There’s a review of Antitrust at Advogato from a free software perspective. I have all but given up on movies about computers because I can’t suspend my disbelief well enough to enjoy them.

Sometimes the government is so ridiculous. One of the conditions of the FCC accepting the AOL/Time-Warner merger was open access to AOL’s instant messaging services — when AOL combines IM with broadband services. Ugh. What the hell does that mean? In the meantime, big corporate players like Yahoo and Microsoft have supposedly completed a unified IM standard. Why didn’t they use an existing standard? Perhaps their system will be unified but not open, which certainly won’t do anyone any good.

Robert Wright’s followup on his article about Donald Rumsfeld and missile defense. I really think that we need to carefully and realistically analyze which course of action will maximize the security of the United States. I haven’t read anything yet that leads me to believe that spending a bunch of money to build an unreliable system that will also piss off half the world is the way to go.

How do you know you’re a geek? Someone sends you a URL to a story in the National Enquirer. Instead of opening it, you look at the file extension, see that it’s .cfm, think, “That’s interesting, they use Cold Fusion,” and move on without ever seeing what’s on the page.

There’s just no greater gratification as a programmer than when you build something and it works the way you expected it to when you try to use it. This can lead to bad habits, because the more complex and baroque a thing you build, the more gratifying it is when it works properly.

MacWeek has a little preview of the Powerbook G4. I’m looking forward to a really comprehensive review, maybe Ars Technica will run a review like they one they did for the cube.

I hated the idea of missile defense under the Clinton administration, and I will hate it under the Bush administration. Unfortunately, while Clinton was toying with missile defense, Bush seems to have made it one of his highest defense priorities. Let’s pretend for a minute that it will actually work (it won’t). Even a working system would make the world a more dangerous place than a world without missile defense altogether. Slate’s Robert Wright explains a way in which the Bush administration’s obsession with missile defense will hurt international relations that I hadn’t seen discussed before. My greatest fear when it comes to missile defense is that it will actually lead people in power to believe that if we have it, we could win a nuclear war. And a war you think you can win might be a war worth having, God forbid.

“A concerted effort to `Bork’ John Ashcroft would not be well received, and I do not believe his Democratic Senate colleagues would be inclined to do that. It would really sour a major opportunity that we have here now to work together for a positive agenda for the American people.”

So, in other words, if the Democrats aren’t willing to roll over and accept the most conservative Attorney General Dubya could find, then they’re souring the bipartisan atmosphere in Washington? Interesting how that works. And what is “Borking” anyway? Asking a nominee to justify their record of extremism? Is that supposed to be a bad thing?

If you’ve ever watched the Iron Chef, you must watch Lego Chef. It’s an excellent spoof of the Iron Chef, the only place it’s lacking is in the speech by Fukui at the end, but that’s nearly impossible to duplicate.

I was surprised that during the Presidential campaign, Dubya didn’t talk more about tort reform, because when he ran for governor in Texas, it was a huge part of his platform. There’s little doubt in my mind that even though it wasn’t a big part of his campaign, it will be a big part of his legislative agenda — his corporate patrons would absolutely love nationwide tort reform. For those of you not from Texas, “tort reform” is code for “no longer holding corporations and other monied interests liable for their actions.”