Given that the next version of Windows is more than two years late, you'd expect that people would be calling for Microsoft to get its act together and release it soon as possible. Not so.

nicked from Digg
and yes better to get it right than launch just to meet some arbitary deadline

Bloggers to Microsoft: Take your time with Vista | News.blog | CNET News.com

"Intuition is fast, based on pattern matching," explains John Allman, Ph.D., head of a laboratory at the California Institute of Technology that focuses on brain evolution. "Our brains are constantly comparing current experience with the past, trying to find a fit so that we can make a quick decision. When we find a match, often in a fraction of a second, our intuition boils down a lot of experience into a simple, visceral metric: I feel good about this or not," Allman says.

Going With Your Gut: Strengthening Your Sixth Sense - Health Site

Animals and plants in Scotland are responding to climate change but some are altering quicker than others, according to a new report.

BBC NEWS | Scotland | Natural events 'occuring earlier'

In upholding bans on same-sex marriage this month, judges in New York and Nebraska relied on the same legal argument: Gays and lesbians do not have a right to wed because their relationships are fundamentally different from straight relationships.

yesyes enshrine bigotry in law
"fundamentally different" yes "they" have 2 heads and eat children
let's quote Deuteronomy
ps the Bible in places also endorses slavery so why not reintroduce that
*annoyed*

Gays Engaged in a Battle for Hearts, Minds - Los Angeles Times

"We may lose business on Intel boards, but we will break the Intel monopoly." With these words, AMD's CFO Bob Rivet announced the takeover of graphics chip maker, ATI, offering a future of joined-up shared processing, split between CPU and GPU.

AMD, ATI and the GPU | The Register

From its first days in Iraq in April 2003, the Army's 4th Infantry Division made an impression on soldiers from other units -- the wrong one.

"We slowly drove past 4th Infantry guys looking mean and ugly," recalled Sgt. Kayla Williams, then a military intelligence specialist in the 101st Airborne. "They stood on top of their trucks, their weapons pointed directly at civilians. . . . What could these locals possibly have done? Why was this intimidation necessary? No one explained anything, but it looked weird and felt wrong."

i recommend this article as a companion piece to the Washington Post article previously recommended which discusses good tactics for fighting an insurgency as learnt in Vietnam, as lessons which have been unevenly applied (if at all).
click here for previous article

'It Looked Weird and Felt Wrong'

It’s too late now, but Israel could have used a friend in the early stages of its war with Hezbollah — a friend who could have tugged at its sleeve and said: “O.K. We understand. But enough.”

That friend should have been the United States.

It is not difficult to understand both Israel’s obligation to lash back at the unprovoked attacks of Hezbollah, and the longstanding rage and frustration that have led the Israelis to attempt to obliterate, once and for all, this unrelenting terrorist threat. Israelis are always targets for terror — whether they are minding their own business in their homes, or shopping at the mall, or taking a bus to work, or celebrating the wedding of loved ones.

(A quick example from a seemingly endless list: An Israeli security guard prevented a Palestinian suicide bomber from entering a mall in the seaside town of Netanya last December. The bomber detonated his explosives anyway, killing himself, the guard and four others.)

But the unnecessary slaughter of innocents, whether by Hezbollah, Hamas, Al Qaeda, American forces in Iraq or the Israeli defense forces, is always wrong, and should never be tolerated. So civilized people cannot in good conscience stand by and silently watch as hundreds of innocents are killed and thousands more threatened by the spasm of destruction unleashed by Israel in Lebanon.

Going after Hezbollah is one thing. The murderous rocket attacks into Israel must be stopped. But the wanton killing of innocent civilians, including babies and children, who had no connection at all to Hezbollah is something else.

The United States should have whispered into Israel’s ear, the message being: “The carnage has to cease. We’ll find a better way.”

Instead, the Bush crowd nodded in acquiescence as Israel plowed headlong into a situation that can’t possibly end any other way than badly. Lebanon, which had been one of the few bright spots in the Middle East, is now a mess. Even if Hezbollah is brought to its knees, the circumstances will ensure that there will be legions of newly radicalized young men anxious to take up arms and step into the vacuum.

(When Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, its strongest resistance enemy was the Palestinian guerrilla group Fatah. When it withdrew 18 years later, it left behind a stronger, more extreme guerrilla movement in Hezbollah, a force that didn’t exist at the time of the invasion.)

Joseph Cirincione, an expert on national security matters (and a supporter of Israel) at the Center for American Progress in Washington, said last week: “There is no question that Hezbollah provoked this current crisis, and that it was right for Israel to respond, even if that meant crossing the Lebanon border to strike back at those who had attacked it. But this operation has gone too far. It’s striking back at those who had nothing to do with Hezbollah.”

As a true friend of Israel, the task of t... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

Find a Better Way - New York Times

The phrase “The customer is always right” was originally coined by Harry Gordon Selfridge, the founder of Selfridge’s department store in London in 1909, and is typically used by businesses to:

1. Convince customers that they will get good service at this company
2. Convince employees to give customers good service

Fortunately more and more businesses are abandoning this maxim - ironically because it leads to bad customer service.

Here are the top five reasons why “The customer is always right” is wrong.

Positive Sharing » Top 5 reasons why “The Customer Is Always Right” is wrong

When the U.S.-led coalition invaded Afghanistan five years ago, pessimists warned that we Americans would soon find ourselves in a similar situation to what Soviet forces faced in the 1980s. They were wrong - but only about the timing.

The military operation was lean and lethal, and routed the Taliban government in a few weeks. But now, just two years after Hamid Karzai was elected as the country's first democratic leader, the coalition finds itself, like its Soviet predecessors, in control of major cities and towns, very weak in the villages, and besieged by a shadowy insurgency that uses Pakistan as its rear base.

Washington's backing of an enlightened government in Kabul should put the United States in a far stronger position than the Soviets in the fight to win back the hinterland. But it may not, and for a good reason: The involvement of America's other ally in the region, Pakistan, in aiding the Taliban war machine is deeper than is commonly thought.

Pakistan: The Taliban's silent partner - Editorials & Commentary - International Herald Tribune

...
In improvising a response to the insurgency, the U.S. forces worked hard and had some successes. Yet they frequently were led poorly by commanders unprepared for their mission by an institution that took away from the Vietnam War only the lesson that it shouldn't get involved in messy counterinsurgencies. The advice of those who had studied the American experience there was ignored.

That summer, retired Marine Col. Gary Anderson, an expert in small wars, was sent to Baghdad by the Pentagon to advise on how to better put down the emerging insurgency. He met with Bremer in early July. "Mr. Ambassador, here are some programs that worked in Vietnam," Anderson said.

It was the wrong word to put in front of Bremer. "Vietnam?" Bremer exploded, according to Anderson. "Vietnam! I don't want to talk about Vietnam. This is not Vietnam. This is Iraq!"

This was one of the early indications that U.S. officials would obstinately refuse to learn from the past as they sought to run Iraq.

One of the essential texts on counterinsurgency was written in 1964 by David Galula, a lieutenant colonel in the French army who was born in Tunisia, witnessed guerrilla warfare on three continents and died in 1967.
...

In Iraq, Military Forgot Lessons of Vietnam