‘Til All Are One

I came across this article at csmonitor.com. Basically, it’s pointing out how juvenile a boycott of all words and products of French origin would be, for example renaming French fries to freedom fries. Besides, they are actually from Belgium, not France. Maybe we should call them oil fries? It only makes sense

That got me thinking. If so many Americans are eager to boycott everything French, what will they do with the admirals, commodores, brigadier generals, colonels, commanders, captains, lieutenants, warrant officers, ensigns, sergeants, corporals, specialists and airmen in their armed forces? Surely they wouldn’t want to use those in the war against Iraq? That leaves only seamen and privates for the assault (generals and majors are officers). Can they fight a battle without aeroplanes (including jets and their pilots), armour, artillery, bombs, rockets, grenades, bullets, rifles or machine guns? Can they attack without magazines or the ammunition stored inside them? And who needs soldiers, anyway? Maybe they don’t need an army, navy, air force or marines? Heck, perhaps they don’t need a military at all!

Strangely enough, weapons inspector doesn’t seem to be of French origin.

In semi-related news, Mandrake Linux 9.1 is out. OSNews has a great review of it, and Tweakhound has an informative interview with Mandrake Linux founder Gaël Duval. It looks amazing, particularly compared to 9.0, which could have been better (although I didn’t think 9.0 was nearly as bad as many reviewers did). As a side note, I clicked the "More links HERE" link at the bottom of the Gaël Duval interview and found PCLinuxOnline.com listed under "Other Good Linux Sites". Yay!!!

I’ve seen comments by some Americans advocating a boycott of Mandrake Linux because MandrakeSoft is French. To them, I have this to say: Are you really that retarded?! I mean, that’s just idiotic [see definition 2]! Free software is an international effort. Code and developers come from all over the world. The corollary of this is that most of the code in Mandrake Linux isn’t from France at all. It also means that all GNU/Linux distributions have some code that would have originated in France. Maybe you should boycott Red Hat, Debian and everyone else as well?