Posts

What conclusions can we draw from the fact that the Arab press seems to be moving away from referring to suicide bombers as martyrs? At first glance, this seems like an encouraging sign. My Palestinian next door neighbors were featured in the local paper this week. The article was not to their liking, I’m not sure what specifically bothered them though. Here’s what we refer to as reaping what you sow. For some reason, the geniuses at AOL decided they’d been too long without a real browser release, so they took a half baked milestone version of Mozilla and called it Netscape 6.0. They’ve since made their way all the way to Netscape 6.2, but all of these releases were still based on pre-release versions of Mozilla. Unfortunately, because of the time required to AOLify the Netscape releases, they’ve also always run behind the Mozilla releases in terms of bug fixes, stability, and new features, so there has never been any reason for anyone to install Netscape 6. ...

There’s nothing quite like a good RMS rant. While I don’t agree with RMS on everything, I appreciate the extreme position that he (and the FSF stake out). Through their intransigence, they push the open source/free software community in what I consider to be a direction that’s positive overall. Today I’m trying to get SpamAssassin up and running. I have finally decided that I can’t take deleting spam by hand any more. ...

The big news today is Dick Cheney’s tour of the Sunday talking head shows, at which he warned us all about the inevitability of future attacks by al-Qaeda. Everybody with the least bit of common sense knows that al-Qaeda is still operating, and that they’re still working on the same stuff they’ve always been working on. The question is why is the administration making a big deal about it again? Could it be that they are trying to distract us from their failures last summer by focusing our attention on attacks yet to come? ...

Two big news items this week seem to confirm what I suspected all along, which is that the 9/11 attacks were not prevented in large part because of information processing problems, rather than a failure of information gathering. Today, it’s been reported that President Bush was briefed in August on a possible attack by terrorists working with Osama bin Laden that involved hijacking planes. Earlier this month, we learned that FBI agents in Arizona were concerned about Arab students at US flight training schools in July, 2001. ...

Bruce Sterling has an op-ed on Star Wars in the New York Times, entitled A Very American Movie. Mostly, I’m just amazed to see his byline there. I remember meeting Bruce Sterling in Houston when he was slumming with the hackers at HohoCon about 10 years ago. I certainly never would have thought that he’d be writing in the New York Times someday, or that I would be reading the New York Times someday. ...

It sure looks like a State Department official told a big, fat lie when he accused Cuba of running a bio weapons program a few days ago. President Carter dismissed the claims yesterday during his visit to Cuba, and Colin Powell also left the guy hanging, basically saying that Cuba has the potential to have a bio weapons program, which is true of any country that does advanced biology research. ABC is sending Politically Incorrect to boot hill in favor of some sophomoric talk show hosted by Jimmy Kimmel of “The Man Show” fame. I generally found the guests on Politically Incorrect to be so stupid and annoying that I couldn’t bear to watch it very often, but overall I think it provided a somewhat accessible perspective on political views that are further outside the mainstream than you’ll get from watching the usual idiots on the 24 hour news networks. I have a feeling that I wasn’t in the show’s target audience anyway because I absolutely cannot bear to watch people argue with each other on television. ...

An Impossible Occupation: Scott Anderson writes a first hand account of the Israeli incursion into the West Bank. He accompanied some elite Israeli paratroopers who were part of the forces that entered Tulkarm, and the story captures the views of the soldiers toward the occupation, how they conduct themselves in battle, and what it must be like to find yourself behind enemy lines for weeks. I think it’s telling that despite the IDF’s numerous precautions against violating the human rights of the Palestinians, the fundamental injustice of the occupation prevents them from getting any credit whatsoever. I wonder how the soldiers feel about settlers who feel it is their religious obligation to reclaim “Judea and Samaria” from the Palestinians. ...

Thomas Friedman: Global Village Idiocy. Friedman trots out some old saws here, but he also makes some good points. The Internet is just a medium for transmission of information, nothing prevents people from publishing garbage or from trawling for garbage. At the same time, the opportunity is there for people to test all of their assumptions against something that more closely resembles reality. That’s an opportunity that most people haven’t had in the past. ...

The pipe bomb guy was trying to make a smiley face on the map with the locations where he planted the bombs. NewsForge interviews Mozilla project lead Mitchell Baker and finds out what’s left before Mozilla 1.0 is released. I’m still using it pretty much exclusively as my browser, and at this point I can’t imagine going back to Internet Explorer. The Economist has an article on the guy behind the Red Bull phenomenon. I’ve never had it, but they do indeed seem to have quite a following in the geek set. ...

Information request: anyone have (or know of) any implementation horror stories with any of the following products? FatWire FileNet Web Content Management (formerly eGrail) Starbase eXpressroom Stellent Content Management