Iran vs Israel
Israel is after some of those bunker buster bombs made famous in the first Gulf War. The bombs are 1000 lb conventional explosive bombs. The way they hurt these under ground bunkers is to penetrate the earth above the bunker and explode at the upper levels of concrete of the bunker itself. Generally, the advantage of placing a building under ground is that the ground will disperse the explosive force of a large explosion to the side (along the ground) instead of down toward the underground building. This bomb penetrates the earth, and uses the ground above the building the other way round to sandwich the layers of concrete together causing vast damage to the bunker. The early versions of this bomb were four thousand lb. It turns out they don't need nearly the explosive force to do the damage. This bomb is laser guided.
Israel bombed the nuclear facilities in Iraq in the eighties. There is no reason to think they would hesitate to take out the Iranian nuclear infrastructure. The Russians are helping Iran build a civilian nuclear power system. I'm curious how that will work out. Covert means of overthrowing the Iranian government has failed in the past.
The IAEA is the source for most of the information and materials to build nukes. They are supposed to prevent it. Honestly, once you build a reactor for generating electricity, building a bomb requires running the fuel through the purification process a few more times. There is definitely a double standard from the U. S. government on who gets the information and access to materials for refining nuclear fuel. I'm not sure I mind it. Refining the fuel seems to be the bottleneck. That is the process every one wants to limit. Generating the fuel must be the more difficult. Remember, the bomb came before electricity in the nuclear field. I bet the bomb is easier to make.

Software Packaging
I setup software to install automatically from the network. Sometimes software has patches that need to be installed automatically as well. All kinds of stuff needs to be done to the software before it is good enough for the corporate network. I would love to know why software companies don't write software that is ready for corporate networks considering none of the software I deal with would be installed on a home PC. The main thing that has to happen is testing. Before we inflict this package (bundled up software and patches, custom links and instructions, custom code for databases, custom ODBC ...) on the users, it must be tested. This can take anywhere from an hour to weeks. It depends on how many problems we run into and how complex the system is. Here is a conversation I've had with managers on several occasions.
Me: "The package is ready for testing."
Them: "It looks good. Let's distribute it to the users. Oh, by the way, there is a new patch."
Me: "That will require making changes to the package and starting the testing faze over again."
Them: "We can't wait for the testing faze again. We need the users to have the package."
Me: "I understand, but we cannot release a package without testing. It may cause damage. You have some choices. Distribute what we have and start a new package with the new patch for testing. Or delay the distribution until we get testing done on the package with the new patch."
Them: "We can't wait for the testing faze again. We need the users to have the package."
Me: "I understand, but we cannot release a package without testing. It may cause damage. You have some choices. Distribute what we have and start a new package with the new patch for testing. Or delay the distribution until we get testing done on the package with the new patch."
You get the idea. I am a contractor and I have absolutely no authority to tell these people they need to follow the rules. We have found really damaging errors during past testing fazes. The rules are there for a reason.
BAH!

BBC
I'm listening to the BBC Five Live. They keep talking about Cricket, and reading out scores. Cricket takes a couple of days to play a test (not a game) and they have scores like 212 to 2 with 12 overs remaining 50 not out, or something like that. I'm so lost it isn't funny. I don't want to understand it.