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Have you read that UN inspectors are back in Iraq? The US is allowing them to investigate the radioactive material that was taken from the Tuwaitha facility by looters. It was then dumped on the ground or otherwise unsafely discarded so that the containers it was stored in could be used for other things. We’re requiring that the inspectors be accompanied at all times by soldiers in order to make sure that they restrict their activities to only investigating that material in particular, and we’re limiting their stay to two weeks. Is it just me, or isn’t it exactly this sort of monitoring and hindrance of UN inspectors that got Iraq into hot water in the first place? I have to laugh at the fact that now that we’re in charge in Iraq we’re putting exactly the same sorts of restrictions on the inspectors that Saddam Hussein did. ...

The best thing that could come out of the Sammy Sosa corked bat scandal is that more people will learn that there’s no point in doing it in the first place. After the initial wave of outrage, many articles are being published that use science to argue that corked bats: increase the distance balls are hit slightly do not help or hurt the batter actually make a batted ball fly less far Hopefully baseball players will learn that there’s no point in corking one’s bat, and fans will learn that while people who knowingly go to bat with a corked bat are cheaters, they’re not really helping themselves. ...

The most powerful simple machine in government is the wedge. First, Bush demanded that the executive branch be given new powers to handle personnel issues in the Department of Homeland Security. There was a huge fight over it, and in the end a compromise was reached that still ended up giving more power to the executive branch. Now Donald Rumsfeld is asking for those same powers and more in the Department of Defense, based on the existing wedge. This illustrates why there are big fights in Washington over seemingly small issues. ...

Merrick Schincariol: Understanding AOP (via Blogging Roller)

Once upon a time, all the commercial software companies completely ignored open source software, thinking that if they did so, it would never gain legitimacy. How they must pine for those days. Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s CEO, is now naming Linux in particular and open source in general as a key competitor for the company. When I look at the big picture, it is truly staggering how far Linux has come.

Michael Kinsley has a good essay today on Bush tax policy and the fairness thereof.

Josh Marshall seems to have a microscoop. In his latest column, he reports that the DefenseLink transcript of the Sam Tanenhaus interview with Paul Wolfowitz is incomplete. Or at least there’s some disagreement about whether it is complete.

Zimran Ahmed has an interesting response to Joel Spolsky’s article on venture capital. Joe Ito also responds.

There was an interesting email message distributed via Interesting People today that accuses Google of socially engineering the Web. The gist of it is that a site that had purchased AdWords was suspended from the system because it opened a popup window when users clicked on the AdWords link. The writer of the email is eager to accuse Google of being nefarious whereas I see this as a pretty clear effort by Google to preserve the value of its assets in a perfectly reasonable way. The most obvious point is that Google suspended this site from AdWords, not from the index. Google indexes everything it can find. As has been widely reported, Google’s AdWords seem to be much more effective than banner ads in actually getting users to click through. If people who click through on these ads are bombarded with popups and other interrupt-driven advertising, they’ll be quickly trained to ignore AdWords the same way they do just about every other form of advertising on the Web. By insuring that the purchases of AdWords adhere to certain standards of common sense and good taste, Google maintains the value of the AdWords system. That just makes good business sense to me, and as a user who sometimes does click through on those ads, I appreciate it. ...

I think web petitions are the closest thing to useless that there is, but if you agree with them, it doesn’t take any time to sign them. So, go sign the Reclaim the Public Domain Petition. As Larry Lessig points out, the only way to get the government to adopt a saner legal model for intellectual property is to get people to care enough about them to make them election cycle issues. One way to do so is to get politicians to start talking about these issues, and another way is to build a grassroots movement that talks about these issues. The good news is that they’re not mutually exclusive, so let’s do both. Speaking for myself, I’ve been concerned about copyright term extensions since the Bono Act in 1998 (because I read a mailing list post about them by John Levine at the time), but I didn’t really understand the full value of the public domain until recently. That said, I’ve always liked Dover Thrift Editions – ultracheap printings of works that are in the public domain. ...