Palestinian spokeswoman Hanan Mikhail-Ashrawi smacked down Osama bin Laden at a speech before the Commonwealth Club:
“Our cause is not up for grabs. You do not have the right to use it for your ends. We have been victims all our lives and we do not condone the victimization of others.”
MEMRI’s latest analysis concerns the opinion of Islamic clergymen on whether Muslim soldiers in the US army violate the tenets of Islam by fighting in Afghanistan. Once again, you’ll see that many Muslim leaders blame Israel for the 9/11 attacks, the convenient fantasy which allows them to let Osama bin Laden off the hook.
Robin Miller has a NewsForge article that speculates on whether the Microsoft settlement will lead to more PCs being sold with Linux preinstalled.
Over the past few years, I’ve had a number of fantasies about completely rewriting the software used to generate this weblog. Needless to say, it’s never happened. I wrote the first version, and have kind of glommed features onto it since then. I have also often fantisized about releasing it as a nifty open source package that people can use to build their own weblogs. However, because I’ve never managed to clean up the code, or even make it coherent, that hasn’t happened either. Half of it is written in PHP, the other half in Perl. The database schema sucks. The code is not well thought out at all. I console myself with the fact that I know I could do better if I tried.
The Hewlett family is going to vote its shares against HP’s merger with Compaq.
Yahoo seems to have drastically cut the number of columnists that they carry on their news site. Even more disturbingly, they have kept Ann Coulter and ditched Molly Ivins. Of course, rights to run Ann Coulter’s columns can probably be obtained for about as much as I’d charge to syndicate rc3.org, so maybe it was just a cost saving move.
Laurel Krahn’s impassioned lament about Major League Baseball possibly eliminating the Minnesota Twins is definitely a must read. Eliminating existing teams would be the stupidest thing ever done in professoinal baseball, and I’m not overstating that one bit.