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Strong opinions, weakly held

Month: May 2002 (page 4 of 11)

The rhetoric between India and Pakistan is becoming increasingly heated, and America seems to be as close as possible to turning a blind eye toward the impending conflict. An all out war between India and Pakistan is likely to feature the use of nuclear weapons and millions of civilian casualties, and it doesn’t seem like enough is being done to avert it on the diplomatic front. The Brits are sending Foreign Secretary Jack Straw to the region next week, and the US is going to send a senior envoy from the State Department, but that seems at most like a good start.

I figured out a small mystery with the Daypop Top 40 Links page today. I had been wondering for the past week or so (although not enough to actually investigate) why the link to the Pyra advertising page was near the top of the list of popular links. It just occurred to me that the reason is that Daypop can’t distinguish between items in weblogs and the links for advertising at the top of Blogspot hosted blogs, so the links at the top of those blogs that haven’t paid to get rid of advertising all count in terms of popularity. I know … duh.

Context for President Bush’s tour of Europe, courtesy of the Washington Post: Resurfacing Animosity Awaits Bush in Europe. The Economist has a preview of the trip as well.

Here’s what we refer to as reaping what you sow. For some reason, the geniuses at AOL decided they’d been too long without a real browser release, so they took a half baked milestone version of Mozilla and called it Netscape 6.0. They’ve since made their way all the way to Netscape 6.2, but all of these releases were still based on pre-release versions of Mozilla. Unfortunately, because of the time required to AOLify the Netscape releases, they’ve also always run behind the Mozilla releases in terms of bug fixes, stability, and new features, so there has never been any reason for anyone to install Netscape 6.

At this point, we’re nearing the release of Mozilla, and Netscape has created a release based on the 1.0 release candidates. Because they dawdled around with the pre-releases for so long, AOL has decided to refer to the new release as Netscape 7.0. I hope that people don’t feel so bitter about the awful 6.0 line of releases (none of which were ready for prime time) that they ignore Netscape 7.0, which really ought to be quite good as long as AOL doesn’t screw up Mozilla’s good work too badly.

My Palestinian next door neighbors were featured in the local paper this week. The article was not to their liking, I’m not sure what specifically bothered them though.

What conclusions can we draw from the fact that the Arab press seems to be moving away from referring to suicide bombers as martyrs? At first glance, this seems like an encouraging sign.

I think everybody has used a script from Matt’s Script Archive at one time or another. Unfortunately, the scripts have not been updated since 1996, and they’re rife with bugs and security holes, the most egregious being that the famed formmail script can be exploited to relay spam. Some guys created drop in replacements for the scripts under the monicker nms, and finally Matt Wright is endorsing the scripts on his site.

It’s about time. Matt’s scripts are a total menace, and even now, they’re available for download from his site. If Matt were a responsible Internet citizen, he would have either fixed the scripts or taken them down. He hasn’t done either, and despite the fact that he admits that his scripts aren’t even up to his own standards, he still lets people download them. Not a wise decision. Furthermore, he doesn’t link to the nms page for downloads, so he has to keep track of updates to the nms versions of the script and upload them to his own site. That’s not too cool either.

The royalties that were to be imposed on Web radio have been rejected.This is, of course, good news.

Eldred v. Ashcroft is a web site that covers a case challenging the most recent extension of copyrights by 20 years. The prime mover in the repeated extensions of copyright protection is Disney’s desire to avoid losing the exclusive rights to El Raton Mickey. Unfortunately, these extensions prevent every other creative work that would otherwise enter the public domain from doing so.

How serious is Israel about making peace with the Palestinians? One might look at the Israeli government’s massive subsidies for settlement and assume that there’s really no interest in peace at all, or at least in a peace outside the Palestinians simply giving up and doing whatever Israel’s government wants.

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