Former Navy SEAL on Coming Out of Shadows

It used to be that Navy SEALs didn't just operate in the shadows. They trained in them too. Their whole story stayed shrouded in mystery. Their secret missions stayed secret to the rest of us.

But when they got Osama Bin Laden, snatched back an American cargo ship taken by pirates and rescued two air workers held hostage in Somalia, then suddenly, it seemed that SEALs were headline-makers.

Add to that some SEALs wrote books about SEAL adventures and even acted in a movie about the SEAL experience using live ammunition when they made "Act of Valor." They can't quite be called "the military unit that no one ever talked about" any longer.

Watch the full story on "Nightline" TONIGHT at 12:35 a.m. ET

Rorke Denver played Lt. Commander Rorke in "Act of Valor," a film that used dozens of SEALs and went on to gross $80 million at the box office. Now, with the help of a writer, Denver is doing some pretty decent storytelling in a new book, "Damn Few: Making the Modern SEAL Warrior."

He agrees that with SEALs like him telling their stories that these guys are out in the open like never before.

"We are, at this moment in our history, when the heat is on, the missions are getting press and coverage," Denver said.

Acts of Valor: Four Boyfriends Took Bullets to Save Girlfriends Watch Video

'Zero Dark Thirty' Screenwriter Responds to Film's Controversy Watch Video

When asked if it was a good thing, he said, "time will tell."

"We are in the public eye and I think that mythology is something that people are hugely, hugely interested in and they have an appetite for it," Denver said. "So for us with the movie and then also with 'Damn Few' I had an opportunity, I feel, to authentically represent and hopefully do it from an honorable point of view and accurately do so."

It's mostly his own story Denver tells in "Damn Few," how he joined the SEALs after college -- they didn't want him at first.

"I put in my first application and they said no, and I am glad it went that way. I think the community really values resiliency and toughness and focus and a 'never quit' attitude. For me, when they said no I thought, that ain't going to cut it."

Denver didn't quit. He reapplied and went on to survive the SEALs brutal Hell Week and training, joined the team and deployed all over the world, including the deadly Al Anbar province in Iraq when the war there was at its hottest. His family waited for him to return stateside.

"The families, I feel, are the ones who pay the price of our choices," Denver said. "But I didn't appreciate how much I was asking my family to bear and experience it with me. They really are every bit a part of our experience and frankly they are the ones who are back home and praying and believing that you are going to come home."

But even his family didn't quite know what Denver did at work every day.

"I never ask questions about what he does," said his wife, Tracy.

But "Act of Valor" was revealing in that way, and Denver's wife watched the film.

"For me it was incredibly eye-opening to actually see a submarine mission or running around in the jungle, jumping out of a plane, shooting his weapons," she said. "For me, it was like, oh, so this is what you are doing when you are away. I appreciated it actually."

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We need to rethink how we name exoplanets

Fed up with dull names for exoplanets, Alan Stern and his company Uwingu have asked the public for help. Will it be so long 2M 0746+20b, hello Obama?

How did you come up with the idea for a list of potential names for exoplanets?
The number of planets in the Milky Way was recently estimated at more than 100 billion. We realised that that's far, far too many names for astronomers to supply, that it would take the general public too. We also realised how much fun this could be for people.

How do people submit names?
For $0.99, anyone can put in a name, as long as it isn't already nominated and isn't profane or pejorative. People can also vote on which names they like best. We only have a few hundred now, but the idea is that we will have hundreds of thousands of names in the database. We will take the thousand most popular, which will correspond to the thousand or so exoplanets that we already know about, and hand those to exoplanet scientists.

What kinds of names are people suggesting?
It is pretty interesting. People are putting in names of friends, spouses. They are putting in lots of science-fiction names like Alderaan and Yuggoth, names of authors such as Heinlein and Asimov, and even politicians like Obama and Romney. As this gets out to the general public, we expect there to be a lot of interesting contests going on - maybe Lady Gaga versus Madonna.

What's wrong with the existing names?
There are none - just "license plate" designations like 2M 0746+20b or OGLE235-MOA53b!

Isn't it a problem that your company, Uwingu, has no formal ties to the International Astronomical Union's naming committee?
I think most people get that this is for fun and engagement. It's not meant to be official. In a sense, it's a social experiment. Naming celestial objects is usually done by astronomers and professionals. Other people who are interested in space never get the opportunity to do that kind of thing. What if they did? What would the people of Earth choose? What would their imagination do that we wouldn't do, as astronomers?

What else is Uwingu trying to accomplish?
The mission of the company is two-fold. Priority one is to better connect the general public with space and the sky. Two is to operate a fund for space research, exploration and education.

What is the Uwingu fund?
It comes from revenues generated by people nominating and voting for their favourite exoplanet names, and it goes toward needy space projects, such as SETI's Allen Telescope Array.

Why should the public trust you with their money?
People in the research and education community recognise our names, so they will come to us in ways that they wouldn't otherwise. We are professional scientists and educators, and we will do the quality control. Our intent is to be worldwide, not only in our revenue, but in our expenditures. Uwingu is the only thing around like this; nobody else has thought of anything similar.

This article appeared in print under the headline "One minute with... Alan Stern"

Profile

Alan Stern is the former head of science missions at NASA. He and a group of fellow scientists and educators launched Uwingu's hunt for names last year at uwingu.com

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Turkey crackdown on radical group after US embassy attack

ANKARA: Turkish police launched a massive nationwide crackdown on Tuesday against a radical Marxist group which claimed a suicide bomb attack against the US embassy this month, the state-run Anatolia news agency reported.

Police issued arrest warrants for 167 people in 28 cities as part of the operation against the Revolutionary People's Liberation Front (DHKP-C), which is classified as a terrorist organisation by the United States, Anatolia said.

A Turkish guard at the US embassy in Ankara was killed in the February 1 attack and three other people including a journalist were wounded.

The outlawed DHKP-C has waged a string of attacks over the past few decades that have left dozens of people dead, including prominent political and military figures.

The fiercely anti-US group has threatened further attacks on other US diplomatic facilities in Turkey.

- AFP/fa

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Microsoft moves Outlook.com out of preview

Microsoft announced Tuesday that its Outlook.com browser-based e-mail service has moved out of its preview stage and is now available globally.

First introduced last July, Outlook.com is Microsoft's boldest e-mail move since Google launched Gmail in 2004 and a clear answer to it. As I said in my First Take, the simple interface, Skydrive integration, and promise of mega storage will remind you of Google's product while the People Hub and vaguely Windows 8 look and feel give Outlook.com a distinct identity.

Microsoft designed Outlook.com to replace its Hotmail product, which it acquired in 1997, and the general availability marks the start of that process. The Hotmail name won't disappear entirely, but Outlook.com will become Microsoft's sole free consumer e-mail offering.

In a phone interview last week, Senior Director of Product Management Dharmesh Mehta said existing Hotmail users can switch over at anytime. You'll be able to keep using your "@Hotmail" address and you'll have the option to claim an "@Outlook.com" alias, as well.

Users who don't switch over on their own will be upgraded in waves to the new product automatically starting this week. Mehta said that the process should finish by the summer, though he declined to name an exact date.

Microsoft also announced that in the six months since Outlook.com debut, the service has attracted to 60 million users. And in an effort to attract more, Mehta said that the company is launching its largest marketing ever for an e-mail service.

Outlook.com's minimalist interface is both familiar and unique.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Kent German/CNET)

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Confirmed: Dogs Sneak Food When People Aren't Looking

Many dog owners will swear their pups are up to something when out of view of watchful eyes. Shoes go missing, couches have mysterious teeth marks, and food disappears. They seem to disregard the word "no."

Now, a new study suggests dogs might understand people even better than we thought. (Related: "Animal Minds.")

The research shows that domestic dogs, when told not to snatch a piece of food, are more likely to disobey the command in a dark room than in a lit room.

This suggests that man's best friend is capable of understanding a human's point of view, said study leader Juliane Kaminski, a psychologist at the U.K.'s University of Portmouth.

"The one thing we can say is that dogs really have specialized skills in reading human communication," she said. "This is special in dogs." (Read "How to Build a Dog.")

Sneaky Canines

Kaminski and colleagues recruited 84 dogs, all of which were more than a year old, motivated by food, and comfortable with both strangers and dark rooms.

The team then set up experiments in which a person commanded a dog not to take a piece of food on the floor and repeated the commands in a room with different lighting scenarios ranging from fully lit to fully dark.

They found that the dogs were four times as likely to steal the food—and steal it more quickly—when the room was dark. (Take our dog quiz.)

"We were thinking what affected the dog was whether they saw the human, but seeing the human or not didn't affect the behavior," said Kaminski, whose study was published recently in the journal Animal Cognition.

Instead, she said, the dog's behavior depended on whether the food was in the light or not, suggesting that the dog made its decision based on whether the human could see them approaching the food.

"In a general sense, [Kaminski] and other researchers are interested in whether the dog has a theory of mind," said Alexandra Horowitz, head of the Dog Cognition Lab at Barnard University, who was not involved in the new study.

Something that all normal adult humans have, theory of mind is "an understanding that others have different perspective, knowledge, feelings than we do," said Horowitz, also the author of Inside of a Dog.

Smarter Than We Think

While research has previously been focused on our closer relatives—chimpanzees and bonobos—interest in dog cognition is increasing, thanks in part to owners wanting to know what their dogs are thinking. (Pictures: How smart are these animals?)

"The study of dog cognition suddenly began about 15 years ago," Horowitz said.

Part of the reason for that, said Brian Hare, director of the Duke Canine Cognition Lab and author of The Genius of Dogs, is that "science thought dogs were unremarkable."

But "dogs have a genius—years ago we didn't know what that was," said Hare, who was not involved in the new research. (See pictures of the the evolution of dogs, from wolf to woof.)

Many of the new dog studies are variations on research done with chimpanzees, bonobos, and even young children. Animal-cognition researchers are looking into dogs' ability to imitate, solve problems, or navigate social environments.

So just how much does your dog understand? It's much more than you—and science—probably thought.

Selectively bred as companions for thousands of years, dogs are especially attuned to human emotions—and, study leader Kaminski said, are better at reading human cues than even our closest mammalian relatives.

"There has been a physiological change in dogs because of domestication," Duke's Hare added. "Dogs want to bond with us in ways other species don't." (Related: "Dogs' Brains Reorganized by Breeding.")

While research reveals more and more insight into the minds of our furry best friends, Kaminski said, "We still don't know just how smart they are."

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Russian Meteor: Close Encounter, Preventing Impacts

Feb 18, 2013 7:03pm

MOSCOW — As if Friday’s massive meteor explosion over central Russia weren’t enough, just hours later a large asteroid buzzed dangerously close to Earth.

And that evening, the California sky was lit up by a fireball, apparently entering Earth’s atmosphere.

It’s a barrage from space that has people asking: Are we ready for the big one?

Nearly 100 tons of space debris enters Earth’s atmosphere every day. Most of it burns up or falls harmlessly into the ocean, but experts still worry that eventually something big will come our way.

PHOTOS: Meteorite Crashes in Russia

Image credit: Chelyabinsk Region Branch of Russian Interior Ministry/HO/EPA

The prospect of Earth getting hit by a giant hunk of space rock is concerning enough that the United Nations is gathering top minds in Italy this week to discuss it.

Scientists say the idea of blowing up an asteroid — as Bruce Willis’ character did in the movie “Armageddon” — is pure Hollywood fantasy. Even if we could hit it, it’s unlikely to stop it.

Existing sky-watching programs run by NASA and others can only spot the biggest asteroids, not the small ones that sneak up on us.

But fear not, citizens of Earth. Scientists have a plan.

RELATED: Russian Meteor: Rushing to Cash in on the Blast

One group, the non-profit B612 Foundation, proposes sending a telescope, called Sentinel, into space to detect incoming objects decades before their orbits intersect ours. Then, unmanned spacecraft could fly to them and nudge them clear of Earth’s path.

The group is trying to raise $200 million to make it happen and hopes to launch the telescope by 2016.

Another project, proposed by the University of Hawaii, aims to give earthlings a heads-up when necessary, starting by 2015.

RELATED: Meteor Events: Rare, but Dangerous

It is called the Atlas program, and the plan is to deploy a string of telescopes that would search for even smaller objects in the sky, hoping to be able to give people at least a few day’s notice that could allow time for an evacuation.

Until then, better keep Bruce Willis on speed dial.

SHOWS: World News

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Nuclear waste: too hot to handle?

Cumbria's decision to veto an underground repository for the UK shows how hard it is to find a long-term solution

THERE are 437 nuclear power reactors in 31 countries around the world. The number of repositories for high-level radioactive waste? Zero. The typical lifespan of a nuclear power plant is 60 years. The waste from nuclear power is dangerous for up to one million years. Clearly, the waste problem is not going to go away any time soon.

In fact, it is going to get a lot worse. The World Nuclear Association says that http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf102.html 45 countries without nuclear power are giving it serious consideration. Several others, including China, South Korea and India, are planning to massively expand their existing programmes. Meanwhile, dealing with the waste from nuclear energy can be put off for another day, decade or century.

It's not that we haven't tried. By the 1970s, countries that produced nuclear power were promising that repositories would be built hundreds of metres underground to permanently isolate the waste. Small groups of technical experts and government officials laboured behind closed doors to identify potential sites. The results - produced with almost no public consultation - were disastrous.

In 1976, West German politicians unilaterally selected a site near the village of Gorleben on the East German border for a repository, fuelling a boisterous anti-nuclear movement that seems to have no end in sight.

In the UK, the practice of choosing candidate sites with little public input was lampooned as "decide, announce, defend". In the US, backroom political manoeuvring led to the 1987 selection of Yucca Mountain in Nevada, at the time an under-populated gambling Mecca with no political muscle. Nevadans have been fighting what they call the "Screw Nevada Bill" ever since. The Obama administration pulled funding from Yucca Mountain to appease Senate majority leader Harry Reid, who is from Nevada, but the decision is still being battled in the courts and Congress, and the site is not completely off the table.

It took a while, but governments began to catch on that the top-down approach wasn't working. Time for a new strategy: look for a community willing to host a repository, using lots of touchy-feely language such as consent-based, transparent, adaptive, phased and terminable. On paper, it is win-win. Sweden and Finland, those paragons of Nordic cooperation and efficiency, are now in the home stretch for opening the world's first nuclear waste repositories, and are held up as proof-positive that the new policy can work.

Yet finding a volunteer community is the relatively easy part, because nuclear waste repositories bring jobs and money. But this doesn't mean their neighbours, or the regional powers that be, are going to go along with it.

This unfortunate aspect of policymaking became readily apparent in the UK last month. Everything seemed a sure shot for taking the next exploratory steps toward a nuclear waste repository in west Cumbria. Located next door to Sellafield, the granddaddy of the UK's nuclear facilities, two local communities comfortable with nuclear matters were in favour. The bugles and bunting were practically being unfurled when Cumbria County Council, concerned about tourism in the Lake District and possible future leaks, vetoed the plan. No other volunteers are in line as a backup.

The US recently announced its own volunteer-based policy, including promises to have an interim storage site up and running within eight years and a repository by 2048. It should know better. Is it forgetting its own track record, even with interim storage facilities?

In the 1980s, the community of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, agreed to host an interim facility. Statewide opposition shut it down. In the 1990s, the Skull Valley Band Of The Goshute Nation, a recognised Native American sovereign nation, volunteered to host an interim facility on its reservation in Utah. Last December, after more than 15 years of legal sparring with the state, the utilities working with the Goshute finally gave up.

The most recent volunteer community to be snubbed is Nye County, where Yucca Mountain is situated. After a commission chartered by the Obama administration recommended a new "consent-based" approach to break the deadlock over the site, Nye County officials wrote to US energy secretary Steven Chu giving their consent to host the repository at Yucca Mountain. Nevada Governor Brian Sandoval subsequently informed Chu that the state of Nevada will never consent to a repository.

It's now over half a century since the dawn of nuclear energy and dangerous and long-lived waste continues to pile up all over the globe. Something needs to be done. Although touted as the solution, finding a consenting community is merely the first step. The harder part is getting everyone else to sign on.

And then comes the real challenge - to determine if the ground beneath a volunteer community is geologically suitable for a repository. This daunting endeavour requires a decades-long process that is both politically sensitive and technically complex. Inevitably, surprises occur as studies go underground. Here, the public needs an independent, technically savvy group whom they trust to address their concerns and interpret the scientific results.

The difficulties of finding a happily-ever-after triad of volunteer community, consenting neighbours and geologically suitable site cannot be lightly dismissed. Replacing a top-down approach with a consent-based one is a step in the right direction, but it doesn't fundamentally solve the problem.

This article appeared in print under the headline "Down in the dumps"

William M. Alley oversaw the US Geological Survey's Yucca Mountain project from 2002 to 2010

Rosemarie Alley and William M. Alley are authors of Too Hot To Touch: The problem of high-level nuclear waste (Cambridge University Press)

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Indonesia floods, landslides kill 17

MANADO, Indonesia: Four children were among 17 people killed over the weekend in central Indonesia after heavy rains triggered floods and landslides, officials said on Monday.

The children, aged between two and nine, died along with 13 adults when flooding and landslides hit the northern part of Sulawesi island early Sunday, provincial disaster management agency spokesman Howke Makawarung told AFP.

"We recorded 17 people killed. All bodies were found on Sunday," he said, adding that heavy rains had hit three areas, including the North Sulawesi provincial capital of Manado which saw water levels up to four metres.

Water, which inundated around 5,000 houses in Manado, had receded by Monday and residents had begun cleaning up their homes.

A landslide which hit the city killed a six-year old boy.

"He was taking a bath in the morning when a landslide suddenly struck his house," the capital deputy mayor Harley Mangindaan told AFP.

Indonesia is regularly affected by deadly floods and landslides during its wet season, which lasts for around six months.

Environmentalists blame logging and a failure to reforest denuded land for exacerbating flooding.

Heavy rains caused flooding in the capital Jakarta in January that left 32 people dead and at its peak forced nearly 46,000 to flee their homes.

- AFP/de

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LG's 5.5-inch Optimus G Pro to reach U.S. in Q2

LG Optimus G Pro

(Credit:
LG Electronics)

After some earlier teasing, LG Electronics fully detailed its Optimus G Pro Android phone today, a high-end model with 5.5-inch screen, LTE networking, and a quad-core 1.7GHz processor.

LG often sells its phones first in its home market of South Korea, and it looks like that's the plan for the Optimus G Pro, too. But it'll arrive in other areas, too, including North America and Japan in the second quarter of 2013, LG said in an announcement a week ahead of the Mobile World Congress show. That's where the South Korean company will show off the phone and announced three lower-end L-series Android phones, the Optimus L7 II, L5 II, and L3 II.

The Optimus G Pro is a large-screen model that
Android smartphone makers such as HTC and Samsung have embraced in an effort to differentiate products from the smaller iPhone. The Optimus Pro G has a 5.5-inch, 1920x1080-pixel AMOLED screen with a linear resolution of 400 pixels per inch.

Combined with its relatively large 3,140mAh battery, that means people can watch Full HD video "for hours on end," LG said.

The processor is the quad-core 1.7GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 600, and the phone comes with 2GB of RAM. The phone itself measure 150.2x76.1x9.4mm

The camera has a 13-megapixel rear-facing camera with an LED flash and a 2.1MP front-facing camera. A feature called VR Panorama will construct 360-degree panoramas out of an array of horizontal and vertical views around the person holding the phone.

Both of the phones' cameras can be used in a dual-recording mode that "allows users to capture video with both the front and rear cameras simultaneously for a unique picture-in-picture experience," LG said.

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Meet the Meteorite Hunter

Michael Farmer is one of the world's only full-time meteorite hunters. Since the 1990s, the 40-year-old Tucson, Arizona, resident has been scouring the world for pieces of interstellar rock, racing to be the first one on the scene and selling his finds to museums and private collectors. On Friday, as Russians reportedly scrambled to collect fragments from a passing meteorite that injured hundreds, Farmer spoke with National Geographic about his unusual line of work.

Why are so many people in Russia busy gathering up meteorite fragments?

It's a historic event. This will be talked about forever. Everyone wants to have a little piece of it. And scientifically, we want to study it. We want to know what's out there, and we want to know how big it is, and we want to know what damage it can cause. The preliminary data from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory says about 7,000 tons landed.

How many meteorite fragments are known to be on Earth?

There are a couple of hundred thousand known meteorites. Of course, there's millions and millions on the planet; we just have to find them. Most of the Earth is inhospitable—heavy forest, jungle, ocean. Meteorites that fall in the ocean are just gone, disappeared to the bottom.

How many other full-time meteorite hunters are there?

Dedicated, serious meteorite hunters? There are maybe 20 of us. If you add in the part-timers who go somewhere whenever [an impact is] close to them, then you might approach a hundred.

How did you become a meteorite hunter?

Here in Tucson right now we have the world's biggest mineral show going on. I bought a meteorite at this very same show 20 years ago, and I was absolutely obsessed and hooked. Since then I've been around the world more times than I can count—four million miles on American Airlines alone.

How many countries have you been to?

About 70 countries, by my last count. About 50, 59 trips to Africa—a lot of work in Africa. The Sahara and other deserts there make meteorites easier to find than on other terrains, and also keep them well preserved.

What are the challenges you face when you're on a hunt?

Well, you're usually going into a kind of chaotic scene where nobody really knows much. In Africa and other places I go [the locals] don't usually understand what's happening, and most of the time they don't care. They're more concerned with eating that day. But the instant some guy shows up and says, "I'll pay you to find this rock," the whole village empties—and then lots of rocks show up.

Related: Best Meteorites for Tourists

It can be dangerous work. I've been robbed, put into prison. For example, I was in prison two years ago in the Middle East, in Oman—actually sentenced, convicted, and put in prison for three months for "illegal mining activity." Not a very nice time. And the same year, 2011, in the fall I went to Kenya three times, after a major meteorite fell. On the third trip over I had a robbery where they ambushed us and almost murdered me. I was down on my knees, with a bag over my head and a machete on my throat and a gun at my head, being beaten. Luckily they decided to just take everything and leave instead of killing us. It's a dangerous line of work because it involves money, and people want that money.

What's the most valuable meteorite you've found?

Well, I've found three separate moon rocks in the Middle East. [Moon rocks are considered a type of meteorite that came loose from the lunar surface and fell to Earth.] And one of them I sold for $100,000 a week later. It was just a small piece—the size of a walnut. But the best meteorite I found was with my three partners up in Canada. It was actually discovered in 1931, but we went back to the location and discovered 53 kilograms [117 pounds] more. It's an extremely rare type of meteorite called a pallasite, and it's about 4.5 billion years old. We sold it to the Canadian government for just under a million dollars. Now it's in the Royal Ontario Museum, in Toronto, and it's considered a national treasure.

Where else do you sell your wares?

Well, I do shows around the world, in France, Germany, Japan. I go to expos, like this one here in Tucson, which is the biggest mineral show in the world and lasts for three weeks. And museums are always calling me.

Related: Archival Photos of Meteorite Recovery

It's a small market. It's not like I need a shop or anything. People call me or email me or go to my website and check it out. The market these days is so ravenous for anything new that when I get a new meteorite, it's usually sold in hours. I don't even have to work anymore. I just make phone calls to a few people, and it's all gone.

Where do you store your collection?

I have multiple storage sites—never put all your eggs in one basket. And I have lots of bulk material. Sometimes I buy this stuff by the ton, and it goes into storage and I sell it off one piece at a time.

What's the verification process like?

Any meteorite, anything that we want to have an official name, has to go to a laboratory, where it gets sectioned and studied by scientists. For example, I'd guess this meteorite in Russia yesterday will be in a lab in Moscow, being researched within hours.

Related: History's Big Meteorite Crashes

In the collector market, we work collaboratively with the scientists. I supply them with rocks, and they supply me with data, both of which I need to make money. People want to know what something is before they buy it.

Are there legal or ethical implications to meteorite hunting?

There always are. Certain countries have passed laws. But when I was arrested in Oman, they actually had no law—they were just very upset that we were taking lots of meteorites. The only law they could charge us with was illegal mining operations—basically running a company in the country without government licensing. But I won on appeal because we had no mining equipment. We were picking up rocks off the surface of the desert. And a judge said, "If a child could do it, then it's not mining." And I was immediately released and sent home.

But there's always friction between the collecting market and the scientific market. There are scientists out there who believe that no meteorite should be in private hands. Well, I tell you, I've been on hunts all over the world and I've only run into scientists a couple of times. They don't have the time or money to do it. So if it wasn't for us, 99 percent of these meteorites would be lost to science.

What about this meteorite strike—do you think scientists will go to Russia?

I guarantee there'll be scientists from everywhere in the world going to this one.

Are you catching the next flight to Moscow?

Well, of course as a meteorite dealer, I want to own this. I woke up this morning to a hundred e-mails from people begging me to get on a plane and go get it so they can buy a piece.

But I'm probably not going. Getting into Russia can be complicated. I'll just buy some from the Russians when it comes out.

Of course, if this had happened in China or somewhere in Africa, I'd be packing my bags right now and getting on a plane, figuring it all out when I get there.

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