Feel good community site craigslist announced today that eBay has bought 25% of the company. Craigslist founder Craig Newmark has the details at his weblog. Apparently, he gave equity in the company to someone who later left the company, and that person wanted to sell out, and wound up with eBay as a buyer. After the eBay folks verified that buying the shares would be OK with the craigslist folks, the transaction was completed.

Reading this and this and this, I can’t help but get the feeling that we’re losing in Iraq. Put aside the fact that Moqtada Sadr is a theocrat and a crazy person with no legitimate political agenda, and consider the fact that US planes are bombing Shiites in Iraq. How badly did we have to screw up for it to come to this? I could understand why we had a running fight with the Sunnis in Iraq, they were the privileged class under Saddam’s rule and they had the most to lose when America took over, being that they’re an ethnic minority in the most resource poor region of the country. But the Shiites are supposed to be the big winners in the occupation — how did we get to a point where we’re bombing them in their cities. At this point, on whose behalf are we fighting?<br/ >
Update: What do you know, Fred Kaplan weighs in today to say that we’re totally screwed. The scariest thing to me is that the neocons have apparently forgotten about the wreckage we’ve created in Iraq and are eager to see if we can turn Iran into an utterly failed state as well, thereby connecting the tattered husks of Afghanistan and Iraq and creating an unbroken band of totally gutted countries.

Ed Felten reports on Microsoft’s decision to offer a cheaper, crippled version of Windows XP in Asia. So Asian customers can choose to buy pirated copies of Windows XP for next to nothing, use any distribution of Linux they choose without paying a thing, or pay more for a version of Windows that leaves out useful functionality like being able to take advantage of having a decent monitor. What kind of market do you think they’ll find for that? I honestly can’t imagine that anyone will choose the crippled version over stealing the full version. Would you?

The domain registrar I use screwed up Cory Doctorow’s DNS. If you’re going to mess up, you should make sure that the victim is an anonymous consumer with no clout. Word of mouth is a killer.

When Bill Clinton was being impeached, he decried the “politics of personal destruction.” At the time, you could easily dismiss that as whining from someone who had royally screwed up, but the truth is that Clinton had political enemies who spent millions of dollars to do everything they could to destroy him, and nearly succeeded. I find it depressing that this tactic now seems to be a mandatory part of the political process in this country.

Whether you look at Fahrenheit 9/11 or Dr. Justin Frank’s book, Bush on the Couch, or the smear campaign that the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth are running against John Kerry, it’s easy to see that a big part of being or running for President is putting up with people who are not satisfied with disagreeing with you, but rather want to destroy you completely. I’m more focused on John Kerry is being mistreated at this point, but honesty compels me to admit that George W Bush gets the same treatment as well.

The thing that really gets me about the chorus of people looking to portray John Kerry’s service in Vietnam as marked with cowardice, dishonesty, and bad faith is that they have lots of perfectly legitimate ground upon which to disagree with him. There’s no dispute that Kerry served only four months in combat in Vietnam, or that he returned from the war and joined the antiwar movement, or that he threw his medals over a wall. If you want to criticize him for those things, by all means, that’s your right. But to go on and allege that he was dismissed from Vietnam by his superiors for his incompetence, or that he cheated and lied his way into the medals he was awarded, or that he joined the antiwar movement not out of conscience but because he thought it would confer a political advantage, you’re sleazy.

There seems to be plenty of ground for argument in politics just based on political acts by these men that are part of the public record. I guess I don’t see why it’s necessary to turn these politicians into objects of hatred as part of the campaign. We’re trying to decide who will do the best job of leading the country for the next four years, not figure out whether these men deserve eternal damnation. And both of them have plenty of history to suffice for both their opponents and advocates. I don’t understand why anyone would even want to run for President in today’s climate.

So my wife was talking to the guy who power washed our house today, and he said he was hoping to set up a Web site where he could put up before and after pictures of the work he’s done. (He’s amazingly meticulous, and cheap … you should see the job he did on my deck.) Anyway, he said he’d talked to some people who offered to do it for $1500 and up, which is really pretty cheap, but more expensive than a guy who works for the prices this guy does can afford. The bigger problem is that I’m certain that these would be static Web sites that would be impossible for him to update on his own unless he wanted to learn about HTML, and FTP, and all the other stuff you need to start out as a Webmaster.

So I’m wondering what the best option is for someone like that. It seems like what he’d need would be a couple of HTML pages and the ability to set up photo galleries and easily publish images to them. It seems to me that given all of the free tools out there, it would be relatively easy to set up such a simple site. I wonder what the best approach is? (TypePad has photo galleries that are pretty nice, but I’m not sure how the weblog as home page would be for a small business.)

Does it seem to you like the investigation into John Kerry’s Vietnam War record is a maze of twisty little passages, all alike? Did John Kerry heroically protect the crew of his boat by killing a combatant with a rocket launcher, or did he cravenly shoot a wounded enemy from behind? Did Kerry return to that location the next day to film a reenactment of the event? Did Kerry “earn” his own Purple Hearts by being wounded in combat, or were two of the wounds self-inflicted? Was John Kerry’s swift boat in the territorial waters of Cambodia in December, 1968?

The campaign by the “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” has been extremely effective because it puts out an alternate account of events out there for people to have to contrast with the account that Kerry has put forth. And most people don’t have time to really look into which side is telling the truth in any great detail. This is why smear campaigns work so well, I suppose.

Update: This site is worth reading if you’re interested in this subject. The claims of the Swift Boat Veterans certainly do seem to be spurious based on what I’ve read.

My wife got her first email virus yesterday, a copy of Bagle.AL. AVG’s virus definitions hadn’t been updated yet, so the home computer was unprotected. However, my repeated home computer defense drills paid off when she called me and asked me about it as soon as she saw it in her in box. What a proud day. Last night I manually updated the virus definitions, and this morning she got another copy that AVG took care of itself. Now if I could only get my father to stop opening his attachments …

Last night I watched Bill Clinton on the Daily Show. He was alright, a lot of the things he said were the same things he’s said every other time I’ve seen him interviewed lately. We can all be thankful that John Stewart didn’t waste his brief window of opportunity to ask Clinton yet more questions about Monica Lewinsky, it’s not like Clinton is going to say something new about that to Jon Stewart that he hasn’t already said to someone else. Anyway, I’m constantly amazed by Clinton’s political smarts. He knows that this election hinges on wooing swing voters and disaffected Republicans to the John Kerry camp, and he also knows that he carries enough baggage that drawing comparisons between he and Kerry will not win anyone over to Kerry’s cause. Instead, he’s doing everything he can to associate himself with President Bush and Dick Cheney by constantly comparing his avoiding the Vietnam War with their decision to do so, and contrasting that to Kerry’s decision to serve. Clinton knows that Republicans hate him more than anything, and that the best way to hurt Bush is to point out how Bush, Cheney, and others did one of the things that Republicans hate him for. That’s one powerful form of judo.

And speaking of service in the Vietnam war, a lot of people wondered why the Democrats spent so much time hyping Kerry’s service in Vietnam in the first place. I think the fact that Kerry’s service compares favorably to Bush’s avoidance, but that’s not the real reason behind it. The real reason is that the one thing Democrats cannot win if they’re perceived as wimps. Americans are sensibly concerned about their security right now, and the Democrats are promising a much less belligerent course for the country than the Republicans. It’s essential that voters percieve that course of action being chosen because Democrats are wise, and not because they’re cowards. Hence, the constant harping on Kerry’s military service.

Finally, I think that Howard Dean has shown lately why it’s a good thing that he lost to John Kerry. There are many things I admire about Dean, including his outspokenness, but accusing the President for issuing terror warnings for political reasons just isn’t that wise. Everyone is free to speculate about why the President issues these warnings, and draw their own conclusions, but making this into a political issue can be damaging to the country. To a great degree, the Bush White House has brought this upon itself by politicizing the terrorism issue, which is bad politics and bad leadership, but I’d like to see Democrats criticize the President for politicizing the issue rather than doing the same thing the White House has done. Every time Clinton used the military in the latter part of his Presidency, he was attacked for attempting to wag the dog by people on both sides, and there’s little doubt that such criticism hurt us in the fight against al-Qaeda. It’s to Clinton’s credit that he didn’t start trotting out intelligence that should have remained secret in order to defend himself. And on that note, I think that hammering the Bush administration for naming the al-Qaeda agent that had been working as a Pakistani informant is perfectly reasonable.

So I caught the tail end of The Abrams Report, the part where Dan Abrams reads viewer email. Anyway, a viewer sent in a pedantic letter correcting the show to let them know that the school teacher who seduced her student was not a pedophile, but rather an ephebophile. Abrams said that they looked it up on Wikipedia and found that while the guy was technically correct, but that he preferred to use a term most people are familiar with. I do think that at some point in the not so distant future, Wikipedia will be the reference work of record for most usage.