July 2003

"A Bahraini company that established a network accessible to those without American phones has been forced to scrap its plans after a week"

segregation seems like a bad idea to me: one of the most important roles of public education is exposing children to diversity

"The Free Software Foundation (FSF) and Open Source Initiative (OSI) have not traded barbed comments publicly in months."

"We have been hit 18 of the last 19 days. I feel like I am at Da Nang or Phu Bai. It just sucks. Luckily, 'only' about 45 people have been hurt."

"Despite geostrategic shifts in East Asia, perceptions of the right-wingers and neo-cons in the United States are largely frozen in the distant past."

"although knowing a patient's ancestry is often extremely useful in diagnosis and treatment, race is both too broad and too narrow a definition of ancestry to be biologically useful"

"Sharon and Arafat bear striking similarities. Neither is in any particular hurry. ... only Abu Mazen genuinely believes the disarray must be brought to an end"

"the West can offer little to the non-Western world beyond rationalization of oppression and technologies of exploitation"

on "the new governing council of Iraq, the coalition provisional administration, attacks on coalition forces, economic concerns, and sermons delivered in Iraqi mosques"

"Our tendency to keep H. pylori in the family means that bacterial and human histories mirror one another."

"Some 10,000 followers of the young Shi'a Muslim cleric took to the streets of the holy city of Al-Najaf over the weekend"

and a parliamentary committee recommends "100 point checks for internet users and the abolition of free email accounts"

"Under Saddam, Iraqi wives all too often saw husbands taken to unknown detention centres and held indefinitely and without visiting rights. While secret detentions are not so frequent under US rule, the anxious wait is no less grim."

Saddam Hussein used the People's Mujahideen to crush the Kurds and the Shia, but they're hostile to Tehran and have supporters in the US government...

"We have been in the urine business a long time, but we always get excited when we discover a new use for this incredibly renewable resource!"

I'm just wondering why AdSense was (for a while) serving Christian dating ads on my review of Feyeraband's Killing Time

"the number of new Jewish-only settlement outposts has actually increased and not decreased since the Aqaba Summit"

"But true to the ways of the new Iraq, Iraqis were second-rank; I had to be with a foreigner to see my new government's first press conference."

"Like opposition to abortion and gay rights, fighting porn has always been front and center of Ashcroft's Christian right politics"

"It is interesting to watch how individuals with limited power and resources negotiate and collaborate with the largest of corporations."

when I was a child, Fraser was a bogeyman... but for the last decade he's looked like the best ex-PM we've ever had

"with Free and Open Source Software, even the poorest nation can become a 'developing country' in the most literal sense. And in the long run, this is more important than saving money on software licenses."

"There are going to be problems if we continue with our different philosophies and different approaches to law enforcement"

the human expert "started to win consistently as soon as he stopped trying to exploit the programs (non-existent) human weaknesses"

"They must exist. They do exist. They are fragments of the True Cross, sacred relics of Mr Blair's holy global empire. Believe in them and you shall be saved."

"some international donors, and some people on Bali, would prefer to see tourism de-emphasized and alternative income sources developed"

"The USA has in fact opened its taxpayers chequebook to safeguard the patent rights of its powerful pharmaceutical lobby."

"although the Chinese-North Korean border was only lightly defended, the Chinese lacked the logistical capability of racing to the demilitarised zone facing South Korea."

"while you might think it is chasing imaginary demons by trying to stifle Linux sales by smaller OEMs, that ain't necessarily so"

"dismantling international law and disengaging with the world will only open a Pandora's box of conflicts, impunity, terrorism, and collapsed states"

apparently new nuclear weapons are needed to destroy chemical and biological weapons... this really is Dr Strangelove stuff

"Indian troops were used to suppress the country's nationalist uprising in the summer of 1920. Like today's American forces, the 60,000 British and Indian troops securing Mesopotamia were never engaged in battle, facing instead hit-and-run raids."

he's wrong about the US not making filtering technology available to Iran - censorware companies will happily prostitute themselves to anyone

- before I took my postal address off my review site, I was averaging nearly an unsolicited book a day - but then I only write 2 reviews a week

"over 400 of the rarest modern English words - in fact, ones that have been entirely absent from the Internet, including all online dictionaries, until now."

"By now, nearly everyone in South Africa knows how HIV is transmitted, and how to avoid it. The enduring mystery is why so many people do not."

if Hamas can restrain its militants and Sharon is prepared to face down the settlers... then just maybe this will work

but because the dump was "Iraqi", US forces in the area are not taking responsibility for caring for the wounded