British reporter legend allegedly shot by US Marines
Great. So now these highly precise American soldiers are also shooting at British reporters. But the Americans will surely talk their way out of that one too.
Archive 23. March 2003
The Expulsion of Animals from Heaven
I frequently visit the grounds of the old zoo and photograph the remains of the zoo - melancholic mementos of something I loved as a child. Yes, I know that not every enclosure met the animals' needs (especially not the bear enclosures). But in my opinion, the problem could have been solved by giving the animals that could not be kept properly to other zoos and concentrating more on what made the zoo lovable. Such as the guinea pig village, which I had almost forgotten. Or the monkey rocks. Or the badger. True, the old zoo was a wild potpourri of quirky buildings and partially arbitrarily purchased and captured animals. But it had character. The new zoo only slowly began to develop that after many years and even today still has too much concrete and sterility in some corners (and the back then so clean concrete just looks shabby and ugly with algae and moss growth).
Also on the grounds is the Tuckesburg, which is mentioned in the text. One of my favorite subjects, even though the picturesque impression becomes somewhat less picturesque after learning of its former use. But it only caught the fat cats.
Smart Bombs?
About all this talk about smart bombs, I have a few questions:
- are the bombs smarter than the military officials who deploy them?
- do the bombs discuss their detonation with the soldiers?
- do smart bombs refuse to obey if civilians could be endangered?
- does a smart bomb read a good book now and then during peacetime?
- do smart bombs fear war or have nightmares?
- what do smart bombs talk about?
- are smart bombs allowed to refuse military service?
- and why don't they just explode right there in the USA?
Commentary: The first dangerous Linux virus is coming
He's not entirely wrong about that. The ptrace bug has robbed Linux of some of its technical innocence with respect to viruses. Because it has impressively demonstrated what system administrators have known for a long time: all software sucks - every piece of software is garbage. Linux too, fundamentally in its kernel. Usually this garbage manifests itself in areas that are less interesting for end users, usually only kernel programmers curse about it (I'm thinking of the IDE subsystem). Sometimes - as with the ptrace bug - it breaks through completely. Then it's up to the distributions to make upgrades as easy as possible for the user and to make kernel installations in particular very easy to manage - because the kernel is after all the heart of a Unix system, and if there are vulnerabilities there, all the periphery doesn't help anymore. By the way, this is a point where Debian has an Achilles heel: because kernel versions can be combined arbitrarily and the kernel itself, while managed with the distribution tools, is not necessarily fully integrated into upgrades, many Debian systems will certainly remain stuck on outdated kernel releases.
In any case, I'm curious what other collateral damage will emerge in this area and how this bug will have further effects.
At heise online news you can find the original article.
The Tuckesburg
Die Tuckesburg
The house of Prof. Landois, founder and first director of the Münster Zoo and planner of the Münster Aasee.
The Future Of XFree86
Well, just another sign that power games are quite common in open source projects too. Let's see what comes of it, but I'm firmly convinced that more open project structures will always prevail over more closed ones in the long run - even if only to the extent that they establish an appropriate alternative project. So XFree Inc. should prepare itself for the long-term prospect of no longer being the sole provider of X-Windows for free Unix-like systems.
The original article can be found at kuro5hin.org.
Double Standard
Wow. So there are the first American prisoners and Rumsfeld is completely outraged that they're being shown publicly, claiming it would violate the Geneva Conventions. Oh. Come on. And what about the repeatedly shown images of captured Iraqis sitting in barbed-wire-secured areas? What about the images of Al Qaeda members in American camps?
Some American broadcasters don't want to show images of American prisoners or the dead. Great - so we lie even more, we continue pretending that the war against Iraq is just a Disneyland for adults.
Of course, the same broadcasters have no problem showing images of captured Iraqis. And no, of course none of this is war propaganda.
So the Geneva Conventions don't apply to everyone after all. Neither do UN Security Council resolutions, so we shouldn't be too surprised.