The best ideas seem obvious once you hear them. For example, it sure makes a lot of sense to think of spam as pollution.

After reading about LinkedIn in an item at Russell Beattie’s site, I want to try it out. Rather than signing up on my own and building my own network, I’d just as soon be invited by somebody. Looking for reader assistance here. (If you are going to invite me, please use the email address [email protected].)

Update: I’ve gotten several invites. Feel free to invite me, though, so I can grow my empire!

I read yesterday in many, many places that Salam Pax’s weblog from Baghdad, Where is Raed?, had returned. Diana Moon posted a series of dispatches from the beginning of the fighting in Iraq to present day that Salam Pax had written, and I really appreciated the man on the street reporting. Diana would hate me for saying this, but after reading Salam Pax’s thoughts, I think that the best account of what was going on in Iraq from the perspective of Iraqis was provided by none other than Robert Fisk. There are a couple of passages that weren’t taken from Fisk articles, but very well could have been.

Dave Winer has heard that AOL has 400 people working on a weblogging package. That seems like about 100 times too many people to me. If you count in marketing and scalability issues, maybe it’s just off by a factor of 20.

On February 5, 2003, Colin Powell laid out the administration’s case against Iraq on WMD charges in a UN speech: “My second purpose today is to provide you with additional information, to share with you what the United States knows about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, as well as Iraq’s involvement in terrorism, which is also the subject of Resolution 1441 and other earlier resolutions.” The speech was taken as convincing evidence by many people.

One attempt to analyze it was published in an Al Jazeera article. Unfortunately, the article only talks about the speech in light of what we knew before the war, and what I’m wondering about is whether things we’ve found since the war started would tend to confirm or refute the allegations that Powell made in his speech, so I soldier on.

Back on April 26, Walter Pincus wrote in the Washington Post that none of Powell’s claims had been substantiated. I haven’t seen any other articles on the topic. The latest news is that a stolen truck that may be a mobile weapons lab was turned over to US forces.

I still await the long article that will go over each of Powell’s claims and discuss them in depth. Was the al-Kindi company building mobile weapons labs? Where are the Iraqi officials and soldiers whose voices were featured in the recordings that Powell used in his speech? We have in custody at least one member of the “Higher Committee for Monitoring the Inspection Teams,” what do they have to say? Where are the secret files and prohibited items that were supposedly being hidden in private homes and concealed by being driven around the country? Where are the warheads armed with biological weapons that were dispersed to western Iraq? Why weren’t they used when we invaded?

In his speech, Powell showed satellite photos of a weapons complex called Taji, including two bunkers he claimed were “active chemical munitions bunkers.” I’ve found stories reporting on looting of weapons from the Taji military base, and about troops that are currently encamped there, but nothing about those bunkers. Obviously if Iraq wanted to hide its chemical weapons, it would have completely scoured that base between Feb 5 and the end of the war, but I find it annoying that nobody has followed up.

I found no mentions on Google News of the Amiriyah Serum and Vaccine Institute, mentioned by name on one of Powell’s slides, nor the al-Musayyib Rocket Test Facility, nor Ibn al Haytham. It seems to me that part of the work of journalists should be to run down these claims. Also discussed by name in the speech is the Tareq State Establishment, allegedly a dual use front that claimed to be a legitimate enterprise but was in fact a chemical weapons producer. No mention of it in the news, unfortunately.

The speech also mentions specific weapons programs, including a program to turn a fuel tank on a Mirage F-1 jet into a chemical or biological weapons sprayer and a program to turn Mig-21 aircraft into UAVs. Any evidence on that yet? What about the 1000 tons of chemical weapons that were supposedly in 6500 missing bombs from the Iran-Iraq war? Toward the end of his speech, Powell starts throwing around the numbers that are meant to really impress:

Our conservative estimate is that Iraq today has a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical weapons agent. That is enough agent to fill 16,000 battlefield rockets. Even the low end of 100 tons of agent would enable Saddam Hussein to cause mass casualties across more than 100 square miles of territory, an area nearly five times the size of Manhattan. Let me remind you that — of the 122 mm chemical warheads that the UN inspectors found recently. This discovery could very well be, as has been noted, the tip of a submerged iceberg. The question before us all, my friends, is when will we see the rest of the submerged iceberg?

That is the question, isn’t it? Needless to say, despite the evidence cited by Powell regarding Iraq’s nuclear program, we haven’t found much there, either.

The other question that must also be asked is why I care in the first place. We went to war with Iraq, we won the war, and there’s little doubt that Iraqis are better off without Saddam than they were with him. The reason I’m still keeping track of this stuff is that I firmly believe we were led to war under false pretenses. I said it before the war, I said it during the war, and I’ve said it since. Next year we’re going to have a Presidential election in which the incumbent is a man who played upon the rightful fears of Americans to gain their assent to a war fought for reasons that he and his advisors would rather not openly acknowledge. I think we deserve better treatment from our leaders than that.

Someone needs to do a study to figure out what the response time for a Web application has to be to prevent people from double posting comments on weblogs. It’s unfortunate that it’s not easy to make submitting a form, processing the form submission, and returning a response an atomic transaction so that if people resubmit or hit stop, the transaction is aborted.

Either way, my feature request for Movable Type is that a configuration option is provided that enables people to be warned that they’re posting a duplicate comment before their comment is published. It doesn’t seem like it would be hard to do that sort of thing, and it would prevent some of the massive comment duplication that I see on certain weblogs.

Paul Graham: The Hundred-Year Language. I finally got around to reading this, and was shocked at the end that Graham didn’t propose that Lisp was already the hundred-year language. Also worth reading from Paul Graham, Hackers and Painters (link via Tim Bray).

I just wanted to say that I love it when smart people agree with me. I’ve read lots of articles about the Bill Bennett humiliation, but it’s only in the world of weblogs that I’ve seen the “slot machines and video poker are pathetic” angle expressed.

Adam Engst has written up a detailed piece on the iTunes Music Store. At first, when I read a shorter summary of the DRM applied to the tracks purchased through the store, I referred to it as “heinous.” Looking back, I realize that was too harsh. My personal feeling is that all DRM is heinous, but as far as DRM goes, the system applied by Apple isn’t too restrictive.

Of course, the fundamental problem with DRM is that five or ten years down the road, the tracks that you paid hard money for could be members of the dead media collection, depending upon industry developments. Obviously if you burn them all onto CDs you’re probably still in good shape, but the bottom line is you’re buying music in a closed format that is inevitably doomed to obsolesence. This won’t bother everyone, but it does bother me.

The Washington Post has an article today about the current situation in southern Iraq. It’s as you would expect — near anarchy, no public services, and no clear plan for moving forward. I don’t blame the US or British for this, I didn’t expect any different. It hasn’t been very long since the old regime was ousted, and it takes a long time to even figure out what’s going on, much less to start fixing things. The problem is, of course, pretending like somehow this occupation was going to be different from every other occupation in human history. We made a bunch of promises to the Iraqis about how much better things would be once Saddam was gone, and now they expect us to deliver.