A solution to the Middle East conflict

Lots have been said and written about the Israel-Palestinian conflict and this article is no different in that respect, but I also have a concrete proposal for a solution which I think will make lasting peace in the region. In my humble opinion it's necessary to separate israelis and palestinians physically in a lasting way, and impossible to do so within Israel. In other words, the palestinians need their own country outside Israel.

It is time to stop just talking and begin acting. I refer to the map below and without further ado I will present my proposal in short form.

1. All hostile operations from both parties will stop and talks about a peace treaty will begin.

2. Egypt will give the palestinians the Northern Sinai Governorate (blue borders) as their new Palestine land.

3. The Palestinians will cease all claims on the Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem and other parts of the West Bank area.

4. Jordan will give the West Bank area (green borders) to Israel.

5. Israel will build and operate a train line from the new Palestine to East Jerusalem, for pilgrims to visit the ancient Mosque.

6. Israel, with the help of the world, will finance the building of 100,000 new housing units each year for the palestinians in the new Palestine, for a period of ten years.

7. Israel will finance and arrange for the palestinians to move from Israel to Palestine, as the housing there are ready to move into. After a period of ten years all palestinians will have left Israel.

8. Israel will recognize the new Palestine as a sovereign state with the right to exist, with its new borders.

9. The new Palestine will recognize Israel as a sovereign state with the right to exist, with its new borders.

10. The arab world will recognize the new Palestine and Israel as soveregn states with the right to exist, with their new borders.

11. The United Nations and the world at large will recognize the new Palestine and the new borders of Israel.

12. The parties involved will sign a peace treaty.

Elite: Dangerous

A new and exciting online space game is coming soon to a PC near you -- Elite: Dangerous (ED). It's a space simulator for PC, containing millions of procedural generated star systems to explore. Take a ship and 100 credits, and set out into the unknown. Make your own destiny!

2014 is going to be such a great year for the space simulator genre. Both Star Citizen and Limit Theory are already funded and will be made. Now Elite: Dangerous needs your support to be made.  

In ED you can choose what you want to do and who you're going to be. You can be a merchant or trader, a mercenary or bounty hunter, an explorer who discovers new star systems, or perhaps you want to be a pirate? Through Internet you connect to this huge online universe with thousands of other players you can work with or fight against. And why not bring a friend or two with you? Friends can team up and create their own teams, or join an already established team.

Just 9 days before the funding campaign ends on Kickstarter, ED has collected £956,542 of its goal of £1,250,000. ED will go in alpha in about a year from now, and beta a couple of months later.  Then, in March 2014 it is scheduled for release!  If ED sounds like a game you want to play, pledge a few pounds on Kickstarter today! I recommend the £90 tier, which is really good value!

Take a few moments now to look at a couple of stunning ED videos. What you see here is from the real game.

There's a lot more information to read and videos to watch on Kickstarter.

This is a big opportunity for everyone who loves space simulators. ED is already a working model today.  It looks really great from what we've seen so far.  Frontier has worked a long time with this and now asks for a little help to finish what they've started.  It's only a few days left now on Kickstarter.  Hurry before January 4th!


Kickstarter: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1461411552/elite-dangerous
Main website: http://elite.frontier.co.uk/

Star Citizen

Something wonderful has happened -- Chris Roberts, the man behind Wing Commander, is creating a new game: Star Citizen!  For those of us who love space simulators, this is what we've waited for a long, long time.  We thought the genre was dead.  There have not been a good space simulator game in years and years on the PC.  So this is very exciting!

There will be a single player game, called Star Citizen -- Squadron 42, and also an online part where you can fly freely around in a persistent universe.

You may be a soldier in the squadron 42; an explorer who travels to unknown star systems; you can mine minerals and sell them as raw material, or you can produce goods from them; you may want to be a mercenary or bounty hunter; or perhaps you want to be a pirat?  There are many roles and occupations!

Take a look at the trailer video below.  The graphic details are unbeleivable! And so will the game be.

There are many more videos of Star Citizen on Youtube, like for instance this extended trailer:

... and the gameplay, explained by Chris Roberts himself:

You will notice that the game is not just on the drawing board, it has already developed into an internal pre-alpha testing model.  The first official alpha version will be released to backers of the project (yes, you can!) in about 12 months -- November 2013.  Then probably more alphas, and beta(s).  The final game is scehduled to be released about one year after the first alpha, in November 2014.  So two years to wait ... but, as I said, backers can play it before that!

So what is a backer?  Well, it's you and me funding the project.  If you pledge for a small amount of money ($35 or more), you get a free copy of the game when it's finished, your own ship, access to alphas and betas, some credits to use in the game, and much more!  There are many pledge levels.  Go to the webiste and look at the packages and included ships, and decide what you will contribute with to the project.  If you want, you can also do this on Kickstarter.  All pledgers receive their Star Citizenship card in the snail mail in about a month.

NOTE: The funding process on Internet will finish on November 19, so you much pledge before that date if you want a personal ship reserved for you and all the other goodies I mentioned above!

Oh, and did I mention that pledgers will have lifetime insurance on their ship(s)?  That's right.  Plus you get a free repair bot in your garage, and more!

Chris Roberts and his team can explain this game and universe much better than me, so go to the website and look for yourself!

Main website: https://www.robertsspaceindustries.com/star-citizen/?rid=47093
Kickstarter: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cig/star-citizen

EDIT: Fixed a link. (2012.11.03, 07:14am Zulu)

Ego the Size of a Planet

You know, sometimes I curse my parents for giving me too much upbringing.  Then, a nanosecond later, I realize (again) they're not to blame.  Most probably.  Or maybe.  I'm not sure.  It's my own fault.  Sort of.  I don't know ... and I never will, that's the real truth.

The topic is egoism ant thoughtlessness and why I see it everywhere, every day.  Is it just me, or do other people make the same type of observations?  I mean, it's getting on my nerves.  I want to block it out and be "normal"!  Why do I have to be bothered by witnessing how other people bulldozer their way through life?  Why can't I just ignore it and mind my own business?  Yes, I want to but it's just easier to say than do.

I'm talking about people who park in handicap spots at the mall; people who uses two parking spots at the mall; people who loses a bag of return bottles on the floor inside the mall and just picks up the bottles that are still whole, while leaving the cleanup to the staff; people who sneak in the queue; people who talk so loud you can hear every word even if you're on the other side of the shop; and so on, and so on.

And this is just some examples from the mall.  It's the same in most other scenes of life too - at work, at school, in the cinema, you name it.

Why are they doing this?  Don't they care about how they stand out in public?  Or are they just not thinking?  Don't they have an upbringing?  Why can't people behave properly?  Is it so hard?  And why do they have to irritate me - I just want to be left alone?

You may say, "Oh, but there are always some people who do such things, but most people are really not like that."  Really?  I wish I could meet you then, at the mall, and the people you refer to, because they're not that many where I put my shoes.

Why can't other people be more considerate?  For me it's the most natural thing in the world to take consideration of the people around me.  I'm brought up to be an oiled cog wheel in the society, not sand in the machinery.  I beleive this is necessarry if we are going to live close to each other.  And in that respect we don't have a choice.  This is the only planet we have.  Everybody can't just walz around doing what they please, thinking they're alone on the planet and don't have to think about other people.  If they think they're alone, then they have an ego as large as the whole planet.  A planet for themselves ...

Guns & Roses

In my post yesterday I didn't mention gun control as one of the means to stop violence, for one simple reason: I want to write a whole blog entry about that topic.

My posision on this issue is clear: we must restrict people's access to guns more.

This decision has not come easy for me.  My gut feeling tells me it's not the weapon, but the man behind the weapon that is dangerous.  Furthermore, grownup people should take responsibility for their own actions.  However, I've come to realize that "grownups" is just a technical term for someone past the age of judicial maturity.  In reality many people are irresponsible and can't make logical decisions.  So we have to protect ourselves from their possible actions towards us.  We even have to protect them from themselves.

Many years ago, my best friend shot his brains out with a revolver.  He was a member of a pistol club, but didn't attend meetings there.  The police knew about that.  Another member of the same club was a local policeman.  The police also knew that my friend wasn't entirely stable.  So they were thinking about taking the magnum revolver away from him.  While they were thinking about this, he killed himself.

Why didn't the police act before?

Why haven't we learned anything from this incident, and many more like it?

As I lay down a rose on my friend's grave, I can't stop thinking that he would've lived today if he didn't have access to a gun.  I'm sure of that.  Maybe 68 people at Utøya would've lived today too, if last week's terrorist couldn't get his hands on a gun.

Let's face it: very few people need to own a gun at home.  So let us purge the society for civil guns.  Let us make new laws that restrict the new licences for guns to those who really need it, and prove they can handle it.  That'll reduce the gun count to a fraction of what it is today.  As it should be.  The police should carry arms, not civilians.

Still pouring down

As most other people I'm still kinda dazed after the shock.  I'm talking about the terror in Norway at July 22, just a week ago.  It's time to begin thinking about what to do next.

How will this affect the norwegian society in the long run?  What is the right thing to do now?  I guess the answers to these questions depends on who you are and what you mean.  My personal opinion is that we have to do a lot to try and prevent this tragedy from ever happening again.

• Give the police more resources - the people, tools, and money they need to do a proper job.  This means more sivil surveillance, better computer systems, more helicopters, armed officers at all times, more police in the streets, and so on.
• Norway should have a prison sentence type which lasts a lifetime, that is a sentence which the prisoner will be in jail until he/she dies.
• The judicial system should be changed, so that if one has killed many people, one should get sentence time added for each and every killing, not just one of them.
• The judicial system is too much geared towards rehabilitation and a humanized prison time.  The problem with this, in combination with short sentence times, rebate on multiple crimes, liberal leave practises, and the lack of a revenge element in norwegian law, to name just a few, is that people in general lose respect for the judicial system and also criminals.  It's a joke and everybody laughs - the criminals laugh of joy and other people laugh of despair and disbeleif.
• Somehow we must be able to spot young people going off track, and try to correct them before they go amok against the society.  Do we have the means and methods to do that today?  I doubt it.  We can do better.  My personal opinion is that upbringing is a key element.  It's important that everybody is taking part in a child's upbringing.  The school must work with the parents, the sports club must work with the parents and the school, and so on.
• Yes, we must also strengthen the democracy.  Include people more in processes, be more open and available, and enlighten people better on democratic processes, to name a few.  I hope the Prime Minister's talk about a better democacy and a more open society isn't just words.

So far, the aftermath debate has not been good, in my opinion.  For instance, people have unintentionally formed "This is what we think and so should you!" circles in online fora.  The tone is very agressive towards people with original thoughts, who they disagree with or don't understand.  I'm not talking about extreme views, but ordinary opinions who should not receive such reactions.  It's sad if a we-stick-together-now feeling should result in what we see now.  It's going the opposite way of more openness.