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Rickard

A French woman is looking at a felony charge for disrobing in anger while being searched at an airport in Evansville, Indiana.

On Tuesday, Howard J Bashman noted on his blog a small error in a footnote of a Fifth Circuit opinion. It just so happens that the judge who wrote the opinion is a reader of How Appealing, and immediately corrected the error after reading about it there. This astounds me.

The CIA World Factbook 2002 was published sometime recently.

It looks like AOL has finally gotten around to hooking up AIM and ICQ — or at least looking into it. Those of us who use Trillian or other generic tools have been able to use both services at once (albeit with separate logins) for quite some time, but full integration would be very nice indeed. Of course, what would be really great is an open standard that provides full interoperability among any service willing to participate, but that seems like a lost dream these days.

Slate has an article on Donald Rumsfeld’s private team of intelligence analysts who are trying to come up with evidence that Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein are somehow linked, mainly because the CIA and DIA have not found evidence of such a connection. It’s obvious that producing a clear link between Saddam and Osama would provide the easiest justification for war that there is, so Rumsfeld and his cronies won’t be satisfied until such a connection is produced. The article takes a historical perspective and shows how Cold War hawks basically took the same approach — twisting the available evidence to produce bogus reports about Soviet capabilities in order to argue against arms control. Ironically, several of the Cold War players who distorted the facts about the Soviets are now on the job making a case for war in Iraq based on fiction.

There is a place for debate in this country about what should be done with Saddam Hussein, who is obviously dangerous and has designs on growing infinitely more dangerous by producing nuclear weapons. Unfortunately, the current administration has no interest in approaching that debate in an intellectually honest way, preferring instead to turn to rhetoric and lies in order to justify an invasion of Iraq. The fact that they won’t be honest with us now as they ask us to go to war leads me to believe that they’ll reject any form of accountability during the war, and more importantly after the war. Politics being what it is, none of this surprises me, but the bottom line here is that many thousands of lives are at stake. It saddens me that the administration has so little faith in the American people that they refuse to bring us an honest case to back up their agenda.

I found a link to Michael J Radwin’s PHPcon presentation about Yahoo’s move from a proprietary page scripting language to Yahoo in Anil’s list of links. This is the first really in depth behind the scenes look at how things work behind the scenes at Yahoo. I always wonder how things work at the really, really big Web sites, so the presentation is quite a treat.

Also interesting are the reasons why they chose PHP over various other languages. They rejected Perl in part for the reasons why I don’t use it as much any more, and they rejected Java/JSP for the simple reason that the threads implementation on FreeBSD is poor.

Due to incompetence on the part of whoever runs Iraq’s state ISP, Wired News was able to check out the mailbox for a publicly available email address on the Iraqi government’s official Web site. It’s pretty interesting to see what disturbed individuals from around the world feel it necessary to say to Saddam Hussein. Kind of makes you wonder what sorts of things are sent to [email protected] …

I admit that I haven’t been paying much attention to Mitch Kapor’s open source venture, even though news of it has been everywhere. However, two things caught my eye today. The first is that Kapor is going to put up to $5 million into the project and the second is that Andy Hertzfeld is working on the project as a volunteer. After Eazel blew up, I wondered if Hertzfeld would remain active in the open source world, and indeed that seems to be the case. Of course, the most exciting thing is that they’re working on an email client/PIM to compete with Outlook, which is something the world desperately needs. I’d like to think that Kapor just got so tired of the crap that is Outlook that he decided that $5 million wasn’t too much to pay to get something better. Hell, if I had $5 million laying around, I might spend it on a decent email client.