Jon "Maddog" Hall Lauretta p. 4
Cloud Computing the Xen Way Stephen Spector p. 14
ENGLISH VERSION
Hiroshima & Nagasaki Diego Maggi Wulff p. 22
VO L I N 5
Technology for punitive purposes
editorial
War Reflexions The wind blowing... the leaves flying ...
fathers bury their sons". Herodotus
mains more important than eye co-
... the smell of ashes...the solitude left. War. This year we wanted to open the 2010 wishing you prosperity and the best news for a good start, so to speak, but without ignoring important issues for reflection, in these times of globalization, speed, progress and major technological steps. Garnish difficult times with punitive contributions have indeed a bitter taste, but every hero and every fighter has left its mark, his trail, his breath and even his blood for an idea. Latinux Magazine wants, this time, to show different facets of a topic as controversial as it is the war. Here the diversity of thoughts of the heroes and villains who wrote the story, who lived and fought battles from different eras, from the error, from ideological climates and, from justice. Everyone thinks as he/she prefers, in the end the wars and their heroes can make use of songs, paintings and poets to reflect their experiences, but you will be the one justifying or not the facts. Here the thoughts of famous history's ideologists: (Note: These notes will be food for thought for our readers)
"War is, in an increasing proportion, not a struggle but an extermination of the art". Karl Jaspers "Only a war that can human beings afford: the war against extinction". Isaac Asimov "War can kill you, but living without a victory, without glory is to die every day". Napoleón Bonaparte "If you wish for peace, prepare for war". Séneca "All wars since the beginning of civilization, are made with blood, are the same, only with different explanations". Samuel Fuller "Politics is war without bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed. Mao Tse Tung "When the rich wage war, it's the poor who die. Jean Paul Sartre "In every war everybody loses, but your failure is sweeter if you triumph over your enemy. Respect for the rights of others means peace". Benito Juárez "The wonderful thing about war is that each murderers' commander makes them bless their flags and solemnly invoke God before going to exterminate their neighbors. Voltaire "The man who love civil war is a man without family ties, homeless and without law". Homero "Mothers of dead soldiers are the judges of the war". Bertolt Brecht "Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind". J. F. Kennedy "Wars will continue while skin color re-
lor". Bob Marley "The truth is inside us. Do not look for it outside ourselves and fighting violently foreign enemies". Mahatma Gandhi. Food for thought, indeed.
"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones". Albert Einstein "War: a massacre of people who don't know each other for the profit of people who know each other but don't massacre each other". Paul Valèry "In peace, sons bury their fathers. In war,
Mariana Henríquez (Venezuela) mhenriquez@latinux.org
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content
Editorial p. 1
"Título" Ricardo Strusberg
the strange world of manuelete p. 16
"War Games" Manuel Morán
In touch p. 4
"Jon Maddog Hall" Lauretta
"History of the virus, because this is a war " Panlo Navarro
p. 6
"Open Source Maturity Model (OSMM)" Felipe Cabada
p. 8
"Linux Free as Freedom" Peter Salus
p. 10
"Cloud Computing The Xen Way" Stephen Spector
p. 14
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p. 18
"Heinlein Citizen: Homo Bellum" Christian Bogado Marsá
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sci-fi
Technology Kiosk "Military technology" Martín Goldin
p. 20
The Hidden side of technology "Hiroshima & Nagasaki" Diego Maggi Wulff
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p. 22
content
Comicnology
Directory
p. 24
p. 25
Editor in Chief Ricardo Strusberg Associate Editor Mariana Henriquez Illustration and Graphic Design Christian "Xenmut" Bittkau Giancarlo Sebastiani Mariana Henriquez Layout Gustavo Maggi Translation Martha Romero Pedro Bernardez Administration Jacqueline Perez de Strusberg
For local contacts: brasil@latinuxmagazine.com chile@latinuxmagazine.com colombia@latinuxmagazine.com puertorico@latinuxmagazine.com republicadominicana@latinuxmagazine.com mexico@latinuxmagazine.com uruguay@latinuxmagazine.com usa@latinuxmagazine.com venezuela@latinuxmagazine.com
LATINUX CLUSTER Sponsored by: Latinux Cluster The Cluster Latinux is an enterprises, educational institutions and consultants network specialized in solutions based in free technologies, including consulting and training for these solutions.At the same time, it focuses in consulting, support, maintenance, developing and enterprises solutions installation services based in free technology worldwide. Inside business opportunities opened from Latinux, one is to cover the no satisfied demand from organizations, companies and governments related to free software development and the chance to take advantage of products and services with a specific local success or in a whole conglomerate acting area.All Latinux participant enterprises are well established in their own working area and all have a long experience with free technology.
LATINUX PRESS Published by: Latinux Press, a Division of Latinux Inc. Address: Avenida Samuel Lewis, Edificio Central, PH. Panama City, Panama .. Phone: + 1 305 517-1853 E-mail: info@latinuxpress.com Latinux Magazine is not responsible for the content posted. No information about the responsibility of the authors and / or associates mentioned herein.
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Jon Maddog Hall WEAPONRY TECHNOLOGY AND FREE SOFTWARE. Maddog is a "computer Guru" who knows the world and is President and Executive Director of Linux International. Hall has made a career and a life around software libre, it is his heart and purpose in his life trajectory. Maddog is dedicated to raising awareness of the benefits of using the Linux operating system. Lauretta: What is your opinion about using technology for advances in weaponry; you know, the military sector? Maddog: I know there are a lot of people that, especially in the early days of free software, said “I do not want my software used if somebody’s going to make money with it and I don’t want my software to be used by the military.” The unfortunate part of that philosophy is that you could use a hammer to build a house or you can use a hammer to kill somebody. Do we stop making hammers because we’re afraid that someone’s going to kill somebody? You know, the military is not an evil thing, necessarily. There are a lot of people that go into the military becau-
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se they feel that they’re defending their country. The military is often used in times of some distress such as hurricanes and things like that. The military steps in to keep the order and help people. You know, the military is not evil. And so to say to them that they can’t use free software because they’re the military, I think is short sighted. You cannot guarantee morality in technology. We have to teach people to be moral people. And therefore technology is not a thing
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which we should be limiting. We should
it is not technology who is the bad
be teaching people the right way of having a life. So I think that there are some people like Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds, who when they were thinking about this they realized that you have to be able to use the software for any purpose. And for you to say— you know, to try and limit it, after a while, nobody could use any software for anything. “I don’t want people who are black, single mothers to use my software. I don’t want people (..)—” No, you can’t do that. That’s why one of the rules, one of the laws of the software is to be able to use the software for any purpose.
people thing here. It is whether or not society has been successful in its purpose of teaching us how to be moral human beings. Lauretta (Venezuela) lauretta@latinuxmagazine.com
Lauretta: Well, then it is clear that human beings are the ones who will provide the proper or improper use of such technology, perhaps because this is in part a social and educational foundation? Maddog: When a child is first born they’re all ego. "Feed me!" "Let me go to the bathroom, I want to poop!" Okay? They know nothing about society, they know nothing about you. All they know is eating, pooping, whatever. I should have said “id” instead of “ego”. The "id" is the thing that keeps something alive. It is only over time that we create the ego; the thing which is really us. And it is society who teaches that. It is society who tells us the right way to go. It is society who gives us education. It is society who is responsible for teaching us how to use free software. And
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Viruses' History: Because this is a War There are, right now, hundreds of thousands of viruses around the net ... so many that there is no antivirus able to defend against this threat. This is extremely dangerous, because we are talking about programs that can even delete data on your hard drive. And all this, which is worrying, leads me to question why all this came about. What is the interest of a programmer in writing a virus to harm others? While thinking about this, I started researching about these undesirables, and I realized I knew nothing about them ... did you know that they date back to the early 80s? This is why I want to make a small chronology of the virus since its birth and those viruses known to have shaken the world ... and I am not exaggerating.
Trojan horses: Trojans, as they are known, are types of malicious software that appear harmless, but often run hidden within the system and allows remote access to it. Worms: Worms are programs that are designed to copy themselves as they go
DO NOT LET THE VIRUS MAKE FUN OF YOU velop techniques for defending against them. To this day, he has over one hundred software security-related publications to his credit, and is the Head of the Cyber Defenders at the University of New Haven, California, assigned to investigating these issues. One thing is clear after what Fred Cohen did. Computing will never be the same ...
The First Virus November 10, 1983 is viruses' day 0. Fred Cohen, a student at the University of California showed in a Lehigh University security seminar in Pennsylvania that it is possible to access computers without their users' permission ... all with a code. The experiment was simple: he managed to insert a code written for this purpose in a system and take control of it, not once but four times. Later, he undertook a thesis based on a demonstration about creating computer viruses. Viruses were categorized into three types, a classification still standing to this day:
from one computer to others in large quantities. As their replication capacity is so high, they are able to reduce considerably the speed of a connection to fully occupy its traffic. Virus: a virus is a program that not only replicates, but also infects. It has the capacity to damage both software and files. Its severity varies. But Fred Cohen wasn't just the first to create viruses; he was also the first to de-
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Brain, Jerusalem and IBM In December 1986 viruses began to gain real importance. This is the same year when the brothers Basit and Amjad Alvi from Pakistan created the Brain virus, considered the first destructive and harmful virus. It was created in the city of Lahore, Pakistan, and infected the boot sector of floppy disks.
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At this point you may ask: "How did it spread through other computers?" Well, it turns out that these brothers were selling pirated copies of programs (imagine that even in those years this was already an issue ...) at very low prices, and within those copies were this virus they created. In this way they managed to infect 20,000 computers (IBM data speak of 360 thousand computers). A nice figure, considering how few computers existed those days.
realized the great danger in which they were, and decided to instruct an entire department for the virus area. Its name?: the High Integrity Computing Laboratory. But the blow to viruses didn't come from them ... The Birth of Defense: the Antivirus that Fred Cohen is the founder of virology for two reasons: * He was the first to apply the term "virus" to software and to develop a system of classifying different types of viruses. * He laid the foundations for the existence of viruses as a defined and classified entity.
But this story does not end there. It turns
Pablo Navarro (Chile) Geeks & Linux Atelier pablo.navarroguerra@gmail.com
out that the Brain code was altered in the U.S., giving birth to ever more dangerous variants thereof. One of these variants, called Jerusalem, damaged .exe files and took control of them, reinfecting the system each time the user used that extension. Thus, it was on its way to making computers unusable. The origin of its name is because it was discovered and isolated in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1987. But by then it had already infected the U.S., Europe and the Middle East . Another variant of Brain, called Cascade, infected IBM in 1988, and incidentally contaminated many of its customers. It was at that time when IBM
Dr. Alan Solomon, a programmer, began to disassemble these codes and create tools for detecting and disinfecting viruses that laypeople could use. In 1988 he created and released the first antivirus known as "Dr. Solomon's AntiVirus Toolkit ". Significantly, it was widely used until it was purchased by the Network Associates Inc. (NAI) company, creators of the popular Scan program. When the antivirus appeared, many people thought the problem had been solved ... They did not realize how naive they were. Because it's true: they had won the battle but not the war. Well, here is the first part of this story, which is far from over. In the next article we'll talk about the counterattack, which was more devastating than the content you just read. See you next time! As the writer of this article, I believe
REFERENCES -http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Cohen -http://www.virusprot.com/virusinformรกticos/historia-virus/Historia2.html -http://www.research.ibm.com/antivirus/ti meline.htm&ei=wq8mS9qEOY2JoAfI1u 3YAg&sig2=7gS_AxyitsWrzIGzz7HUA&ct=w More references in html version. Page Page
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Open Source Maturity Model (OSMM)
As is known, in educational institutions and enterprises, the problem of viruses has been critical related to the performance of their equipment, such as was mentioned in the previous issue. A software libre antivirus software can be used to avoid licensing fees. Next we will detail using OSMM methodology to justify the formal part of the selection of an SL antivirus tool.
The OSMM methodology Challenges Facing the user when choosing a software product: 1. The challenge faced by organizations when assessing whether a particular Open Source product is feasible or not, differs significantly from its commercial counterpart. 2. The organization's key challenge, in choosing a commercial package, is to "identify" the seller offering the most comprehensive product: software, support, training, etc.. 3. The users' key challenge for "Open Source" is to locate and evaluate individual elements of the product to assemble a complete product, one that meets all the needs of the organization.
when choosing between a wide range of products with different capabilities. Model Parameters: An "Open Source" can not be introduced at a workplace only assessing their strengths and weaknesses. To evaluate a product it should also take into account issues related to present and future demands of users.
1. 1. The OSMM model (Open Source Maturiy Model) Developed by Capgemini consultans enables it to determine the right product to use. This model serves to compare and decide which solution is the ideal SL to be implemented in the organization. Allows you to make a balanced assessment
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SOFTWARE MATURITY MODEL AVAILABLE IN THE SELECTION OF AN ANTIVIRUS
Product indicators: 1.Product 2.Integraci贸n 3.Use 4.Acceptance Each of these groups comprises a number of indicators, which make up the score of the product. Some aspects to consider in the process are: 1. Technological: We have the source code, it can be adapted and modified according to the needs of the entity and provides technology enrichment for the entity. 2. Security: With access to source code and knowing what it does, the user will know conclusively if the software is as safe as they say. The user makes sure
the code does what he must do and has no malicious code. 3. Training: We talk of "investment" in regard to user training in the use of such software, the skills being acquired today will serve for the future and the programs do not change by trade issues. 4. Compatibility: When storing, always, the data in a standard format, even with more evolved versions available you can always access information. 5. Update: As updates are not dependent on commercial interests but the entity need of them, there are not need to make updates if they aren't needed. 6. Costs: The entity is free to install the software on all machines it wants, the software cost can be zero, or a distribution can be pay for. 7. Hardware: By not being required to do software updates there are not requirements to do hardware upgrades, thus Software Libre will provide the possibility of re-using the obsolete hardware. 8. Expiration: You can use the software version you want as long as you wish and be able to recruit anyone to support it. 9. Standards: It gives the user the possibility to move in a huge range of applications. Results: After having detailed each of the OSMM methodology aspects
evaluated, the following is the formal part behind the results found in the article of the previous issue. Documents can be downloaded from the following address: http://www.siitne.com.mx/documentos/osmm. Step 1: Choose the three best positioned on SourceForge: Clamwin, AV MoonSecur Simple Machine Portect, see document Name: lista_antivirus.pdf, and his technical specifications ficha_clamwin.pdf, ficha_moon.pdf y ficha_simplepm.pdf Step 2: Application of the methodology OSMM to each of the antivirus software, see the documents osmm_clamwin.pdf, osmm_moon.pdf and osmm_simplepm.pdf Step 3: The comparison and theresults: Noting the results we can conclude that the solution ClamWinFree Antivirus gained more successes so this item is better positioned. Felipe Cabada (Mexico) fcabada@latinu.org
Comparative Summary of Solutions Integration Vs General Requirements
Antivirus
Requirements to comply
ClamWinFree Antivirus
37
Moon Secure Antivirus
32
Simple Machine Protect
21
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In September 1983, Richard Stallman had announced the GNU Project. And his doing so inspired cooperation that went all over via the Net. At that time, Linus Torvalds, born in Helsinki 28 of December 1969 December the 28th, 1969, was 14 years old and was "playing" with a Commodore VIC-20. Only a few years later, he spent his savings on a Sinclair QL, running at 7.5MHz with 128KB of RAM (the VIC-20 had 5K).
A few years later, Linus, by then a university student in Helsinki, inspired by a talk by Stallman, was playing with Minix, a Unix-clone written Version by Andy Tanenbaum. Linus began writing another clone. "Just for fun," he said. It begun as a terminal emulator and by 1991 Linux was available via ftp. How did it grow? Thanks to Richard Stallman, Andrew Tannenbaum and Linus Torvalds, Linux is "free as in freedom." So there is no way of knowing how many users of the many Linux versions there are. So let's look at the growth of the system itself over its first year. Also in 1992, SuSE was formed and
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A LOOK AT THE HISTORY OF LINUX
Bruce Perens produced MCC Linux. On December 8th, Adam Richter released Yggdrasil Alpha (Beta followed on
Date 17 June 1996 112 2 December 1996 5 June 1997 24 Ju uly 11998 998 July
Hat and Linux Pro. Let's look at Debian. First released by Ian Murdock, Debian has had several managers. After the movie "Toy Story" Number of software appeared (November packages included 1995), each release was named after one of the film's characters -- the last column is the number of software packages included.:
9M arch 1999 March 15 A gust 22000 000 Agust 19 July 2002 6 June 2005 8A pril 2007 April 14 February 2009
Table of evolving versions of Debian
February 18th, 1993). 1993 also saw Slackware and Debian. 1994 saw Red
By early 1996, when the First Freely Redistributable Software Conference was held by the FSF, there was quite a large GNU and Linux community. In 18 years, Linux has grown enormously. Today there are well over 300 distributions and the community is truly world-wide.
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Date Happy 40th Birthday, Linus! Peter H. Salus (Canadรก) peter@netpedant.com
Version
17 September 1991 5 January 1992 25 May1992
174KB compressed (with support for X Windows).
The system growth in its first year
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In memory of the fallen
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Cloud Computing The Xen W ay The Cloud Computing revolution is upon us! The computing industry is buzzing with this seemingly amazing new paradigm shift in how we compute; however, those of us in the industry realize that Cloud Computing is really just the final step in the centralization of computing power back from the PC revolution where de-centralization was the norm. Of course, this revolution is now being led by the open source community and its various solutions such as the operating system, virtualization platform, storage, and management tools. In this article, I will focus on the contributions of the open source Xen.org project and its contribution to Cloud Computing with the Xen hypervisor.
The Xen hypervisor is estimated to have about 20% of the server virtualization market and close to 100% of the existing cloud infrastructure including Amazon EC2, Rackspace Cloud Servers, and GoGrid. In August of this year the Xen.org community announced a new initiative, Xen Cloud Platform (XCP), to establish a complete open source solution with an industry supported API for Cloud Providers. XCP infrastructure will enable various other open source projects such as Eucalyptus, OpenNebula, and Nimbus to better leverage the Xen hypervisor with a new API set focused exclusively on cloud computing. “Rackspace is very excited about the direction and scope of the Xen Cloud Platform,” said Lew Moorman,
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president and chief strategy officer, Rackspace. “We have built our Cloud Servers offering on the Xen platform and are experiencing strong customer interest in this new model of hosting. The cloud will not only reduce the cost of computing but also provide instantaneous access enabling customers to improve the speed of business. It is very exciting and encouraging to see Xen.org put the full weight of the community behind the development of a cloud platform.” The Xen Cloud Platform will address the needs of cloud providers by combining the isolation and multi-tenancy capabilities of the Xen hypervisor with enhanced security, storage and network virtualization technologies to offer
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a rich set of virtual infrastructure cl services. The platform will also dress user requirements for secur availability, performance and isola across both private and public clou The project will not attempt to deve new, independent management and chestration offerings since this is area with existing rich offerings and tive ongoing development in the co munity vendors. The Xen Cloud Platform combine the mobility and openness tributes of the Xen virtualization p form with innovative storage, secu and network virtualization techno gies already under development as of Xen.org. As a result, the new p
loud adrity, ation uds. elop d ors an d acom-
will s atplaturity olopart plat-
REFERENCES For More Information on the products discussed in this article, please visit: Xen Cloud Project http://www.xen.org/products/cloudxen.html Eucalyptus Project http://open.eucalyptus.com/ Open Nebula - http://www.opennebula.org/ Nimbus - http://workspace.globus.org/ Rackspace Cloud Computing http://www.rackspacecloud.com/ form will not only address cloud provider requirements around security and isolation, but will also meet next-generation user requirements for security, availability, performance, isolation and manage between on-premise and off-premise infrastructures. In early November of this year, the Xen.org community announced XCP 0.1, a proposed virtualization solution to act as the platform for XCP 1.0. With the release of XCP 0.1, the Xen.org community invites all open source and proprietary vendors to join in the creation of an open, industry
standard solution for cloud providers. We look forward to working with other industry leaders in being a component in the coming cloud revolution. Stephen Spector (USA) stephen.spector@xen.org
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The strange world of manuelete
War Games A few days ago, without explanation, I had the great idea of letting go of my computer keyboard, leaving the house and playing foosball... which was not such a good idea after all. After I nearly broke my foot, and finally deciding that my sport is sleeping, I watched how my teammates were playing something that looked more like Star Wars than a friendly game, and I said to myself: "Games have sure changed a lot since my childhood "… Then, I went back to my house. After three quarts of water, six beers ... five minutes, going to the bathroom, three more beers and finally sitting on the throne (basically an old chair that is falling to pieces and used to rest as I write crazy things on the computer), I realized that staying competitive in today's games was something that made no sense. So I went to investigate. Long ago in this same galaxy, before ice cream was invented, people were ALREADY playing war games, just as a game . Apparently strategy, struggle, sweat and competition have always gone hand in hand. Unfortunately I could not find information backing my hypothesis that most human differences can be solved with sugar, and that those that
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can't can de definitively solved with alcohol. The first war games, which did not include physical contact of any kind, now called strategy games, where you change" body sweat" to " neural sweat”, date back to the 7th Century AD. There are myths that say that there were such games in 600 BC and 300 BC, but I think they existed before existence itself. Among the oldest are chess and GO, both Asian-born, and many variations of chess such as Shogi and Chaturanga ... and other games like Congkak. Centuries after the appearance
WHERE CHANGE THE FACTOR "BODY SWEAT" TO " NEURAL SWEAT" of these games, computers decide to make an original contribution, and humans began to manipulate code and end up making games because they have too much free time. One of the games that eventually appeared was Quake (1996). This game revolutionizes the way we see the world with its 3D graphics and multiplayer capacity. The fWar Games
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irst version didn't have that, but the game evolved and EVEN stopped being a game to become an ENGINE for other games, many of which are played today. It is a fact that most players of MMORPGS (Massively Multiplayer Role-Playing Games, usually online) reside in Asia. It is also important to note that there are games that are only released over there, most of which are translated later than sooner; the latest versions of many of them are never seen in our continent. It is important to say also that most of these games deal with themes of combat by definition ... The main objective of the majority is basically "look for monsters, kill them and level up�. The most common variation is "look for other players, kill their characters, take away their property and ultimately be the best." These acts, though frowned upon, are often a legal way of playing and nobody complains. Those who do are the first to be killed, so you have to seek alliances and create factions, and hunt in groups of forty that are organized using programs like "Ventrilo" and wage virtual wars where virtual people die, people who reincarnate and go through the streets naked, walk into a bank and inform the teller of their recent death, with the teller
understanding that this is something normal and allowing them to use their deposit in the same way as any other adventurers with or without clothes, with or without money, with or without virtual corpses. Basically, in MMORPG-type games, you assume the role of a character and interact with other characters. Because of the amount of time you spend at the computer, it doesn't matter if the games are in first, second or third person ... they are the direct descendants of the oldest strategy games in history, such as the already renowned chess. The big difference is that now you don't control entire armies, but you are part of an army that will attack another ... sometimes waiting your turn. And all this is fine, but it gets out of control sometimes. There have been people who have committed suicide because of characters lost in the limbo of the Internet, and there have people who have starved to death due to the time spent behind a screen chasing virtual enemies. These things obviously happen only in countries with a high density of players by area, and to people who definitely have had nothing better to do. This does not mean that games today are either bad or good. The games ARE and that's it; individuals are the ones making them crazy tools to make
or throw away money... I, for example, decided to avoid getting mad and only get involved with only one-player games where you control and destroy little spaceships in order to save your planet. Not planet Earth, however. In fact, the enemy's little ships probably come from there, and don't have good intentions. If they did, they would not be shooting at me with crazy rays and weapons, and would try as far as possible to park, instead of colliding directly with my hospitals and transforming them into intergalactic mush. The last game of this kind I've played is called "Space Out", and was made in Venezuela by Venezuelans ... an applause for their efforts. If you follow these simple rules, you can play EVERY video game in the universe and survive in the attempt ... hope to see you next issue with more interesting facts about this super crazy world where we live in. Thanks! Manuel MorĂĄn (Venezuela) fullthrottle.moran@gmail.com
Rules before playing video games: - That blood is not yours - Bullets hurt ... a lot - Simply by wielding a battle ax for more than six hours through hrough a fieldd ffull ull of w wild ild bbeasts, easts, without bathing, eating, and without sitting, would make a normal human hum man a hero. But But your character is NOT a normal human being - When your character dies, you can create another one; stop op crying - No matter how much magic you think you know, bullets still kill you - Unlike your character, you only have one life, and there is no "continue" - Eating mushrooms does not make you spit fire and grow - Swords that shoot bullets are very good, but they don't exist - Buy a little fridge and put it next to your computer or console. If you cannot do this, place your online games device as close possible to your home refrigerator. Preferably within.
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Citizen Heinlein: Homo Bellum "THE NOBLEST FATE THAT A MAN CAN ENDURE IS TO PLACE HIS OWN MORTAL BODY BETWEEN THE BELOVED HOME AND WAR'S DESOLATION" ROBERT HEINLEIN I consider myself a lucky man. I have not the slightest idea how to handle a war weapon, how to march or stay awake for more than 48 hours. Never in my worst nightmares it has been imminent the fact of dealings with a circumstance of war. But I know for sure that not everyone has my luck. My grandfather, my grand-grandfather, my parents and who knows how many of my ancestors had to live circumstances where the army and and war had a supreme significance. A matter of life or death. Millions of my peers daily encounter situations where violence, raw and naked power, it seems the only way out.
Peace is rather strange in the history of our species. In Rome, the temple of Janus, god of doorways, closed its doors in peacetime. It is said that in almost eight centuries of history, the temple was closed only five times. The ordinariness of war is one of the main elements in the controversial novel by Robert Heinlein Starship Troopers. For those who were born in peace, war can only be experienced through the records that others left. And as any record of human life, some are overzealous and tragically pessimistic. But others are skeptical that peace is an invention of civilians. Heinlein was a member of this group. To some extent, Heinlein invented the idea. He chose to write his latest young adult novel from a series of criticisms he made to the Ameri-
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can left wing on their requests for unilateral nuclear disarmament during the fifties. These objections were frowned upon in their social circle and within the group of science fiction writers of the time, mostly pacifists, so he felt compelled to write an entire novel to defend his ideas. "Violence, naked force, has solved has resolved more issues in history than any other factor, and the opposing view is naive thinking of the worst kind. Species that forget this basic truth always pay with their lives and freedoms "Heinlein described through Colonel Dubois, veteran teacher and principal vehicle for carrying ideas from author to reader. Someone came to categorize the novel as "a propaganda poster for recruitment of the size of a novel�. It well could be. In the U.S. military, it has become one of the most widely read novels in both levels, non-commissioned offi-
cers at the academies for officers, and for some is required reading. Loaded with patriotism, the Federation of Earth's is the product of the collapse of naive democracies of the twentieth century (for an attack by the Chinese Communists. The novel was written a couple of years after the Korean War), where a frankly militaristic government provides basic freedoms to all people, but the vote is reserved for an elite meritocratic/veteran: citizenship required military service. Assuming the military's moral superiority for having "civic virtue", meaning the ability to give their lives for the nation thy are part of, the vote must be earned. The tenth chapter begins with a strong sentence of American Founding Father Thomas Jefferson "The tree of liberty must be watered from time to time with the blood of patriots", consolidating one of the backbones of the text. Not surprisingly, it became required reading for those who decide to take the military life. It wouldn't be strange that it make them feel good about themselves. Superiors. Heinlein never saw actual combat. Joe Haldeman wrote a whole story in response to Starship Troopers. In his novel The Forever War describes in an anti-heroic way the life of a group of soldiers in the future. Joe Haldeman served and fought in Vietnam. In the 70s, when he wrote the novel, the war did not seem
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as fantastic as was described in Heinlein's story. While Heinlein does not hide the harshness and cruelty of war he always rewards their characters. Honor, glory, citizenship. The Vietnam War took from many the old prejudices of the war. Whether in space, in an Indochinese forest or at any home, victims of violence have hardly a Darwinian perspective about life. It is not about the strongest or the fittest when it comes to humans. Doing so I as naive as to imagine that violence has resolved more conflicts than any other factor. While war has been constant, the Roman maxim "If you want peace, prepare for war" is a contradiction, not only obvious, but real. The modern armies are much like the Mobile Infantry Heinlein's novel. Devices which accompany them allow to see farther, clearer, to listen better, and better communicate with their comrades. They also believe that their enemies are subhuman, freaks who will never be the same. But few could blame them. Murder has never been easy to deal with. But even though I adamantly
oppose their fascist approaches, even if you feel disgust for the glorification of something that is essentially undesirable, yet I'm not sure what I think about the heart of the novel: "The noblest fate that a man can endure is to place his own mortal body between the beloved home and war's desolation". Christian Bogado (Venezuela) inverso@gmail.com
Hugo Award for best novel in 1960 The Hugo Award is named in honor of Hugo Gernsback, founder of the pioneering science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories and the invention of the term science fiction. Prizes are awarded annually since 1953 at the World Science Fiction Convention. The design of the award is a stainless steel spaceship.
"THE TREE OF LIBERTY MUST BE REFRESHED FROM TIME TO TIME WITH THE BLOOD OF PATRIOTS AND TYRANTS. IT IS ITS NATURAL MANURE". (THOMAS JEFFERSON)
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technology Kiosk
War Technologies It’s common to hear that in every war there are only losers, but many of the most basic technologies available today were created exclusively for use against some enemy. There is a great spectrum of vehicles that were born with the battlefield in mind; that’s the history of Jeep, Hummer and sadly even Volkswagen. Such is also the case in the
world of medicine, including prosthetics of all kinds, amazing surgical and rehabilitation systems and an endless list of other contributions, originating from the consequences of war. Israel is an example, a country in permanent war that has for years been the biggest exporter of biomechanical technologies. Even the foundations of modern telecommunications were created to
TECHNOLOGIES BORN FROM THE BATTLEFIELD connect command centers with the battle front and even the Internet, through which you are enjoying this magazine, is based on the first networks created by the American defense agency known as D.A.R.P.A. (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), which still sponsors tech research in very different areas such as passive radars, unmanned vehicles and Artificial Intelligence.
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As a mental exercise, let me propose that the technologies that will invade our lives in the future be created for commercial and public use first, because although the arms race gives us many useful inventions, is not hard to see that the price we pay for it is too high. Martin G. Goldin C. (Venezuela) martingoldin@gmail.com
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the hidden side of technology
Hiroshima and Nagasaki
We believe with conviction, for example, that Hitler was a crazy megalomaniac, that the Holocaust has been the most terrible and reprehensible genocide in human history and that America was the great savior defeating the Nazis. However, there are ambiguities on many events, with the use of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki being the most controversial of all.
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From the Manhattan Project to "The Historic Decision" Before I explain about the process of carrying out the deed, you must understand the time and the historical context that formed the reason for the United States to develop a plan of study and manufacture of nuclear bombs. During 1939 and 1940 Germany had conquered half of Europe. Its military strength subjected everything in
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We might not find in history a more fascinating epic than World War II. The meaning of "maximum epic" acquired not just by the memorable battles and the destruction of "The Nazi Devil," but by the clear difference between good and bad, heroes and demons, men and beasts, even when all have been (and there it is most terrible of war) only human beings. It may be the case where this duality has been most defined. For those believers in democracy and human rights, we have been totally in favor of the Allies.
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A Never-ending Controversy
its path. France was defeated easily, like the Netherlands and Belgium, the Soviet Union had made a non-aggression pact with Germany (Hitler would break that pact in mid-1941 invading the USSR) and England was the only strong rival of h tht the nation dominated by Hitler. The g thee een nti ntire nt tire tire reat of the Nazis conquering entire w not a vague idea idea ea but b t a tangita planet was le re alit itt and the United Unit U Un nit ni n it St it Sta tat hhad to ta ble reality, States be pprepared to fight ht th ht the G be German forces. They knew they represented thee only hope of stopping the German Empire in case the British surrendered. Besides the major achievements of the Third Reich in the first two years of war, there was another threat of further danger to the future: scientific nuclear weapons development. If the Germans were able to design and build a weapon of such mass destruction, they could eliminate all the human beings who were not of Aryan race and who were against Hitler. In
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a smaller scale detonation of the bomb
self, state that Japan was doomed to be
short, the world would belong to the
has been tested on in New Mexico and
defeated and that,
will of one man.
had worked. All that remained was for
not have been necessary to use such weapons. Besides, all the dead were inno-
For all these reasons, lea-
the chief executive of the U.S. govern-
ding scientists residing in the U.S. alerted the government about the Nazi danger of nuclear development and the need to research and develop nuclear bombs from uranium. Their spokesman was Albert Einstein, who along with Leo Szilard wrote a letter to President Roosevelt about the need for nuclear development. When Einstein heard about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he said he would have preferred to have burned his hands instead of writing the letter. When the Japanese air forces attacked the American military port at Pearl Harbor in 1941, the U.S. government decided to develop a scientific-military project aimed at making the first atomic bomb. The codename for this plan was "Manhattan." Led by physicist Robert Oppenheimer, the project was put into action and settled in Los Alamos, New Mexico, away from cities. Over one hundred thousand people (more than the capacity of the Real Madrid's Santiago Bernabeu football stadium) worked in this great endeavor, but most ignored the real purpose of the work they performed. In July 1945, when German and Italian armies had surrendered and Japan was the only one who offered resistance,
ment to give the order to release the bomb in two small Japanese cities. And the order came. President Truman told the Enola Gay crew to prepare for the launch of the atomic bomb: "Proceed according to schedule, on Aug. 6”. That day the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Three days later it was dropped on Nagasaki, leading to the end of World War II. The End of the War vs. Morality The Hiroshima bomb caused about eighty thousand deaths (over 30% population of the city), of which one in four people was “volatilized”, meaning, there are no remains or trace of their bodies. The Nagasaki bomb caused another sixty thousand deaths. Between both of them, they produced more than 130 thousand serious injuries. Those who advocate the use of the atomic bomb, as did President Truman, claim that this decision prevented many more deaths than which occurred since Japan surrendered to them and their empire dwindled. They argue that if they had not used these weapons the war with Japan would have continued for another year, and what most of the world wanted was to end the most terrible war in history, regardless of the means. Critics, including Einstein him-
therefore, it would
cent, which brands the act as "slaughter". All the dead and wounded were scapegoats to achieve a desired end which could have been obtained by other means. Moreover, assuming that the United States defended human rights and especially morality, their actions in this regard are reprehensible. The White Shadows Some of the bodies that the atomic explosion vaporized functioned as screens and protected from radiation small spaces where they stood, drawing on such areas a kind of white shadows. These shadows were all that remained of them. Diego Maggi Wulff (Venezuela) diegomaggi89@gmail.com
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