Somehow I missed this Bruce Sterling SxSW preview. Oh, and I also missed the whole Chu Mei Feng deal, too.

It’s obvious you’ve been doing too much programming when you start putting curly braces around your paragraphs when you write.

bitterlemons.org is a site that presents articles from both sides of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. They’re just getting started, but if they can really publish interesting stuff every week, the site should be quite useful. (Thanks, Romain.)

Ted Koppel defends Nightline on the NYT op-ed page:

But I have one complaint — and that is about the anonymous suggestion from one of our corporate executives, quoted in The Times, that “Nightline” has lost its relevance. Another unnamed executive implied that the program is no longer competitive or profitable — both assertions are demonstrably untrue — but relevance is a more subjective matter. I would argue that in these times, when homeland security is an ongoing concern, when another terrorist attack may, at any time, shatter our sense of normalcy, when American troops are engaged in Afghanistan, the Philippines, Yemen and Georgia, when the likelihood of military action against Iraq is growing — when, in short, the regular and thoughtful analysis of national and foreign policy is more essential than ever — it is, at best, inappropriate and, at worst, malicious to describe what my colleagues and I are doing as lacking relevance.

Steve Ballmer says that the sanctions requested by the 9 holdout states in the anti-trust trial would kill Microsoft. Sounds perfect.

I’m in love with the XML::Simple module for Perl. It’s amazingly useful for a certain class of tasks.

Paul Boutin on the state of the wi-fi world. My next tech purchase is going to be a wi-fi card and hub.

The Economist has a decent summarization of the changes President Bush proposes to welfare reform.

Spinsanity picked up the absurd backlash against Democratic skepticism about the future of the “war on terror” (I wish I could come up with a better name). They cite a quote I hadn’t yet seen:

Meanwhile, Rep. Thomas Davis, R-Va., head of the Republican House Campaign Committee, claimed Daschle’s “divisive comments have the effect of giving aid and comfort to our enemies by allowing them to exploit divisions in our country.”

The Davis quote is interesting because it is a flat out accusation of treason against Tom Daschle. What a sleazeball. Here’s the text from Article 3, Section 3 of the Constitution:

Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.

A reader sent along a pointer to one of the facilities where the shadow government is probably ensconced: the Mount Weather Special Facility, in western Virginia.