The New York Times today has an article about the Carlyle Group, a 12 billion dollar private equity firm that has built its business by hiring lots of former government big shots and then investing in businesses that are associated with government (like the defense industry and telecommunications). The chairman of the company was Secretary of Defense in the Reagan administration, and George Bush, James Baker, and John Major are also on the payroll. Back when Dubya was a business failure (before his sweetheart Rangers deal), the company put him on the board of one of their companies to help him out. I’m not sure what to say about this, other than repeating the old saw: “them that has, gets.”

You know, it was OK when black people said Clinton was the first black President, but it seems stupid for Clinton to say it himself.

Declan McCullagh reviews The Lone Gunmen for Wired News. I skipped it because the season premiere of The Sopranos was on, and I didn’t feel like taping it.

I find the destruction of the enormous statue of Buddha at Bamyan by the Taliban to be one of the most stupid, outrageous, offensive things I’ve heard about in a long time. I first heard this story on NPR the other day, and I have literally been seething ever since. Destroying ancient statues for the purposes of adhering to some warped interpretation of religious dogma is just such a monument to zealotry and capriciousness. Hopefully, 2000 years from now people will look at the big gap in the side of that cliff and say to themselves, “My, what idiots the Taliban were.”

Web advertising networks are watching you. Use a browser with decent cookie management.

ONJava has a good comparison of XSP and JSP. To me, XSP seems intimidatingly complex. Is anyone using it for a real site?

More bad news on the scumbags at VeriSign and ICANN. VeriSign, as a reward for their sheer greed and incompetence, gets permanent hold of .com and long term hold on .net. More importantly (for this site), there’s talk of reimposing the old restrictions on .org domains so that they are only issued to real non-profit organizations. That would be fine with me if the idiots had accepted any of a huge number of proposals to expand the namespace beyond the pitiful number of TLDs that are currently available. I’m not in love with .org, but I’m certainly not a .net or a .com.