Hundreds of thousands of people gathered in Florence, Italy today to protest against invading Iraq (and globalization, Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, and other stuff). I’m definitely not sold on going to war with Iraq, but this protest has the feel of reflexiveness to me. How many of those people are against it because the United States is behind it? And I wonder how they recommend we treat Saddam instead? Surely none of those people think that Saddam Hussein should simply be left to his own devices, to make all the weapons he wants and continue to brutally oppress his miserable subjects. Protesting is all well and good, but there’s more to the world than just opposing the dominant agenda. That’s the problem that the Democrats ran into earlier this week. We need something more than “Bush is wrong” to carry us forward.

TRW has created a laser weapon that can shoot down rockets and artillery shells in flight. I’m not particularly sanguine about the long term prospects of this weapon as a useful deterrent against rockets and artillery used by decently equipped armies, but it’s still pretty cool. And it could prove very useful in one of its intended uses — defending towns in Israel against mortar and rocket attacks by groups operating out of the occupied territories and southern Lebanon. Unfortunately, it’s still at the proof of concept stage. I link to this mainly because I find it interesting that laser weapons look to be close to finding a practical application. Just another example of real life catching up with sci fi.

If you get the chance, you must watch the documentary Journeys with George, which is currently airing on HBO. It’s basically the video memoir of an NBC producer who spent the entire 2000 Presidential campaign as part of the press corps following George W Bush. Not only is it a well done documentary, but it provides some insight into the character and personality of our current President.

I’ve been ill for the past few days, and completely missed the leak of a new Halloween document from Microsoft.

Now that the Republicans have the run of the government, civil rights advocates, environmentalists, and well, basically everyone who doesn’t represent corporate interests with saddlebags full of money or the religious right will have to pay closer attention to what’s going on. For example, it looks like Orrin Hatch has slipped in a nasty amendment to the homeland security bill that would allow any government agency to ask ISPs to see customer email in case of an “emergency” without a court order. Yuck.

Everybody already knows that the Democrats got hammered yesterday in the midterm elections. From what I could see from the predictions going into the balloting yesterday, few people on either side thought that it would go so well for the Republicans. Today, the bulk of the postgame analysis seems to be saying that the Democrats got clobbered because they didn’t have a cohesive story to tell the American people about how they would make things better, and I have to say, that makes sense to me.

What is the Democratic policy message? That they’re against privatization of Social Security, that they’re against vouchers, that they can’t decide whether they’re for or against war in Iraq. Whether or not President Bush is responsible for it, the economy has really fallen apart since he took office, and the only thing he’s done to stop the bleeding is make some lousy protectionist trade policy and cut taxes. So what alternatives do the Democrats offer? Beats me.

What yesterday’s election teaches us is that there aren’t enough people around who are offended by the many failings of the Republicans to elect Democrats. It also teaches us that the Republicans aren’t offensive enough to bring out the Democratic voters in high enough numbers to win elections. What remains to be seen is how the Democrats can pick themselves up off the mat and do some good over the next two years, and more importantly, put together a winning ticket in 2004. Hopefully one that can regain the Senate, if not the House, as well.

Hey, if you’re in America, go vote today. And take Russell Beattie’s advice on who to vote for while you’re at it.

You know I love The Register, but this story on Mozilla security holes is pretty pathetic. The story discusses six security flaws that were discussed on BugTraq, only one of which affects the current stable releases of Mozilla. A few weeks ago, Mozilla 1.0.1 was released specifically to fix the security holes mentioned in this article (along with about 20 others), so why is it news now that people are discussing these holes, which have already been repaired? I’ve heard that some old versions of Sendmail are subjec to buffer overflows, perhaps The Register should have a reporter call me.

How sleazy can politics get? Check out this flier that was distributed in majority black precincts in Baltimore, Maryland today. Not only are voters incorrectly told that they have to pay their parking tickets and overdue rent, and settle any warrants before voting, but the election date on the flier is Wednesday. The bastards who pull these sorts of dirty tricks ought to be under a jail somewhere.

Brad Choate was kind enough to reply (via email) to my reply to his piece pondering the potential malign effects of Wine on future Linux development. His note sent me off to read some, and I’m going to address his points, starting with the last:

Finally, I should point out (with regard to your closing statement) that WINE is not an emulator.

This is something I did not know. Wine is actually a lot more interesting than an emulator — it’s a transparent compatability layer that will enable Windows programs to run under Linux without installing Windows at all. That’s kind of tangential to the main point in his email, which is:

I’d say within another year or two (unless MS pulls the rug out from under them), it will be second nature to run Windows software on Linux. And to what end? To run Windows solutions as opposed to Linux solutions. If it runs under WINE, why port it? If it runs under WINE, why target Linux at all? And certainly, the Linux faithful will always develop for Linux no matter what. But I’m talking less about existing Linux developers and more about companies that are looking at Linux today and considering it as a viable target for software development. To me, WINE is shooting the Linux community in the foot.

I better understand the point Brad was making now, but I still don’t agree with it. The danger here is that we might potentially lose native Linux development from companies who decide that a Windows version of their software running under Wine is good enough, so they don’t need to go to the lengths to port their software directly to Linux. That may happen, but it seems to me that Wine doesn’t change the value proposition much for these companies. What percentage of software is ported to Linux from Windows anyway? My guess is that the percentage is very low. Furthermore, enterprise software companies aren’t going to rely on Wine, because doing so just won’t be as reliable as running directly on the Linux kernel. So we’re talking about some amount of end user software that will run via Wine rather than natively. (Brad went on to mention games, but my feeling on this is that either Wine will run games so well that the emulation won’t matter, or it will run them poorly and everyone who would consider porting will still create a port for Linux.)

When you look at the huge mass of software that was never going to be ported to Linux, it’s exciting to think that you may be able to run it via Wine instead of just swearing it off altogether. To me, if the value of the Linux kernel and programming interface is so low that Wine may kill them, we probably all ought to be using Windows anyway. Fortunately, I don’t believe that’s the case.