Monday, March 24, 2003

Demand full news coverage from the U.S. press As I wrote earlier today - I am off my war protesting mode until our troups are safely home. In a democracy, I feel that it is absolutely vital that we all get well rounded and accurate information. In particular, in addition to knowing how our troups are doing, we should know about civilian casualties in Iraq and surrounding countries. No one wants civilian casualties (both from direct fire and soon, due to lack of drinking water, etc.) but to be honest, that is part of any war. Every aspect of the war must be fairly and accurately covered. After this war, when we get our troups back safely home, we will have to re-integrate with the rest of the world (I hope we do!). To do this, we will have to honestly look back and understand the good things that we accomplished (a free Iraq) as well as the costs in human life. I have great faith that the U.S., English, and Australian troups will take every care to safeguard civilian lives. I think that most civilian casualties will be the result lack of safe drinking water and from air attacks. Let's all pray that a minimum of lives are lost, both our troups and civilians. A good source of news is Google News because they automatically collect news feeds from many countries. 4:24:22 PM

Interesting Microsoft stuff My wife and I were guests at a friend's home in Los Angeles this weekend. Another guest included a senior Microsoft executive on the .Net project. It was interesting to compare J2EE and .Net with someone who is driving innovation in .Net. One of the novel things he mentioned was possibly using SOAP for all granularities RPC (e.g., inside the same CLR instance, between instances on the same computer, across networks, etc.). Anyway, it was a lot of fun talking with him. BTW, Robert is in charge of XML web services. I added Web services to a commercial Java app server, so we had lots of overlap in interests, but on different platforms. 8:18:30 AM

Probably time to stop the war protesting My wife and I, even though there were some valid reasons for "hurrying up" this war, protested to wait for the UN inspection regime. I know from talking with a family member who was in the gulf war that it can demoralize troups when they hear of war protests back home. In my opinion, it is best to stop the protesting for now, and after the troups are safely home, then this will all be history and we can continue to analyze the motives for going to war and the effectiveness of our current strategy. 8:03:45 AM

© Copyright 2003 Mark Watson. Last update: 9/16/03; 7:35:15 AM.