Exploring the increasingly addictive and entertaining Google Earth, I found my way towards the Kleine Brogel air force base in Belgium. This, reportedly, is where the Americans keep their atomic weapons on Belgian soil, held at the ready for a strike against the Soviet Union. The weapons may or may not be gone now, depending on who you believe. The Soviet Union, likewise, may or may not be gone. Continue reading ‘An Eye in the Sky’
Archive for September, 2006
Spiegel Online have a rightfully indignant opinion piece on the slippery slope Europe is navigating in its treatment of muslim communities:
It took the Catholic Church 359 years to revoke its condemnation of Galileo, but the current Pope needed only two days to distance himself from his quotation of a statement that remains topical despite being uttered 500 years ago. Piet Hein Donner, the former Dutch Minister of Justice, who has just resigned from her [sic] position, believes Islamic Shariah law could be legally introduced in Holland if two thirds of the Dutch population were to one day approve it. The London police has announced it will inform and consult with a board of Muslim community leaders the next time it plans an anti-terrorism operation that affects Muslims.
Let’s be clear: in a secular democracy everybody deserves respect and equal treament before the law, and nobody should be afforded special rights or consideration. If the day to day functions of a Western state require actions that might offend the muslim community, that’s just tough luck.
What set the Spiegel off was the pre-emptive scrapping of Mozarts opera Idomeneo, which was set to be performed at the Deutsche Oper in Berlin. Germany’s Office of Criminal Investigation (LKA) decided that “the possibility of performances being disrupted cannot be ruled out”, because of a scene where Idomeneo, the King of Crete, appears on stage with a bloody bag containing the heads of Poseidon, Jesus, Buddha and Mohammed. Idomeneo, to add insult to injury, holds the heads aloft for all to see.
Now, if Mohammed feels insulted because he was mocked, maligned or manhandled, get him to fight his own battle. The same goes for Poseidon, Jesus and Buddha, and unless they can prove they’re tax-paying residents of said Western democracy, they have no say in how the place is run. Cancelling an already scheduled opera (and opera, as painful as it can be, is still an important part of the European cultural heritage) means caving to religious pressure.
Despite sometimes violent objections, Madonna did not cancel a single one of the performances in which she was mock crucified on stage. Why? Because she wasn’t doing anything illegal, she offered a show where the audience wasn’t forced to attend, and she was simply exercising her right to free speech. Or song.
Religious extremism in Europe will come to a head sooner or later. It will not simply fade away. The longer religious communities pressure society and government for special consideration, the more the European electorate will drift towards the right and fall into an “us and them” mindset. This will only allow the religious extremists to claim oppression, and will further polarise the situation. Avoiding this scenario will require sacrifice from the religious communities, not from secular society.
The Van Aukens are billed as “The World’s Greatest Horizontal Bar Performers” in this classic Vaudeville poster. But something about the combination of Freddie Mercury moustaches, Rocky Horror silver lamé shorts and ballet positions make these two gentlemen distinctly creepy.
BeOS truly was the greatest OS ever. Its system info functions include the following:
<strong>get_system_info()</strong>
Yup, quite logical.
<strong>is_computer_on()</strong>
Check, can come in handy.
<strong>is_computer_on_fire()</strong>
It’s true, BeOS had a system info function to check whether the computer was on fire. According to the BeOS documentation: “Returns the temperature of the motherboard if the computer is currently on fire. If the computer isn’t on fire, the function returns some other value.”
Pope Benedict XVI really put his foot in it when he quoted the words of Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus: “Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.” Muslim groups across the world refuted this argument through varying degrees of violent protest, and by calling for a number of sticky ends to befall the pope.
As easy as it is to be sarcastic about the violence and hatred inherent in all Judeo-Christian religions, it’s an obvious trait more often than not ignored by the media. Pacifist Christians, Jews or Muslims live a life of peace in spite of, not because of, their chosen faith. Their world is dominated by an increasingly angry thunder god spoiling for a good smiting. Infidels (and in the Western Judeo-Christian mindset these can include liberals, homosexuals, atheists or any combination of the above) conspire to weaken their societies, and must be crushed.
The danger of what has come to be called Islamofacism lies not in its aggression towards the Christian West and Jewish Israel, but in the fraternal feelings of religious hatred it encounters there. The Pope, whether he cares to admit it or not, is as much in the business of playing carrot and stick with good and evil as any radical imam in the fundamentalist mosques of Europe. If you don’t boil over in righteous anger at the infidels, the thunder god will direct some righteous anger of his own at you. “They” are out to get “us”, unless we get them first.
This is the part of the rant where I point out an obvious yet insightful answer. But there is none. Organised religion will not go away. Christian, Jewish and Muslim leaders will not end their game of afterlife tit for tat. Clusters of hate will still form spontaneously, and as emotional lightning rods like the Danish “Mohammed cartoons” appear, will direct their religious anger at these targets. How long can civilisation tick over before enough spontaneous clusters and random lightning rods combine to unleash a holy war? Not long, I’m willing to wager.
A Belgian court has decided that Google News is a news portal rather than a search engine (and we know how important words are when deciding on the nature of things). Under threat of having to pay half a million euros in fines per day until it’s done, Google has to remove all articles published by the French-speaking and German-speaking Belgian press from Google News. (See a PDF of the judgement at Chilling Effects.)
Now, to understand the nature of this “copyright infringement”, keep in mind that Google News does not offer the full text of news articles. The job Google News does (and does well) is sorting articles by topic and grouping together clusters of interest. For an overview of what’s available, Google usually presents a first sentence from the article as introductory text, accompanied by a very small thumbnail image for the more important stories, and all linked to their original publications.
So the content offered by Google News can never be a substitute for the original publication, but only means I (as user) don’t have to trawl through a dozen online Belgian publications just to find out that, as always, they have very little to say and nothing new to contribute to any discussion.
The court’s “expert witness”, who managed to conclude that what Google did was not the same as being a search engine, is a civil engineer called Luc Golvers, chairman of the Belgian Club for Information Security. (Want to bet they have a secret handshake?) I have no way of telling how well Golvers grasps what Google does, but I do know as information security expert he recommends Microsoft products. Which, as infosec specialists know, is unusual.
Sanity prevails in the Dutch-speaking Flemish press, with a very sensible conclusion published on Express.be:
De rechter stelt ook dat de Google cache de gebruiker in staat stelt om de verplichte registratie of betaling op sommige krantenwebsites te omzeilen. Vanuit technisch oogpunt is dat uiteraard onzin[...].
Google News does not offer the full text of news articles (as the search engine does with cached pages), and if anything Google’s news pages are even more copyright-friendly than its search engine. Sadly, the men in their grey suits who hanker for a simpler age when arbitrary rules governed their small world will be with us for a long, long time.
This is what happens when you leave non-native English speakers in charge of your translation into English: online Expat publication Expatica (not known for the quality of their English or journalism) reports on a statement by a spokesman for the East Flemish diocese. When asked about a school’s stand on enrolling non-Dutch speaking children at primary school De Kreek, the spokesman’s words (originally spoken in Dutch) are translated as:
“We want to give every child a fair chance. De Kreek has already enrolled foreign speaking children.”
The spokesman presumably used the Dutch word “vreemdtalig”, to indicate a speaker of foreign languages (i.e. other than Dutch), which inspired out intrepid translator to forge the completely new language known as Foreign.
My pet peeve of the moment: people who write “I am loathed to admit it”.
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22I+am+loathed+to+admit+it%22
Yes, you are loathed. Despised as well.
Update: people who write “juggler vein” don’t score well either. Google currently lists 14,300 of them, a massive 8,070 of whom also mention Jesus. I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions.
