The U.S. Olympic men's basketball team lost for the first time in 16 years to Puerto Rico. I guess it had to happen sometime.

This brings up the age-old question: should professional athletes be allowed to compete in the Olympics? It's a tough question to answer - I can see both sides of the argument.

On the one hand, if you bring in professional athletes in basketball, you are going to be in a situation like we have had for the last 16 years, where one country dominates the sport. Using amateur athletes generally assures a fairer contest.

Another interesting observation is that athletes that make tens of millions of dollars per year tend not to get as much out of the Olympic experience. They fly in just before their event, stay in the most expensive suite in a 5-star hotel, and fly back to their home country after their event is over. They miss the Olympic village, the comraderie with other athletes, the ceremonies - some athletes make friends that will last a lifetime. But I doubt Ervin “Magic” Johnson took those experiences away with him during his Olympic games in 1992.

And thirdly, amateur athletes spend four years of their life preparing for the next Olympics. That is their "world championships". Professional baseball players have the World Series, basketball players have the NBA Championships, hockey players have the Stanley Cup. These pros already HAVE a dream to persue. It would seem that, to many of them, winning at the Olympics is actually worth less than winning their own sport's championship. It's almost a wasted gold medal - I'd rather it go to someone who appreciates it.

Looking at the other side of the coin, if the Olympics are about finding the best athletes in the world, noone should be excluded. If the professional figure skaters were excluded from the Olympics, then the gold medal winner could not claim to be the best skater in the world, as some professionals might be able to beat them.

Second, the only difference between a "professional" and an "amateur" is money. A professional makes a living from the sport - endorsements or winnings. Do we want all of our Olympic athletes to be poor and destitute? Or should the only people eligble to compete come from rich families that can afford to subsidize them? That seems like a silly distinction to me. If you can make a living being a professional weight-lifter, all the power to you. If you work at Home Depot and only weight lift on the side, you might not be able to devote as many hours to training as the professional, but it's still a fair competition.

In the end, I guess I agree that professionals should be allowed in the Olympics. Perhaps I have a problem with some of these modern sports being Olympic events. I mean, if baseball, basketball and soccer are Olympic sports, why not football and chess?

But that's another argument for another day. ;)

I've been trying to resist the urge to buy gadgets and electronics unless I really needed it. Well, today I bought a few things I have had my eye on for a while since the prices were excellent.

I bought a 32MB USB Drive for $14.99 CDN (about $10 USD). I don't need it, but I've been watching the prices on USB drives fall for a few months, and finally decided to get one.

I also bought an external DVD writer (multi-format) for $169.99 CDN ($125 USD) after mail-in rebate. Again, I've been waiting for years for DVD writers to drop in price. Does anyone remember when they cost $6,000? I plan to use it for data backup, and I might try to convert home videos to DVD format. And because it's external, that means it's portable, and I don't need to remove my existing CD-RW drive.

I also got a 160GB hard drive for $149.99 CDN ($110 USD) after mail-in rebate. Now this is the thing I needed the least, as I currently have three physical hard drives in my computer. But I am going to remove the smallest one (which had held about 8 GB), and replace it with this one.

Anyways, every once and a while I don't mind spending $350 or so to keep my home computer current with latest technologies.

Newsday has a really interesting piece on how Trump's casino business is now in Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection pending restructuring, and how the Trump image may be losing some of its lofty stature.

After all, how can Donald Trump, host of the Apprentice, put himself up as a model businessman when his publicly traded business (the casinos) is bankrupt?

Even more interesting is the graphic that accompanied the story listing The Donald's holdings:

© 2004 Newsday

I was just thinking this morning, with Service Pack 2 of Windows XP just being released, how much of a hassle it would be to reinstall everything. And how risky.

For instance, let's say your PC is acting strange, and there is no way to fix it. So you decide to reformat your hard drive, and install every piece of software on there from scratch. Sometimes, that's the best way to get things working again.

Well, you install Windows XP off your original CD, and connect to the internet to download the latest patches. Well, within seconds your PC is infected with a worm, and it constantly reboots itself.

What every Windows XP user should do is follow THESE INSTRUCTIONS to create themselves a new Windows XP Installation CD. So when you decide to repave, you'll have SP2 already installed - no worms are getting in.

Jonathan Swartz, an executive at Sun Microsystems, argues quite correctly that having access to source code does not really help most customers. He redefines the word “open” as software that makes it easy to move off of. If it locks you in, it's not “open” - even if you have the source code.

(Of course, he has a good reason to say that - Sun does not provide the Java source code, even though it's under pressure from companies like IBM to do so.)

I agree with Jonathan. Linux is not open.

By the same definition, Java is not open. Jonathan mentions that if you develop a .NET application, if you wanted to move it to another platform you would have to rewrite it. (I guess he hasn't heard of Mono.) What's the difference between .NET and Java in that regard? Nothing. If you want to move off Java, you would have to rewrite your application.

I stumbled across a blog that has an interesting comparison of the dates when news that is bad for Bush is released, and the dates when Homeland Security's issues terror warnings. It is trying to make the case that Bush is using terror alerts and warnings to knock these stories off the front page.

I'm not sure if I totally believe the evidence they are laying out. The evidence can be discredited with one simple statement:

Over the past two years, there has been a constant stream of “bad news” for President Bush. So every single terror alert or warning issued is likely to coincide within a few days with bad news.

To put this another way, there is a higher rate of drowning in Florida than in Nevada. It's not that people of Nevada are better swimmers than people in Florida... It's because Florida is surrounded by water. There is no sense looking for a conspiracy when a simpler explanation exists.

In the past two years, you have these major events that look bad for Bush:

• No weapons of mass destruction in Iraq
• The changing reasons for going to war in Iraq
• High American casualties in Iraq (almost 1,000 dead, many more injured)
• Cost of Iraq and Afghanistan ($200 billion and climbing)
• Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden are still out there
• Haliburton scandals that affect VP Cheney
• Government deficits (almost $500 billion per year)
• Release of pre-9/11 intelligence that was not acted upon
• White House leaks CIA operative's name

I mean, I could go on and on for many more pages. Dozens of events have occurred in the past couple of years that look bad for Bush. So there is a high likelihood that one of those events will coincide with a terror alert.

Plus, the list also includes minor events like war protests, Kerry choosing a running mate, change in power in other countries running on anti-war platforms (Germany, Spain, etc.), pullout of troops from other countries, UN and Red Cross pull out of Iraq, etc. I mean, if you really wanted to count every possible bad event, you could make a list of hundreds of such events.

So there is no conspiracy here. Those who have read this blog before will note that I am no real great fan of Bush, but I don't think this list shows evidence of anything sinister.

I agree there are political motives behind most things any president does, this list isn't proof of them though.