April 5, 2003

Warhawks Invoke 3/5ths Clause to Justify Civilian Causalities

Filed under: Fun and Games — Tim @ 10:50 am

WASHINGTON, DC – In an ongoing effort to stem criticism from all sides of the political spectrum, leading members of the neo-conservative movement finalized a resolution resurrecting an amended Constitutional provision.

Paul Wolfowitz, deputy Secretary of Defense told reporters that, “This was a necessary post-war action for taxation purposes only – someone has to build Mohammed roads to move from points A & B & C, and those cost money. Besides, the provision worked fine for over 70 years in this country and look how we turned out.

I also think before you people rush to conclude wild unsubstantiated slippery-slope consequences of these actions; you should stop living in the past. What was done was done, mistakes were made and we should move forward. After all, it’s not like the Iraqi people would be subjected to forced labor or ostracized from society. Hell, there isn’t even an Arabic word equivalent to “niggardly.”

I stand firm with this decision, we should give the provision another try. After all, it took two detonations of atomic bombs on civilian targets to bring the Japs to their knees. We could do that again, but somehow I don’t think the Iraqis would care if we nuked Japan again.”

Not all neo-conservatives think alike though.

Joseph Farah, editor-in-chief of WorldNetDaily, a popular neo-conservative website, told reporters that, “This really has nothing to do with a post-war plan; these ay-rabs really aren’t fully human. Sure Ali looks like your average Joe when he’s stripped down to his underwear, I bet they even reproduce in a similar fashion as we do – though much dirtier and not in a Jesus approved position. But don’t let them fool you; they aren’t Real Humans in the White-Man’s Burden sense. They speak a completely different language, eat completely different foods and worse, believe in different things than you or more importantly, I do.

To their credit, at one point in their development the Ay-rab world was cultured and refined, they reportedly even had their own schools and libraries to educate themselves on how to raise camels and live in the sandy deserts. But they really haven’t advanced much in the past century or two. So, we need to re-civilize them, re-enlighten them and re-educate them. We gave them plenty of time and warnings, now they will understand what is meant to have a bleeding-heart of love and how peace and tolerance can be forced into their barbaric daily lives.”

Speaking briefly to reporters, Barbara Bodine a former US envoy to Yemen and neo-conservative stated, “Yes, I agree with whatever those two gentlemen concluded with. The ay-rabs are 3/5ths of a real American, and that’s really pushing it because they still worship leaders and are extremely nationalistic. Oh and to lead by example, I plan on moving to post-war Iraq to help administer and export my widely acclaimed belief system.”

May Allah have mercy on all of their souls.

And the red button does what?

Filed under: Foolish — Tim @ 9:51 am

Pardon the long interval between bloggings – it is completely my fault, funny story. To tell it, I’ll need to explain how a few things work, namely name-servers – aka, the DNS.

You’ve probably seen or heard of that acronym, but don’t know much about it. It stands for: [drum roll] Domain Name System and is actually two elements, the name-server and a “resolver” (more on this below).

Well the way your browser works is the following, whenever you type in a URL, like: www.cpsc.ucalgary.ca the browser actually places another period/dot at the end. Now that is significant because the “trailing” dot represents root, just like the slash (/) represents root in UNIX (like Slashdot.org). Additionally, domain names are resolved backwards, starting at that “trailing” dot.

Here is a good example of how this works for the domain www.cpsc.ucalgary.ca (I borrowed this from here):
1. Ask a root server the location of the “ca” domain name server
2. Ask the “ca” domain name server the location of the “ucalgary.ca” server
3. Ask the “ucalgary.ca” server the location of the “cpsc.ucalgary.ca” server
4. Ask the “cpsc.ucalgary.ca” server for the IP address of www.cpsc.ucalgary.ca

Now remember, the web is not based on names (words), but rather IP addresses (numbers). So, the name-server responds to browser requests by supplying name-to-address to conversion. When it doesn’t know the answer, the resolver will ask another name-server for the information.

So you’re probably wondering where this omnipotent all-knowing root server is and as much as John Poindexter would like it under his thumb in his basement, there are several public ones. If you head on over and visit the Internet Software Consortium (ISC), they state that there are 13 main DNS servers and it maintains the F-root one “as a public service” (no, I didn’t find out the significance of ‘F’).

Additionally, the ISC maintains the development of the Berkeley Internet Name Domain (BIND) software which is like Apache is for webserving (instead of domain serving). The ISC also has a short overview of BIND, easy to soak up, check it out.

Based on this article, there is no real “central” organization responsible for maintaining and updating the list of domains. It exists on many different name-servers as a distributed database and therefore can grow for as long as people are willing to buy domain names with 67 characters : )

If you want to read more about this, the O’Reilly book ‘DNS and BIND‘ was listed on several sites I read through as a thorough examination of this issue.

And now for the kicker, when I switched the domain names for Movementarian.com and Technocraticus.com I added an “ing” to the name-servers, thus propagating them to a non-existent host and taking the sites offline for 24-hours. This my friends, is yet another reason I should not be allowed to make important decisions – now where is my bib?