Eben Moglen: SCO Scuttles Sense, Claiming GPL Invalidity. Thank goodness that somebody is quickly evaluating and rebutting SCO’s spurious legal arguments.

Update: Oh, and SCO has shown slides of some of the supposedly infringing code in Linux and the copyrighted source code it was cribbed from. Unfortunately, that code was released freely by none other than SCO themselves. Whoops.

Update: There’s even more on this here …

There were a couple of interesting nuggets to be mined from Today’s Papers this morning, concerning Afghanistan. The first is that President Bush doesn’t seem to know that we have more troops in Afghanistan than ever and the second is that none of the major papers have correspondents in Afghanistan any more. It’s telling that even though we have 10,000 troops facing enemies in a foreign country and are halfheartedly engaged in a rebuilding project there that is crucial to suppressing terrorism (much moreso than our effort in Iraq), the media seems to have completely moved on.

According to MEMRI, this is a message from self-described members of al-Qaida claiming responsibility for the power outage last week.

From On the Verge: a guide for migrating from Internet Explorer to Firebird.

In the run-up to the war in Iraq, one of the many justifications for invading Iraq was the recovery of a single POW, an American pilot, who the evil Iraqis had supposedly been holding captive since 1991. Now that looks like another assertion based on faulty intelligence (via Dangerousmeta). Nobody would say that we went to war in order to rescue this pilot, but at this point it’s looking increasingly clear that this was yet another piece of propaganda designed to further inflame the ignorant masses. His status was changed from MIA to captured last October when the administration was marketing the coming war to its utmost. By doing so, they no doubt led the pilot’s family and friends to believe that he had been suffering in an Iraqi prison for 12 years, and that he’d be coming home soon when we invaded. It becomes harder with each passing day to believe that these were innocent or honest mistakes.

If you’re interested in a sneak preview of the sorts of obituaries that news services have in the can for Saddam Hussein when he meets his bitter end, take a look at the obituaries for Idi Amin that were published today. It must be quite an intriguing challenge for obituary writers to properly capture the sense of the truly evil and brutal in their final farewell. The Sunday Telegraph effort is particularly evocative.

Everybody knows that when it comes to online argument, claims by one of the participants that they’re getting lots of supportive email from people who won’t publicly comment are a sure sign of defeat. In the SCO third quarter earnings call, their CEO did the equivalent by claiming that the silent majority of the IT world supports SCO.

Dangerousmeta is back, and prettier.

If you’re running Red Hat Linux, you can download RPMs for natively compiled Eclipse, which has been described to me as “blazingly fast.”

Rogers Cadenhead has an item on his site about Trade Wars. Back in the day, I was an absolute Trade Wars fanatic, playing on several different boards at the same time and always looking for a good fight. What a great game.