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Cannot Activate Windows XP After a Repair Install

This is a very common problem. It is potentially diasastrous, yet it is not addressed or even acknowledged on the Microsoft answers website.

The issue is that on the first restart after a Windows XP repair install a screen appears saying ‘This copy of Windows needs to be activated before you can log on. Do you want to activate now?’

If you click no, the computer logs out. If you click yes, the computer loads the desktop background but nothing else. Control-Alt-Delete does not work, nor do any other tricks or workarounds to get a task bar or start menu or any programs running.

The solution is as follows:

Start the computer into safe mode. It will probably not start in safe mode with networking, but will start in ordinary safe mode.

Check whether you have XP Service Pack three installed. If SP3 is not installed, install it. If you don’t already have a copy, download the XP SP3 standalone installer from Microsoft and burn it to a CD. It will run and install in safe mode.

Restart the computer into safe mode.

Install Internet Explorer Eight. If you don’t already have it, you should download the IE8 standalone installer from Microsoft and burn it to a CD. It will install in safe mode.

Restart the computer. It should now start without a problem. You may still get the activation screen, but if so, the activation window will now open, and you can activate over the internet or via telephone.

This problem is caused by the repair install corrupting internet explorer seven, making it impossible for the activation screen to open.

Installing Internet Explorer 8 fixes the problem. But IE8 will not install if you do not have either internet access or XP SP3. In this situation you do not have networking so you have no internet access, so you need to install SP3 first.

Yousef Nadarkhani

Who?

If you haven’t heard of Pastor Yousef Nadarkhani, then maybe we do need an inquiry into the mainstream media.

Yousef is a Christian pastor in Iran. He has never been a Muslim. Yet he has been sentenced to death for apostasy on the basis that his ancestors were Muslims.

From Melanie Phillips:

The brutal regime in Iran continues to inflict appalling levels of barbarity upon its own citizens.

A Christian pastor, Youcef Nadarkhani, aged 35 and the father of two children, has been sentenced to death for apostasy, a crime for which he was jailed two years ago. But this savage punishment is far worse even than it seems. For Nadarkhani is deemed to have committed apostasy merely because he has Islamic ancestry. Whether he was ever actually a practising Muslim was not even established. The Washington Post reported:

‘The 11th branch of Iran’s Gilan Provincial Court has determined that Nadarkhani has Islamic ancestry and therefore must recant his faith in Jesus Christ. Iran’s supreme court had previously ruled that the trial court must determine if Youcef had been a Muslim before converting to Christianity.

‘However, the judges, acting like terrorists with a hostage, demanded that he recant his faith in Christ before even taking evidence. The judges stated that even though the judgment they have made is against the current Iranian and international laws, they have to uphold the previous decision of the 27th Branch of the Supreme Court in Qom.’

Now the Iranian authorities have claimed he is to be executed not for apostasy at all but for a slew of other crimes. As CNN reports:

‘Gholomali Rezvani, the deputy governor of Gilan province, where Nadarkhani was tried and convicted, accused Western media of twisting the real story, referring to him as a “rapist.” A previous report from the news agency claimed he had committed several violent crimes, including repeated rape and extortion. “His crime is not, as some claim, converting others to Christianity,” Rezvani told Fars. “He is guilty of security-related crimes.”

‘In a translated Iranian Supreme Court brief from 2010, however, the charge of apostasy is the only charge leveled against Nadarkhani. “Mr. Youcef Nadarkhani, son of Byrom, 32-years old, married, born in Rasht in the state of Gilan is convicted of turning his back on Islam, the greatest religion the prophesy of Mohammad at the age of 19,” reads the brief.’

If there is enough international pressure, Iran may relent.

So pressure! Email your MP. Write (politely) to the Iranian Ambassador. Pray.

Shut Up and Eat Your Lentils

Menzies House is doing its best to make people aware of the appalling censorship of public comments on the laughable (and depressing) “Clean Energy Future’ legislation.

A parliamentary joint select committee (I always thought a joint committee was impartial, but perhaps not if it is ‘select’) called for public submissions on the 1000 page plan to impose a tax on Carbon Dioxide.

An unprecedented 4500 Australians took the time to write to submit detailed submissions to the committee. All of these were rejected, with only 70 (mainly pro-tax) submissions published. At no time in the history of the Australian Parliament has a Committee flatly rejected to even consider the opinions of the Australian people.

In contrast, the government was more than happy to receive previous submission in support of the carbon tax, even if they were as simple as “I am writing to express my support for the government to legislate to put a price on carbon. I urge the government to move ahead with the Carbon Tax” (Rob Feith). This two sentence email was accepted as a submission by the Department. Yet 4500 detailed submissions by Australians opposed to the carbon tax were rejected.

Gillard’s government really wants to hear your views, as long as you agree with it.

Amongst people who agree with the Gillard/Brown government are the cheerful souls at Say Yes Australia. You can add your voice by creating a sign expressing your opinion about the proposed CO2 tax. The expectation is that your opinion will be some variation of ‘Gosh yes, let’s stop carbon pollution and save the planet for our children.’

Those who can think for themselves might have a different view.

I added ‘Are you nuts? CO2 is not a pollutant.’ Other possibilties were: ‘CO2 is the basis of all life.’ ‘CO2 is a positive by-product of cheap energy.’ ‘Plants need CO2 – more CO2 means better crops.’

Go and make a sign of your own. But I dare say none of those will be appearing on their website, or the lawn of Parliament House.

Also on the Menzies House website, a link to a wonderful review of Rob Lyon’s wonderful book, Panic on a Plate:

Here are a a few bits of the review, from the blog Velvet Glove, Iron Fist:

In the last eighty years, the proportion of household income spent on food has dropped from a third to less than a tenth. Fruit and vegetables from around the world are on the shelves all year round. Women are no longer chained to a life of domestic drudgery. Malnutrition and rickets are a distant memory. For the first time in history, we who are lucky enough to live in the West do not have to worry about food.

But worry we do – about genetic modification, fast food, BSE, childhood obesity, adult obesity, salt, margarine, cholesterol, fat, pesticides, red meat, food miles, carbon footprints and school dinners. At the very moment when we should be most relaxed about the food supply, we are bombarded with fears. Fast food is “addictive”, so we are told, and the food industry is trying to kill us for profit. Unless we take drastic action, most Britons will be obese by 2030.

As Rob Lyons patiently explains in this splendid plea for sanity, these beliefs owe more to ignorance and prejudice than fact. Take the humble hamburger, which obesity crusaders have chosen as their very own Moby Dick. On the face of it, it is bewildering why “two all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun”—to quote the old Big Mac slogan—should be the embodiment of evil. A burger is only bread, meat and salad. Each Big Mac contains 500 calories – a fifth of a man’s daily ‘limit’ – and you wouldn’t want to copy Morgan Spurlock’s silly experiment of eating nothing else, but it is no more fattening than the supposedly more wholesome alternatives. Ketchup is rich in vitamin C and so are fries – surprisingly, a portion of fries contains between a quarter and a third of an adult’s daily recommended vitamin C intake. There are better candidates for demonization in every middle class kitchen. “Cheese is roughly one third fat. Parmesan is also pretty salty. Olive oil is pure fat. Butter must be, by law, 80 per cent fat,” writes Lyons. “Honey and raisins – usually regarded as ‘good’ – are practically pure sugar. Orange juice is 87 per cent water, almost all the rest is sugar.”  

“Don’t eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food,” says the writer Michael Pollan. Mmm, all those handpicked vegetables and buxom maidens toiling over churns of butter. Jumpers for goalposts. Marvellous.

Or perhaps not. Your grandmother would probably not recognize spaghetti, hummus or kiwi fruits as food, but she would certainly be familiar with bread and dripping, gruel, fried everything and the early symptoms of scurvy. The range and quality of British food has improved immeasurably since the turn of the last century and supermarkets have broadened our horizons considerably.

Changing MMORPGs

I have played World of Warcraft for nearly three years. Now I am playing Rift.

I had two WoW accounts. That was from the time when you couldn’t have characters from both factions on the same account on a PvP server.

Because I had opened the accounts in different names I was not able to combine them even after that rule was changed – despite the fact they were paid with the same credit card, and all other personal information was the same.

Both accounts were hacked. Each time that happened, the response from Blizzard was accusatory, even rude.

I bought authenticators for both accounts. But the login only asked for an authentication key about quarter of the time.

Earlier this year I got an email from Blizzard saying one of my accounts had been banned, because I had been using a ‘hack.’ That’s a mini programme that enables you to move faster, walk through walls etc.

I had two 85s on that acccount, an ele Shaman and an unholy DK, plus a few other minor toons. I enjoyed playing the Shaman, who also had top level skinning, leatherworking and cooking. I was anxious to get that account back.

I emailed Blizzard saying I had not logged into that account for several weeks, and had never used a hack. I got a curt email back saying the decision would not be reconsidered. I emailed again, asking politely for an explanation. I didn’t get a reply.

I continued to play my other account for a while – I have three 85s on that one, a Lock, a Druid and a Pally. But my heart was not in it any more.

A month ago I said goodbye to WoW forever. For the last couple of weeks I have been playing Rift. It doesn’t yet have the depth of content WoW has, but gameplay is as good or better, professions are definitely better, the dynamic content is great, and support staff seem helpful and interested.

So far I have a level 32 Champion Warrior, and a level 14 Pyro Mage.

Rift will have to work hard to match the new content in WoW, and the attractions of Star Wars: The Old Republic, which launches in December of this year.

I have a suggestion.

One of the nice things about Rift is the soul tree system, which enables players to combine talents from different streams within a single class.

A major improvement, and something no other MMORPG has, would be to allow players to combine soul trees from any class – essentially allowing them to create their own classes. So you could combine a Champion/Riftblade Warrior with the Necro stream from the Mage class, or any other combination of any trees from any class.

This could be boosted by allowing any character to wear any armour, giving for example, speed and spellpower bonuses to cloth armour, parry and strength bonuses to plate.

This would add a uniquely flexible character and combat system to an already interesting game. If new content continues to be added, I think this change would make Rift unbeatable.

Persistence

Over the last weekend I thought I would give up writing this blog. It has been an interesting couple of years. Some 1200 posts, half a million words.

This Winter has been difficult. Constant personal issues involving health and family for the last five years have begun to drain my emotional energy – and it does take emotional energy to force yourself to sit down and think, I mean really think, and then write, about the issues of the day. 

The real problem has been time. There are fewer tourists, and local people have less money to spend. This has meant working longer hours to try to cover the costs of staying in business. And I do need some time just to switch off and relax, and some time for family and friends.

Maintaining Qohel was beginning to look like a very low priority.

But after yesterday’s Federal Court decision, it is increasingly important to persist, and to insist on the importance of free speech.

I find many of Tim Lambert’s blog posts offensive, both because of his personal attacks on people he disagrees with and because of his determined resistence to facts. But I still link to him, and would be very disturbed if it was seriously suggested bloggers who hold his views or write in the way he does should be forced to modify their thinking.

Democracies work because people are informed. They come to be informed through considering a variety of viewpoints and theories. Free speech is essential to effective democracy. The fewer restrictions on free speech, the better a democracy will work.

Even David Irving and Mahmoud Imanutjob have the right to speak. They cannot insist on any right to force us to listen. But forcing people to hear particular views and only those views is only a short step behind the silencing of others.

Democracy and freedom of speech are incompatible with an imagined right not to be offended. Attempts to establish such a right, and especially to give that right to particular groups, will create, and always has created, obstacles to the exchange of facts and ideas, and just as importantly, will create divisions and resentments which undermine respect and trust.

Condom Cash Grab

A Geraldton man is disgusted after his two year old daughter started chewing on a used condom she allegedly picked up in the McDonald’s playground.

I have eaten at that McDonalds. It was clean and tidy. Many of its customers were not.

How is it Macca’s fault that some moron tossed a used condom over their fence? Even the best cleaners can’t be everywhere.

The father is right to be disgusted – who wouldn’t be? But making it into media headlines sounds like a cash grab.

Andrew Bolt Guilty – And They’re Coming For You Next

Somehow, in the shambolic mess of Justice Bromberg’s mind, a person who says that race should make no difference, and that people should be rewarded and assisted according to their abilities and needs, is guilty of racial discrimination.

Somehow, in the blinkered hollow of Justice Bromberg’s mind, people who claim extra rights and privileges on the basis of race, which they claim to be free to determine without reference to any racial characteristics whatever, are entitled to those privileges, and any questioning of this is insulting, intimidating, discriminatory and inflammatory.

God help us.

Just Some Stuff You MIght Have Missed

If you only read or watch or listen to Australian news sources.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan has cut trade and diplomatic relations with Israel, is increasing naval activity close to Israel, has threatened to attack Cyprus if US company Noble Energy proceeds with plans to drill for gas near its Leviathan field (between Israel and Cyprus), and has announced plans to visit Gaza.

This confirms Turkey’s resurgent desire to become the leading power in the region as the ‘Arab Spring’ weakens long standing regimes. Turkey seeks to re-establish its credibility with the Arab/Muslim world by repudiating its former close relationship with Israel. This is, or should be, a major security concern for Israel and Western nations.

Russia is rebuilding a railway line to a previously unsuccessful special economic zone in North Korea. The DPRK hopes that easier access to the zone, around the port city of Khasan at the North-East corner of North Korea, where the borders of North Korea, China and Russia meet, will revitalise its trade and economic development.

More open trade could bring new and much needed openness and prosperity to the DPRK, or it could be a sign of a worrying coziness between North Korea, China nd Russia.

Russia under Putin is reverting to dictatorial centralist government.

China will need to weigh its relationship with the DPRK against its very important economic links to the US and Australia. But China may very well feel that its hand in those relationships is so strong that it can do what it likes.

Monsoonal floods in southern Pakistan have killed over 100 people, and severely damaged rice, cotton and sugar crops.

The West will come to their aid again, and it is right that we should do so. But these seasonal floods are regular and predictable. Why does Pakistan’s government not build appropriate infrastructure to mitigate their effects? Perhaps any future defense aid to Pakistan could be tied to measurable efforts to protect its people from predictable natural events.

Finally, just six months after the devastating earthquake and tsunami, Japan has been struck by the most damaging typhoon for the last seven years. Over 100 have been killed, and thousands are still trapped or missing.

May God bless and protect them.

Robert Manne Is No Intellectual

Not if by ‘intellectual’ you mean someone who is capable of considering events and evidence, and coming to reasonable conclusions, a person capable of careful and objective analysis.

His article in the Sydney Morning Herald on September 2nd was called ‘A Pressing (ha, ha, I’m sure he felt very clever about that) Case for Standing Up To Rupert Murdoch’s Bullying.’

News Ltd owns 70 per cent of the circulation of major newspapers in Australia.  If Rupert Murdoch, the chairman and chief executive of News Corporation, were an  apolitical or a distant figure, this might not matter, but he has a powerful set  of ideological beliefs and is determined to maintain tight control over the  political line of all his papers on issues that interest him.

That may be news to many of Murdoch’s editors, to judge from the diversity of opinion expressed in their editorial pages, and their public support for different parties at the last election.

There is no evidence in Murdoch papers of bullying, or even ‘tight control.’ Nor is there any reason to think that a family of papers in which such a diversity of views are welcome could have the nefarious effect on public opinion that is causing Professor Manne so much worry.

Maybe he is frustrated that only 30% of Australians read papers which share his views:

The company’s domination of our newspaper market poses a real and present danger to the health of Australian democracy.

Really? Murdoch started a long way behind the pack, with just one Adelaide paper. Now 70% of Australians prefer to to read a Murdoch paper. That sounds to me like democracy in action.

Compare the variety of opinion in Murdoch editorials with, say, The Age or the ABC.

The ABC is supposed to be our ABC. We pay for it. But there is no programme on the ABC in which my views are regularly aired or considered. As for The Age, any thought of diversity of opinion in the pages of Professor Manne’s favourite paper is a joke.

It is reasonable for a paper to have a consistent editorial line on political matters. Some Murdoch papers do this.

It is less reasonable to refuse to allow the expression of alternative views in opinion columns or letters pages. No Murdoch paper does this.

Refusing to publish news which is unwelcome to one side of politics means that a paper has ceased to be a reliable news source and has become a party rag. The Age does this. This morning’s edition is a perfect example.

Rupert Murdoch seems to be a global warming believer, so it is difficult to see how The Australian’s regular publication of dissenting views, despite Manne’s angst about this, does anything other than disprove Manne’s assertion of megalomaniacal control.

The mild dominance of Murdoch papers in the Australian market is not evidence of Murdoch bullying, or of rigid editorial control, but rather of ordinary Australians’ preference for news sources which report the news fairly, and in which their views get a fair hearing.

Professor Manne’s problem seems to be that he simply cannot understand why most Australians don’t share his opinions. Since he is right about everything, this can only be because there is some dreadful conspiracy. Or because the rest of us are stupid.

Howard on Terorism and Our Response Over the Last Ten Years

I think John Howard is a little too enthusiastic about Indonesia, where there is still a troubling level of Islamic violence against minority religious groups, and about the so-called Arab Spring.

There is reasonable concern that movements interpreted by the West as movements for democratic reform in Arab nations will only be democratic until Wahhabist governments are installed. Democracy is antithetic to Wahhabist thought since the obligation of Muslims is to work for the implementation of Sharia, while democracy places the opinions of men (and even kaffirs) above Islamic law.

Hence protests like this in Western democracies:

Islam - No to Democracy

Islam - No to Freedom of Speech

Nonetheless, Howard is right both to identify many positive changes in the world over the last ten years, and to assert the need for continuing effort and care.

Rick Perry and the Value of Human Life

I am not a US citizen (though my wife is), so I can’t vote in the US presidential election anyway. And I support the death penalty in very limited circumstances.

But I could not vote for Rick Perry, much as his conduct and policies are admirable in other areas, because it seems to me likely that in order to appear tough on crime, he allowed to be executed at least one man he knew, or ought to have known, was innocent.

I remember seeing the film Judgement at Nuremburg when I was a child. Even at about eight years old, I was struck by an exchange between the American judge and one of the German prisoners (former judges under Hitler).

I may be remembering it incorrectly – it was forty-five years ago – but what I remember is the prisoner saying “I never thought it would come to this,” and the judge responding “It came to this the first time you sentenced an innocent man to death.”

If you allow a man you know is likely to be innocent to be put to death, you are not someone who should be leading a state or nation, no matter how strong your economic credentials.

First They Came for the Fat Kids

Pastor Martin Niemoller, who spent seven years in Nazi prisons, wrote:

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out —
Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out —
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out —
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak for me.

And now they are coming for the fat kids. Who will be next?

And Right On Cue

Five minutes after I posted the previous article about global warming alarmists losing debates and resorting to insults, an article by professor of psychology Stephan Lewandowksy appeared on the ABC’s Drum website.

It starts off well enough:

Science is self-correcting.

In the long run, occasional errors that slip into the peer-reviewed literature are ironed out.

Errors and mistaken assumptions cannot persist because publication of a peer-reviewed paper is only a first stage of peer review: The subsequent, even more rigorous stage of peer-review occurs after a paper’s publication and involves the scrutiny of scientific work by the entire field.

All good. Scientific papers are subject to peer review before they are published, and their publication leads to further research, discussion, and possibly refutation. This is how knowledge grows, through a kind of Hegelian dialectic. Which is just a fancy way of saying a discussion in which various points of view come to the fore, are discussed, modified, and then replaced with ideas that build on those that came before.

Sadly, Lewandowksky’s article then immediately lapses into the kind of name calling that characterises alarmist debate.

The pretext for his article is the resignation of Wolfgang Wagner as editor of the journal Remote Sensing. Wagner’s  resignation followed the publication, after peer review, of a paper by Roy Spencer and Danny Braswell.

Wagner describs his reasons for leaving:

…In other words, the problem I see with the paper by Spencer and Braswell is not that it declared a minority view (which was later unfortunately much exaggerated by the public media) but that it essentially ignored the scientific arguments of its opponents. This latter point was missed in the review process, explaining why I perceive this paper to be fundamentally flawed and therefore wrongly accepted by the journal.

OK. But if the concern is that the arguments are poorly made, or have already been rebutted, or are just plain wrong, why not simply call for responses? In other words, why not address the preceived errors?

Roy Spencer responds:

But the paper WAS precisely addressing the scientific arguments made by our opponents, and showing why they are wrong! That was the paper’s starting point! We dealt with specifics, numbers, calculations…while our critics only use generalities and talking points. There is no contest, as far as I can see, in this debate. If you have some physics or radiative transfer background, read the evidence we present, the paper we were responding to, and decide for yourself.

If some scientists would like do demonstrate in their own peer-reviewed paper where *anything* we wrote was incorrect, they should submit a paper for publication. Instead, it appears the IPCC gatekeepers have once again put pressure on a journal for daring to publish anything that might hurt the IPCC’s politically immovable position that climate change is almost entirely human-caused. I can see no other explanation for an editor resigning in such a situation.

But that is not good enough for Professor Lewandowsky. The scientists who wrote this heresy, and anyone who thinks like them, must be discredited. Instead of addressing any issues of fact or methodology in the Spencer/Braswell article, he simply resorts to the customary alarmist insults:

Although most so-called climate “sceptics” prudently avoid peer review – preferring the internet as an outlet for their pseudo-science – very occasionally a “sceptic” paper does appear in a peer-reviewed journal.

In a dramatic turn away from what has been the normal method of scientific advance, those who question the currently popular view are not to be considered scientists. They are not even sceptics. They are pseudo-scientists, who are cunning enough to avoid exposing their views to review by other scientists.

Wrong. For example, the CO2 Science website has a report in which the most common alarmist claims are countered with references to over 600 peer reviewed articles, all of which question some aspect of the anthropogenic global warming schema. The 2009 NIPCC Report is even more comprehensive, quoting thousands of peer reviewed articles and concluding that there is no credible evidence of dangerous human influence on global climate.

This is despite the best efforts of people like Phil Jones to ensure strict controls are put in place to stop sceptical papers appearing:

From Phil Jones To: Michael Mann (Pennsylvania State University). July 8, 2004
“I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”

The next step in Lewandowsky’s oh so prediuctable diatribe is to imply that sceptical scientists are corrupt, making the claims they do because they have been lured into pseudo-science by bribes from oil companies. Some scientists’ research has been funded in part by oil companies. Most acknowledge this openly. So what?

As Jo Nova has pointed out, government funding for climate alarmist research is approximately 1000 times oil company and other private funding. On that basis, there should be 1,000 times more questioning about possible alarmist bias for financial gain or job security than for sceptical science.

Lewandowsky finishes with this extraordinarily insulting dismissal of climate researchers who do not share his views:

Ideology, subterfuge, and propaganda. That is all there is to climate denial.

Tell that to leading and internationally recognised scientists like Roy Spencer, Timothy Ball, John Christy, Freeman Dyson, our own Ian Plimer and Bob Carter, and thousands of others.

In the end, what matters is evidence. The key question is ‘Is there any evidence of correlation between human activity and changes in global climate.’

The answer is ‘No.’

Perhaps a more interesting question for a professor of psychology would be why the ‘experts’ (ordinary people seem a bit more resilient despite the best efforts of the legacy media), fall so readily for each successive costly and eventually falsified scare campaign (Y2K, SARS, DDT, the population bomb, etc, etc), and why those same experts so quickly demonise any dissent.

PS. The reason the alarmists are desperate to discredit Roy Spencer is that he is so widely recognised as a leading climate scientist:

Roy W. Spencer received his Ph.D. in meteorology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1981. Before becoming a Principal Research Scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville in 2001, he was a Senior Scientist for Climate Studies at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, where he and Dr. John Christy received NASA’s Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal for their global temperature monitoring work with satellites. Dr. Spencer’s work with NASA continues as the U.S. Science Team leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer flying on NASA’s Aqua satellite. He has provided congressional testimony several times on the subject of global warming.

Dr. Spencer’s research has been entirely supported by U.S. government agencies: NASA, NOAA, and DOE. He has never been asked by any oil company to perform any kind of service. Not even Exxon-Mobil.

That is the bio from Dr Spencer’s website. His blog has a useful summary of the issues addressed in the Remore Sensing paper.

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