The view from outside the U.S. is that Bush may have run a little too far up the mountain...

The Financial Times said that although Bush's keynote speech "pressed all the right buttons" at home, "there is a danger that his ringing rhetoric about defeating an `axis of evil' will divide the alliance, rather than seal a common purpose."

"North Korea and Iran do not belong in the same breath as Iraq. To lump them together is simplistic and will alienate new allies in Asia, Europe and the Middle East," added the business daily.

Exalted income, status, and the coasts seem to be breeding-grounds for hyper-criticism and self-doubt. Those who hammer nails — unlike lawyers in New England or Los Angeles – have more worries each hour than the brand of mosquito repellant issued to al Qaeda terrorists in Cuba. Few from the interior of the country – working class, rural, or even those still caught in the whirlwind of middle-class suburban life – doubt American resolve and power. The latter have seen our ability first-hand and are confident in what they can do themselves – whether that entails building a house in a few weeks, bringing a cotton crop in, or serving 15 tables in a 30-minute rush hour. Most of these Americans are distant from Europe and so indifferent to public opinion from the continent. Rather than making them obtuse, this isolation ensures that those in the heartland are in a sense less neurotic than those in the media, entertainment, and politics on the two coasts – hardly worried at all what a French journalist or some crazy British socialist writes about Guantanamo Bay. People in El Paso or Des Moines don't care much whether carping Europeans visit American universities, review books, or talk glibly on international television, and instead have an instinctual confidence that the humane and competent war we have waged in Afghanistan could not be replicated by any European power.

O'Reilly's accusatory and hectoring interrogation of Al-Arian, filled with false statements and McCarthy-like smears, climaxed in a chilling parting shot in which the host repeatedly told his stammering guest that if he were with the CIA, "I'd follow you wherever you went" -- clearly implying that he believed Al-Arian was a terrorist. Not surprisingly in the fearful and hysterical climate after Sept. 11, the show resulted in a torrent of angry calls, including death threats against al-Arian, to USF.

This tells us that the scandal yardstick our political and media culture currently uses is bent like a pretzel. You say your president may have finagled a real estate deal many years ago? Time to name a special prosecutor! He lied about his sex life? Draw up the articles of impeachment! But tell us that a high-profile corporation donated millions of dollars to legions of politicians, including the president; bent the government to its will; lined the pockets of its executives while dodging all taxes; then went bankrupt, vaporizing thousands of employees' retirement accounts? Nah, that's no "political scandal." Come on -- where're the bimbos?
Enron's dismal story simply doesn't meet the high bar of triviality the press today demands. The sums of money involved are too great; the flaws in our political system that it exposes are too vast. It's just too real to qualify.

Sclavos and his company, Verisign, increasingly run the Internet. Think we're exaggerating? Consider this: Virtually every time you surf the Net, you run into one of his servers. Has your Website failed or been hacked recently? There's a good chance his company knew about the problem before you did. Do you have a domain name? He probably sold it to you. Bought anything online lately? He owns the business of making sure that no one steals your credit card number. And once you made your purchase, his company was probably responsible for aggregating that payment with other transactions and funneling them to the right banks and payment processors.

Each nest is a peer entity capable of performing computations and hosting resources. Nests handle requests coming from users by generating one or more ants --- autonomous agents that travel across the nest network trying to satisfy the request. Ants interact indirectly with each other by modifying their environment by updating the information stored in the visited nests. This form of indirect communication, used also by real ants, is known as stigmergy.