Barry Talks! : Common Sense for Uncommon Times

Friday, November 7, 2003

An Even Smaller Number Would "Do" Pyongyang

"Unofficial" North Korean spokesman Kim Myong-chol writes in the Asia Times (which really should know better):
Very, very few in the rest of the world can imagine how scared the North Koreans have been for the past half-century since the ceasefire in the Korean War. They have lived fearfully under the nuclear sword of Damocles, kept hanging by successive US governments, and they will continue to do so unless the Bush administration agrees to abandon the state of belligerency.
Very few can share the dread, anger and frustration of the North Korean people, who have been singled out as an "axis of evil" state and a potential target of nuclear preemption and branded as a rogue state by the world's most powerful nation. The Bush administration's threats have only served to rally North Koreans behind Kim Jong-il in a determined life-and-death resistance.
Nope. The North Korean people are scared of their own leaders and scared because of the propaganda lies they tell. The North Korean people are starved, repressed and tortured at the hands of their own government. The government of the DPRK is a blight upon humanity.
Kim then goes on to threaten the United States:
Should Bush bow to neo-conservative pressure not to agree to co-existence with North Korea and decide to launch a military invasion of the tiny country, that would be a US choice. The North Koreans would readily take up the nuclear gauntlet. There is no need to fire thousands of nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) to put the torch to New York and other metropolitan areas of the US mainland. A small number would do the job.
Say what? If Kim is speaking on behalf of the North Korean government, as he claims he does, then that government has just threatened the people and territorial integrity of the US, in which case the US ought to consider an appropriate response: like making sure by force if necessary that the DPRK can never attack us.
If Kim is speaking on his own behalf, then the Asia Times ought to be ashamed for printing this drivel. Oddly, the Times is unaware of Kim's Pyongyang connections (in the linked article, he says "North Korea already have hundreds of nuclear warheads all locked on American cities." Charming.)

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Adapt or Be Productive

Dylan Evans writes an odd editorial in today's Guardian:
Sure, most of us can use computers these days. We know how to send email, surf the web or write a letter in Word. But would you know what to do if all those pretty little icons in your browser disappeared and, instead of Windows, you were left staring at lines of letters and numbers of HTML, the language in which web pages are written? If, like Neo in The Matrix, you could see the code behind the graphics?
If your answer is "no", then you are in the majority - one of the many millions of peasants in the technological middle ages. Like most humans in The Matrix, who believe they are living a normal life when in fact their bodies lie inert in a vast complex of pods, you are asleep, a prisoner of your ignorance. And the only way to escape is by getting to grips with the machines, by learning their language. If you don't get inside them, they will get inside you. Adapt or die.
OK, Dylan, we get that you just saw the latest Matrix and maybe it scared your socks off.
However, reality: almost nobody knows how a car works (describe, please, in detail, the operation of a fuel-injected internal combustion engine) -- and that's how we like it. Ditto with computers. Our goal as software developers is to make these tools as easy to use as possible to make you the user as productive as possible -- and as satisfied as possible so you'll come back and buy more software!
I have nothing against you learning how your machine works -- quite the contrary, I encourage it, you'll get more out of your investment. But our job, I insist, is to make this tool as productive and easy-to-use as we possibly can for you so you don't have to know at what priority a DMA completion interrupts the processor.

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