, and thus begat Irwindale. Intel saw Irwindale was good, but Opteron was still better.

So Intel was wrathful and split Irwindale asunder internally, creating Paxville DP, with dual cores.

Intel looked at Paxville DP and said unto itself “still not enough cache!” and soon more cache grew within the Paxville DP and thus begat Tulsa.

Thus endeth the lesson, from the book of Wikipedia, Chapter Xeon..

Ahem..

Google To Warn About Pages With Malware

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The BBC is reporting that Google will try and warn people about pages they return that may contain malware.

Initially the warnings seen via the search site will be generic and simply alert people to the fact that a site has been flagged as dangerous. Eventually the warnings will become more detailed as Stop Badware researchers visit harmful sites and analyse how they try to subvert users’ machines.

I had a play with one example that the BBC quotes:

A research report released in May 2006 looked at the safety of the results returned by a search and found that, on average, 4-6% of the sites had harmful content on them. For some keywords, such as “free screensavers” the number of potentially dangerous sites leapt to 64%.

But I couldn’t get it to warn me – perhaps it’s because Google knows I’m not running Windows ? 🙂

Has Cassini Found Lakes on Titan At Last ?

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The Planetary Society is reporting some really interesting news:

Saturn’s moon Titan was once thought to conceal a global ocean of methane and ethane beneath its smoggy atmosphere. However, while the landforms seen by Cassini and Huygens show ample evidence of past modification by the action of flowing liquids, actual bodies of present liquid have proven elusive through more than two years of investigation. Until now. During a July 22, 2006 flyby, Cassini’s RADAR instrument has finally unveiled what appears to be a land of lakes in Titan’s northern polar regions.

Pretty neat stuff, and this image is a neat example of some of the data they’ve got..

Possible Lakes on Titan