My view is that if you seriously care about your computer and software,
you'll buy Acronis because MSFT won't be doing that. Do you have a
situation where you can't boot and need to fix Vista? Tell us what it is,
and we can probably help you.
Acronis is a much better backup situation. MSFT is not going to build in
ancillary apps like a first rate defrag and a backup that does the things
the $50 buck third parties do. Too much federal litigation on a litigation
plate already signing settlement agreements like they're goin' outta style.
CH
I'd like to salute apathetic America wasting lives and billions like they're
goin' outta style as well.
October 14, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
The 'Good Germans' Among Us
By FRANK RICH NY TIMES
"BUSH lies" doesn't cut it anymore. It's time to confront the darker reality
that we are lying to ourselves.
Ten days ago The Times unearthed yet another round of secret Department of
Justice memos countenancing torture. President Bush gave his standard
response: "This government does not torture people." Of course, it all
depends on what the meaning of "torture" is. The whole point of these memos
is to repeatedly recalibrate the definition so Mr. Bush can keep pleading
innocent.
By any legal standards except those rubber-stamped by Alberto Gonzales, we
are practicing torture, and we have known we are doing so ever since
photographic proof emerged from Abu Ghraib more than three years ago. As
Andrew Sullivan, once a Bush cheerleader, observed last weekend in The
Sunday Times of London, America's "enhanced interrogation" techniques have a
grotesque provenance: "Verschärfte Vernehmung, enhanced or intensified
interrogation, was the exact term innovated by the Gestapo to describe what
became known as the 'third degree.' It left no marks. It included
hypothermia, stress positions and long-time sleep deprivation."
Still, the drill remains the same. The administration gives its alibi (Abu
Ghraib was just a few bad apples). A few members of Congress squawk. The
debate is labeled "politics." We turn the page.
There has been scarcely more response to the similarly recurrent story of
apparent war crimes committed by our contractors in Iraq. Call me cynical,
but when Laura Bush spoke up last week about the human rights atrocities in
Burma, it seemed less an act of selfless humanitarianism than another
administration maneuver to change the subject from its own abuses.
As Mrs. Bush spoke, two women, both Armenian Christians, were gunned down in
Baghdad by contractors underwritten by American taxpayers. On this matter,
the White House has been silent. That incident followed the Sept. 16
massacre in Baghdad's Nisour Square, where 17 Iraqis were killed by security
forces from Blackwater USA, which had already been implicated in nearly 200
other shooting incidents since 2005. There has been no accountability. The
State Department, Blackwater's sugar daddy for most of its billion dollars
in contracts, won't even share its investigative findings with the United
States military and the Iraqi government, both of which have deemed the
killings criminal.
The gunmen who mowed down the two Christian women worked for a Dubai-based
company managed by Australians, registered in Singapore and enlisted as a
subcontractor by an American contractor headquartered in North Carolina.
This is a plot out of "Syriana" by way of "Chinatown." There will be no
trial. We will never find out what happened. A new bill passed by the House
to regulate contractor behavior will have little effect, even if it becomes
law in its current form.
We can continue to blame the Bush administration for the horrors of Iraq -
and should. Paul Bremer, our post-invasion viceroy and the recipient of a
Presidential Medal of Freedom for his efforts, issued the order that allows
contractors to elude Iraqi law, a folly second only to his disbanding of the
Iraqi Army. But we must also examine our own responsibility for the hideous
acts committed in our name in a war where we have now fought longer than we
did in the one that put Verschärfte Vernehmung on the map.
I have always maintained that the American public was the least culpable of
the players during the run-up to Iraq. The war was sold by a brilliant and
fear-fueled White House propaganda campaign designed to stampede a nation
still shellshocked by 9/11. Both Congress and the press - the powerful
institutions that should have provided the checks, balances and due
diligence of the administration's case - failed to do their job. Had they
done so, more Americans might have raised more objections. This perfect
storm of democratic failure began at the top.
As the war has dragged on, it is hard to give Americans en masse a pass. We
are too slow to notice, let alone protest, the calamities that have followed
the original sin.
In April 2004, Stars and Stripes first reported that our troops were using
makeshift vehicle armor fashioned out of sandbags, yet when a soldier
complained to Donald Rumsfeld at a town meeting in Kuwait eight months
later, he was successfully pilloried by the right. Proper armor procurement
lagged for months more to come. Not until early this year, four years after
the war's first casualties, did a Washington Post investigation finally
focus the country's attention on the shoddy treatment of veterans, many of
them victims of inadequate armor, at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and
other military hospitals.
We first learned of the use of contractors as mercenaries when four
Blackwater employees were strung up in Falluja in March 2004, just weeks
before the first torture photos emerged from Abu Ghraib. We asked few
questions. When reports surfaced early this summer that our contractors in
Iraq (180,000, of whom some 48,000 are believed to be security personnel)
now outnumber our postsurge troop strength, we yawned. Contractor casualties
and contractor-inflicted casualties are kept off the books.
It was always the White House's plan to coax us into a blissful ignorance
about the war. Part of this was achieved with the usual Bush-Cheney
secretiveness, from the torture memos to the prohibition of photos of
military coffins. But the administration also invited our passive complicity
by requiring no shared sacrifice. A country that knows there's no such thing
as a free lunch was all too easily persuaded there could be a free war.
Instead of taxing us for Iraq, the White House bought us off with tax cuts.
Instead of mobilizing the needed troops, it kept a draft off the table by
quietly purchasing its auxiliary army of contractors to finesse the
overstretched military's holes. With the war's entire weight falling on a
small voluntary force, amounting to less than 1 percent of the population,
the rest of us were free to look the other way at whatever went down in
Iraq.
We ignored the contractor scandal to our own peril. Ever since Falluja this
auxiliary army has been a leading indicator of every element of the war's
failure: not only our inadequate troop strength but also our alienation of
Iraqi hearts and minds and our rampant outsourcing to contractors rife with
Bush-Cheney cronies and campaign contributors. Contractors remain a
bellwether of the war's progress today. When Blackwater was briefly
suspended after the Nisour Square catastrophe, American diplomats were
flatly forbidden from leaving the fortified Green Zone. So much for the
surge's great "success" in bringing security to Baghdad.
Last week Paul Rieckhoff, an Iraq war combat veteran who directs Iraq and
Afghanistan Veterans of America, sketched for me the apocalypse to come.
Should Baghdad implode, our contractors, not having to answer to the
military chain of command, can simply "drop their guns and go home."
Vulnerable American troops could be deserted by those "who deliver their
bullets and beans."
This potential scenario is just one example of why it's in our national
self-interest to attend to Iraq policy the White House counts on us to
ignore. Our national character is on the line too. The extralegal
contractors are both a slap at the sovereignty of the self-governing Iraq we
supposedly support and an insult to those in uniform receiving as little as
one-sixth the pay. Yet it took mass death in Nisour Square to fix even our
fleeting attention on this long-metastasizing cancer in our battle plan.
Similarly, it took until December 2005, two and a half years after "Mission
Accomplished," for Mr. Bush to feel sufficient public pressure to
acknowledge the large number of Iraqi casualties in the war. Even now,
despite his repeated declaration that "America will not abandon the Iraqi
people," he has yet to address or intervene decisively in the tragedy of
four million-plus Iraqi refugees, a disproportionate number of them
children. He feels no pressure from the American public to do so, but hey,
he pays lip service to Darfur.
Our moral trajectory over the Bush years could not be better dramatized than
it was by a reunion of an elite group of two dozen World War II veterans in
Washington this month. They were participants in a top-secret operation to
interrogate some 4,000 Nazi prisoners of war. Until now, they have kept
silent, but America's recent record prompted them to talk to The Washington
Post.
"We got more information out of a German general with a game of chess or
Ping-Pong than they do today, with their torture," said Henry Kolm, 90, an
M.I.T. physicist whose interrogation of Rudolf Hess, Hitler's deputy, took
place over a chessboard. George Frenkel, 87, recalled that he "never laid
hands on anyone" in his many interrogations, adding, "I'm proud to say I
never compromised my humanity."
Our humanity has been compromised by those who use Gestapo tactics in our
war. The longer we stand idly by while they do so, the more we resemble
those "good Germans" who professed ignorance of their own Gestapo. It's up
to us to wake up our somnambulant Congress to challenge administration
policy every day. Let the war's last supporters filibuster all night if they
want to. There is nothing left to lose except whatever remains of our
country's good name.
<> wrote in message
news: oups.com...
>I was at first impressed with the built-in backup/restore feature in
> Windows Vista. That was until I needed it when my hard disk crashed.
> There are two major flaws.
>
> 1. If you try to make a complete PC restore in the Windows Recovery
> Environment, and try to restore the boot disk onto a new disk, the
> boot record will NOT be restored, even if you select to let the
> program reformat the drive. This means that if you need to recreate
> your boot disk, you first have to make a new install of Vista (and
> thus create a boot record) and then restore the drive using WRE.
> Otherwise your restored drive will not boot. The "system repair"
> feature in WRE does not fix the boot record either.
>
> 2. After you have restored a complete PC backup and want to restore
> your backed up files up to a later point, you will find out that this
> is not possible. The "restore files" feature will only show backed up
> files up to the point when you made the complete PC backup. The only
> way to restore files from a later point in time is to manually open
> the zip files on your backup drive, and copy them.
>
> I am seriously wondering how drunk the developers where when they
> wrote this backup program. The idea to store complete copies of your
> hard drives as VHD-files and letting the setup program om the Vista
> DVD be able to completely restore these, is smart in theory. It could
> have been very neat... if it worked.
>
> Another interesteing question is why it is not possible to restore
> individual secondary drives. The only options are to either restore
> only the boot drive or all drives. I guess you could mount the VHD-
> files in a Virtual PC and then manually copy the files, but why do
> they have this limitation?
>
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