Global Toad News

Recently in response to my previous entry about bottled water someone sent me a link to this website which had this interesting bit of correspondence with the FDA:

FDA:Sodium fluoride has been marketed in the United States since before 1938,when the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (the Act) was enacted. The Act is the
basic food and drug law of the United States and is intended to assure the consumer that foods are pure and wholesome, safe to eat, and produced under sanitary conditions; that drugs and devices are safe and effective for their intended uses; that cosmetics are safe and made from appropriate
ingredients; and that all labeling and packaging is truthful, informative, and not deceptive.

With the passage of the Act, an approved New Drug
Application (NDA) was required for marketing any new drug product (drug products introduced after 1938), as the regulatory mechanism for ensuring
that all new drugs were cleared for safety prior to distribution. An amendment to the Act in 1962 required that, before marketing a drug, a
manufacturer also had to provide substantial evidence of effectiveness for the product’s intended uses.

But what was Sodium fluoride used for prior to 1938?

Sally says:

Sodium fluoride supplements weren’t tested as a decay preventative until the 1950′s or 1960′s. The sodium fluoride on the market before 1938 was sold as a rat poison. Were there any other medicinal reasons for using sodium fluoride before 1938?

So without any research on the benefits of Sodium Flouride, it was converted from something that kills rats to something added to your diet. No wonder I see ads that have doctors who claim to not have drunk a glass of water in 20 years.

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There is a nice product for displaying your data relationships in a nice to view and easy to use manner called the Clarion Data Mapper (http://www.strategyonline.co.za/datamapper/index.php) it’s somewhat shareware/nagware, but you can use it indefinitely with little limitations, so if you use Clarion, this is something you might want to take a look at.

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In a great announcement for public appreciation of space the New Scientist (http://www.newscientistspace.com/article/dn10411-nasa-to-save-hubble-to-astronomers-delight-.html) says:

NASA’s most famous observatory, the Hubble Space Telescope, will get a much anticipated life extension after all. NASA Administrator Michael Griffin announced on Tuesday that a space shuttle will be sent to upgrade Hubble and add a few years to the lifetime of the venerable queen of the sky.

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There is an interesting picture from the Hubble Telescope at http://www.spacetelescope.org/images/html/heic0405a.html, the description begins:

“Starry Night”, Vincent van Gogh’s famous painting, is renowned for its bold whorls of light sweeping across a raging night sky. Although this image of the heavens came only from the artist’s restless imagination, a new picture from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope bears remarkable similarities to the van Gogh work, complete with never-before-seen spirals of dust swirling across trillions of kilometres of interstellar space.

(this is a thumbnail go here for a larger version)

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The title might be a little misleading, what the FCC is attempting to do is apply the same regulations for conventional phones to Voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP) phones.  Specifically the FCC wants to collect more fees (otherwise known as taxes) from the people who use VOIP phones.  In some cases the fees would cost the line cost to double (i.e. a $10/number charge for Sunrocket would exceed the ~$16/mo charge that Sunrocket had last time I looked).
For more information you can go to  The Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA)‘s web site.

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Over at “The Reg” (
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/10/29/microsoft_vista_eula_analysis/) there is an interesting article about the new Vista License (aka the EULA from hell).  The author teaches classes at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri and he has people read and discuss these issues, for instance:

[...] recently, I had the adults in “Technology in Our Changing Society” read both the Windows XP EULA and the GNU General Public License. When I asked them what they thought, one woman said, “The EULA sounds like it was written by a team of lawyers who want to tell me what I can’t do, and the GPL sounds like it was written by a human being who wants me to know what I can do.”

But that was the Windows XP EULA, what does he think about the new Vista EULA well he says:

[..]previous EULAs weren’t anything great – either as reading material or in terms of rights granted to end users – but the Vista EULA is horrendous.

Hmm, horrendous? That’s a strong word to use, it’s not just bad, evil or some other thing, it’s among the worst EULA you could get.  And the really sad part is that with Bill Gates’ Microsoft’s huge influence in government (since they started ponying up the campaign donations, like the RIAA) we can be sure that the courts will take their side more than not, and with companies like SCO able to sue IBM for things after 20 years of advocating that IBM do what SCO is now claiming to be a breach of a contract that IBM had entered into with AT&T (see www.groklaw.net) it’s a toss up what will happen to you if you use Vista and violate the new EULA from Microsoft, and 20 years could pass before Microsoft sues you (yes they were waiting for you to finish high school and college).

Welcome to contract law!

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I ran into two interesting articles at Rense.com, one that said

http://www.alternet.org/story/43480/

The corporations that sell bottled water are depleting natural resources, jacking up prices, and lying when they tell you their water is purer and tastes better than the stuff that comes out of the tap.

….

In fact, says Kellett, not only does tap water often taste the same as bottled water, but it is also often safer to drink as well.

…

Of course, Coke and Pepsi tout the elaborate additional steps they take that purify the water after it comes out of the tap, with both companies filtering it multiple times to remove particulates before subjecting it to additional techniques such as “reverse osmosis” and ozone treatment. Reverse osmosis, however, is hardly state of the art — essentially consisting of the same treatment applied through commercially available home tap water filters, while ozonation can introduce additional problems such as the formation of the chemical bromate, a suspected carcinogen. In March 2004, Coca-Cola was forced to recall nearly 500,000 bottles of Dasani water in the United Kingdom due to bromate contamination that exceeded the U.K. and U.S. limit of 10 parts per billion. This past August, three grocery stores chains in upstate New York who all used local company Mayer Bros. to produce their store brands issued recalls after samples were found contaminated with more than double the bromate limit; in some cases, contaminated water was apparently sold for five weeks before the problem was detected.

So bottled water really isn’t any safer (well some brands are and some aren’t) but Cities/states like to claim immunity from suits and while some of the better companies may just take tap water and run it through a filter, that is still better, because I really am concerned about Fluoride.

I mean there are articles where there is a Prominent Researcher Apologizes For Pushing Fluoride

I had just tracked down Dr. Hardy Limeback, B.Sc., Ph.D in Biochemistry, D.D.S., head of the Department of Preventive Dentistry for the University of Toronto, and president of the Canadian Association for Dental Research. (Whew.)

Dr. Limeback is Canada’s leading fluoride authority and, until recently, the country’s primary promoter of the controversial additive.
In a surprising newsmaker interview this past April, Dr. Limeback announced a dramatic change of heart. “Children under three should never use fluoridated toothpaste,” he counseled. “Or drink fluoridated water. And baby formula must never be made up using Toronto tap water. Never.”

One thing you won’t find in the first article is anything about fluoride, which is added to tap water in most places in the United States.  Why?  Because fluoride disposal is big business and most places think that they are (and they may be) legally required to buy and add the toxic waste fluoride to the water by some law or regulation that they are required to follow.  While the cities cannot (usually) be sued for poisoning you (as long as they claim some rational for the judicial fiction of sovereign immunity) and they won’t go out of business even if they are found liable, and they will just steal raise taxes from the residents to pay any judgments, so there is no incentive for them to remove fluoride, private companies can be sued for having toxins in their products and can be held liable for misrepresenting them (though laws are pending to limit the liability, so good luck winning that case).

In any case, I also like to just get a cold bottle of water when I am visiting with someone, I’ll drink tap water even though here in the U.S. most of it has fluoride, but I prefer bottled water until some compares apples to apples.

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Over at MSDN there is a nice suggestion:

Connections May Be Forcibly Closed When Running on Windows Server 2003 SP1

When testing scalability with a large number of client connection attempts to an instance of the SQL Server Database Engine running on Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1, Windows may drop connections if the requests arrive faster than SQL Server can service them. This is a security feature of Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1, which implements a finite queue for incoming TCP connection requests. It results in the following error:ProviderNum: 7, Error: 10054, ErrorMessage: "TCP Provider: An existing connection was forcibly closed by the remote host ...

To resolve this issue, use the regedit.exe utility to add the following registry key:

Key	Type	Name	Value
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters\	DWORD	SynAttackProtect	00000000

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Lately more and more sites seem to have connection issues with MS SQL Server (maybe due to antivirus/intrusion detection software) there is an interesting thread on this at MSDN, which has the following little query that could be helpful:

USE tempdb
GO
set nocount on
go

PRINT ‘-> Relative time spent on I/O, CPU, and idle since server start’
SELECT @@CPU_BUSY AS [@@CPU_BUSY], @@IDLE AS [@@IDLE], @@IO_BUSY AS [@@IO_BUSY],
CONVERT (varchar(8), CONVERT (numeric (6, 4), (100.0 * @@CPU_BUSY / (@@CPU_BUSY + @@IDLE + @@IO_BUSY)))) + ‘%’ AS Pct_CPU_BUSY,
CONVERT (varchar(8), CONVERT (numeric (6, 4), (100.0 * @@IDLE / (@@CPU_BUSY + @@IDLE + @@IO_BUSY)))) + ‘%’ AS Pct_IDLE,
CONVERT (varchar(8), CONVERT (numeric (6, 4), (100.0 * @@IO_BUSY / (@@CPU_BUSY + @@IDLE + @@IO_BUSY)))) + ‘%’ AS Pct_IO_BUSY
PRINT ”

PRINT ‘-> Misc network and I/O stats’
SELECT @@PACK_RECEIVED AS [@@PACK_RECEIVED], @@PACK_SENT AS [@@PACK_SENT],
@@PACKET_ERRORS AS [@@PACKET_ERRORS (network errors e.g. 17824)]
SELECT @@TOTAL_READ AS [@@TOTAL_READ], @@TOTAL_WRITE AS [@@TOTAL_WRITE],
@@TOTAL_ERRORS AS [@@TOTAL_ERRORS (disk read/write I/O errors)]
PRINT ”

PRINT ‘-> GETDATE()’
PRINT CONVERT (varchar, GETDATE(), 109)
PRINT ”
PRINT ‘Done.’
GO

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Microsoft has a nice list of ODBC connection attributes at http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms130822.aspx

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From http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=35227

….if you have problems with identity theft, actual or potential, all the big phone companies will assist you to reasonable lengths, politely and quickly. All but one that is, Cingular. Cingular will do everything in its power not to assist, up to and including lying to you. Avoid Cingular if you are at all worried about your safety, they are far worse than having no use, it is actively antagonistic. Time to call T-Mobile. Can anyone recommend a good plan?

I only note this because I have used Cingular, and frankly the service is singularly unique, unlike other companies, they seem to basically kick you to the curb, they may have less dropped calls (doesn’t seem so to me) but they seem to have a lot of “dead areas” in the Chicago Metropolitan area, maybe it’s just the Cingular phones that they have.

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Often I run across people who are tasked with managing mulitple Windows machines using Remote Desktop (which is fine).  I often wonder why they don’t have the Windows 2003 Administration Tools Pack installed, and I realize that Microsoft just doesn’t promote it to the average user.

So even though I’ve been using this since I could shoehorn it onto a system, and it’s full of things I don’t use, I am putting the link to it here, so other people can get it easily find it, and hopefully save me some time.

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As has been shown with the recent Instant Messages from former Congressman Foley, the captured messages from HP, and other issues, what you say online has a habit of staying around long after you might have wished it was gone.

While I don’t condone what Foley did, I do think that people should have the right to privacy, for talking about issues without censure, for exploring unpopular ideas, and be able to research things that might be questionable at times. 

Which is why I recommend http://www.scatterchat.com/ for instant messaging, and some sort of encryption for your emails, and using Tor for almost all of your internet activity. Because the United States government would like to read all your email, and “posting annoying Web messages or sending annoying e-mail messages without disclosing your true identity” is a federal crime in the United States, and currently the Bush Administration is trying to pass legislation that would require that all of your internet activities are stored for two years, and you can’t tell what is going to be a crime in two or three years from now.  I mean, I am sure that Patricia Dunn didn’t expect to indicted for what she thought was legal, but heck keeping the emails and chat logs probably isn’t much of help.

Of course the same people who jump up and down saying that ignorance of the law is no excuse for the poor slobs at the bottom of the food chain (i.e. 95% of the population) also clamour for lienency when their friends are implicated, but it really doesn’t matter becuase if you have enough money, you can buy yourself a pardon, just like Marc Rich, so of course there really isn’t pushiment if you are well connected (which is why there are rumblings about the potential for a Libby Pardon).

Of course, I could be wrong, and the United States government could be taking steps to ensure that you have the right to say, print and think what you want without fear of reprisals, but then again, it doesn’t hurt to be safe.

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The is an interesting article at Microsoft-watch.com which talks about Microsoft’s current issues with the big anti-virus vendors, on interesting point in the article is:

On the one hand, you have Symantec and McAfee taking out very critical high-profile ads arguing that by locking out security vendors, Vista will be less secure.

But you also have Symantec putting out a security bulletin highlighting that Internet Explorer had fewer vulnerabilities than Mozilla browsers.

Some people might think this is just a coincidence, but to me it looks like a classic carrot-and-stick approach. The security report reminds Microsoft what good friends big security companies can be. And, as I noted in another article, it probably won’t escape Microsoft’s notice that the Symantec report could have easily highlighted the fact that Microsoft took an average of nine days to fix IE vulnerabilities, while Mozilla browsers were fixed in an average of one day. [emphasis GlobalToad.com]

Symantec (and the other vendors) have to tread a thin line, because they need Microsoft to have some holes so their products are relevant, but not so many holes that people go to the more reliable, scalable and cost effective solutions that Linux offers (note: I still use Windows, but I tend to use Windows 2000 running in a Vmware virtual machine off a Linux host).

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