Posts

Jimmy Carter: Just War

From what I’ve read so far, it looks like the SCO vs. IBM case comes down to SCO accusing IBM of abusing SCO trade secrets in its work on AIX and Linux. I really don’t know much about trade secrets as opposed to patents or copyright (or even trademarks), but fortunately Nolo Press came through as they always do. It seems that the fundamental issue is whether IBM employees who signed a nondisclosure agreement and were exposed to SCO’s proprietary information utilized that information in work on AIX or Linux. ...

Everyone’s reporting that the US believes Osama Bin Laden is travelling in a specific caravan that is being tracked very closely. I just hope we can catch him alive, bring him back to the United States, and force him to sit through a trial by jury in a civilian courtroom. I can’t imagine a greater indignity for him than denying him is blaze of glory, mistreatment at the hands of Americans, or anything else that would allow him to persist in his elevated sense of self worth. Capture him, try him, and punish him just like any common criminal. ...

Fred Kaplan’s reporting on the UN negotiations at Slate has been essential for quite some time now. His most recent article reports what I assumed to be the case all along, that Resolution 1441 has plenty of weasel room in it that gives France, Russia, and other countries opposed to the war plenty of room within which to negotiate. The Bush administration can pretend like these countries are not honoring their commitments, but they wouldn’t have signed on to 1441 in the first place had it not given them the outs they need to press their agenda. ...

This post is number 5001 since I started keeping the rc3.org posts in a database. That’s a pretty big milestone as far as I’m concerned.

I’m kind of reading about SCO’s lawsuit against IBM, and like everybody else, I’m not impressed. I find it interesting that they’ve hired David Boies to represent them, but I don’t think that will be enough to win it for them. In any case, they’re going to have an awful case winning in the court of public opinion, but if they extract $1 billion from IBM, they won’t have to. The bottom line here for me is that SCO needs to show Linux source code supplied by IBM that violates SCO’s intellectual property. It’s all open source, obviously, so there’s no need for them to even scratch up a subpoena. The fact that they haven’t already done this leads me to doubt the merits of their case. Update: the intellectual property in question is not patents. SCO does not hold any patents at all. So SCO is suing for something else. This suit is looking less impressive by the minute. ...

I link to this list of 10 reasons you don’t want to run a massively multiplayer online game because for awhile I was obsessed with the idea of starting a company to write an MMOG. It seemed like the most fun in the world, and indeed, I don’t find his list to be much of a deterrent. I bet the reason for that is that I have quite a bit of experience with these types of games, and because I am not a veteran of the game industry. In the end, despite doing a lot of brainstorming, I never wound up doing anything. The horror stories about what it’s like to work in the game industry really scared me away. I still think it might be fun, though. ...

Norman Mailer’s New York Review of Books piece Only in America is a worthy read for those pondering the motivation of those who would lead us into war. As with many NYRB pieces, you may not agree with a bit of it, but it’s still worth reading and thinking about. It attempts to answer the questions that haunt me at quiet moments. Just as I can’t imagine what would lead a man to become a dictator like Saddam Hussein, I can’t imagine the inner dialogue that tells George W Bush that war is the only way to get to where we need to be. Is he motivated by the firm conviction that this is a battle between good and evil and that no compromise can be reached? Does he really fear that Iraq will arm terrorists? I honestly have no idea. I think if I could put myself in his shoes, things would be much easier for me to deal with, but I can’t. ...

Even though, thanks to many reader emails, I now understand how the mind reader puzzle I liked to yesterday works, I still have to link to Joe Crawford’s explanation, which is accompanied by screenshots and everything.

Yesterday, President Bush said flat out in his press conference that North Korea’s drive to build as many nuclear weapons as possible is a “regional issue.” In the meantime Donald Rumsfeld is increasingly making noise about reducing troop levels in South Korea. None of this seems to indicate that we’re going to take a strong stand in trying to resolve this crisis. Rumsfeld said that South Korea has an economy 25 to 35 times the size of North Korea’s and that they have all the capability they need to deter North Korea themselves. As we already know, North Korea is probably the most militarized country in the world. If the new US stance is that North Korea’s neighbors need to solve this problem themselves, then what we could be looking at is increased militarization of South Korea and possibly even militarization in Japan. Is that something we really want? Either of those two countries could also start seeking nuclear capability themselves to offset North Korea, which would join China as the only nuclear power in the region. We know that the troops we have in South Korea could not protect it from an all out assault by North Korea, our troops are there to show South Korea and North Korea that we have skin in the game. Going to war with South Korea means going to war with the United States. It’s impossible to predict what sort of response this would provoke from North Korea, but we need to think long and hard about what kind of message this sends to every country where US troops are currently stationed. Despite the fact that there are other good reasons to reduce the number of US troops in South Korea (one of which is the general resentment toward them there thanks to bad behavior on our part), pulling them out when they’re under the gun does send a message of weakness to the rest of the world. ...