The Glamor of Travel
Ted Neward: The Glamor of Travel
Markos Moulitsas Zuniga of Daily Kos has done his best to make it hard to find the comment he posted on April 1, 2004, about the Americans who were torn apart and hung from a bridge in Fallujah. He erased it from the Google cache and the Internet Archive, and redirects the “permalink” on the page to an unrelated page at his site, but I managed to find a URL that still works—until the Daily Koward notices our referrals: Daily Kos: Corpses on the Cover.
UPDATE at 4/21/05 10:06:04 pm: To see Kos’s back-room machinations at work, click the date next to his name at the bottom of the post, which is supposed to be the permalink to his comment, and see where you end up. |
| Sun Ming Ming, whose head measures above most door frames, follows Keith Gatlin into Fitness by Design for a late morning workout. Ball in hand, Sun, 21, muscles his 350-pound frame into training partner Dshamal Schoetz, a 7-footer who played at Greensboro College who is nearly nine inches shorter. Sun pivots and places the ball firmly into the hoop. Swish.
"With his size, that intrigues everybody," Gatlin said. "He can really shoot the ball to be that size. The challenge for him now is to get mobile, to get up and down the court." Sun also can handle the ball and has a sweet outside shot that swishes with the quick flick of his wrist. When it comes to dunking, he doesn't need to leave the ground. Basketball, Gatlin will tell you, is not Sun's problem. Sun's weakness is his flexibility and his lack of weight training. While playing for the Junior Olympic team and then Da Qing, his province's club squad, Sun never lifted weights and is just now building upper-body strength... |
| From my conversations with him in the late 70s, when he was archbishop of Munich, I learned a few things about him: 1) That he hated the Nazis even during his short time in the Hitler Youth. He was a nominal member, but was exempted weeks after his compulsory joining because of his fragile health and studies in the Catholic seminary (many boys actually joined Catholic institutions to avoid service in the HJ.) His teen years had a lasting effect on him as he was able to see the difference between reality and what the Nazis taught. His love for truth and being truthful all the time stems from this early experience. 2) He was a progressive Catholic in his early year (played an important role at the 2nd Vaticanum), but the intolerance of 1968 made him change his mind. He abhorred communism and the carefree nihilist thinkings in these times and became a conservative, but not a reactionary, as many claim. 3) He saw the dangers of Islamic fanatism in the 70s already. Khomeini was a menetekel for him. At this time he didn't see Islam so much as a threat for Europe (yet), but for Asia and Africa. 4) He is more a friend of the Jews than most other Catholic priests. I remember him saying that Christians and Jews are on the same direction to salvation, just on different paths. Islam instead was an aberration that would lead humanity into a religious "dead end street" (Sackgasse was his exact word). He strongly favoured a rapprochement between the Catholic and Jewish faith, but didn't see any common ground between Christianity and Islam. Latest proof of this was that he strongly supported John Paul II travel to Israel but did have a big headache about that voyage to Damascus. I doubt you'll see Benedict XVI visiting a mosque... ever. And he sees Turkey as a big religious threat to the judeochristian identity of Europe. He may come across as the Great Inquisitor, but he has never refused discussion and arguments. He is firm on the "essentials" of the Catholic faith. The German Catholic professors he suspended clearly violated the essential principles of Catholicism. He is an extremely intelligent, bright personality... a bit shy with people though. He won't pretend to have the charisma of JPII. And yes, I think, we'll see a few surprises from him in the next years. I had to chuckle when I heard the Chicoms demands today. Oh boy, they are messing with the wrong guy here. Benedict of Nursia one restored the Christian faith in a devastated Europe. Commentators have focussed much on Benedict XV as the closest role model of Ratzinger. But I think he's much closer to Benedict XIV. http://www.newadvent... And yes, he loved the "Apfelmaultaschen" (pasta made with potato flour, filled with apples and powder sugar and cinnamon on top) my wife prepared for him :-) They look like this: http://www.donau.de/... I guess you won't find this detail on CNN :-) |
| An associate of mine recently asked for some metrics to help him back up their decision to move away from JSP and toward PHP. In a recent post, I looked at the fact that many major corporations are using PHP, yet we rarely hear about it. To help address some of the concerns about deploying PHP in the enterprise, this month's article in International PHP Magazine will focus on, "Enterprise PHP Coding Standards" you can enforce in your organization to ensure high-quality code... |
| I have used Python since 1997, even before I knew PHP. I smile when Ian says that PHP 5 is barely catching up with the 1995 version of Python. That's irrelevant because what made PHP successful is not what PHP is lacking but the features that PHP has that are superior to Python. Also people continue to confuse simplicity with deficiency. Here are some of the areas where Python remains inferior, despite a 5-year headstart over PHP: * Python is not a template language, in the sense that you cannot mix code and html easily. PHP is a wonderfully flexible in this respect. * Python is a so-so string processing language. One reason being it treats strings as immutable. PHP has much better string processing facilities: embedded "$var in strings", mutable strings, auto-conversion of other data types to strings, output buffering, etc. * PHP's documentation is cleaner and much easier to understand than Python's. Probably because PHP is a simpler language. * PHP has tighter integration of a lot of web related stuff. For example, HTTP and SERVER variables... |
| Bangalore is starting to appear on the radar of militant groups, Indian police warned this weekend, after uncovering a terrorist plan to target IT companies in the city widely regarded as the country's technology hub. Bangalore, which is in the southern part of India, had been considered safe from possible terror attacks by separatist groups, which so far have mostly struck in India's northern and western states. But last week, Delhi police seized evidence pointing to a possible attack on certain IT companies in Bangalore... ...Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Motorola and Texas Instruments. Additionally, America Online, Google and Yahoo opened centers in the city last year. |
| Today's Blogs What Are The Bloggers Saying Today? The Latest Chatter in Cyberspace. www.slate.com |
| today's blogs The latest chatter in cyberspace. "Syria Out!" By David Wallace-Wells Posted Monday, Feb. 28, 2005, at 5:38 PM PT "Syria out!": Lebanese Prime Minister Omar Karami resigned this morning, dissolving the nation's unpopular, pro-Syrian government in the face of nationalist protest that followed the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri... |
| In a follow up to addressing the joust between CAIR’s Ibrahim Hooper and Rocky Mountain News columnist Vincent Carroll, additional evidence has been produced in regard to who else may have actually been involved in the 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. http://religion.upi.com/view.php?StoryID=20050412-124811-1156r http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/news_columnists/article/0,1299,DRMN_86_3697983,00.html Were Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols the only perpetrators of this atrocity? For years, that’s what we’ve been told. However, with the nation marking the ten-year anniversary of this cowardly act, new or at least newly publicized evidence points out that these two America-hating domestic terrorists had some very unsavory associations with those who are tied to Islamic terrorism. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,153635,00.html There’s also the issue of John Doe number two, the all-elusive accomplice that more than two dozen witnesses say they saw in the Ryder truck with McVeigh. He has never been captured. There were two composite drawings made of this individual. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,153644,00.html The first composite was that of a thuggish looking man with a dark complexion. http://www.greatdreams.com/john-doe-2.htm The second composite, which has proven to be nearly as elusive as John Doe number two himself, was said to have been that of a white man, and looked absolutely nothing like the thug in the first composite. On June 14, 1995, the Justice Department announced that it had all been a big mistake. One of the witnesses, Eldon Elliot of Elliot’s Body shop, had been confused when he gave his description of John Doe Two. He had mixed him up with a completely innocent, burly army private who came to the office a day later. Back to the first composite drawing -- which many have stated bears a strong resemblance to dirty bomb suspect and Muslim convert Jose "Ibrahim" Padilla. http://www.rotten.com/library/bio/crime/terrorists/jose-padilla/ http://www.greatdreams.com/john-doe-2.htm 4/17/2005: Fox News ran a program involving the OKC bombing. The show detailed incriminating phone records, which included repeated calls from the home of Terry Nichols to a place called Star Glad Lumber in the Philippines. Star Glad Lumber is operated by a man whose brother and cousin were both notorious terrorists, involved in "splinter groups of the Abu Sayyaf terror group in the Philippines." Nichols also repeatedly called a boarding house in Cebu City, an establishment that has been linked to 1993 World Trade Center bombing mastermind Ramzi Yousef. For the record, the same kind of ANFO fertilizer fuel bomb was used in New York and in Oklahoma City. This may or may not come as a shock: Mohammed Jamal Khalifa, a brother-in-law of Osama bin Laden, who has been named co-defendant in a class action lawsuit filed on behalf of over 500 families of the 9/11 victims, also founded the Philippines branch of the International Islamic Relief Organization (IIRO), which has been designated a terrorist financing organization by the United States and other countries. There have also been some formerly classified Philippines investigative documents that have provided the basis for almost all major media reports concerning Khalifa's ties to al Qaeda and Abu Sayyaf... |
| Proposed fixes tend to concentrate on... making personal data harder to steal--whereas the real problem is [the ease with which a criminal can use personal data to commit fraud]. If we're ever going to manage the risks and effects of electronic impersonation, we must concentrate on preventing and detecting fraudulent transactions. ...Financial intuitions [sic] need to be liable for fraudulent transactions... Credit card companies simply don't worry about verifying the cardholder or putting requirements on what he does. They concentrate on verifying the transaction. ...once financial institutions are liable for losses due to these types of fraud, they will find solutions. Right now, the economic incentives result in financial institutions that are so eager to allow transactions--new credit cards, cash transfers, whatever--that they're not paying enough attention to fraudulent transactions. They've pushed the costs for fraud onto the merchants. But if they're liable for losses and damages to legitimate users, they'll pay more attention. And they'll mitigate the risks. |
| ...collecting, storing and displaying one's entire life, for private use, or for friends, family, even the entire world to peruse. ...[it] owes much to bloggers... millions of people have taken to digitally indexing their thoughts, rants and God knows what else; all online, disclosing the virtual caches of their daily lives, exciting or boring. Next came moblogging, connecting camera phones to online diaries, allowing not only for more visuals to be added to blogs, but also for real-time, on the go postings of experiences and events. And that's still just the beginning. |
| ...you can store every conversation you've ever had in a terabyte. You can store every picture you've ever taken in another terabyte. And the Net Present Value of a terabyte is USD 200... |
| It’s a shame that I’m here in Iraq with the Marines right now and not back at Ohio University completing my senior year and joining in blissful ignorance with the enlightened, war-seasoned protesters who participated in the recent “die-in” at College Gate. It would appear that all the action is back home, but why don’t we make sure? That’s right, this is an open invitation for you to cut your hair, take a shower, get in shape and come on over! If Michael Moore can shave and lose enough weight to fit into a pair of camouflage utilities, then he can come too! Make sure you all say your goodbyes to your loved ones though, because you won’t be seeing them for at least the next nine months. You need to get here quick because I don’t want you to miss a thing. You missed last month’s discovery of a basement full of suicide vests from the former regime (I’m sure Saddam’s henchmen just wore them because they were trendy though). You weren’t here for the opening of a brand new school we built either. You might also notice women exercising their new freedom of walking to the market unaccompanied by their husbands. There is a man here, we just call him al-Zarqawi, but we think he’d be delighted to sit down and give you some advice on how you can further disrespect the victims of Sept. 11 and the 1,600 of America’s bravest who have laid down their lives for a safer world. Of course he’ll still call you “infidel” but since you already agree that there is no real evil in the world, I see no reason for you to be afraid. Besides, didn’t you say that radical Islam is a religion of peace and tolerance? I’m warning you though -it’s not going to be all fun and games over here. You might have bad dreams for the next several nights after you zip up the body bag over a friend’s disfigured face. I know you think that nothing, even a world free of terror for one’s children, is worth dying for, but bear with me here. We’re going to live in conditions you’ve never dreamt about. You should get here soon though, because the temperatures are going to be over 130 degrees very soon and we will be carrying full combat loads (we’re still going to work though). When it’s all over, I promise you can go back to your coffee houses and preach about social justice and peace while you continue to live outside of reality. If you decide to decline my offer, then at least you should sleep well tonight knowing that men wearing black facemasks and carrying AK-47s yelling “Allahu Akbar” over here are proud of you and are forever indebted to you for advancing their cause of terror. While you ponder this, I’ll get back to the real “die-in” over here. I don’t mind. |
| An open-source software company called ActiveGrid is challenging the established thinking among builders of large-scale business applications. The premise of ActiveGrid, which released an early version of its server software and tools on Monday, is that application servers based on the Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) specification are no longer required. Company Peter Yared was even handing out "No J2EE" pins at LinuxWorld earlier this year... ...In an essay, Yared argued that the day of powerful applications servers that centralize many functions, like database access and caching, are passé. Instead, a distributed grid of back-end application servers will function more like a "text pump" moving text-based XML files around the network. And scripting languages, he says, are very good at handling text and easily building Web pages. |
| Leaving aside the ethical specifics of this situation, if I knew that an event was about to occur that included possible violence, I would do exactly what it appears the photographer did in making this picture: (1) I would choose an elevated mobile platform where I had an unobstructed view of the scene, and where I had maneuverability to observe as well as rapid exit...such as a pick up truck (2) I would be at enough distance to be somewhat protected and inconspicuous (3) I would choose a medium telephoto lens that could be hand held in a moving vehicle, yet give me large enough images to be clearly recognizable. So, the assassination picture has all the earmarks of a planned image, indicating that the photographer had taken most of the considerations that I have written about above. |
| The upper collimator, on the other hand, is set to the position dictated by the low-order byte of MEOS by another concurrently running task (Hand) and can therefore be inconsistent with the parameters set in accordance with the information in the high-order byte of MEOS. The software appears to include no checks to detect such an incompatibility. |
| During machine setup, Set-Up Test will be executed several hundred times since it reschedules itself waiting for other events to occur. In the code, the Class3 variable is incremented by one in each pass through Set-Up Test. Since the Class3 variable is 1 byte, it can only contain a maximum value of 255 decimal. Thus, on every 256th pass through the Set-Up Test code, the variable overflows and has a zero value. That means that on every 256th pass through Set-Up Test, the upper collimator will not be checked and an upper collimator fault will not be detected. The overexposure occurred when the operator hit the "set" button at the precise moment that Class3 rolled over to zero. Thus Chkcol was not executed, and F$mal was not set to indicate the upper collimator was still in field-light position. The software turned on the full 25 MeV without the target in place and without scanning. |
| * Ways to get information about errors -- for example, software audit trails -- should be designed into the software from the beginning. |
| myQuery.FetchFirst(); while (!myQuery.IsEndOfFile()) { ... processing steps ... myQuery.FetchNext(); } |
| myQuery.FetchFirst(); while (!myQuery.IsEndOfFile()) { ... processing steps ... if (bSkipRecord) { continue; } ... processing steps ... myQuery.FetchNext(); } |
| for (myQuery.FetchFirst(); !myQuery.IsEndOfFile(); myQuery.FetchNext()) { ... processing steps ... if (bSkipRecord) { continue; } ... processing steps ... } |
| for (ixCount = 0, myQuery.FetchFirst(); !myQuery.IsEndOfFile() && ixCount < MAX_TBL_COUNT; myQuery.FetchNext(), ixCount++) { ... processing steps ... if (bSkipRecord) { continue; } ... processing steps ... } if (ixCount >= MAX_TBL_COUNT) { // Note that our loop did not work as intended! } |
| They allegedly transferred a total of Rs 1.5 crore (US $3.5 lakh) from a multinational bank into their own accounts, opened under fictitious names. The money was used to splurge on luxuries like cars and mobile phones. Twelve people, including the alleged mastermind, have been arrested. The police are trying to determine the extent of the scam and whether the accused committed such crimes earlier... ...Asked to divulge the name of the bank, the accounts of which have been hacked into, Dayal said he could not reveal names of the company’s clients as they had signed a non-disclosure agreement. But, according to sources, the bank is Citibank. According to the police, Thomas, who worked in the callcentre for six months before quitting the job in December 2004, had the secret pincodes of the customers’ e-mail IDs, which were used to transfer money. In January, he roped in his friends and transferred money from four accounts of the bank’s New York-based customers into their own accounts, opened under fictitious names. The money was transferred to the accounts on February 22, March 23 and March 31. The amount was later withdrawn by cheques drawn in their (accused’s) names or on the names of other people. The customers, from whose accounts the money had been withdrawn, alerted the bank officials in the US, after which the crime was traced to Pune... |