Bush Weak On Terrorism?

MSNBC – Avoiding attacking suspected terrorist mastermind:

With Tuesday’s attacks, Abu Musab Zarqawi, a Jordanian militant with ties to al-Qaida, is now blamed for more than 700 terrorist killings in Iraq. But NBC News has learned that long before the war the Bush administration had several chances to wipe out his terrorist operation and perhaps kill Zarqawi himself — but never pulled the trigger.

…

“People were more obsessed with developing the coalition to overthrow Saddam than to execute the president’s policy of preemption against terrorists,” according to terrorism expert and former National Security Council member Roger Cressey.

Originally found at: http://www.calpundit.com/archives/003430.html.

Nerd or Murderer?

Check out a rather amusing quiz called “Programming Language Inventor or Serial Killer“. I am proud to announce that I have not developed any programming languages.

And UXO falls off the radar…

As previously announced in the gaming community Origin Systems (OSI) the makers of Ultima Online and Ultima X: Odyssey is being dissolved and its assets (which includes “employees”) are being moved from Texas to California. Apparently they think they will save money by moving a crapload of employees from a fairly cheap area to the money sinkhole that is California.

In response to the move the top two people associated with the UXO project (along with their community person) have left OSI/EA. Rumors in the forums state that key people are leaving from UO also. Not a single person in the leadership of either project have actually said they were staying yet.

Prediction: UXO will be moved to CA then either be knifed by EA (in their typical manner) before release after months or years of delay or shipped in a Horizons-like state (a game without soul, without decent content, buggy as hell, and only liked by a small core of players that seem to love paying for a drab painful world).

So UXO drops off the radar… And in its place comes Everquest 2. Sony seems to have been learning from other games and fixing one of EQ’s painful features.

WordPerfect Vies for a Comeback?

BetaNews has an article about the upcoming release of WordPerfect Office 12. My response while reading it was “WTF? This product isn’t dead yet?”. I’m sure the 0.1% of people still using old versions by choice might find the news interesting. I can’t help but think that any company that deploys WordPerfect (or any Corel product) is asking to be screwed. Especially considering the long history of horrible buisness decisions associated with the product.

Not to mention that things have changed since WordPerfect was relevant.

Chernobyl

An individual has posted an interesting set of photos showing the aftermath of Chernobyl (as mentioned on Slashdot). The bottom photo on this page in particular highlights the human cost.

“Wow… That is really fucked up…” does not adequately describe it.