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This Analysis of Sapphire SQL Worm seems to indicate that worm writing is becoming more like Core Wars. Maybe we should be happy somebody out there is still writing tight code …

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Michael Kinsley’s got a few things to say about George W Bush and affirmative action this week in Time. Nobody wants to lose out on an opportunity because they belong to the wrong demographic, but I agree with Kinsley when he argues that the only difference between affirmative action programs and the sort of preferential [...]

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Dispatches From Davos, Chris Anderson’s reports from the World Economic Forum are worth reading. (Via Boing Boing.)

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Declan McCullagh reports that Congressmen and the copyright industry are building on their successful partnership and urging the Justice Department to enforce the “No Electronic Theft” act, which turns anyone who has downloaded copyright protected material into a felon. The copyright industry wrote the act in 1997, but the Justice Department hasn’t bothered to beat [...]

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KDE 3.1 is finally out. I’m compiling it on my laptop even as I type this. What this means for me personally is that I don’t have to go into my Gentoo package mask file and uncomment all of the KDE stuff every time I want to update my system. I’ve been using KDE 3.1 [...]

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I gleefully rise to the bait offered in Brad O’Hearne’s article: 10 Reasons to Dump Your Java IDE. He argues as much against IDE-dependent developers as he does against IDEs, but I’ll still play along.

Reason 1: Dependence on an IDE is a liability. Rebuttal: Of course it is, but it’s impossible to use a tool and [...]

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The Economist has an interesting piece on American public opinion on war with Iraq. My informal polling suggests that support for the war, while theoretically very strong, is in fact rather soft. Of course, my polling is as informal as it could possibly be, given that it only includes people who sit near me at [...]

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As much as I complain about Bill Gates the business man, I have nothing but respect for Bill Gates the humanitarian. He’s written a piece for the Wall Street Journal once again urging the scientific community to work to cure the diseases that plague the developing world. And, as usual, his pleas come with some [...]

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This is a link to various reactions to the weapons inspectors’ report from Iraq. Don’t click on it, though, because everybody says exactly what you would expect them to say.

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The oddest thing I heard about the big SQL Server worm is that it knocked the majority of Bank of America ATMs offline for a period of time. If anyone sees a story that explains how this happened, please let me know.

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