George W. wants the world to love the C.I.A. ...

CIA needs to restore public trust - Hayden
http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?click_id=3&art_id=qw1147964943876B226&set_id=

"General Michael Hayden, US President George Bush's nominee for CIA director, said on Thursday the spy agency needed to restore public trust"

Oh yes it does!...

May 2004: "Iraqui prisoner abuse encouraged by CIA agents, report"
http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2004/s1100414.htm

(Also on http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/special/enron/2544757.html )
"the report by Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba found that reservist military police at the prison were urged by Army military intelligence officers and CIA agents to "set physical and mental conditions for favorable interrogation of witnesses."

(September, 2004)
CIA May Have Held 100 'Ghost' Prisoners
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0910-20.htm

Prisoner abuse, CIA patterns from the past
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB122/

"CIA interrogation manuals written in the 1960s and 1980s described "coercive techniques" such as those used to mistreat detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, according to the declassified documents posted today by the National Security Archive. The Archive also posted a secret 1992 report written for then Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney warning that U.S. Army intelligence manuals that incorporated the earlier work of the CIA for training Latin American military officers in interrogation and counterintelligence techniques contained "offensive and objectionable material" that "undermines U.S. credibility, and could result in significant embarrassment.""

Meanwhile, George W. Bush, son of CIA chief George Bush, said back in Septiember, 2001:

May 2006: CIA nominee defends domestic NSA spying
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,1778313,00.html

"I've got a lot of confidence in the CIA, and so should America," Bush said.
http://www.cnn.com/2001/US/09/26/gen.america.under.attack/index.html

Should we believe the Agency's track record, or George W. Bush's broken promises??

I rest my case...

The uglification of the Sun workstation cases. I want the w1100z´s one back!

I don´t know what the Sun hardware engineers were thinking, but if you ask me, the new Sun Ultra 20 workstation has an UGLY case, unlike its predecessor, the w1100z Java Workstation which was beatiful, in my book.

Such attractive hardware specs (AMD Opteron CPU, etc), with such an ugly case, WHY OH WHY??.

And I´m not the only one who thinks so.... Floyd Marinesc and others at TheServerSide, said:
"It is amazing to me how consistently ugly Sun workstations look in comparison. They must work hard to maintain such standards. The irony I find in this is that I will pay more for good industrial design. (I'm typing this on my Powerbook G4.) I wish Sun would respond to my want to pay more."

I think the w1100z case was beatiful in comparison to the new Ultra 20´s case design.

I hope the Sun guys have a sense of humour, because this is how I predict the Ultra 20´s succesor will look like, given the current trend: :-)

[Click to enlarge]

[Click on the image to enlarge it]