The good folks at Red Hat released their newest product, Red Hat Linux 9 last week. As Red Hat Linux is a GPL product, allowing anyone to freely distribute it, an enterprising developer used it to promote his new peering technology, Bittorrent.

Though it’s still rough around the edges (even I had trouble installing it, and I’m an old-school Linux hacker), the technology behind it is solid. I was totally amazed to watch it download three CD’s worth of software faster than I could have ever hoped to download it from an FTP server. Many times faster.

It works by chaining folks together as they download. For instance, once one person grabs a chunk of file, that person’s chunk gets shared by others who need it. Rather than all these people flooding a handful of FTP servers, they cooperatively share the files amongst themselves. Thus the download can scale almost without limit.

Keep an eye on this project, because tools like BitTorrent will soon rule the Internet.

I read an interesting essay on the fabrications that have previously led our country into war. It is, quite literally, as old as the nation.

Some juicy quotes:

Chile, 1963-76: Americans support the fascist Augusto Pinochet, whom overthrew the democratically elected President Salvador Allende three years earlier. While Pinochet was a bloody despot who had thousands of civilians tortured and murdered, he was also favorable to American corporate interests. [Cooper] Many of his killers were trained in the “School of the Americas,” in Fort Benning, Georgia. [Anon1]

“I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.” Henry Kissenger.

Hey, Henry. It’s called “democracy.”

The point of it all is that when the jet engines get throttled up and troops are ready to roll, dust off your bullshit detector because you’re bound to hear some doozies.

I just read an article about Kip Frey, the guys who never did a damn thing as president of Accipiter but get rich. Kip couldn’t lead to save his life, yet he keeps getting slapped into management roles at startups.

The puff piece in Triangle Business Journal calls him a “serial entrepreneur.” What a joke. He shut down Ventana publishing, sold Accipiter, sold Opensite, and shuttered Zoom Culture. I thought an entrepreneur started companies, not finished them off?

If Kip ever steps in to run your company, update your resume!

I always thought that homophobes were people who just weren’t comfortable about their sexuality. Why should it bother somebody if someone else is gay? I think its the fear that they themselves are weak.

Tonight while Kelly, Hallie, and I were driving from a dinner at a place in a neighborhood shopping center, some jackass decided to tailgate us nearly all the way back to our house. Having had teenagers do this before, at first I assumed it was just a lousy driver and changed lanes.

Jackass followed the lane change, keeping mere feet from my bumper. A few more lane changes and he was still there.

Kelly suggested we not lead this guy straight to our home, so I headed for the Garner Police Department, where I know a few people. As we waited for a left turn, the guy continued driving, pausing long enough to yell something at us, flip us off, and, unlucky for him, allow us to get his tag number (PTR 7912). We waited until he was well ahead of us before heading home again.

Apparently seeing our Peace is Patriotic sticker infuriated him while he waited behind us at a traffic light. Afterward, Kelly and I were hard-pressed to justify his response. What rational person would behave like that?

Kelly pointed out the obvious – this person wasn’t rational, and it was a good thing she was there to moderate my intense desire to go kick his ass. “Who knows what he may have done,” said Kelly. “I don’t care,” was my reply. “Nobody threatens my family.” The idea of a schmuck getting beat down by an angry peace protester was amusing, but I let it go.

I chalk it up to frenzy that’s been whipped up by the idiot pro-war talk-show hosts, spewing invective against anyone who doesn’t fall in line. Should people start following their lead and begin hurting people, I think those talk show hosts should be removed from behind their microphones and put behind bars.

Who knows where tonight’s incident could have led. I am still pondering that, four hours after it occured. One thing’s for sure, though. It shows just how far the country’s fallen since Perpetual War was declared.

A trip to Raleigh’s Exploris museum had me captivted by the Anne Frank exhibit. Seventy years ago, a German dictator turned the populace against itself by starting a Jewish witchhunt. They said it could never happen there, and it did. I hope America isn’t headed down that same path of bull-headed ignorance.

This article in the New York Times is sickening. Yes, that’s right. The New York Times. Not some no-name foreign rag with an axe to grind.

Some quotes from Either Take a Shot or Take a Chance:

“We dropped a few civilians,” Sergeant Schrumpf said, “but what do you do?”

To illustrate, the sergeant offered a pair of examples from earlier in the week.

“There was one Iraqi soldier, and 25 women and children,” he said, “I didn’t take the shot.”

But more than once, Sergeant Schrumpf said, he faced a different choice: one Iraqi soldier standing among two or three civilians. He recalled one such incident, in which he and other men in his unit opened fire. He recalled watching one of the women standing near the Iraqi soldier go down.

“I’m sorry,” the sergeant said. “But the chick was in the way.”

She wasn’t a “chick,” Sargent Slaughter. She was somebody’s daughter. Or sister. Or wife. Or mother. And now she’s another notch on your scorecard. You killed her without a second thought.

The Iraqis are bastards for taking hostages, don’t get me wrong. But why is there absolutely no remorse in that soldier’s words? What would Patton say? Where is the honor that used to characterize our military?

I fully support our troops protecting themselves, even if I don’t support their being deployed in such an asinine war. It is, after all, the Department of Defense, not Offense. But the total lack of compassion this man shows after just killing an innocent human being is nothing less than appalling.

Thursday night I attended a Skywarn class put on by the National Weather Service in an effort to get volunteers trained to recognize weather events. My friend Tanner Lovelace joined me, as well as Suzzanne Naylor.

The two hours that the presentation lasted was not enough to go into as many details as I would’ve liked. We did see dozens of spectacular photographs of weather phenomena, as well as diagrams to how strong storms develop. It all was enough to get me hooked, though I still want to attend the class on April 14th at the Fuquay fire department. Since there is no “closing time” for fire departments, we can stay as long as needed to cover the material.

The next time a storm blows through, I may be out chasing it, reporting conditions to the NWS and snapping pictures like crazy. Woohoo!

offers some balance on SARS. Thus, its only time to head for the hills if you’re interested in hiking now that spring has finally sprung.

All that sneezing is probably just from pollen. 🙂

Top officials in Toronto’s medical staff believe up to 3,000 people may have been exposed — directly or indirectly — to Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, according to Toronto Sun sources.

“It’s out of control,” the source said.

An “unprecedented” quarantine of thousands of Torontonians has been ordered to stop the deadly spread of SARS, which has also been declared a provincial emergency.

http://www.canoe.ca/TorontoNews/ts.ts-03-27-0002.html

A new type of atypical pneumonia dubbed Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome continues to spread globally, with 1,316 cases and 48 deaths reported so far, most of them in China and Hong Kong. Despite the fact that health care professionals are practicing rigorous isolation techniques when they treat known or suspected victims, the disease is causing tens of new victims to fall gravely ill every day. It’s now clear that early guesses about the pathogen’s infectiousness were too optimistic, and that means more stringent measures to contain the outbreak are now justified.

Yesterday, doctors in Hong Kong announced that 14 people in one apartment block appear to have contracted SARS from another resident, who in turn got the disease from visiting his brother in hospital. The new victims live on different floors, meaning that they probably got the disease by inhaling small amounts of virus in airborne water droplets, perhaps left in the air by the “index patient” when he coughed in the building’s elevators or lobby.

Are you terrified yet?

http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/200303/msg00414.html