Uwe Hermann | A slightly paranoid Debian developer

I stumbled over this video (5.2 MB) today, while watching videoblogs in democracyplayer (for which I'm preparing a Debian package at this very moment).

The video seems to be a bit older, and I have no idea who the original author is or what license applies to it. Anyways, it's funny, scary and very very true at the same time. Watch it.

This man really deserves our respect: Stanislav Petrov, former Russian Army colonel has quite probably saved our planet in 1983.

He has recently been awarded a special World Citizen Award at a UN meeting in New York which reads "Man Who Averted Nuclear War".

To quote mosnews.com:

Back in 1983 Petrov made a decision that prevented a war that could have destroyed the planet. He was the duty officer at Russia’s main nuclear command center in September 1983 when the system indicated a nuclear missile attack was launched by the U.S. on Russia.

[...]

The Soviet procedure manual was inflexible, and it demanded he notify his superiors of the attack immediately. But relying on his intuition, Petrov disobeyed. For almost five minutes, he stalled, holding his hotline phone in one hand and his intercom in the other, barking orders to his personnel to get back to their desks.

Then he made the decision that saved the world. Summoning up his firmest voice, he called his Kremlin liaison and said it was a false alarm. But today he admits, "I wasn’t 100 percent sure. Not even close to 100 percent".

(via Fefe)

Quick, someone send this to George W. Bush (and a bunch of similarly reality-challenged politicians around the world). Not that I think it would help any...

The War on Terror — As viewed from the Bourne shell. No comment.