Back in the 50's there was the "bomber gap" which America used as an excuse to build thousands of intercontinental bombers to "counter" a vast, but almost wholly fabricated Soviet fleet of bombers.

The bomber gap was followed almost immediately by the "missile gap". As usual, the 'enemy' dictator of the day cooperated by claiming that they were turning out ICBMs "like sausages". Needless to say the US responded by manufacturing hundreds of ICBMs to counter what turned out to be an imaginary flock of godless commie mega-death dealing missiles.

This pattern of lies and deception on the part of the government of the day (both Dem and Repub) continued into Vietnam, where it wasn't till near the end when the world "discovered" that there was indeed, no "light at the end of the tunnel" despite the myriads of lies.

Come the fall of the Soviet Union all the lies collapsed, and although a formidable "enemy" - the Sovs were revealed for all to see as a paper tiger. A tiger that was never, ever, a credible threat to America.

Rather than re-evaluating the faulty intelligence or at least its misuse, America embarked on a search for the much needed new enemy, and soon found it in the form of the inchoate masses of "fanatical Islam" whom we are now supposed to believe constitute an existential threat to America. Not surprisingly the intel towed the party line, and continues to do so today, with the highly notable exception of the latest NIE which shockingly told the truth about the real threat from Iran.

Who was responsible? The CIA knew well the truth but they remained silent. It was the politicians acting on behalf of the not so imaginary military industrial complex who were, in the end, responsible for those many lies.

The X Prize foundation is offering the Automotive X Prize, or AXP, which will offer a $10m pot and a manufacturing deal to whoever can design and build the world's fastest car that will do 100 miles per gallon or better and be suitable for mass production.

X prize for cars - http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2008/01/15/automotive-x-prize.html

http://auto.xprize.org/

And I not sure if they meet the criteria for the X Prize but there are already Japanese nenpimaniacs (mileage maniacs) who have hacked a Prius to get 116 Mpg!

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/04/how_japanese_mi.php

The bad news is that it is all over and the days of private car ownership, well driving anyway - are over. The oil is half gone, and within 5 years only the rich will drive.

If Bush lights the middle east on fire by attacking Iran, make that 2 years.

I won't miss them.

Of course you can always do the Mad Max thing...

Y2K did not destroy the world because we fixed the problem. I myself spent a year working on a Canadian government database that was full of date errors and would have essentially ceased to function if the date problem was not corrected.

There were 10's if not 100's of thousands of people like me who worked a lot of overtime correcting those issues. For non-technical people I can see how they would have thought that a computer that didn't know what year it was would be a problem, but it would have been. The world ran on complicated computer systems back in 00 (or should I say 2000?). If they had failed, and many would have, it would not have been the "end of the world" (probably) but it would have been a huge problem. Hence the sobriquet of the time, "the Y2K problem".

It's kind of like the time you forgot to turn off the stove before you went to bed, but then remembered to shut it off in time. Fixing the problem was relatively easy, but if you had failed to do so, there is a good chance your house would have burned down, and a smaller chance that the whole neighbourhood would have gone down as well.

Granted some of the horrific predictions were exaggerated, but in the end, that it what it took to wake up all the complacent (and non-technical) managers to the scope of the problem).

We have a new Y2K problem today, it's called climate change, and unless we turn the stoves off, all over the world, we are going to lose the neighbourhood.

His logo is the only one that looks like it was designed this century. All the others look old, which appropriate, because so are the other candidates and I don't mean chronologically.

The O can be used to signify Obama and his ideas without any text or superfluous graphics, and that in itself is brilliant as well as a first.

But where he really shows us that he "gets it" is the fact that he incorporates his URL as part of the logo. No one else did that. But then why should they, I would be surprised if any of them use email or the Internets.