Iran refuses to compete with Israeli

ATHENS (Reuters) – Iran’s world judo champion Arash Miresmaeili refused to compete against an Israeli Sunday, triggering a fresh crisis at the Olympic Games where race, creed or color are not allowed to interfere with sport.

“This is a general policy of our country to refrain from competing against athletes of the Zionist regime and Arash Miresmaeili has observed this policy,” [the Iranian National Olympic Committee in Tehran ] said.

I wonder how the IOC will deal with this, given the anti-Semitism predominant in Europe.

OSCE "observers" to monitor US elections

A bunch of countries from Europe are sending “observers” to the U.S. to tell us whether American elections are fair. A number of them have recently experienced civil war, massive election fraud, and de-facto dictatorships. Virtually all oppose the policies of the current administration.

WASHINGTON (CNN) — A team of international observers will monitor the presidential election in November, according to the U.S. State Department.
The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe was invited to monitor the election by the State Department. The observers will come from the OSCE’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights.
It will be the first time such a team has been present for a U.S. presidential election.
“The U.S. is obliged to invite us, as all OSCE countries should,” spokeswoman Urdur Gunnarsdottir said. “It’s not legally binding, but it’s a political commitment. They signed a document 10 years ago to ask OSCE to observe elections.”
Thirteen Democratic members of the House of Representatives, raising the specter of possible civil rights violations that they said took place in Florida and elsewhere in the 2000 election, wrote to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan in July, asking him to send observers.

Twelve Commandments of Web Server Management

I recently had occasion to configure my first Windows 2003 server, so I decided to write down some guidelines to aid the configuration and keep it secure. Before long, I had a lengthy list of boring rules, so I decided to make a list of commandments for managing web servers. Here is the result – the Twelve Commandments of Web Server Management. If I left out anything, thou shalt leave me a comment! Continue reading Twelve Commandments of Web Server Management

Gmail/Firefox Tricks/Free $$$

Two cool tricks: put your Firefox install on a flash drive, and get a notification agent for Gmail.

If you are a TAMU student, I highly recommend participating in the economics experiments this summer and fall. Two years ago, I made boatloads of money ($50-$100/session) in the experiments with a bit of game theory and basic knowledge of human psychology. I’m not sure what this has to do with economic theory, but if the department insists on wasting $ on experiments that demonstrate the obvious, I’ll be glad to help them part with it.