Here’s a nice piece about the war on Iraq

I came across this piece quite a while ago on one of the egroups I am a member of. Quite entertaining. Go ahead and read the entire thing. Sometimes makes me wonder who comes up with such stuff. Quite creative he / she is

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Permission is freely granted to copy, print, and distribute this

material by any means, so long as the author is given proper credit

and so long as this statement is included in any and all copies made

for distribution.

Q: Daddy, why did we have to attack Iraq?

A: Because they had weapons of mass destruction.

Q: But the inspectors didn’t find any weapons of mass destruction.

A: That’s because the Iraqis were hiding them.

Q: And that’s why we invaded Iraq?

A: Yep. Invasions always work better than inspections.

Q: But after we invaded them, we STILL didn’t find any weapons of

mass destruction, did we?

A: That’s because the weapons are so well hidden. Don’t worry, we’ll

find something, probably right before the 2004 election.

Q: Why did Iraq want all those weapons of mass destruction?

A: To use them in a war, silly.

Q: I’m confused. If they had all those weapons that they planned to

use in a war, then why didn’t they use any of those weapons when we

went to war with them?

A: Well, obviously they didn’t want anyone to know they had those

weapons, so they chose to die by the thousands rather than defend

themselves.

Q: That doesn’t make sense. Why would they choose to die if they had

all those big weapons with which they could have fought back?

A: It’s a different culture. It’s not supposed to make sense.

Q: I don’t know about you, but I don’t think they had any of those

weapons our government said they did.

A: Well, you know, it doesn’t matter whether or not they had those

weapons. We had another good reason to invade them anyway.

Q: And what was that?

A: Even if Iraq didn’t have weapons of mass destruction, Saddam

Hussein was a cruel dictator, which is another good reason to invade

another country.

Q: Why? What does a cruel dictator do that makes it OK to invade his

country?

A: Well, for one thing, he tortured his own people.

Q: Kind of like what they do in China?

A: Don’t go comparing China to Iraq. China is a good economic

competitor, where millions of people work for slave wages in

sweatshops to make U.S. corporations richer.

Q: So if a country lets its people be exploited for American

corporate gain, it’s a good country, even if that country tortures

people?

A: Right.

Q: Why were people in Iraq being tortured?

A: For political crimes, mostly, like criticizing the government.

People who criticized the government in Iraq were sent to prison and

tortured.

Q: Isn’t that exactly what happens in China?

A: I told you, China is different.

Q: What’s the difference between China and Iraq?

A: Well, for one thing, Iraq was ruled by the Ba’ath party, while

China is Communist.

Q: Didn’t you once tell me Communists were bad?

A: No, just Cuban Communists are bad.

Q: How are the Cuban Communists bad?

A: Well, for one thing, people who criticize the government in Cuba

are sent to prison and tortured.

Q: Like in Iraq?

A: Exactly.

Q: And like in China, too?

A: I told you, China’s a good economic competitor. Cuba, on the other

hand, is not.

Q: How come Cuba isn’t a good economic competitor?

A: Well, you see, back in the early 1960s, our government passed some

laws that made it illegal for Americans to trade or do any business

with Cuba until they stopped being Communists and started being

capitalists like us.

Q: But if we got rid of those laws, opened up trade with Cuba, and

started doing business with them, wouldn’t that help the Cubans

become capitalists?

A: Don’t be a smart-ass.

Q: I didn’t think I was being one.

A: Well, anyway, they also don’t have freedom of religion in Cuba.

Q: Kind of like China and the Falun Gong movement?

A: I told you, stop saying bad things about China. Anyway, Saddam

Hussein came to power through a military coup, so he’s not really a

legitimate leader anyway.

Q: What’s a military coup?

A: That’s when a military general takes over the government of a

country by force, instead of holding free elections like we do in the

United States.

Q: Didn’t the ruler of Pakistan come to power by a military coup?

A: You mean General Pervez Musharraf? Uh, yeah, he did, but Pakistan

is our friend.

Q: Why is Pakistan our friend if their leader is illegitimate?

A: I never said Pervez Musharraf was illegitimate.

Q: Didn’t you just say a military general who comes to power by

forcibly overthrowing the legitimate government of a nation is an

illegitimate leader?

A: Only Saddam Hussein. Pervez Musharraf is our friend, because he

helped us invade Afghanistan.

Q: Why did we invade Afghanistan?

A: Because of what they did to us on September 11th.

Q: What did Afghanistan do to us on September 11th?

A: Well, on September 11th, nineteen men – fifteen of them Saudi

Arabians – hijacked four airplanes and flew three of them into

buildings, killing over 3,000 Americans.

Q: So how did Afghanistan figure into all that?

A: Afghanistan was where those bad men trained, under the oppressive

rule of the Taliban.

Q: Aren’t the Taliban those bad radical Islamics who chopped off

people’s heads and hands?

A: Yes, that’s exactly who they were. Not only did they chop off

people’s heads and hands, but they oppressed women, too.

Q: Didn’t the Bush administration give the Taliban 43 million dollars

back in May of 2001?

A: Yes, but that money was a reward because they did such a good job

fighting drugs.

Q: Fighting drugs?

A: Yes, the Taliban were very helpful in stopping people from growing

opium poppies.

Q: How did they do such a good job?

A: Simple. If people were caught growing opium poppies, the Taliban

would have their hands and heads cut off.

Q: So, when the Taliban cut off people’s heads and hands for growing

flowers, that was OK, but not if they cut people’s heads and hands

off for other reasons?

A: Yes. It’s OK with us if radical Islamic fundamentalists cut off

people’s hands for growing flowers, but it’s cruel if they cut off

people’s hands for stealing bread.

Q: Don’t they also cut off people’s hands and heads in Saudi Arabia?

A: That’s different. Afghanistan was ruled by a tyrannical patriarchy

that oppressed women and forced them to wear burqas whenever they

were in public, with death by stoning as the penalty for women who

did not comply.

Q: Don’t Saudi women have to wear burqas in public, too?

A: No, Saudi women merely wear a traditional Islamic body covering.

Q: What’s the difference?

A: The traditional Islamic covering worn by Saudi women is a modest

yet fashionable garment that covers all of a woman’s body except for

her eyes and fingers. The burqa, on the other hand, is an evil tool

of patriarchal oppression that covers all of a woman’s body except

for her eyes and fingers.

Q: It sounds like the same thing with a different name.

A: Now, don’t go comparing Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia. The Saudis

are our friends.

Q: But I thought you said 15 of the 19 hijackers on September 11th

were from Saudi Arabia.

A: Yes, but they trained in Afghanistan.

Q: Who trained them?

A: A very bad man named Osama bin Laden.

Q: Was he from Afghanistan?

A: Uh, no, he was from Saudi Arabia too. But he was a bad man, a very

bad man.

Q: I seem to recall he was our friend once.

A: Only when we helped him and the mujahadeen repel the Soviet

invasion of Afghanistan back in the 1980s.

Q: Who are the Soviets? Was that the Evil Communist Empire Ronald

Reagan talked about?

A: There are no more Soviets. The Soviet Union broke up in 1990 or

thereabouts, and now they have elections and capitalism like us. We

call them Russians now.

Q: So the Soviets – I mean, the Russians – are now our friends?

A: Well, not really. You see, they were our friends for many years

after they stopped being Soviets, but then they decided not to

support our invasion of Iraq, so we’re mad at them now. We’re also

mad at the French and the Germans because they didn’t help us invade

Iraq either.

Q: So the French and Germans are evil, too?

A: Not exactly evil, but just bad enough that we had to rename French

fries and French toast to Freedom Fries and Freedom Toast.

Q: Do we always rename foods whenever another country doesn’t do what

we want them to do?

A: No, we just do that to our friends. Our enemies, we invade.

Q: But wasn’t Iraq one of our friends back in the 1980s?

A: Well, yeah. For a while.

Q: Was Saddam Hussein ruler of Iraq back then?

A: Yes, but at the time he was fighting against Iran, which made him

our friend, temporarily.

Q: Why did that make him our friend?

A: Because at that time, Iran was our enemy.

Q: Isn’t that when he gassed the Kurds?

A: Yeah, but since he was fighting against Iran at the time, we

looked the other way, to show him we were his friend.

Q: So anyone who fights against one of our enemies automatically

becomes our friend?

A: Most of the time, yes.

Q: And anyone who fights against one of our friends is automatically

an enemy?

A: Sometimes that’s true, too. However, if American corporations can

profit by selling weapons to both sides at the same time, all the

better.

Q: Why?

A: Because war is good for the economy, which means war is good for

America. Also, since God is on America’s side, anyone who opposes war

is a godless unAmerican Communist. Do you understand now why we

attacked Iraq?

Q: I think so. We attacked them because God wanted us to, right?

A: Yes.

Q: But how did we know God wanted us to attack Iraq?

A: Well, you see, God personally speaks to George W. Bush and tells

him what to do.

Q: So basically, what you’re saying is that we attacked Iraq because

George W. Bush hears voices in his head?

A. Yes! You finally understand how the world works. Now close your

eyes, make yourself comfortable, and go to sleep. Good night.

Q: Good night, Daddy.

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Wanna extract some DNA?

Wanna extract some DNA and look like ones of those detectives you see every other day on TV? Well it turns out all you need is 15 minutes of time, a blender and some alcohol. The rest of it is a piece of cake. Okay here are the instructions. Thanks to About and Slashdot for providing me with the information. Ok here goes

1. Gather together a banana/ an onion/ a chicken liver, salt, warm water, a blender, liquid soap, toothpicks, a strainer, a glass jar and rubbing alcohol.

2. Cut your banana/ onion/ liver into tiny pieces.

3. Place your banana pieces in the blender, add a teaspoon of salt and slightly cover the mixture with warm water.

4. Mix in the blender for 5 to 10 seconds making sure the mixture is not too runny.

5. Pour the mixture into the glass jar through the strainer. You want the jar to be about half full.

6. Add about 2 teaspoons of liquid soap and gently stir the mixture. You should try not to create bubbles when stirring.

7. Carefully pour the rubbing alcohol down the side of the glass stopping near the top.

8. Wait for 5 minutes.

9. Use the toothpicks to extract the DNA that floats to the surface.

10. Repeat this procedure for the onion and the chicken liver.

Tips:

1. When pouring the alcohol, make sure that two separate layers are being formed (The bottom layer being the banana mixture and the top layer being the alcohol).

2. When extracting the DNA, twist the toothpick slowly. Be sure to only remove the DNA from the top layer.

Office 2003

Just got myself a copy of Office 2003. Prety neat, espically Outlook. I am an ardent Outlook fan and have a copy of each and every email (well almost every) that I have sent/ received since past three years. I have tried several email clients ranging from Netscape, Mozilla, Thunderbird, Eudora, Pegasus, etc etc but finaly decided to stick to Outlook. Reasons, well it has exactly what I want. Well for instance, I have three email accounts and I like to pop all of them to a single mailbox. Now Mozilla does not permit me to do that. If I were smart enough, I would have modified the mozilla source to make this happen, but I accept it I don’t have the time nor the inclination to be smart. I like open source and I use it quite a bit, but sometimes you have to draw a line. The other day I had to open a word document and I thought ‘Well since I don’t have Office, maybe I should try OpenOffice‘ . Sadly the Java code for Open Office does not produce a good UI. OOo is good but not good enough. I want the native OS colors on the UI. I hate the basic java UI and I am using the word hate coz I do. I DO NOT like the dirty gray color that java gives me. I don’t get it, if it is possible to produce native colors why isn’t it just done? Look at the difference between Eclipse and Netbeans. Netbeans is made by Sun and trust me the UI suxs. On the other hand Eclipse is opensource and supported by IBM. I love those colors. I think that if FSF has to grow to people’s desktop, the one thing that definitely has to improve is the UI. Why can’t Linux come with anti-aliased fonts by default? Why does text have to look so bad on Linux? Why do I have to downlaod Windows fonts and install them to make it look better? Well I know I might be asking for too much for a guy who lives off free stuff, but then what the heck. Anyway Office 2003 definitely rocks though I still am not fond of Frontpage and prefer Dreamweaver anyday. There is a tonne load of shit in there besides that. There is something called a Publisher and something called an InfoNote. I dont think I will be using any of those, but lets see.

Movies and a bit of face recognition

Just came back from this movie ‘Stuck on you’. A mushy movie. Not too much to my liking. A movie I am definitely looking forward to is ‘The Return of the King’ . Doe to release next Wednesday it seems to have been timed perfectly to match with the end of my semester. Well shall ring the holidays in with the King. Anyway came across this article that said that Britain is planning to introduce biometric chips in its passports. These will have face, fingerprint and maybe iris data of the individual stored on the chip. Well since I have been working on face recognition the one thing I can definitely say is that face recognition is not something that is gonna work just like that. If a person is forced to stand in front of a camera and the light, pose and several parameters are held constant, then yup it will work. But we are still quite far from the day when a camera will be able to pick put a suspect from a crowd. The systems in the Florida airport and at the Superbowl prove this point. The recently held FRVT (face recognition vendor test) gave each of the participants a 3-D model of the face. Now a 3-D model is not something that you can make in a second. It is time / processor intensive even with today’s 3Ghz + processors and definitely not real-time. Well lets see how this goes. I think that this is going to be more money thrown down the drain

A 3D Desktop

Just yesterday I came across this 3D desktop from Sun. Called Project Looking Glass, Sun claims it ‘will bring 3D windowing capabilities to the desktop to offer a far richer user experience for work and “play.” But, it’s not only about “eye-candy,” it’s about creating an engaging user experience, one that can make communications and collaboration even easier.’ Well I had a look at the video and it looks nice enough. But the burning question remains, will it be fast enough to run on my desktop? From my experience with Java, any progarm takes at least twice as long to run. In the demo video, we see multiple videos running simultaneously. IMHO this is possible only if they have a couple of Sun Solaris machines doing all the processing in the background. Well feel free to correct me if you think I am wrong!

Dubya!

Try this out. Go to google and type in miserable failure and click the I’m feeling lucky button… Guess who’s website is the first ?? Yup you guessed it right. It’s Dubya :)) . The cool part is that no where on the website can you actually find the word miserable failure. So is Google making up the results?

edit: Just found out that this is an idea by Old Fashioned Patriot . The idea is to link Miserable failure to Dubya’s website in as many blogs as possible so that his website always turns up as #1 when u search for miserable failure on google. Well I am doing my part 😉

Technology at its best

What would you like your cellphone to do for you? Do you want to use it only to answer calls or would you like it to do everything? I still remember those days when a cellphone meant something as huge and chunky as a cordless phone that I use at home. But now with the marvel of technology, things are improving at a rate that is hard to comprehend. The other day when I was looking through Nokia’s website, I came across this phone. It has a built in web broswer (Opera) with a 640 * 480 res, it has handwriting recognition. You can play videos, music and God only knows what else. And look at the size and the weight. Would love to own such a device, just waiting to earn enough 😉 . I love technology. Another product I am really looking forward to is OLED based monitors. I hear that with devices a screen can be made as thin as a sheet of paper and the best part is that you can actually roll it and carry it. Boom the weight of your laptop just dropped by 3 pounds. Isn’t that worth waiting for?

Linux – Two down!

Well seems like Redhat just gave up on the consumer market. According to this report, the CEO of Redhat thinks that Linux is not ready for the consumer yet. In a way I do agree , but at least the average user had an option of buying an OS at an affordable price and with some amount of support. Also Suse is being bought over by Novell. I don’t know what that means in terms of the life of Suse as a Linux alternative, but rumors are rife. Anyway my guess is that people who do want to try Linux will always go ahead and download it, install and try it. Hey on the flip side, I heard that there are a few beta versions of Longhorn floating around on the internet and ppl are actually installing it on their computers and trying it out. I don’t think I am that brave. I am blue screening with an official version of Windows XP and the only way out seems to be a replacement of my wireless chip. Sad… Anyway thats all for now folks. Am gonna check out Matrix tonight. And for the people who haven’t heard Neo dies! Shall update you about that in my next blog… Live life … King size (borrowed from an ad back home)

I’m googled

Yeah! Finally the spider at Google caught up with me! My website is now listed within the top 5 results when you look for my name (yeah an ego search, I am egoistical) . Well I think a part of this is due to Anil who placed a link to my blog on his blog. Also Devhood where I try to make a few decent posts in the forum. Just missed out on Halloween celebrations. Slept thro’ it actually. Anyway more later.

Easter Eggs

You might have heard about the term Easter Eggs in computers. Borrowing from Eeggs.com they are defined as The term “Easter Egg”, as we use it here, means any amusing tidbit that creators hid in their creations. They could be in computer software, movies, music, art, books, or even your watch. There are thousands of them, and they can be quite entertaining, if you know where to look. Pretty cool aint it?