The Mono Project dumped the GPL for the obscure X11 license to make it easier for corporations to contribute code.

I transferred the last domain I had that was still registered with Network Solutions, and they sent me a cheery little form letter telling me how sorry they were to see me go and that I could transfer back any time. It was actually well written enough that I felt a little pang of guilt for dumping them. That is, until I remembered that they are evil, influence purchasing, customer hating, monopolistic scumbags who deserve to be run out of business as rapidly as possible.

No Pop-up Ads on Google

One of the things the Taliban are often vilified for is their utter rejection of art in all its forms. Apparently, they have company in the Bush administration. John Ashcroft has decided that he finds the sculptures in the Justice Department building’s great hall distasteful, and has installed drapery that conceals them. I guess we should be glad that he didn’t just order them to be blown up. On the other hand, Ashcroft’s decision to hide statues called the Spirit of Justice and the Majesty of Justice seems strangely appropriate, they probably don’t want to see him, either.

Phil Agre has written some interesting thoughts on Enron and markets at the top of his latest set of pointers. He also went right ahead and wrote an addendum to the piece here.

Apparently we decided that we were done waiting for those six guys who barricaded themselves in a Kandahar hospital to leave. (Update: all dead. I figured this was the likely outcome when they barricaded themselves in the hospital weeks ago.)

The New York Times has another scoop in the Enron scandal. They’ve learned that Veba, a German utility company, nixed a merger with Enron in 1999 after discovering the problems that ultimately led to Enron’s collapse (Veba’s accounting firm, PricewaterhouseCoopers, helped them out). If Veba could figure out the real financial picture at Enron from public filings by the company, so could Arthur Andersen or any number of financial journalists.

Doris Kearns Goodwin explains in Time how she accidentally plagiarized the work of another author. When you’re dealing with the amount of material she did, I can see how it could happen. Her article is also a testimony to the ways computers have made researchers’ lives easier. Scanners and word processors beat out the old pen and legal pad every time.

Dick Cheney continues to refuse to turn over any information to the General Accounting Office about his energy task force. He says that doing so makes it “virtually impossible for me to have confidential conversations with anybody,” as if he has the right or need to do so. I don’t know whether Cheney knew this when he took the job, but our elected officials are accountable to the American people. I agree that there are times when secrecy is needed, particularly when national security is at issue and lives are at stake. But we’re talking about energy policy here, not people who are infiltrating terrorist organizations.

A helicopter carrying 14 senior Russian officials blew up (or crashed) in Chechnya, killing them all. I would say that if this were an attack by Chechen rebels, things would really get bad there, but I don’t think it’s possible for them to get a lot worse. One of the reasons Russia was so supportive of our war in Afghanistan is that they want the rest of the world to back off when it comes to Chechnya. Afghanistan, Algeria, and Somalia notwithstanding, Chechnya might be the worst place on earth. (Well, there’s also Sierra Leone, and Angola, and pretty much all of the countries in the great lakes region of Africa. It’s so hard to choose.)