It’s easy to see why people are worried about Iran getting nuclear weapons. Here are some quotes by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad:

“As the Imam said, Israel must be wiped off the map.”

So he’s pretty much dedicated to the destruction of Israel — fair enough. But then he goes on to say the following in his letter to Bush:

“Why is it that any technological and scientific achievement reached in the Middle East region is translated into and portrayed as a threat to the Zionist regime?”

Hmm, I don’t know. Why would anyone think he possibly means to harm Israel?

“Like it or not, the Zionist regime is heading toward annihilation. The Zionist regime is a rotten, dried tree that will be eliminated by one storm.”

Either he has some specific, very interesting meteorological information, or the guy is talking about a war (or the use of a nuclear device). Look, I think these people (and the Mideast in general) have some legitimate complaints about a great many things that the U.S. is doing, but nothing is gained by carrying on like this. They are coming off as insane, dangerous children, not like a state that deserves to be treated with respect.

Naturally, this leads to them not being treated with respect, at which point they get more angry and pump more money into terrorism and war-making enterprises. It’s a cycle that will lead to nothing but pain for everyone.

OMG, this thing is so awesome. I’m thinking I’ll have a 7 series at around 50 years old (5 Series at 40, 3 Series now), but I hope I don’t have to wait that long to see this in my own BMW:

Video: BMW Infrared Night Vision

Ever wonder what mail servers people run? I found myself wondering what the top universities used, so I wrote a lame little script to go and query the top 50 schools from this list, find out their mail servers, and then netcat to them to see what they respond with.

The results were interesting. I was specifically wondering how the war between Sendmail and Postfix was going. As expected, Sendmail is still winning, but Postfix seems to be holding its own. 220 perseus.services.brown.edu ESMTP Sendmail X.X.X; Tue, 9 May 2006 17:06:13 -0400 (EDT) 220 mailhub4.dartmouth.edu ESMTP Sendmail 8.13.5/DND2.0/8.13.5; Tue, 9 May 2006 17:06:16 -0400 220 ns3.br.harvard.edu ESMTP Postfix 220 nisc.net.isc.upenn.edu ESMTP Postfix 220 emfw1.Princeton.EDU ESMTP (0ebdea0d60768e14e7c57b1a3713dd99) 220 mr5.its.yale.edu ESMTP server ready at Tue, 9 May 2006 17:06:18 -0400 220 MIT.EDU ESMTP Sendmail (no collect or third party calls) at Tue, 9 May 2006 17:06:19 -0400 (EDT) 220 water-ox.its.caltech.edu ESMTP Postfix 220 mx4.stanford.edu ESMTP Postfix 220-pohl.acpub.duke.edu ESMTP Duke University Sendmail 8.12.10/Duke-5.0.0; 220 MailRouter-2.wustl.edu ESMTP Mirapoint 3.5.8-GR; Tue, 9 May 2006 16:06:26 -0500 (CDT) 220 relay.it.northwestern.edu ESMTP Postfix 220 ipex2.johnshopkins.edu ESMTP (–snipped–) So out of 36 responses I got 7 with Postfix in the banner. If we take that highly unscientific sample and call it legit, we’re looking at roughly 20% of top-50 universities using Postfix. Not bad.

Aside from the MTA war, though, it was just interesting to see what these guys were putting in their banners. Check out the Princeton one, for example — they have some sort of secret message encoded with MD5 in theirs. And MIT points out that they don’t want any collect or third party calls. Nice.

Anyway, here are the results and the tool I used. Be sure to check out the raw output as well; there are quite a few interesting tidbits in there.:

The Results The Raw Results The Script I Used The List of Universities I Used

Hmm…this is no-doubt stirring quite a controversy. According to the book referenced in this article, women are essentially unhappy today because they’re trying to go out and be selfish, i.e. doing too much for themselves vs. for their family.

I’m not going to comment much on this other than to say that I enjoy this type of debate. It’s the type of discussion that leads to true learning — one direction or the other.

Link: Happy Housewife vs. Mad Mommy

Why is it that it consistently takes me like thirty (30) seconds to access Apple’s iTunes Music Store? A while back I was getting in like instantly, but now it’s like I’m loading the next level of a game from the 90s.

Perhaps it’s my machine; I am only running a dual-core 2.0 Ghz Intel with 2GB of memory. Or maybe my bandwidth? I’m admitedly limping along at around 8Mb/second.

What exactly is the problem here? I’m starting to get a bit pissed about it. I don’t see how I can be getting this sort of delay on top of the line hardware and sick bandwidth. Oh, and it does it all night long, too. It’s not just during peak hours.

Anyone have any ideas?

OMG.

This album is so incredibly sick. As expected, it takes time to soak in. My favorite song currently is Rosetta Stoned — track 8. For the first time in many years, an album’s content actually sticks with me and keeps me thinking during the day. It’s brilliant stuff.

If you haven’t yet purchased it, go get that way.

“Tonight, at one in the morning, it will be 01:02:03, 04/05/06″

A mathematical death.

A very cool piece that closely follows my line of thinking:

http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/28

“”It is impossible to predict whether the H5N1 virus will lead to a pandemic,” the report said, “but history suggests that if it does not, another novel influenza virus will emerge at some point in the future and threaten an unprotected human population. …

Hmm, so at some point we’ll get rocked by flu and millions will die. Thanks. So basically, “I’m not saying we’re all going to die a horrible death any time soon, I’m just saying that eventually it’ll happen.”

I’m all for getting prepared, but how necessary is it to spread doom and gloom? I sometimes get the feeling that these people get more kudos if their reports spell out imminent destruction than if they are level-headed.

Well, to whoever wrote that report — kudos to you.

…but this one isn’t really a diet, and it’s highly technical and very strange. So I think I’m going to try it. Just ordered the book from Amazon, and it should be here soon.

Just a teaser — the entire concept is to reset your body’s food requirement. It’s very simple. Instead of wanting a lot of food, you’ll simply want less and will almost literally forget to be hungry. (that’s the idea, anyway).

The reason I am partially interested is that it’s got the interest of the Freakanomics folks, and some cool people at Berkeley — high quality endorsements, to be sure.

Anyway, I’ll let you know if there’s anything to it. I’m actually very curious as to the science behind the technique being able to affect the brain so significantly. Very cool stuff.