No, the Easter Bunny did it!

(Finder's credit to darthgeek)

Linus Torvalds has admitted that he was really just a front-man for Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, after being "outed" as a fraud by the Alex de Tocqueville Institute, which has just published a new study (and book) asserting that "his claim to have invented Linux is probably false".

(Linus speculates that someone h@X0r3d adti.net.  Or maybe they forgot to renew their domain.  Or maybe their clocks are just running a month and a half late....)

"Houston, we have an exit strategy.... maybe."

W00t!  We have an exit plan from Iraq!  ...Or do we?

The new strategy, discussed by senior officials in Washington and London over the weekend, came as both countries accepted that Iraq would be given full sovereignty on July 1.  In an example of Blair's quiet influence on Bush, suggestions from Washington of only partial sovereignty have been dropped, the [Times of London] said.

About time, if you ask me.  (Finder's credit on this article to darthgeek again.)

And yet, at the same time, the US has informed Seoul that it plans to redeploy "thousands of American troops" from South Korea to Iraq.  It has been hinted that a brigade of the 2nd Infantry Division may be the chosen unit.

"The U.S. government has told us that it needs to select some U.S. troops in South Korea and send them to Iraq to cope with the worsening situation there," said Kim Sook, head of the South Korean Foreign Ministry's North American Bureau.

Both of these come the day after the car-bomb assassination of the head of the US-appointed Governing Council near to Coalition HQ in Baghdad.  The assassination, for which a previously-unknown group caling itself the Arab Resistance Movement al-Rashid Brigades claimed responsibility (with the usual rhetoric), is currently believed to be the work of Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, as it bears many of his style marks -- using suicide bombers, going after highly visible symbolic targets, and killing large numbers of civilians.  National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice, speaking hours after the bombing, stated that the assassination will not affect plans to hand over power to Iraqis.

"[Rice] said the US had known that there would be attempts to derail the political process in the run up to the planned handover on 30 June."

Opinion in the UK over PM Tony Blair's commitment to a speedy withdrawal from Iraq seems to be mixed.  "There is no actual commitment to a withdrawal at any particular stage," says the BBC.  It is reported that the plan for handover of control to Iraq calls for the training of around 260,000 Iraqi security forces, including 75,000 police and an army of 40,000.  So far, however, only 21,000 of the 75,000 police and 3,000 of the 40,000 troops have been trained, with 2,000 more troops in training.  Of the five branches of the planned Iraqi security forces, only the 40,000-strong Iraqi Civil Defence Corps, a paramilitary police unit, is more or less up to strength.

According to the BBC, "the loyalty of some of these units is in doubt," but the question is loyalty to whom?  "Many members of the police force have sided with insurgents and some of the ICDC units refused to fight in Falluja," says the BBC.  But all this says is that they're not necessarily loyal to the US.  It certainly doesn't preclude them being loyal to Iraq, which -- let us not forget -- is their country, not ours.  Our high-sounding moral proclamations of good intentions probably cut little ice with those of the Iraqi people who view the Coalition forces as occupiers.  By all accounts, there's a strong body of sentiment of "Thank you for freeing us.  Now go home, please."

So, which is it?  Are we withdrawing from Iraq, or stationing more troops there?  Seems it's kinda hard to do both at once, and reinforcing our troops there now is only going to make it harder to pull out cleanly after July 1 if the new Iraqi government gives us our marching orders.

Of course, cynicism might suggest that this could be a strategy of trying to jam the lid on and have everybody stand on it to hold it down until July 1, then everyone runs like hell all at once....

Obsolete music!

My random playlist just popped up People Need Love, by Abba.  [steels himself for gasps of shock and horror]  The second line of the song is,

"Every woman knows that it takes a man to get matrimonial harmony"

And I thought to myself, "You know, they're going to have to revise that song now...."

I hate being broke.

I've been hankering after either a Canon PowerShot Pro90 IS or an Olympus C2500UZ since before I got laid off from Red Hat (since before I left Cardima and went to Red Hat, actually).  Why those two digicams?  Because they share the same electronically-image-stabilized 10:1-optical-zoom lens (7-70mm f/2.8, equivalent to 37-370mm on a 35mm film camera).

PriceWatch no longer lists either of them at all.  The few places that still list the Pro90 IS new still list it for close to $1000.  There's four of them on eBay right now, one at $61 with three bids on it (you can bet that's going to turn into a bidding war).  And we're functionally broke....

(Of course, there's a reserve on it too, which has not yet been met.  My guess is it's probably close to the $275 BIN price.  If we had the money, it'd possibly be better to try for the one that's $199 with one bid -- or perhaps wait for one to be listed with a reasonably low BIN like the first one.)