Dan Gillmor on the HP-Compaq merger: “This deal seems borne more of despair than daring.”

The Bush administration seems to be working on some sort of quid pro quo with China where we publicly approve of their expanding their nuclear arsenal and they accept the fact that we build a missile defense system. In other words, we tell them it’s OK to build enough weapons to overwhelm any defense system we might build in exchange for them agreeing to our building of such a system. That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. Have we thought at all about what the effect on other countries will be if two of the most powerful countries in the world agree that a return to expansion of nuclear arsenals is a good thing? Oh, and in the meantime, we’re talking about OKing a resumption of underground nuclear testing by China and potentially the United States.

Daniel Gross discusses Little Magazines and the future prospects for TheStreet.com and Salon in a Tom Paine article. It includes this nice turn of phrase:

So you won’t get rich. So what. The game has changed. It’s no longer “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” It’s “Survivor.”

There are a couple of national missile defense related items in a recent RISKS digest. My latest idea is that I agree to protect the country from nuclear attack and the government gives me the money they’re spending to test NMD systems. I feel that the likelihood of protection is about the same, and I’ll be much better off in the end.

The Russian Foreign Ministry is warning computer experts against travel to the United States.

Wired News is running an article today on the security risks of running computers configured for corporate use at home. It seems like a strange angle for a story to me — I think that most home and office computers are uniformly insecure. Unless you take affirmative steps to secure your PC, it’s probably insecure, no matter how it was originally set up. The thing that irritates me about most news reports on security stuff is that they seem to really be about the people quoted in them raising their own profiles.

Huge IT news today: HP is buying Compaq for $25 billion. My prediction is that this merger is going to work out about as well as Daimler-Benz’s takeover of Chrysler — in other words, it’s going to be a disaster. Compaq didn’t help themselves out by buying out Tandem and Digital a few years ago, and I don’t see how HP is going to get better by buying out Compaq. The company expects to save $2.5 billion by the middle of fiscal 2004 despite the fact that the costs of merging these two monsters are going to be huge.