James Bamford’s op-ed in the New York Times today questions whether the utility of spy-plane missions outweighs the risks and cost in human lives of those missions.

Amazon.com is finally assimilating Bibliofind. That’s too bad.

This, my friends, is what we refer to as desecration.

Nationalize Salon! is a modest proposal by David Propson.

Microsoft is cleaning up the big mess with their Passport Terms of Service.

David Plotz is a bit disturbed by Dubya’s hyper-promotion of baseball now that he’s President. There’s no bigger baseball fan than me, and even I find his obsession with baseball more than a bit disturbing (and unseemly). Memo to Dubya: shilling for your favorite professional sports league is not one of the jobs of the President.

The inimitable Larry Wall is finally writing up the design of Perl 6 in a series of “apocalypses,” one corresponding to each chapter of the camel book. He’s just released Apocalypse 1. It is, of course, a must read for Perl programmers.

Everyone’s linking to this Ask Tog column on Replay TV (as evidenced by the fact that it’s currently redirecting to an alternate page), but I think it’s too important to pass up. The question he poses is a good one for the age of automatic software updates:

Unless people are protected from purposeful and involuntary downgrades in the usability of already-purchased products, we will see a deterioration of consumer rights unimagined before. “Buyer Beware!” is one thing, but how can you beware of what the manufacturer will do to damage or degrade your product years after you bought and paid for it?

The big issue for the Naughties* seems to be control of information. The ongoing MPAA and RIAA war on consumers is, or course, an excellent example, but there are others as well. Major League Baseball is attempting to restrict how newspapers can use photographs they take at baseball games. Remember when people used to say “information wants to be free” with a straight face?

Steve Champeon’s wrapup of SXSW for O’ReillyNet is really good, even if it isn’t really about SXSW. It’s kind of a state of the Web industry address, and in my opinion, is right on the money. My parents ask me about the Web all the time now that every greedy financier on CNBC is running it down, and I ask them, “Do you think more or less people will be using the Web next year?” The Web is here to stay, even if most of the companies founded to take advantage of it aren’t. I think that’s just fine.