BBC news highlights, and others

[unixronin]

In the continuing slide from power of the Motor City, Ford has been supplanted by Toyota as the world's #2 auto maker.  (Ford's numbers, however, do not include Mazda, of which it owns 33%.)

Afghani transitional president Hamid Karzai is due to sign the new Afghani constitution in Kabul.  12 chapters in length and containing 161 articles, it describes Islam as the country's sacred religion but guarantees protection for other faiths.  Hey, I hope that's a fashion that catches on.

Meanwhile, British PM Tony Blair still "has absolutely no doubt" the intelligence about weapons of mass destruction he received in the run-up to the Iraq war was genuine.  Proof that you can fool some of the people MOST of the time.

Opportunity's first vacation snapshots are astonishing NASA scientists.  "It's a beautiful alien place," said Professor Steve Squyres, chief scientist on the mission.  And people say scientists don't care about anything but their data....

Brasil has joined forces with India in a trade pact hoped to "change the geography of world trade" and "meet the needs of the poorest people of the planet."

Thailand has admitted hushing up early news of its own avian flu outbreak, and has confirmed that a six-year-old boy in Bangkok has died from the flu.  The epidemic has spread to Indonesia, but the Indonesian government is in no hurry to cull infected chickens.  Imports of Thai pountry have been banned by China, Japan, the EU, Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan, South Korea, the Philippines, Hong Kong and Bangladesh, among others.  No word of a US ban yet.  Thailand has invited representatives from all six Asian nations hit by the bird flu crisis to an emergency summit.

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Rather more locally, I've spent just about all day trying to get whitestar, my Windows 2000 box, back to full functionality after installing Daemon Tools last night in an effort to get Civ3 to run from a mounted image of the original CD, rather than from the original CD itself.  (Daemon Tools is a CD/DVD recording/emulation package.  Don't ask me why it's called Daemon Tools.  It's not a daemon.  I think they just liked the word.)  In so doing, I discovered that Daemon Tools is apparently so resolutely inimical to VirtualCD 4, my current virtual-CD-drive software, that if you have once installed Daemon Tools, even if you've then completely removed it, that machine will never again boot with Virtual CD 4 installed on it except in safe mode.  This, needless to say, displeases me.  At this time, after cleanly reinstalling and restoring my most recent backup, I can't get Windows to properly load the driver for my CD burner, and can't get Virtual CD working again since it apparently depends upon having a functioning physical CD or DVD drive.

So if this experience is anything to go buy, just say no to Daemon Tools.  Use Virtual CD or Alcohol 120% instead.  (Hell, they even say, "If you want more than four virtual drives, fuck off and go buy Alcohol 120% or something.")