random($foo)

Went to an Annenberg War Discussion, where I became pegged as a left-wing looney. All the same, I suppose, after all, I was listening to an army officer talk about how he feels guilty he’s not there, like he’s missing out on the Super Bowl, and a bunch of big-J bigwigs talk about how they feel the US journalism hasn’t been that bad and they’d have to watch out so they can remain unbiased (they mentioned Arnett being out of line for actually, God forbid, speaking the truth). There was some talk about international journalism, but there seemed to be mystification more than clarification. A student mentioned that in Italy, they were just reporting about the bombing and about the dead civilians, but coming back to the US it was all about the soldiers cradling babies.

By that time, I didn’t even bother to say anything [I’d been marginalized by then], but perhaps that skewing of coverage has to do with Iraqi civilian casualties outnumbering Anglo-American Coalition troop casualties by, oh, about ten to one (651:69 at the moment). [see also WMD sites uncovered: 0]

Iraq lost Internet access over the weekend.

US forces’ use of depleted uranium weapons is ‘illegal’

According to a August 2002 report by the UN subcommission, laws which are breached by the use of DU shells include: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; the Charter of the United Nations; the Genocide Convention; the Convention Against Torture; the four Geneva Conventions of 1949; the Conventional Weapons Convention of 1980; and the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907, which expressly forbid employing ‘poison or poisoned weapons’ and ‘arms, projectiles or materials calculated to cause unnecessary suffering’. All of these laws are designed to spare civilians from unwarranted suffering in armed conflicts.

That’s 11 conventions, including the Geneva Conventions that the media was all hyped up about last week. Of course, the army says they’re safe, but with street fighting inevitable, we’ll see what happens with all this exposure.

Iraqi cancers, birth defects blamed on U.S. depleted uranium

[Karen Parker, UN consultant,] said there are four rules derived from all of humanitarian law regarding weapons:

• Weapons may only be used in the legal field of battle, defined as legal military targets of the enemy in war. Weapons may not have an adverse effect off the legal field of battle.
• Weapons can only be used for the duration of an armed conflict. A weapon that is used or continues to act after the war is over violates this criterion.
• Weapons may not be unduly inhumane.
• Weapons may not have an unduly negative effect on the natural environment.

Depleted uranium fails all four of these rules,” Parker said last week.

More about: Depleted Uranium w/ BBC infographic, Depleted Uranium Information Page, CSMonitor: Trail of a Bullet, The National Online: Depleted Uranium

Noticed yesterday dpreview has a full Canon EOS-10D review up online. It’s currently on sale and shipping for $1,500 US. Specs: 6.3MP CMOS (1.6x), RAW+JPEG, better AF, ISO 3200 push, 2800-10000K white balance (in 100K increments), DiGiC processing

Ritz Camera has em for $1500. No tax/shipping. $456 for ESP…

Future reference (via Linux Kernel Tuning):

In addition to the number of shared memory segments, you can control the maximum amount of memory allocated to shm at run time via the /proc interface. /proc/sys/kernel/shmmax indicates the current. Echo a new value to it to increase it.

echo "67108864" > /proc/sys/kernel/shmmax

To double the default value.

Some recent interesting class referers to free_culture:

• MIT: ESD.10 Introduction to Technology and Policy
• Furman: IDS 59 Emergence & Collaboration (with a blog and wiki too!)
• Oneonta: PHIL 231 Media Ethics

IE5+/Mozilla 1.3+ rich-text editor (incorporates midas)

The “I can’t believe it’s not a table!” layout – some interesting layout techniques, a few gotchas still… not quite tables. It’s too bad that so much effort is expended on hacking to create really fundamental layouts.

A National Geographic Society survey showed that 87% of surveyed 18-24yo’s could not (and presumably still cannot) find Iraq on a map (slightly better than the 83% who couldn’t find Afghanistan). When I was in fifth grade, we had weekly quizzes on World geography, filling out maps of each geographical section of the world (well, except for Antarctica, it’d be pretty sad if you flunked that one I suppose). Here’s a little worksheet if you need a refresher:

From the same survey, and for comparison:

• 70% cannot find New Jersey
• 49% cannot find New York
• 11% cannot find the United States

Hmm, finally got around to doing some basic Netjuke mucking. Annoyingly, there’s no field/table that stores Artists/Album, which means that you have to calculate that yourself. Here’s a test of the last 10 albums added to my jukebox: