Tuesday  2003-01-07   World

Suicide non-solution

In "The Suicide Bombers" Avishai Margalit provides detailed accounts of Palestine suicide bombers and their devastating effects:

The members of the Israeli center-left, the only people who could secure for the Palestinians a state alongside Israel, used to believe in two propositions. First, the occupation since 1967 has been a moral and social disaster for Israel, let alone for the Palestinians, and it has to end. Second, if Israel withdrew to pre-1967 borders this would end the conflict. The second intifada convinced more and more Israelis, including many on the right, of the truth of the first proposition; the occupation cannot go on. On the other hand, the suicide bombers have convinced more and more Israelis, including many in the center-left, that the end of the occupation would mean neither an end to the conflict nor, more important, an end to the terror.

Tuesday  2003-01-07   Software

X11 grows up

After all these years X11 whose excuse has been "it's not, repeat, not a windowing system but a toolkit/protocol for such" becomes a useful GUI. X11 for Mac OS X even lets users to replace the native Aqua window manager with their own choice.