The Brits

It's common wisdom that the hardest of times bring out the best in people. You have to admire the British and even more so, their dealings in stark contrast to our "911". Rather than spout off all about war, the inequity of it all (terrorism was and is about as far from a Godly act as anything I can imagine) -- they are doing what we should have done.

Tony Blair is asking the hard questions. For the record: "Who's behind this?" -- easy, Islamic Terrorists. "Who do we bomb?" Still easy -- some country where things were staged, or, if you're creative, you might choose someone who seems related. The Brits are asking a far harder question: Why did these 4 young men blow themselves up? Even harder: "What can we do to stop this?".

You can try and fight a war against "Terrorism", but are you going to win a war against an idea? You fight bad ideas and programming with good ideas and better programming. You fight wars against organized evil -- we can fight a war against Saddam, or Osama, but we can't fight a war against "terrorism". The terrorists are obviously after the end of our civilization for reasons relating to something dear to them -- our nuclear weapons are somewhat at a disadvantage here. Most of our military infrastructure, for that matter, is pretty much useless.

But the Brits are doing what we should have done almost 4 years ago, and it makes me admire their government. Even the Mayor of London had the gall to speak about terrorism in a way that their government didn't agree with. And they didn't make him step down -- they said "well, we disagree with that, but it's an opinion and we respect it."

What a stark contrast to our government and the way they've set about brow-beating anyone who disagrees. Don't think that's the case? How many republicans do you know that run about with bumper stickers that equate being a Democrat with being a supporter of Terrorism. That's not democracy.

Bush should take a good close look at one of his staunchest allies on the planet (Blair). That's the way to do it, and we should help them, join them and ultimately, I'd hope, show the Brits that we too, can show compassion and kick ass at the same time.
--FeriCyde

Okay, so here's a thought about research...

Titled Research: Third of study results don't hold up, one has to wonder -- what about the accuracy of this study? What if it's off by a factor of 30% (or even total crap)? That would mean that up to .3 * .3 studies (or less than 10 percent) are wrong, um conservatively speaking. Or, we could take the positive approach, which would be that it's off in the other direction -- an additional 30 percent of the 30 percent that are wrong are wrong. That would be .30 + .70*.30, or a whopping 51% of all studies being crap.

Of course, this cheap shot analysis is wrong, as should be readily apparent -- it's probably off by more than .30, even. Wait, maybe it's off by 9% or 51%...

Crap!
--FeriCyde

Secure X window stuff...

I've put up a revised version of my own toolkit I've been using for a while to securely connect to boxes via X. It's called, appropriately, securex. Soon there might be a story or two about it (finally got the article done and the documentation to install secureX is being finalized). It's not too shabby for a small shell hack. You can download it from the BatchLogin sourceforge repository.