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U.S. Discharges Troops for Abuse in Iraq

The three soldiers, all from Pennsylvania, were scheduled to face courts-martial this month but opted instead to submit to a nonjudicial hearing, in which their conduct was judged by a commander without a jury, Lt. Col. Vic Harris said. Such hearings are common practice, he said. Brig. Gen. Ennis Whitehead III, the acting commander of the 143rd Transportation Command, found the three soldiers had maltreated prisoners at Camp Bucca, southern Iraq, on May 12. He demoted two of the soldiers and ordered that all three forfeit their salaries for two months.

The general found that Master Sgt. Lisa Marie Girman, 35, of Hazelton, Pa., knocked a prisoner to the ground, "repeatedly kicking him in the groin, abdomen, and head, and encouraging her subordinate soldiers to do the same," Harris said. Girman received an "other-than-honorable conditions" discharge from her immediate commander.

Staff Sgt. Scott A. McKenzie, 38, of Clearfield, Pa., was found to have dragged a prisoner by his shoulders and then to have held his legs apart "and encouraging others to kick him in the groin while other U.S. soldiers kicked him in the abdomen and head," Harris said. McKenzie was also found to have thrown the detainee face-down to the ground and have stepped on "his previously injured arm." The general also found McKenzie made "a false sworn statement to a special agent of the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Division." McKenzie was demoted to sergeant and later received a "general, under honorable conditions" discharge.

Spc. Timothy F. Canjar, 21, of Moscow, Pa., was found to have made a false statement to the army's criminal investigators and to have held a detainee's legs apart "while others kicked him in the groin," in addition to "violently twisting his previously injured arm and causing him to scream in pain." Canjar was demoted to private -- a rank two lower than specialist -- and received a "general, under honorable conditions" discharge from his commander, Harris said.

LA oulaws "master/slave" terms for harware vendors? How about this one:
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Under the high pressure from femisist and sexual minority organizations, FCC decides to force all electronic equipment vendors to cease usage the terms male and female in regard to sockets such as cable ones. From now on they should use the term finger instead of male, and asshole instead of female, as new terms has nothing to do with any sex (everyone has both fingers and an asshole) and thus cannot offence any sexual group.

I may consider writing a course "Power Linux User Quickstart" :)

Postfix is not a tool - it's a server software. Gnome is not a tool either - it's a windowing/desktop environment.

Tools is what you use to fix someting or to build something.

Here is my list of Linux Power Tools:

• bash - in Linux you really need it to choose other CLI tools;
• find - you need it to find what to fix;
• awk, sed - you need to filter what you found;
• emacs - you need it to edit config files in order to fix them;
• cvs - you need it to keep track of a history of your changes;
• lynx - that's how you find new software with fix patches;
• wget - that's the way you download new software;
• Perl, Tcl, Python - many scripts, you want to fix, are written on these languages;
• gcc, make, configure - you may or may not program on C, but you have to build lots of packages from their source;
• C - actually programming on C is always good to know;
• PostgreSQL, MySQL - it's not just a database server - it can serve your data;
• webmin, linuxconf, apt, rmp, Portage - some tools are prescripted already, chose what's better for yur system;
• iptables - protect yourself;
• Postfix, Apache, Squid, Zope, Samba, LDAP, Gnome, KDE, X11, CUPS - only now you are ready to learn not fixing tools, but what should be fixed;

I thouth to answer on this comment, but then decided that it would be too offopic. This subject is too big. I'd better save it for bigger battles.

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As a Linux user I've been sufferring from being stuck to Xfree86 for too many long years. That's why my previous irony was so sad.

In 1994 my Linux desktop was more advanced than then-time win-3.x. Since then Windows has got DCOM, NT-microkernel and Active Directories. The system design is unsecure per se, but the system is usable.

In XFree86 I still cannot copy images or rich text formatting through the clipboard, while most of Xfree86 progress went to catch new hardware after it's been out there for windows already. I guess Xfree86 team stuck to bitmap processing: vector graphics is still experimental, while the idea of multimedia is forbidden in Xfree86 team whatsoever - otherwise why multimedia objects are not in clipboard and why Xfree86 has nothing to do with sound?

Speaking about sound: in MacOS my sound is shisfted through stereo channels depends on the place on the screen I click or drag. That's because sound and graphics are processed together in MacOS. Why this idea had never hit brains of Xfree86 developers? If it would then they would defenitely would not forbidden sound in Xfree86.

It's sad for me to realize that a good system design is less important than a good financial investment. But I still applaud to Mozilla, Linux Kernel, Python, Apache, Zope, Gnome, KDE, OpenOffice, Jabber and many other OSS teams for their underpaid efforts to make a difference.

I like this collection of misleading quotes from Microsoft, from Bill Gates and about Microsoft.

My favorite ones:

• "The Internet? We are not interested in it" -- Bill Gates, 1993
• "Sometimes we do get taken by surprise. For example, when the Internet came along, we had it as a fifth or sixth priority." -- Bill Gates, Jul, 1998
• "We had planned to integrate a Web browser with our operating system as far back as 1993" -- Microsoft (27 Jul 1998, filing its first court responses to federal antitrust)
• On code stability, from Focus Magazine: "Microsoft programs are generally bug-free. If you visit the Microsoft hotline, you'll literally have to wait weeks if not months until someone calls in with a bug in one of our programs. 99.99% of calls turn out to be user mistakes. [...] I know not a single less irrelevant reason for an update than bugfixes. The reasons for updates are to present more new features.
• Bill Gates, Free Market and the LA Times: "There are people who don't like capitalism, and people who don't like PCs. But there's no-one who likes the PC who doesn't like Microsoft"
• Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning. --Bill Gates, Business @ The Speed of Thought
• "640K ought to be enough for anybody." -- Bill Gates
• I don't think there's anything unique about human intellience. All the neurons in the brain that make up perceptions and emotions operate in a binary fashion. (Bill Gates)
• "There won't be anything we won't say to people to try and convince them that our way is the way to go."
• "We have no intention of shipping another bloated OS and shoving it down the throats of our users." -- Paul Maritz, Microsoft group vice president
• On the solid code base of Win9X: "If you can't make it good, at least make it look good."
• "Microsoft's biggest and most dangerous contribution to the software industry may be the degree to which it has lowered user expectations." -- Esther Schindler, OS/2 Magazine