Month: July 2006

Like so many stories, some of the key details tend to get lost when people make their judgements on what is fair and equitable. Take, for instance, the current conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, through the eyes of these two individuals.

Salem focuses solely on the kidnapped soldier angle, which has received most of the focus in all the press accounts and news stories I’ve seen. And, true, this plays a factor. Taken alone, I would argue that the current escalation of violence could be considered disproportionate.

However, that’s not the whole story, and weighing a response on that factor alone is insufficient. Gordon rightly points this out in his response:

You say that Israel should have first negotiated, instead of immediately reacting. But the Hezbollah already have their negotiating card… they wilfully started a shelling campaign, came over the border and killed and kidnapped Israelis.

The kidnapping occurred inside Israel, not in Lebanon. And it included not just the kidnapping of two soldiers but the deaths of eight others. But even more important is that Hezbollah began firing rockets in to northern Israel even before Israel began its response. When you add that factor in, it’s clear enough that Israel couldn’t just stand idly by chasing after negotiations while it was being attacked.

I spent the past week or so making a few minor updates to the website. Most are behind the scenes, but one is definitely more visible than the rest. I’ve now included a tagging feature, whereby I can attached indexable keywords to each post so you (and I) can quickly navigate to the related posts on a topic.

It’s a feature that’s been around for awhile, and I thought I would implement it here.

I also made some behind the scenes revisions around how the blog and album ids are tracked, which will enable me to clone the blog faster than I previously could. I have another revision planned to make the interface ‘customizable’, thereby letting me create multiple independent blogs on the server.

I was poking around Flyertalk yesterday when I stumbled across this thread by two posters, Dovster and BEYFlyer. Dovster is located in a kibbutz right up against the border with Lebanon; BEYFlyer lives in the southern suburbs of Beirut, near the airport.

Both have been regularly posting the info they have and their experiences as Israel and Hizbollah escalate their conflict. The thread, in fact, attracted the attention of MSNBC, drawing in scores of new visitors and posters, mostly offering well-wishes to both posters.

The most impressive aspect, though, remains the moderators and the posters both, who have shown impressive restraint in not letting the thread degenerate in to political attacks. For those who don’t know, this is a common bulletin board problem, and Flyertalk is certainly no exception. 🙂

And, of course, I offer both my own best wishes and hope that they make it through and the conflict ends soon.

It doesn’t make the press as often as it should in the US, but it’s becoming clear that the Taliban is experiencing a resurgency in Afghanistan, with an increasing amount of the country coming under their sway.

It’s good to know that the Bush Administration and its allies have an aggresive plan in place to deal with this, as well as to reverse the increasing factionalization of Iraq. Just read the closing words of the article, and see for yourself how confident

“We need to realise that we could actually fail here,” warns Lieutenant-General David Richards, British commander of the Nato-led peacekeeping force. “Think of the psychological victory for Bin Laden and his ilk if we failed and the Taliban came back. Within months we’d suffer terror attacks in the UK. I think of my own daughters in London and the risk they would be in.”

I’m catching up with some blog postings, and as I stumbled across this one I just shook my head. North Korea, a secretive, reclusive regime with weak ties to the rest of the world and one of the world’s most tense borders, in the process of developing nuclear weapons and a proven exporter of nuclear technology, test fires a long range missile that thankfully fizzled, and the Left’s response is

The fine print is important, though. As the Times notes in their dispatch today: the Taepodong-2 “is thought to be potentially capable of reaching United States territory in Alaska, if North Korea perfects the technology. But that ability has never been demonstrated in a test. (emphasis added)”

So, what, it’s just Alaska? We should wait until they have some better before we start to care?

The NJ papers never cease to amaze me. In all the coverage of the budget shutdown, the one aspect the papers have unceasingly failed to cover is the casino shutdown. It’s truly wonderful to know that the most visible and fundamental aspect of the whole budget nonsense is that people aren’t able to piss their money away at casinos and on the lottery.

In the meantime, every article I’ve read failed to give a proper accounting to why NJ ended up in the fiscal mess in the first place. Sure, they repeated so many times that the shutdown was a direct result of the failure to compromise on a sales tax increase between the Governor and the head of the Assembly. But the discussion beyond that failed to provide a proper context to the sales tax increase. I saw little to no answers to questions such as how many budget cuts were being proposed, and where; what spending increases were being proposed; what contractual obligations the state had to honor in its budget, etc. Perhaps this was all done prior to the shutdown, yet, even if it was, I somehow doubt many people have been paying that much attention before it became a reality.

I understand how writing about casinos may be more fun, and likely a lot easier, but it does a disservice to the community these papers supposedly support to not educate readers properly on the topic of the day.

I laughed out loud as I read this article on how to defeat the copy protection schemes in the current batch of HD-DVD and Blu-Ray players built in to computers.

Computer magazine c’t has discovered that the first software players running on Windows XP allow screenshots of the movies to be created in full resolution. To do so, you only need to press the Print key on your keyboard while the movie is running. Such a screenshot function could then be automated to produce copies of HD movies both from Blu-ray Discs and from HD DVDs picture by picture. As c’t calculated, the performance of current PC systems is sufficient for a clean recording using this procedure. Once a pirate has all of the individual pictures, they can be put together to create a complete movie and mixed with the audio track that is grabbed separately.

I love when a low-tech option can circvumvent high-tech restrictions.