Phil Agre released two more sents of attack related links (10/6, 10/7) over the weekend.
One question I have not seen clearly addressed in any news stories I’ve read is what we hope to accomplish, specifically, through our current attacks on the Taliban. Maybe I’ve missed it. Is our goal to blow up Osama bin Laden wherever he’s hiding? Is our goal to destroy all of the terrorist training camps in Afghanistan? Is our goal to depose the Taliban? Is it to weaken the Taliban so that they can be defeated by the Northern Alliance? Are our objectives a secret? It will be impossible to judge whether we have succeeded, and indeed, when we should disengage, if we’re not clear on what it is we’ve set out to do.
Robert Fisk has the cynical take on the weekend’s events. My opinion is that there is absolutely no way we could both attack Afghanistan and placate the Muslim world, and that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be attacking Afghanistan. There’s too much historical bad blood and past hypocrisy there for us to have any credibility with them.
In lighter news, Brian Jepson has taken a first look at JUMP to .NET, Microsoft’s attempt to integrate Java with the .NET platform. In other news, Parrot 0.0.2 was released last week. You have to fear software that starts out as a prank.
This weekend, Larry Augustin made a few really interesting posts to the FSB mailing list. The first covered the differences between software and service business models. The explained some of the terms he used in the first. Then there’s one on margins, and another on company valuation.
National Review Online: James S. Robbins on the historical context of bin Laden’s struggle against the West.
Geek thought for the day: programming in JavaScript really, really makes you appreciate Java. As a long time scripter, I never thought I’d take to strictly typed languages, but now I don’t know how people write programs of any size without strict types.