Posts

Despite the fact that I usually talk about heavy stuff here, one of my big passions is computer games, and I’ve watched with interest the debate between Greg Costikyan, who has a game-design blog, and Warren Spector, uber game designer. The debate started after Costikyan commented on the state of the industry following Spector’s keynot at GCD. Spector replied, and now Costikyan has closed the loop. It’s an interesting debate, and diversion from everything else going on in the world. ...

George Soros has written an op-ed that’s appearing in Asian papers. This quote says it all: The Bush administration believes that international relations are relations of power; legality and legitimacy are mere decorations. They carry the same attitude toward the American people and toward Congress. Update: it’s worth mentioning that you should read the entire article. His thesis is that America is creating a “supremacy bubble” where our expectations of what we’re capable of have been inflated beyond our actual capability. This thesis gets at what I think scares a lot of people both overseas and here in America about this war and the larger Bush agenda. I realized that my excerpt does absolutely nothing to illustrate what the piece actually says, it’s just an interesting point found within. ...

Looking at the membership list for the UN Security Council, I’m having trouble figuring out where we’ll get 9 votes for going to war with Iraq. There are 15 members, and 7 “no” votes or abstentions scuttles things. Here’s my list of people who aren’t going to vote “yes”: France, Germany, Pakistan, Russia, Syria, and China. That means if one of Guinea, Mexico, Angola, Cameroon, or Chile just abstains, it’s all over. I’m counting Spain, the US, the UK, and Bulgaria as sure “yes” votes. Certainly the odds are not stacked in our favor, although obviously we’re doing everything we can to induce, cajole, or bully the fence sitters to take our side. The Washington Post has a quick rundown of what the media is saying in each of the Security Council countries. Update: I saw on the news tonight that Pakistan is expected to vote in favor of the US/UK resolution and that it’s down to the US to land either Mexico or Chile, which seems doable. ...

As I’ve said before, SpamAssassin 2.50 is quite an improvement over the 2.4x versions in terms of successfully catching spam, even without using the Bayesian filter. I finally felt like I had built up enough “ham,” mail I didn’t want to be treated as spam, spam that SpamAssassin caught automatically, and most importantly, spam that slipped past SpamAssassin, to train the Bayesian filters, so I did so yesterday. I have to say that SpamAssassin is working even better than before now that the Bayesian filtering has kicked in. Specifically, I was getting one or two pieces of spam every day from some kind of art dealer, and now the Bayesian filter is insuring that those messages are being routed into my spam folder. This morning, there was absolutely no spam in my inbox, and no false positives in my spam mailbox either. I haven’t had any problems with false positives in a long time, but I was getting some spam that was slipping through, much to my chagrin. The Bayesian filtering does not seem to have induced more false positives, and is reducing the misses, so I’m more pleased than ever. If things continue along these lines, then I will be pretty darn close to eradicating spam from my life. ...

Tim Bray lists 15 things that are scarier than Saddam. Number 12 is the one that keeps me up at night.

Joi Ito wonders today about the value of linking to thinks that seem to have already made the rounds. I’ve given some thought to this myself. On one hand, your readers aren’t going to appreciate coming to your site and seeing a bunch of links to stoires that they’ve already seen links to everywhere else. On the other hand, you can’t assume your readers read all the same sites you do. That’s a mistake that I’m prone to. Oftentimes readers send me links to things that I’ve seen a number of places, and which I didn’t link to simply because they already did seem overexposed. My general rule is to not link to stuff that’s really making the rounds unless I can say something original about it, or I can find background info about it that’s not getting any play elsewhere. If I do just want to link to something because I think that its overexposure does not outweigh its important, I try to make the item extremely short so those who have already seen it can blow past it quickly. ...

It looks like Iran is the latest country to pull the old uranium/plutonium trick on the rest of the world. Iran has been under pressure for building a nuclear power plant (with Russian help) that produces nuclear waste that can be turned into weapons grade plutonium. In the meantime, they’re almost up to speed with a uranium enrichment program that will produce material for nuclear weapons as well. Should we start calling this the North Korea gambit? I also wonder if Pakistan supplied them with the technology for uranium enrichment just like Sy Hersh says they did for North Korea. ...

Josh Marshall, who has in many ways been the best of the war liberals in terms of arguing in favor of a military solution to the Iraq problem, has changed his mind. His reasons are worth reading. Like Marshall and many other liberals, I have felt that we may not have a choice other than to go to war with Iraq at some point. My problem with the pure anti-war argument is that our current relationship with Iraq is incredibly unstable. There’s no doubting that the sanctions regime has resulted in cruel circumstances for the Iraqi people, regardless of whose fault that is. There’s also no doubt that enforcing the no fly zones is the only thing that has kept Saddam Hussein from crushing the life out of the very encouraging political development in Northern Iraq among the Kurds. We also know for sure that if Iraq becomes a nuclear power, they will instantly become a far more dangerous version of North Korea. Just as war has consequences, so too does continuing the status quo, or unilaterally disengaging. I don’t know that the right answer is at this point, but I believe that given the Bush administration’s aims, they’ve worked toward achieving those aims in the least effective way imaginable. ...

Cameron Barrett is back from hiatus and has returned with a bang, expressing his disenchantment with the current state of the United States. Personally, I have no desire to make another country my home (although I wouldn’t mind spending six months or a year overseas for the experience of it), and I believe that people are still clamoring to get into the United States in spite of the current administration and the fact that our economy is in the gutter. What I want to point out is that I admire Cam’s courage in writing what he wrote. It was bound to be unpopular, and to attract unreasoned comments and personal insults. He published it anyway. ...

In response to a request by a journalist asking when designers of online news sites should abandon other browsers and focus on Internet Explorer, Adrian Holovaty penned a letter standing up for coding to standards. Isn’t coding just to IE so much yesterday’s idea? I didn’t think anyone still spoke of that as a plausible strategy outside the context of an Intranet. Anyway, the deal here is that the piece should probably be written by Adrian rather than Staci, because the odds are great that he knows a heck of a lot more about designing news sites (and explaining how to design them) than she ever will. ...