Introduction

Svay Reing Border

The town of Svay Rieng is the capital of the province of the same name and while there’s not much to see in the town, there are a fair few attractions nearby worth seeing on your journey toward Vietnam.

The main allure of Svay Rieng, bedsides its convenience, is its friendly nature. The town is quite pretty and laid back, with its riverside setting, and comes with good food and sleeping options. Elsewhere is the beautiful Prey Ba Sak area just outside town and the Prasat Prasat temple.

Cow cart [They come from Kg.Chhnang,Kg.Thom]

Svay Rieng was heavily bombed during the Vietnam war. This small province in southeastern Cambodia sits on a piece of land commonly known as the parrot’s beak. It is mostly surrendered by Vietnam and bordered by Prey Veng in the West.

Svay Rieng was thought to harbor a large number of Vietcong and suffered a ground assault from combined US and Cambodian troops. It also suffered heavily under the Khmer Rouge when it was deemed that the Cambodians living in the more densely populated provinces in the southeast had to be relocated to the northwest to boost rice production.

There are many several mass graves in Svay Rieng and documents show that up to 94,000 people were executed in a single site.

Nowadays, Svay Rieng remains one of the poorest provinces in the country. Most of its residents survive on subsistence farming as the land has poor soil and its rice crops are negatively affected by the extreme flooding during the wet season, followed by a drought. Being so impoverished, many of its people have moved to Phnom Penh to eke out a living from collecting garbage and now live in one of the largest slums in Phnom Penh called Toul Chey.

Sleepy Town

Children

Its provincial capital, Svay Rieng, is a sleepy little town where cows are as common as motorbikes on the road. However, the highway which connects Phnom Penh and Ho Chih Minh City in Vietnam happens to run through it and it benefits from the commercial traffic. The Tonle Waiko, a tributary of the Mekong, runs through the town. Basically, Svay Rieng is off the tourist maps and is best for backpackers and those who want a slice of rural life in Cambodia.

Bavet is a key border town and the only land crossing from Vietnam which issues the e-visa on arrival. It is undergoing rapid change as investors flock in to build multi-million dollar casinos. These are patronized mainly by the Vietnamese who cross over daily as they are not allowed to gamble in their own country. Many of the residents of Bavet are of Vietnamese origin as can be told by their peaked Vietnamese hats.

There are a couple of little known temple ruins here at Prasat Chea Hao and Prasat Basac but few other attractions exist in this sleepy town of Svay Rieng.

Travel to Svay Rieng – Getting There

The best option for getting to Svay Rieng from Phnom Penh is to take a shared taxi for the 2-hour ride; they leave from the Chbah Ampeau taxi park in town. Buses are cheaper and take 3 hours, while getting from the Vietnam border is best done by taxi. Phnom Penh International Airport is just outside the capital.

Svay Rieng Attractions

Basac Temple and Granite that carved letters talks about Basac history

Prey Basac Temple : this is the biggest attraction in the area; a recreational area just a few miles outside town with a hillside setting and a temple.

Brasoth Center: about a mile out of Svay Rieng, it has excellent sports facilities.

Svay Rieng Market: typical provincial town market where you can buy fresh produce or knock-off designer items, as well as take in the bustle.

New building: new building finished in July,2009. This building was start working at June,2008 and supported by EK OUTDOM HUK LUNGDY, but he die in 09-Nov-2008 by falling down  helicopter at RomDoul district, Svay Rieng province, evening.

October 20, 2009–This moonraker, designed by Paul’s Robotics in Worcester, Massachusetts, was awarded first prize in the third annual Regolith Excavation Challenge, held October 18 at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. The remote-controlled robot took home top honors by lifting 965 pounds (437 kilograms) of faux regolith–the fine, powdery lunar topsoil–into a container within 30 minutes.

A testament to tinkerers, the competition recognizes moon-soil excavators that are sturdy enough to scoop pounds of regolith, powerful enough to move across the moon’s surface, and light enough to maneuver easily, say organizers at the California Space Authority, the competition’s nonprofit sponsor.

Such soil-hauling machines will be needed in the future as humans prepare to build a lunar outpost on the moon, according to spokesperson Eric Daniels. In addition to helping with construction, astronauts will likely need to excavate regolith to harvest useful materials such as oxygen and hydrogen.

“The hope is that through the excavation designs, someone will strike upon an innovation or new concept that revolutionizes power and energy requirements for excavation,” Daniels said.

This story was upload at 11:47 P.M

Since man first touched the moon and brought pieces of it back to Earth, scientists have thought that the lunar surface was bone dry. But new observations from three different spacecraft have put this notion to rest with what has been called “unambiguous evidence” of water across the surface of the moon.

The new findings, detailed in the Sept. 25 issue of the journal Science, come in the wake of further evidence of lunar polar water ice by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and just weeks before the planned lunar impact of NASA’s LCROSS satellite, which will hit one of the permanently shadowed craters at the moon’s south pole in hope of churning up evidence of water ice deposits in the debris field.

The moon remains drier than any desert on Earth, but the water is said to exist on the moon in very small quantities. One ton of the top layer of the lunar surface would hold about 32 ounces of water, researchers said.

“If the water molecules are as mobile as we think they are — even a fraction of them — they provide a mechanism for getting water to those permanently shadowed craters,” said planetary geologist Carle Pieters of Brown University in Rhode Island, who led one of the three studies in Science on the lunar find, in a statement. “This opens a whole new avenue [of lunar research], but we have to understand the physics of it to utilize it.”

Finding water on the moon would be a boon to possible future lunar bases, acting as a potential source of drinking water and fuel.

Apollo turns up dry

When Apollo astronauts returned from the moon 40 years ago, they brought back several samples of lunar rocks.

The moon rocks were analyzed for signs of water bound to minerals present in the rocks; while trace amounts of water were detected, these were assumed to be contamination from Earth, because the containers the rocks came back in had leaked.

“The isotopes of oxygen that exist on the moon are the same as those that exist on Earth, so it was difficult if not impossible to tell the difference between water from the moon and water from Earth,” said Larry Taylor of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, who is a member of one of the NASA-built instrument teams for India’s Chandrayaan-1 satellite and has studied the moon since the Apollo missions.

While scientists continued to suspect that water ice deposits could be found in the coldest spots of south pole craters that never saw sunlight, the consensus became that the rest of the moon was bone dry.

But new observations of the lunar surface made with Chandrayaan-1, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, and NASA’s Deep Impact probe, are calling that consensus into question, with multiple detections of the spectral signal of either water or the hydroxyl group (an oxygen and hydrogen chemically bonded).

Three spacecraft

Chandrayaan-1, India’s first-ever moon probe, was aimed at mapping the lunar surface and determining its mineral composition (the orbiter’s mission ended 14 months prematurely in August after an abrupt malfunction). While the probe was still active, its NASA-built Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) detected wavelengths of light reflected off the surface that indicated the chemical bond between hydrogen and oxygen — the telltale sign of either water or hydroxyl.

Because M3 can only penetrate the top few millimeters of lunar regolith, the newly observed water seems to be at or near the lunar surface. M3′s observations also showed that the water signal got stronger toward the polar regions. Pieters is the lead investigator for the M3 instrument on Chandrayaan-1.

Cassini, which passed by the moon in 1999 on its way to Saturn, provides confirmation of this signal with its own slightly stronger detection of the water/hydroxyl signal. The water would have to be absorbed or trapped in the glass and minerals at the lunar surface, wrote Roger Clark of the U.S. Geological Survey in the study detailing Cassini’s findings.

The Cassini data shows a global distribution of the water signal, though it also appears stronger near the poles (and low in the lunar maria).

Finally, the Deep Impact spacecraft, as part of its extended EPOXI mission and at the request of the M3 team, made infrared detections of water and hydroxyl as part of a calibration exercise during several close approaches of the Earth-Moon system en route to its planned flyby of comet 103P/Hartley 2 in November 2010.

Deep Impact detected the signal at all latitudes above 10 degrees N, though once again, the poles showed the strongest signals. With its multiple passes, Deep Impact was able to observe the same regions at different times of the lunar day. At noon, when the sun’s rays were strongest, the water feature was lowest, while in the morning, the feature was stronger.

“The Deep Impact observations of the Moon not only unequivocally confirm the presence of [water/hydroxyl] on the lunar surface, but also reveal that the entire lunar surface is hydrated during at least some portion of the lunar day,” the authors wrote in their study.

The findings of all three spacecraft “provide unambiguous evidence for the presence of hydroxyl or water,” said Paul Lucey of the University of Hawaii in an opinion essay accompanying the three studies. Lucey was not involved in any of the missions.

The new data “prompt a critical reexamination of the notion that the moon is dry. It is not,” Lucey wrote.

Where the water comes from

Combined, the findings show that not only is the moon hydrated, the process that makes it so is a dynamic one that is driven by the daily changes in solar radiation hitting any given spot on the surface.

The sun might also have something to do with how the water got there.

There are potentially two types of water on the moon: that brought from outside sources, such as water-bearing comets striking the surface, or that that originates on the moon.

This second, endogenic, source is thought to possibly come from the interaction of the solar wind with moon rocks and soils.

The rocks and regolith that make up the lunar surface are about 45 percent oxygen (combined with other elements as mostly silicate minerals). The solar wind — the constant stream of charged particles emitted by the sun — are mostly protons, or positively charged hydrogen atoms.

If the charged hydrogens, which are traveling at one-third the speed of light, hit the lunar surface with enough force, they break apart oxygen bonds in soil materials, Taylor, the M3 team member suspects. Where free oxygen and hydrogen exist, there is a high chance that trace amounts of water will form.

The various study researchers also suggest that the daily dehydration and rehydration of the trace water across the surface could lead to the migration of hydroxyl and hydrogen towards the poles where it can accumulate in the cold traps of the permanently shadowed regions.

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/090923-moon-water-discovery.html

The ongoing visit of Thaksin, and his new post as economic advisor, has further chilled an already-strained relationship between the two nations. They have both withdrawn their ambassadors and Thailand is reviewing a number of agreements between them.

http://english.cctv.com/program/asiatoday/20091112/103924.shtml

The 128GB and 256GB models feature read speeds of up to 220MB/s and write speeds of up to 150MB/s, while the 64GB model has the same read speed but a write speed of 110MB/s. The Falcon II series ships with the latest firmware from Indilinx and offers support for the TRIM command in Windows 7.

G.Skill offers a two-year warranty and promises a MTBF of over 1.5 million hours. Pricing and availability is unknown.

http://www.dvhardware.net/howto.html

On the morning of Nov. 10, over 90 students were queuing up for the jabs at the door of a classroom at Beijing Blue-sky No.2 High School. Watching out for those who are not fit for the jabs, Bai Yun soon found another 3 girls who had caught a cold and put them on the “unfit” list. Baiyun explained that the children of migrant workers were not left out in the government’s drive to provide free A/H1N1 inoculations for the city’s school students. We value the health of every child.

Nov. 10, medical personnel come to a school for children
of migrant workers in Beijing to give the students vaccine
inoculation.

“It’s cold out here, and keep your coat on until you are inside,” Head-teacher Zhao said to Zhang Huidong, a student who comes from Hebei Province.

These children’s parents are all migrant workers, who mostly don’t have a good education themselves. Whether their children get the jabs or not is not top of their concerns. So the head-teachers have to take over the responsibility.

“After the students turned in the signed health statements, we called every family again to confirm their children’s history of allergies and vaccinations. We have to be absolutely sure,” Zhao said.

In the observation room, first-aid drugs and oxygen bags are readily available and an ambulance is parked right in front of the school building. Any student who is found showing abnormal reactions after getting the inoculation will be taken to the nearest hospital immediately.

At present, massive A/H1N1 flu inoculation for school students is still going on in the city and is expected to be finished in the week. 80,000 students at the 140 schools for children of migrant workers can get the inoculation for free on a voluntary basis.

Reference:
http://www.cctv.com/english/special/news/20091111/103547.shtml

*After Windows Server 2008 installation done

*Download file here to get a cracker, dont care anything’and then to click on button  ‘Click here to download the file’, Save the file in your computer

* Then, click Start -> Run and type Services (or go to Start -> Program -> Admin tools and choose services from there). Go to Services->Software Licensing and choose “Disabled” as Startup method.

* Reboot your computer, when rebooted, go to
C:\Windows\ServiceProfiles\NetworkService\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\SoftwareLicensing
and delete the tokens.dot file there, replacing it with the one from this package.

Yet again, go to Services->Software Licensing and choose “Automatic” as Startup method.

* Run the vistaactivation.exe file (as included), activate your computer as if it was
running Vista Ultimate. (Should any errors occur, just neglect them.) Restart your
computer.

* After reboot, Windows Server 2008 will now ask for a cd-key, use the following one:
6F2D7-2PCG6-YQQTB-FWK9V-932CC – wait a few minutes it for it to activate, et voila!
Now you’ve got a activated Windows Server 2008 version.

So what’s the downside with all this? The computer is semi-recognized as Vista Ultimate
now, but server roles should still apply as if they were part of the Server 2008 version.

Enjoy your activated Windows Server 2008 copy, if you like this product, you should buy it.

The downside is that, in most cases, it takes a human being to figure out whether there is anything interesting there. Sure, there is motion-sensing technology, but such systems are often fooled by animals, cars, or even by a tree rustling in the wind.

Three former Palm executives think they have some software that could help shake things up. Their company, Vitamin D, is releasing a public beta on Monday of software that can detect and isolate human motion, potentially allowing the growing number of surveillance cameras out there to be a whole lot more useful.

The software, which works on either PCs or Macs, puts a yellow box around any human motion it detects and can be further refined to show only someone coming or going from a particular area–say entering or leaving through a particular door. The software is designed to work with any IP camera or even an inexpensive Web cam.

Getting in the surveillance game is admittedly a bit of a shift for early Palm employees Greg Shirai and Rob Haitani–two guys who have spent most of their careers creating consumer gadgets.

But, after years of listening to Palm and Handspring founder Jeff Hawkins talk about his brain research, Shirai and Haitani, along with Celeste Baranksi, another ex-Palm executive, thought they had a way to make a business out of it. “We were always fascinated by what Jeff was doing,” Shirai said. Vitamin D’s software is powered by artificial intelligence technology licensed from Hawkins’ Numenta start-up.

Shirai and Haitani say they are starting with the security camera industry because that’s the first application the technology can be used in. But over time, they hope to refine the technology such that it can have broader uses, such as powering object-based search within video streams.

Haitani gave a preview of the technology at this year’s Demo conference. There’s also a video of the technology in action on Vitamin D’s Web site.

Using artificial intelligence makes the system remarkably adaptable, Haitani said, something that is not the case even with very high-end systems that use various rules to try to identify humans.

Vitamin D’s software, for example, is able to pick out two people carrying a lawn mower, someone crawling, or even a person pushing a stroller–all shapes that don’t look a lot like what an algorithm might think of as human.

“You can see how the shape-based rules quickly break down,” Haitani said.

The technology isn’t perfect. It isn’t well suited to nighttime work, or anything where there isn’t sufficient light. “We actually would not do well in poorly lit scenes,” Shirai said.

Shirai and Haitani have been using the software at their homes and office to try it out. They haven’t caught any thieves yet, though there was one scare, Shirai said.

He noticed a group of people struggling at the company’s front door early one morning.

“I thought, oh my gosh, there are these people breaking into our office,” Shirai said. In reality, he had found something far less sinister–what time his office’s cleaning crew came each day.

Haitani said he also learned that his house is frequented by hummingbirds when he is not there. “Apparently my front lawn is this crossing path,” he said.

For those who have security cameras, particularly consumers and small businesses, Vitamin D’s software can offer significant time savings. Going through all the motions detected in hundreds of hours of video–even if one only spends 5 seconds on each clip–could require hours of work. By contrast, narrowing it down to just humans might cut that workload down to just minutes, as the two demonstrated last week, showing me examples from their collection of surveillance tapes.

The software will be free during the public beta, though the company hopes to start charging for a final version in the first half of next year.

Other potential customers could be law enforcement or even the intelligence community. Indeed, In-Q-Tel, the investment vehicle for the intelligence community, is among Vitamin D’s early investors, along with HTC, the cell phone maker that Haitani and Shirai know well from their Palm days.

Reference:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10392844-56.html

KUALA LUMPUR: Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak has been invited by his Thai counterpart Abhisit Vejjajiva to meet up with southern Thai leaders in December.

Foreign Minister Datuk Seri Anifah Aman said this in his reply to Datuk Ibrahim Ali (Independent-Pasir Mas) who asked about the situation in southern Thailand.

“The Prime Minister has been invited by the Thai Prime Minister to meet up with the leaders in southern Thailand.

“We appreciate the action taken by the Thai Prime Minister. Thailand respects our position. What happens in southern Thailand will also affect our border,” he said.

Anifah said Malaysia has adopted a neutral stand as its foreign policy except when it is invited by a neighbouring country to look for a solution, in which case Malaysia would give its co-operation when required.

Last Thursday, Bernama reported that Thailand’s influential Deputy Prime Minister Suthep Thaugsuban had poured cold water on calls by the separatist group, Pattani United Liberation Organisation (Pulo), for Malaysia to act as a mediator in the southern Thai conflict.

Suthep, in charge of security matters, told the media in Bangkok that he personally believed that the suggestion would not work.

Earlier Monday, Anifah also told Datuk Idris Haron (BN-Tangga Batu) — who asked about the relationship between Malaysia and Indonesia — that his ministry is aware of the existence of a “third party” which had tried to strain the good ties between the two countries with petty issues.

These issues include Manoraha Odelia Pinot, the estranged wife of Kelantan prince; the Ambalat territorial dispute and the issue of the Balinese “pendet” dance by the Disovery Channel in a promo of a documentary of Malaysia.

“This third party is making use of such issues as a political tool,” Anifah claimed. “We are monitoring the siutation.”

Reference:

http://thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2009/11/9/nation/20091109130001&sec=nation

The Nov. 15 meeting between Obama and leaders of the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations will take place on the sidelines of an annual summit of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in Singapore, U.S. Ambassador for ASEAN Affairs Scot Marciel said Saturday.

Myanmar’s prime minister, Thein Sein, will attend the meeting, which marks the 32nd anniversary of Washington’s relations with ASEAN, senior Myanmar diplomat Min Lwin told The Associated Press in Manila.

The junta chief, Senior Gen. Than Shwe, typically shuns official meetings outside Myanmar.

The talks are to be the highest-level contact between Myanmar and the U.S. in decades.

Officials have not said if Obama will meet privately with Thein Sein. The last U.S. president to meet a Myanmar head of state was Lyndon B. Johnson, who held talks with then Prime Minister Ne Win in September 1966 during a state visit to Washington, according to Richard Mei, the U.S. Embassy spokesman in Myanmar.

Under Obama, Washington has reversed the Bush administration’s policy of shunning Myanmar in favor of direct talks with the Southeast Asian country that has been ruled by the military since 1962.

Myanmar welcomes the shift in U.S. policy, Min Lwin said, describing the change as “positive.”

Marciel and Min Lwin were in Manila along with other senior ASEAN diplomats to finalize the agenda for Obama’s meeting with ASEAN leaders. The talks will focus on trade, energy, health, climate change, food security, disaster response and security issues, Philippine Foreign Undersecretary Enrique Manalo said.

“What we’re trying to do is to step up and increase our engagement with ASEAN,” Marciel said.

Philippine Foreign Secretary Alberto Romulo has said ASEAN welcomes the Obama administration’s new policy of engagement with Myanmar, adding that Southeast Asian governments have continued talking with the junta while constantly prodding it to move toward democracy.

“All of us talk with Myanmar,” he said. “There is no harm in talking.”

ASEAN has faced a barrage of criticism in past years over its failure to coax democratic reforms from the junta or to win freedom for detained opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi and some 2,000 other political prisoners.

Nobel Peace Prize laureate Suu Kyi has been detained for 14 of the past 20 years, mostly under house arrest.

Despite their new approach to Myanmar, also known as Burma, U.S. officials have said that tough sanctions against the junta will remain until talks with its generals result in long-demanded democratic reforms.

Seven ASEAN member states – Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam – belong to APEC, which includes the U.S. and other Western nations. The three ASEAN members not in APEC are Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar.

Reference:

http://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/20091107/API/911070589?Title=Obama-to-meet-Myanmar-other-ASEAN-leaders