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13. mars 2003
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Adobe Acrobat split into three
In a move to reconquer the market, Adobe has decided to split its besteslling Acrobat product (the writer, so to say, not the Reader which is free and probably already built into your browser) into three. The cheapest will be a Acrobat lite version selling for around $50, then there is a standard acrobat, and for the first time Adobe will now venture into the enterprise market with a high-end database based version starting at $20,000.
11:39:21 PM 
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Coalition to Iraqis: go home!
This is the front- and backside of the English version of a propaganda leaflet that is being dropped for the Iraqi troops and people.
Here is an overview of all the recent leaflets (site loads slowly).
8:40:33 PM
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Oops!
"Israeli soldiers accidentally killed two Israelis near a Jewish settlement south of the West Bank city of Hebron on Thursday, Israel Radio said." (Reuters)
I bet the IDF still denies it has a "shoot first, ask afterwards" policy.
7:26:15 PM
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Ouch!
Yesterday: acute toothache. Not at all comfortable, as you can guess: I managed to sleep tonight thanks to painkillers (ibuprofen, but prescription dose) and a sleeping pill.
Today: Right side of face was double size and the pain pretty intense. Dentist gave me an appointment pretty fast, and just gave me a root filling. It still hurts (unlike last time I had that done) and I eat prescription painkillers (codeine+paracetamol) like candy. He also gave me penicilin for a week. I hope that does it.
If there should be any slow blogging the next few days, well, this is why.
3:22:42 PM
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Would an attack on Iraq now be legal?
International law is, like its domestic variant, a subject with its fair share of grey areas . A number of experts on law on international relations gave different opinions on the subject.
The fact remains that previous UN resolutions could be used to justify an attack now, and with the support of quite a few legal opinions. Interestingly, if a vote should fail due to insufficient votes or a veto, the case for war will be legally weaker than it currently is.
1:25:03 PM
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The times they are a'changing
In the article Our World-Historical Gamble Lee Harris argues that the coming conflict marks something new in the history of conflict, like e.g. the French revolution was. Evaluating the new conflict after the old rules leads to wrong results, as we're dealing with players who make no attempt at rational analysis and conduct.
Harris does a hegelian/marxist analysis of the fundamentals in the conflict, as he sees it, between parts of the islamic world and the west. Normally, a country comes through wealth by mastering certain arts and techniques; by understanding and exploiting the natural world and building a community fit to take advantage of it, and will have to "develop a sense of the realistic."
However, the Arab wealth has come to them through no effort of their own; oil is being extracted from their ground by europeans and americans, mainly for consumption by the rest of the civilised world. What the Arab nations are left with is an enormous amount of wealth they have done nothing for.
"What Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein have in common is that they became rich because the West paid them for natural resources that the West could simply have taken from them at will, and without so much as a Thank You, if the West had been inclined to do so. They were, by one of the bitter paradoxes of history, the pre-eminent beneficiaries of the Western liberalism that they have pledged themselves to destroy."
Harris further argues that the liberal democracies has gotten themselves into a dilemma of their own making, and that extreme groups who play by new rules take comfort and shelter from this fact.
"Here we have the heart of our historical impasse, and the only way out of it is to cut the Gordian knot. And this is precisely what the current United States administration has elected to do"
So here we are, a justification of a new world order of unilateral use of force.
9:53:12 AM
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Saddam's secret weapon: Balsa and duct tape
 This is the drone plane that the Buish administration claims is a danger to the world's greatest superpower and a "smoking gun" against Iraq. Iraqi officials insist it is an prototype plane that can only be used for reconnaissance and not suitable for dropping anything. The size makes it extremely unlikely it is able to carry any significant weight.
Perhaps the reason it is considered such a threat is that it is built of balsa and the Dept of Homeland Security's all-purpose wonder medicine: duct tape.
12:34:26 AM
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No misspellings, please, we're bloggers
The Raven has just revived the art of metablogging, which has suffered a bit here on Salon blogs since Mark at Fried Green al-Qaedas called the quits on his regular Salon Blog Tour of Quality. Raven is, to nobody's surprise, doing a good job metablogging some newsbies and some veterans.
I lament again that Radio Userland, our blog software, does not come with a built-in spell check. The Raven is not one to easily forgive misspellings. 
12:03:45 AM
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© Copyright 2003 Jan Haugland.
Last update: 01.04.2003; 01:33:07.
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