The article, Why Can’t We Talk about Peace in Public? by Matt Taibbi (AlterNet), contains some disturbing quotes from other soldiers in Iraq. They are far less reflective than the soldier from the article above.

“It’s starting to sink in… I’ll have to go home, the opportunities to kill these fuckers is rapidly coming to an end. Like a hobby I’ll never get to practice again. It’s not a great war, but it’s the only one we’ve got. God, I do love killing these bastards. … I still have 20 days of kill these motherfuckers, so I don’t wanna take even one day off.”

The author is an airforce pilot, seeing the world through a high-tech bomb sight; seeing his targets as splotches on a screen; seeing everything that moves as an insurgent. Though the soldier is clearly to blame for his own complete lack of empathy, it’s hard not to consider the sheer amount of brainwashing, both military and civilian, that went into creating this fine human being. It’s hard, in fact, to lay the blame for what he’s become at his feet. He is what he was raised to be by a society that needs grist like him for its perpetual wars. Or, as Taibbi puts it:

“In my mind, all the people in the Bush administration and in Congress and in the media who got these kids sent there in the first place have to be the first ones held responsible for whatever those kids do after being thrown into the fire. I just don’t yet have the stomach to start pointing the finger at a bunch of teenagers and twenty-somethings who never should have been sent there in the first place.”

Here’s a picture.

Steve Sack hammers it home

Do you see the US anywhere on there? No? Good … then, you’ve got the right idea.

One of the founding mothers of the neocon movement that has made this world such a warm, safe place to live also died recently. Former U.N. envoy Kirkpatrick dies (CNN) has the story, which is naturally chock full of quotes about how sorely she will be missed—by such upstanding community members as Bill Frist, Bill Bennet, John Bolton and the American Enterprise Institute. Somehow they forgot to mention what an ironclad, heartless bitch she was who often competed with Maggie Thatcher in drawn-out contests to see who could squash more of the poor under the heel of her sensible pump.

Seriously, Kissinger. What are you waiting for?

The Washington Post and Pinochet (UggaBugga) writes about this article, A Dictator’s Double Standard (Washington Post), in which the basic attitude toward Pinochet is akin to “At least Hitler introduced the Volkswagen and the autobahn and reduced unemployment”. Although comparing Pinochet to Hitler isn’t fair—Pinochet wasn’t nearly as efficient—neither is the Post’s comparing him favorably to Castro.

All in all, a disgusting showing from the Post, which doesn’t even have the decency to label it as an editorial.

As expected, reports from Chile itself aren’t nearly as forgiving of Pinochet as the BBC and other western media are. Crowds Take to Streets to Celebrate Pincohet’s Demise by Jen Ross (Common Dreams) tells the story of “a cacophony of car horns and cheering yesterday”. The only disagreement was over whether to be happy he was dead or mad that he evaded going to trial.

“I still can’t use the default Windows XP blue theme for very long”

me too but the silver skin with minimal window caption height works quite well for me. ;)

“…a lot of IT staff I know by default switches back to this old interface.”

Heh. I used to be one of those … but I stopped using the Windows Classic look when I found Opus OS 1.5 by Ross 'b0se' Harvey, Opusworks (Deviant Art). I still can’t use the default Windows XP blue theme for very long, but Vista looks pretty nice. I just don’t have the horsepower on my notebook to turn on all the pretty details …

Wildcards are a way to provide partial support for propert generics, in which—if B inherits from A—List<B> also inherits from List<A>. In both Java and C#, this is not the case, which makes passing generic parameters all the more difficult.

The where keyword in C# corresponds to the extends keyword in Java. It indicates that the actual generic parameter must conform to the given base type (which can be a class or an interface). In your example, the implementation of the generic class may call any features defined in MYBASETYPE on MYTYPE.

Nicely written article. I thought exactly the same. A non-geek will probably never click that arrow button. Even I read the hint / tool tip first before I clicked on that ominous little button. So it really is the hidden-geek-option-button normal users don’t care about.

Actually I am searching a lot for things in Vista but most of the time it helps if you just ask yourself “What would I like to do?”. It seems Microsoft spent a lot of thought simplify the whole system and therefore moved quite a lot of options to new places or combined it with other options and so on.

AND: badly they did not yet remove the “Classic Windows Look and Feel” yet :’( I hoped they will remove this fancy old gray user interface with Vista but it is still there. So also more then 10 years after this operating system we still will see the Win95 interface as a lot of IT staff I know by default switches back to this old interface. Maybe they don’t like to learn new stuff ;-) Think I now have to take cover because of the Win96-geek-readers here :-)))

Over and out,
Marc

hi marco,

just to get things the right way (as i don’t know java very well):

is this wildcard-thing the same as the “WHERE” in C# 2?

For example:

public class A<MYTYPE>
where MYTYPE : MYBASETYPE, new
{
…
}

have to try your examples above in the c# and see if i get this working as well as it looks like a nice exercise for rainy weekends like this ;-)

cheers, marc

i already thought it must be bad in the U.S. regarding military expenses but even that worst? …so who am i that i already think the swiss military is ways to expensive?? ;-)

Interactive Map of Springfield is now available, with popup cels for many buildings to help you remember which ones are which.

I found a friend’s name in your wedding guest list, Mr.Jilei yin. I lost contact with him for almost 10 years.

Would you please pass on my e-mail address to him, if you still keep his information?

Thanks,

Rose
rosehold@online.sh.cn

but its cool for people out there like me to get the summaries of nearly everything happend in germany − go on ;-) does cathy like soccer as well (and therefore let you watch it all the time)? :-))))

watched the match as well but this was just lost time. propably this is why i feelt to sleep right after the middle (and just one beer ;-) ). same shit happend while the basil match which was not that good as well. maybe i just know how to watch the boring matches instead the good ones.

cheers, marc

And don’t speek but shout − specially to your boss. Pre- and postfix everything with “Sir”. That’s a basic too :-)

I just tried it out and am still very excited about it. Both PowerPoint and Word are worlds better than any previous versions.

“the “bad thing” is that microsoft once more did their own thing for the toolbar-system.”

Kind of … the toolbar is actually a whole area on which any controls can be laid. The “ribbon” really only works for applications with a lot of functionality and a lot of different workflows. It also only works once a lot of time has been put into researching how people want to use the program.

Many other applications—including those condsidering using the “cool new” toolbar from Microsoft—will have far less success than they expect. Even if they manage to replicate the look and feel, they won’t be able to replicate the usability with a simple copycat approach. That said, I do hope they at least make the toolkit available so that applications that do want to make the leap to using a “ribbon” can do so in a standard way.

i already had a look to this movie some months ago. my first impression was “oh, looks nice but will it be usefull?”. after some thinking about it i would like to get this new version asap. think this ideas will be interesting for other applications as well.

the “bad thing” is that microsoft once more did their own thing for the toolbar-system. now, where they are shiping their current toolbar-system with .net 2.0 they just started to use another system once more so component-writers can do business once copy the microsoft style. the race is started once more :-)

cheers, marc

Check out the second pane for a well-written summary of the situation:

Didn’t know that.
So, we definitivly should cancel IE ;-)
btw: i am missing a “thumbs up” image for the comments :)

cheers, marc

… mine’s barely powerful enough to show the screenshot :-)

can’t wait to get such an engine but i guess i then need a new pc :-(

Took this demo for several spins and it pretty much kicks ass! It has almost none of the problems mentioned above (although it’s kind of hard to shoot). I imagine the control issues are addressed in the manual … and it’s a steal at $20!

I even got a nice response. We agree to disagree … could have been worse.

“Marco,

“I am glad and surprized to hear that you are willing to agree to disagree. Let freedom ring:

““In vain would that man claim tribute to patriotism, who seeks to subvert these(religion & morality)greatest pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens.”- George Washington

“Semper Fidelis (Always Faithful),

“Joseph Gomez”

When you start up Opera for the first time ever, it defaults to the Startup home page at Opera. From here, you have a link to Customize, which offers one-click downloads that adjust your browser to have the “IE/Firefox look and feel” or “Safari look and feel”.

They may not be open-source, but they seem to know how to get new users accustomed to their product.

Does Firefox have anything like this?

That’s interesting because of their job description, that “many of them [are] tasked to protect US troops and personnel”. The Army can’t be so bad … they hire more troops to protect their troops.

“Often the foreign contract workers are highly paid former soldiers who are armed with automatic weapons, leading to Iraqis viewing all foreign workers as possible mercenaries or spies.”

That is a dastardly conclusion to which only a crazy Arab could come. Ahem.

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=15&ItemID=5337

Is an article by Rober Fisk highlighting the actual number of deaths suffered by the occupation regime. One saliant point is that the media reports the number of soldiers dying, whereas the number of US employees who go back in body bags is much higher.

Try not to think of the credibility Michael Moore lost when he supported Wesley Clarke (as he was pioneering the ABB movement), consider the excellent points he makes in Personal Voices: Setting the Record Straight by Michael Moore (AlterNet) on their own merits. Here he talks about the coverage of Falluja and the rising Iraqi revolution:

“First, can we stop the Orwellian language and start using the proper names for things? Those are not “contractors” in Iraq. They are not there to fix a roof or to pour concrete in a driveway. They are MERCENARIES and SOLDIERS OF FORTUNE. They are there for the money, and the money is very good if you live long enough to spend it.”

To Bush’s babbling about terrorists and Baathist extremists, he responded: “You closed down a friggin’ weekly newspaper, you great giver of freedom and democracy!”

About reporting in Iraq, he reminds us that what we are seeing is not reporting in a news sense, but simply packaging of press releases:

“…it is now too dangerous for a single media person to go to that [Saddam statue] square in Baghdad … those brave blow-dried “embeds” can’t even leave the safety of the fort in downtown Baghdad. They never actually SEE what is taking place across Iraq (most of the pictures we see on TV are shot by Arab media and some Europeans). When you watch a report “from Iraq” what you are getting is the press release handed out by the U.S. occupation force and repeated to you as “news.””

Moore has his own cameramen in Iraq, and they tell him that:

“…when they fly into Baghdad, they don’t have to show a passport or go through immigration. Why not? Because they have not traveled from a foreign country &#8211; they’re coming from America TO America, a place that is ours, a new American territory called Iraq.”

Bush as Hitler? Let’s Be Fair by Alexander Cockburn (Counterpunch) quotes an article by contributor Dave Lindorff:

“It’s going a bit far to compare the Bush of 2003 to the Hitler of 1933. Bush simply is not the orator that Hitler was. But comparisons of the Bush Administration’s fear mongering tactics to those practiced so successfully and with such terrible results by HItler and Goebbels on the German people and their Weimar Republic are not at all out of line.”