In 1998 A customer of mine had a whole batch of Dells who all had the same problem that the second IDE port didn't work. No problem as long as you kept the machine as you received it, but it became a problem when I wanted to add cdroms. As the whole batch had the problem they should have known about it. But instead they tried to make life difficult for me: "have you tried that? Didn't you make that mistake?". It paid of for them. I got so sick of it that I only asked replacement for those computers where I actually needed 3 IDE devices at that moment. But in fact the whole batch (some 15 computers) was bad.

I don't agree with much of what you said. But based on my recent experiences with Google Adsense I agree that Google has lost its moral compass. First they accused me of hosting illegal music and when I proved that that was not true they simply to my Adsense account away for having changed the color of my ad.

Disgusting...

The ad says that Oracle will aim for tight integration with its database. That might be less welcome news for those people who do not use it for Oracle databases.

Reminds me of the Dutch blasphemy law in the 1970s. The time spirit had become liberal, but there were still those old laws. So they prosecuted some writers who had written blasphemous books (if I remember well in one God had sex with a donkey). The writers were condemned to some fine. But the free publicity for their books had been such that they didn't care at all.

With hundreds of US military "advisors" in Georgia the US very probably was informed before of the Georgian attacks. And they are probably now working as advisors behind the screens - providing data from the satellites. This looks very similar to Operation Storm in which the Croat army crushed the Serbs in the Krajna in 1995. Then too US advisors played a major role on the background. Even the lack of respect for Ossetian lives reminds of the lack of respect for Serb lives in the Krajna. Maybe somebody can check which "advisors" that were then in Croatia are now in Georgia.