As if the region did not have enough problems, the Middle East has ended the year with a crushing humanitarian disaster. Friday's earthquake in Bam, in southeastern Iran, has claimed at least 20,000 lives, and possibly twice that number.

It is a great pity the Iranian ayatollahs cannot match this level of generous human response, even when it is their own people who are suffering: they have specifically rejected any assistance from Israel, the country in the region with the capacity to do the most to help.

Instead of poring over the sound and picture quality, reviewers could simply have taken the systems home. Their spouses/children/grandparents and everybody else would quickly have told them the truth. "We're going out tonight and I want to record a movie. That Betamax tape is useless: it isn't long enough. Get rid of it."

Comparisons between VCRs with similar features showed no significant differences in performance. In fact, most of the differences could only be seen with sensitive instruments, and likely would never show up on most consumer grade television sets. In particular, the qualitative differences between the two formats were less than the differences between any two samples from the same manufacturer.

What energy source is noisy, a visual blight on the pristine countryside, taxpayer and ratepayer subsidized, a hazard to birds (including endangered species), the subject of a $100 million cleanup/restoration operation in California and two to three times more costly to produce than an identical substitute? If you guessed wind generation of electricity, you are correct.
What energy source requires over 100 times the space of conventional electric power plants, is located in pristine desert areas, is taxpayer and ratepayer subsidized, and produces the most expensive electricity on earth at twice the cost of nuclear power? If you guessed solar farm generation of electricity, you are also correct.

When it comes to creating quality vocal tracks, Yamaha's VOCALOID singing synthesis technology literally changes everything. The future will now be very different. The last bastion of human musical expression - the singing voice - has been realistically harnessed in synthesis. Now it's time for YOU to express your music in YOUR own words. You can sing your heart out - through LEON, LOLA, MIRIAM, and other VOCALOID virtual vocalists from Zero-G, thanks to the incredible new technology developed by Yamaha.

In Brooklyn Heights, a video-store owner got a ticket for an ashtray that he says he used only to help a customer who walked in with a lighted cigarette in her hand. She had to put it out in something, no?
A more prominent New Yorker, Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, received a summons because of ashtrays in his Times Square office. Inspectors, who had gone there on a complaint about smoking, found no one puffing away. But they did spot the ashtrays. That was enough.

Chinese for "Internet cafe" is Wangka.

What is unusual about this cluster is that it has been running since April 1997 despite the addition of machines, upgrades to the operating system, upgrades to applications, a changeover to a SAN architecture and even the physical relocation of the machines to a new site some seven kilometers away. Yet, through all these changes the cluster has provided continuous IT services to the Amsterdam rozzers.
The current up-time for the cluster is about 2430 days, or more than six years, with the installation of the oldest hardware, an FDDI concentrator, only 1650 days ago, while the oldest computer system was installed about three years ago.

Off the Wall: The Fine Art of Rock

Pop in aesthetic, punk in sensibility, the concert poster provides the vital 'word on the street' for music aficionados.