Wal-Mart has launched a new music service, and of course they’re selling each song for 88 cents rather than the 99 cents that the iTunes Music Service charges. As you may suspect, Wal-Mart’s licensing terms are draconian. You’re also limited to Windows Media Player for playing the songs. I know that the iTunes Music Store limits you to using iTunes, but iTunes is nice to use.

The main takeaway from this how-to manual on travelling abroad for major dental work is that flossing your teeth and having them cleaned regularly may suck, but it doesn’t suck the most.

For awhile, I was linking to all sorts of stuff about Bjorn Lomborg, who wrote the book The Skeptical Environmentalist. The book was an iconoclastic look at the environmental movement, and generated a lot of negative feedback (as most widely exposed iconoclastic works do). Kuro5hin has an update on what’s been happening with Lomborg lately. The comments are worth reading, too. (It’s also worth noting that the headline is extremely misleading. Lomborg was only vindicated on one specific charge, many of the assertions in his book have been discredited.)

So I got sucked into this essay about the Wright brothers, and it turned out instead to be a great illustration of the problems with the patent system.

Juan Cole wrote up a nice then and now piece on Saturday about our dealings with Iraq in the 80s and the Iran-Contra scandal.

Joel Spolsky: Biculturalism. A review of Eric Raymond’s The Art of UNIX Programming and, briefly, of Raymond’s politics.

The Debian Project has posted an investigation report explaining how their machines were compromised.

The soldiers who tracked down Saddam Hussein are from Phil Carter’s old unit.

I’m still travelling on family business with basically no Internet access. I should be back online on Sunday and updates should resume on December 22. I haven’t even been able to follow the breaking news, much less write about it. In other news, my GPRS still isn’t working. Stupid Cingular.

One small point to make about Michael Kinsley’s column criticizing how Democratic Presidential candidates are handling the issue of Iraq on the campaign trail: one could have been opposed to war in the first place and support seeing things through now out of a general sense of responsibility. By invading and occupying Iraq, we undertook an obligation that we would not just pull out and let the country finish falling apart. My biggest fear right now is that the Bush administration is looking for a way to do just that without taking the rap it.