General

I got a rather disturbing movie showing the recordings of an Apache helicopter's nightvision camera. What you can see is an Apache shooting 3 soldiers (I don't exactly know, but these pictures seem to be from Iraq, since one of the soldiers is waving with a typical scarf) with the Apache's 30 mm chain gun. This video even shows evidences of war crimes (I marked it bold in the transcript). Here my transcript of the radio communications you can here:



[can't understand] and roger.

laser range arm. outta range. fuck. range auto. right, got all the range on it.

roger. hit it.

good.

second one. hit the other one. the truck.

right, he was moving by the truck.

hit the truck, sir? is there anybody in the truck, waitin' (?) or moving?

not seein' any.

store that, auto range store.

oh, there's a guy moving right there.

firing. hit it.

target four. we'll take the other truck.

roger. wait [can't understand] by the truck.

right there.

roger.

he's wounded.

hit it.

hittin' the truck.

the truck and him! go forward and hit it.

roger.



They were shooting at a wounded enemy soldier. War is dirty, but does it have to be so dirty that US-american soldiers have to shoot at wounded soldiers using 30 mm bullets, literally letting them explode?

I'm getting forced into drawing Nassi-Shneiderman diagrams for the bubblesort algorithm. It somehow makes me feel like 15. About 5 years ago I had to do that the first time, and here in vocational school, it's not getting any better.

Currently I'm experiencing how a teacher can teach relational databases the wrong way. It's virtually impossible to explain how to bring a table into the first normal form without explaining what a primary key and a foreign key is. So nobody understood what it's actually about (except for those who knew what relational databases are all about), no, it confuses them more than it actually helps.


Her style of drawing entity relationship diagrams is also really strange, just like Access does it. That really sucks IMHO. I wish she'd use the style that I learned a few years ago at HTL Leonding. She also praises Visio to be the best tool around for drawing ERDs. I simply cannot agree. Unfortunately OmniGraffle only supports this strange "crow foot" notation for relations, which I don't like, either.