When President Bush summoned journalists to the White House on Wednesday, he expected to explain why things had gone so dangerously wrong in North Korea. Then a famous baseball pitcher flew his airplane into a New York residential skyscraper, killing himself and a companion and setting off alarms that reverberate in memory.Discontent about the diplomatic missteps in Washington that culminated in North Korea's nuclear swagger dropped, for a time, from the center of national attention.
The national attention span is always uncertain, moving from the sexual preoccupations of a congressman whose resignation was swifter than any act of Congress, to arguments about the number of Iraqis who have been killed since the U.S. became their protector."The only thing we have to fear," said President Franklin D. Roosevelt, pausing to brace his listeners, "is fear itself."The commander in chief in the war on terrorism described the nation's purpose on Wednesday in this way: "Stay the course means, 'Keep doing what you're doing.' " He said further, according to The New York Times: "Stay the course also means, 'Don't leave before the job is done.' "Not every generation deals with fear and uncertainty in the same way. Government leaders proclaim a war on terrorism, while citizens fear that war may follow the war on poverty and the war on drugs into the footnotes of American history.The country grieves for Cory Lidle, the pitcher-pilot, and his flight companion. However the awful event is eventually classified, it will be remembered as New York 's most spectacular traffic accident. The driver, in this case, let his affection for flying take him into the most populous city in the country. He was licensed to fly, but he was not an old-timer at the controls.Other athletes have figured in vehicular tragedies, but so have hundreds of thousands of less-famous non-athletes. Some of the accidents could be prevented. In Chicago, the serving of goose liver in restaurants is against the law, but the same places are licensed to sell intoxicating drinks to customers whose cars are parked nearby, ready for the drive home.The crash of a plane into a Manhattan skyscraper took the breath away from Americans already scarred by memories of 9-11. It was reported that Lidle observed all regulations governing flights that loop around the Statue of Liberty and travel in the shadows of tall buildings. That might lead a person to wonder why the government requires grandmothers to take off their shoes for examination before boarding an airliner, but apparently permits licensed pilots to fly themselves and their guests into fearsome areas.If the areas were not fearsome, American military planes would not have taken to the air to shield such cities as Los Angeles and Seattle after news of the New York catastrophe was broadcast.Government agencies are not well coordinated in providing national security. Possibly they never will be in a nation as large and diverse as the United States, where change is constant, bureaucracies are territorial and politicians embrace capitalism more happily than democracy.Cory Lidle will make it into a hall of fame if his mistake, his wrong turn, loosens a healthy fear among his fellow citizens. His recreational flying reveals how exposed the capital city of world commerce remains today. Healthy fear, which is not terror, can draw attention to potentially disastrous oversights in leadership and planning.Overcoming fear, as Franklin Roosevelt suggested, is fear's only value.
Friday, October 13, 2006
Monday, October 09, 2006
Mistake (contract law)
In contract law a mistake is incorrect understanding by one or more parties to a contract and may be used as grounds to invalidate the agreement. Common law has identified three different types of mistake in contract: unilateral mistake, mutual mistake, and common mistake.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Sunday, September 03, 2006
Bush’s Biggest Mistake
The pre-9/11 blunder you’ve probably never heard of
By David Corn
The real question for the 9/11 commission — and the American public — is not whether George W. Bush considered al Qaeda an urgent threat before 9/11, but this: How did the U.S. government let Khalid al-Mihdar and Nawaf al-Hazmi get away with it?
Don’t know who al-Mihdar and al-Hazmi are — or were? Their names should be household words; they should be as famous as Lee Harvey Oswald. They were two of the 9/11 hijackers who took control of Flight 77 and crashed it into the Pentagon. But they were
different from the other 19 hijackers. The CIA had been watching them as early as January 2000. Yet the CIA failed to let the FBI know that these two men — who had attended an al Qaeda summit in Malaysia in early 2000 — were in the United States or heading toward it. Consequently, the FBI lost what probably was the best opportunity it had to unravel the 9/11 plot.
This episode is important to keep in mind as Washington partisans and commentators dissect the face-off between Richard Clarke, the former White House counterterrorism coordinator, and the Bush White House, particularly National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. (This column was written before Rice’s much-anticipated public testimony to the 9/11 commission.) The Clarke dustup focused on a matter that shouldn’t be a subject of dispute. Clarke accused George W. Bush of having failed to consider the al Qaeda threat a top priority before September 11, 2001, and the White House cried did-not. But Bush told journalist Bob Woodward (for Woodward’s book Bush at War) that before 9/11, when it came to Osama bin Laden, “I didn’t feel that sense of urgency.” So where’s the argument? Other evidence uncovered by the 9/11 commission and a separate 9/11 investigation conducted by the House and Senate intelligence committees support Bush on this point. Why not take him at his word?
But the urgent/not-urgent debate has produced enough smoke (so far) to obscure what should be another cause of concern for the White House: al-Mihdar and al-Hazmi. The story of these two has been covered in the media, but not to the same extent as such pressing matters as, say, Janet Jackson’s right boob. And, more importantly, the CIA has gotten a complete pass for one of the biggest screwups in U.S. history, and Bush has gotten a pass for giving the CIA a pass.
Here’s the story in short, according to the final report of the 9/11 congressional inquiry. The CIA had spied on an al Qaeda meeting in Kuala Lumpur that occurred the first week of January 2000. Within days, the CIA knew that al-Mihdar and al-Hazmi had been present, and the agency had enough information on the two to add them to a State Department watch list that could have been used to deny them entry to the United States. Yet it did not do so. In early March 2000, the CIA learned that a week after the Malaysia gathering, al-Hazmi traveled to Los Angeles. It also knew that al-Mihdar had accompanied al-Hazmi part of the way, but the CIA did consider the possibility that al-Mihdar, too, had been heading toward the United States. In February 2000, the two settled in San Diego. They rented a place and obtained driver’s licenses using their own names. They took flight lessons. In July 2000, al-Hazmi applied for a visa extension. In December, he moved to Arizona with another 9/11 hijacker. And at some point, al-Hazmi’s brother came to the United States. He, too, would become one of the 9/11 hijackers.
Because the CIA failed to tell the FBI — until August 23, 2001 — that al-Hazmi and al-Mihdar were in the United States, the FBI never went looking for them. Had the FBI been searching for them, it well could have found them. The two had had numerous contacts with a longtime FBI informant in San Diego. The FBI agent who handled this informant told the intelligence committees, “I’m sure we could have located them, and we could have done it within a few days.” Unfortunately, the CIA was 17 months late in passing information on the pair to the FBI, and then FBI headquarters did not disseminate it to the FBI office in San Diego until after September 11. All this means that the CIA had a bead on two of the hijackers, who could have led the feds to others, and it did virtually nothing. If I were a 9/11 victim’s family member, this would keep me up at night and crying during the day.
Why would a high-profile examination of the al-Hazmi and al-Mihdar case be bad news for Bush? There are two reasons. First, Bush seems to have done nothing in response to this awful mistake. He has defended the pre-9/11 performance of the CIA. He has not publicly demanded accountability or explanations. Apparently, no one has lost his or her job for these mistakes.
Second, if it were more widely known that the U.S. government had been this close to al-Hazmi and al-Mihdar, Bush’s lack of urgency would look worse and perhaps downright negligent. Some Bush defenders have argued that a more vigorous Bush policy pre-9/11 would not have made a difference. The 9/11 plot had been put into motion long before Bush hit 1600 Pennsylvania, and a new push against al Qaeda and bin Laden — even the assassination of bin Laden — might not have stopped the action. But there’s a counterargument: If Bush and his aides had considered al Qaeda an urgent matter, they might have responded to the increased warnings that came in during the summer of 2001 by going ballistic and demanding that government agencies double-check and triple-check all the information they had on al Qaeda operatives. Had Bush and Rice sounded a call to arms, would midlevel officials have connected the dots on al-Hazmi and al-Mihdar? Would they have paid more attention to other telltale signs in their possession, such as the infamous Phoenix memo, which was sent by an FBI agent in July 2001 to the bin Laden unit at headquarters and which reported that suspected extremists linked to bin Laden were taking flight instruction in Arizona?
Bush and Rice are lucky such questions are unanswerable. Their line has always been, there was nothing we could have done. Just days ago, Bush adviser Karen Hughes said, “I just don’t think, based on everything I know, and I was there, that there was anything that anyone in government could have done to have put together the pieces before the horror of that day.” The case of al-Hazmi and al-Mihdar proves her wrong. With this foul-up in mind, the congressional intelligence committees concluded, “The intelligence community failed to capitalize on both the individual and collective significance of available information . . . As a result, the community missed opportunities to disrupt the September 11 plot.”
The Bush crew refuses to acknowledge that mistakes were made. It’s as if al-Hazmi and al-Mihdar never existed. (If only.) September 11 family members — and citizens who care about truth, history and government accountability — can only hope the 9/11 commission exposes not only what went wrong but Bush’s less-than-urgent attitude toward the blunders that enabled bin Laden to succeed.
www.laweekly.com
By David Corn
The real question for the 9/11 commission — and the American public — is not whether George W. Bush considered al Qaeda an urgent threat before 9/11, but this: How did the U.S. government let Khalid al-Mihdar and Nawaf al-Hazmi get away with it?
Don’t know who al-Mihdar and al-Hazmi are — or were? Their names should be household words; they should be as famous as Lee Harvey Oswald. They were two of the 9/11 hijackers who took control of Flight 77 and crashed it into the Pentagon. But they were
different from the other 19 hijackers. The CIA had been watching them as early as January 2000. Yet the CIA failed to let the FBI know that these two men — who had attended an al Qaeda summit in Malaysia in early 2000 — were in the United States or heading toward it. Consequently, the FBI lost what probably was the best opportunity it had to unravel the 9/11 plot.
This episode is important to keep in mind as Washington partisans and commentators dissect the face-off between Richard Clarke, the former White House counterterrorism coordinator, and the Bush White House, particularly National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. (This column was written before Rice’s much-anticipated public testimony to the 9/11 commission.) The Clarke dustup focused on a matter that shouldn’t be a subject of dispute. Clarke accused George W. Bush of having failed to consider the al Qaeda threat a top priority before September 11, 2001, and the White House cried did-not. But Bush told journalist Bob Woodward (for Woodward’s book Bush at War) that before 9/11, when it came to Osama bin Laden, “I didn’t feel that sense of urgency.” So where’s the argument? Other evidence uncovered by the 9/11 commission and a separate 9/11 investigation conducted by the House and Senate intelligence committees support Bush on this point. Why not take him at his word?
But the urgent/not-urgent debate has produced enough smoke (so far) to obscure what should be another cause of concern for the White House: al-Mihdar and al-Hazmi. The story of these two has been covered in the media, but not to the same extent as such pressing matters as, say, Janet Jackson’s right boob. And, more importantly, the CIA has gotten a complete pass for one of the biggest screwups in U.S. history, and Bush has gotten a pass for giving the CIA a pass.
Here’s the story in short, according to the final report of the 9/11 congressional inquiry. The CIA had spied on an al Qaeda meeting in Kuala Lumpur that occurred the first week of January 2000. Within days, the CIA knew that al-Mihdar and al-Hazmi had been present, and the agency had enough information on the two to add them to a State Department watch list that could have been used to deny them entry to the United States. Yet it did not do so. In early March 2000, the CIA learned that a week after the Malaysia gathering, al-Hazmi traveled to Los Angeles. It also knew that al-Mihdar had accompanied al-Hazmi part of the way, but the CIA did consider the possibility that al-Mihdar, too, had been heading toward the United States. In February 2000, the two settled in San Diego. They rented a place and obtained driver’s licenses using their own names. They took flight lessons. In July 2000, al-Hazmi applied for a visa extension. In December, he moved to Arizona with another 9/11 hijacker. And at some point, al-Hazmi’s brother came to the United States. He, too, would become one of the 9/11 hijackers.
Because the CIA failed to tell the FBI — until August 23, 2001 — that al-Hazmi and al-Mihdar were in the United States, the FBI never went looking for them. Had the FBI been searching for them, it well could have found them. The two had had numerous contacts with a longtime FBI informant in San Diego. The FBI agent who handled this informant told the intelligence committees, “I’m sure we could have located them, and we could have done it within a few days.” Unfortunately, the CIA was 17 months late in passing information on the pair to the FBI, and then FBI headquarters did not disseminate it to the FBI office in San Diego until after September 11. All this means that the CIA had a bead on two of the hijackers, who could have led the feds to others, and it did virtually nothing. If I were a 9/11 victim’s family member, this would keep me up at night and crying during the day.
Why would a high-profile examination of the al-Hazmi and al-Mihdar case be bad news for Bush? There are two reasons. First, Bush seems to have done nothing in response to this awful mistake. He has defended the pre-9/11 performance of the CIA. He has not publicly demanded accountability or explanations. Apparently, no one has lost his or her job for these mistakes.
Second, if it were more widely known that the U.S. government had been this close to al-Hazmi and al-Mihdar, Bush’s lack of urgency would look worse and perhaps downright negligent. Some Bush defenders have argued that a more vigorous Bush policy pre-9/11 would not have made a difference. The 9/11 plot had been put into motion long before Bush hit 1600 Pennsylvania, and a new push against al Qaeda and bin Laden — even the assassination of bin Laden — might not have stopped the action. But there’s a counterargument: If Bush and his aides had considered al Qaeda an urgent matter, they might have responded to the increased warnings that came in during the summer of 2001 by going ballistic and demanding that government agencies double-check and triple-check all the information they had on al Qaeda operatives. Had Bush and Rice sounded a call to arms, would midlevel officials have connected the dots on al-Hazmi and al-Mihdar? Would they have paid more attention to other telltale signs in their possession, such as the infamous Phoenix memo, which was sent by an FBI agent in July 2001 to the bin Laden unit at headquarters and which reported that suspected extremists linked to bin Laden were taking flight instruction in Arizona?
Bush and Rice are lucky such questions are unanswerable. Their line has always been, there was nothing we could have done. Just days ago, Bush adviser Karen Hughes said, “I just don’t think, based on everything I know, and I was there, that there was anything that anyone in government could have done to have put together the pieces before the horror of that day.” The case of al-Hazmi and al-Mihdar proves her wrong. With this foul-up in mind, the congressional intelligence committees concluded, “The intelligence community failed to capitalize on both the individual and collective significance of available information . . . As a result, the community missed opportunities to disrupt the September 11 plot.”
The Bush crew refuses to acknowledge that mistakes were made. It’s as if al-Hazmi and al-Mihdar never existed. (If only.) September 11 family members — and citizens who care about truth, history and government accountability — can only hope the 9/11 commission exposes not only what went wrong but Bush’s less-than-urgent attitude toward the blunders that enabled bin Laden to succeed.
www.laweekly.com
Tuesday, August 29, 2006
The largest mistake of management for all history of the American business.
Progress came slowly after the original invention. Bell and Watson worked constantly on improving the telphone's range. They made their longest call to date on October 9, 1876. It was a distance of only two miles, but they were so overjoyed that later that night they celebrated, doing so much began dancing that their landlady threatened to throw them out. Watson later recalled "Bell . . . had a habit of celebrating by what he called a war dance and I had got so exposed at it that I could do it quite as well as he could." [Watson] The rest of 1876, though, was difficult for Bell and his backers.
Bell and Watson improved the telephone and made better models of it, but these changes weren't enough to turn the telephone from a curiosity into a needed appliance. Promoting and developing the telephone proved far harder than Hubbard, Sanders, or Bell expected. No switchboards existed yet, the telephones were indeed crude and transmission quality was poor. Many questioned why anyone needed a telephone. And despite Bell's patent, broadly covering the entire subject of transmitting speech electrically, many companies sprang up to sell telephones and telephone service. In addition, other people filed applications for telephones and transmitters after Bell's patent was issued. Most claimed Bell's patent couldn't produce a working telephone or that they had a prior claim. Litigation loomed. Fearing financial collapse, Hubbard and Sanders offered in the fall of 1876 to sell their telephone patent rights to Western Union for $100,000. Western Union refused.
Mistake of a century
Business Western Union at that time promptly extended. For the first 11 years of the existence this company has increased the capital in 110 times. Hubbard has offered the patent for phone to it for ridiculously low price which at all did not defray all charges on researches. But president Western Union William Orton has considered the new device as a frivolous toy and the transaction has refused. The management of the prospering company did not see sense in mastering new services. It became one of the largest mistakes of management for all history of the American business.
Having received from a gate the turn, the angered Hubbard has refused attempts to sell the patent. Partners have decided to develop business independently. One more wise decision became creation of the separate enterprise which would be engaged in operation of the invention. So, on August, 1st, 1877 has appeared Bell Telephone Company, served 778 telephone lines.
Having received from a gate the turn, the angered Hubbard has refused attempts to sell the patent. Partners have decided to develop business independently. One more wise decision became creation of the separate enterprise which would be engaged in operation of the invention. So, on August, 1st, 1877 has appeared Bell Telephone Company, served 778 telephone lines.
Monday, August 28, 2006
51 mistake in the third “Lord of the Rings”
Mistakes in Hollywood blockbu$ters is usual thing. Millions of dollars invested in such projects do not protect from errors of various visibility, which remain unseen by many people in charge. And when the film is screened in cinemas, maniac fans are as happy to search for those mistakes as to watch the film itself. Remember “Matrix”: they found 112 errors in the original movie, 84 in its sequel and at least 23 in the third part.
“Lord of the Rings” trilogy in this sense is no worse (or no better). While fans all over the world are waiting to see another masterpiece by Peter Jackson, English critics from Daily Star found 51 mistakes in the movie already. Here are some of them:
When Frodo waves goodbye to other hobbits (before going with Gandalf), his finger bitten off by Gorlum, is magically in its place.
At a panorama of Minas Tirith there are a few guard towers. They suddenly disappear short before the battle, only one remains. However, the towers come back during the battle.
There are a few episodes with magic transformations. In the scene on Mountain of Fate, Sam’s got a dark bloody trace by his left eye. Then Frodo comes in and says sacramental “The Ring is mine”. Sam appears again, the trace is gone, like it was scared off by Frodo’s words.
With the same ease disappears blood of other Middle Earth inhabitants. In one battle scene Gandalf’s sword is covered with orcs’ blood, and then in a second it’s perfectly clear. Great magic of Gandalf the Grey!
It is understandable, that directors shooting blockbu$ters think no a way too wide dimension to be attentive to details. This job is saved to an army of viewers, who must have something to do during long winter (and strangling summer) nights…
“Lord of the Rings” trilogy in this sense is no worse (or no better). While fans all over the world are waiting to see another masterpiece by Peter Jackson, English critics from Daily Star found 51 mistakes in the movie already. Here are some of them:
When Frodo waves goodbye to other hobbits (before going with Gandalf), his finger bitten off by Gorlum, is magically in its place.
At a panorama of Minas Tirith there are a few guard towers. They suddenly disappear short before the battle, only one remains. However, the towers come back during the battle.
There are a few episodes with magic transformations. In the scene on Mountain of Fate, Sam’s got a dark bloody trace by his left eye. Then Frodo comes in and says sacramental “The Ring is mine”. Sam appears again, the trace is gone, like it was scared off by Frodo’s words.
With the same ease disappears blood of other Middle Earth inhabitants. In one battle scene Gandalf’s sword is covered with orcs’ blood, and then in a second it’s perfectly clear. Great magic of Gandalf the Grey!
It is understandable, that directors shooting blockbu$ters think no a way too wide dimension to be attentive to details. This job is saved to an army of viewers, who must have something to do during long winter (and strangling summer) nights…
Most common human misspellings and typos
For example word like Myspace has many typos, the results are based on the proximity of the characters on a QWERTY keyboard, and a database of common spelling/typo mistakes (as well as a few other factors), they are fairly accurate and likely to occur in a real world situation:
nyspace kyspace jyspace mtspace muspace
mhspace myepace myapace mydpace mywpace
mysoace myslace myspsce myspzce myspqce
myspade myspave myspaxe nyspaxe myspaver
nyspace kyspace jyspace mtspace muspace
mhspace myepace myapace mydpace mywpace
mysoace myslace myspsce myspzce myspqce
myspade myspave myspaxe nyspaxe myspaver
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