Moshe Bar has an interesting article on recent controversies on the Linux kernel mailing list.
Laura Miller’s take on the Jonathan Franzen/Oprah Winfrey tiff is worth reading.
Salman Rushdie’s latest New York Times op-ed dispatch, Yes, This Is About Islam, criticizes certain pathologies that seem to be sweeping the Muslim world. He also draws a very useful distinction between “Muslims” and “Islamists.” I’ll be using the term “Islamist” instead of “Islamic extremists” from now on.
The Washington Post reports today that Al Qaeda has been raising millions of dollars by selling diamonds mined by rebels in Sierra Leone into Europe. The Sierra Leonean rebels sell the diamonds at a fraction of their value and use the money for weapons and supplies, and various other revolutionaries, terrorists, and profiteers act as middlemen and use the profits to fund their own activities.
President Bush signed an executive order yesterday giving former presidents the right to block the release of their presidential papers to journalists and academics. Furthermore, the sitting president can also block the release of the papers of former presidents if they wish to do so. This should disgust any advocate of government accountability.
Here’s the Proposed Final Judgment in Justice Department’s case against Microsoft.
OK, I admit it, I’m somewhat obsessed with this whole Oprah-Franzen thing. Here’s a link to the inside the publishing industry scuttlebutt from The New York Observer (link via Dangerousmeta).
From Sports Shooter #36 comes an excellent account of photojournalism in Pakistan. The second item on the page is NY Times photographer Vincent Laforet’s experiences in Quetta, Pakistan. The pictures that accompany the story are excellent, too.
An analysis of three Linux kernel VM systems by Derek Glidden: Glidden’s paper takes a look at the VM systems mentioned in the Linux kernel story that I linked to earlier.
A California court has ruled that code is speech. Let’s hope that this ruling has legs, and will survive when it is appealed. Simply treating code as speech solves so many inconsistencies in the way the law applies to technology that it’s amazing the courts haven’t already established that as the standard for ruling on cases where it applies.
Tony Judt’s piece in the latest NYRB, America and the War, is another excellent pragmatic essay about the roots of anti-Americanism and what we can do to reduce it.