The Economist had a good article last week about the death of the CEO as rock star phenomenon, which was really overdue. Next thing you know, we’ll actually see executive pay brought more in line with the pay of the people who actually do the real work. Don’t get me wrong, there are executives out there who are doing a great job, but I know for certain that the people who get the headlines and the people who deserve them are distinct groups with very little overlap. ...
What in the world is going on in Europe? An anti-immigration Dutch politician, Pim Fortuyn, was shot dead walking out of a radio station, sparking widespread protests around the Netherlands. (Fortuyn’s political views were a bit more interesting than Jean-Marie La Pen’s, although taken in total, nearly as loathesome.) What’s scary is that this guy was expected to get about 15% of the vote in the upcoming general elections. One wonders what this trend indicates when it comes to European angst about Muslim immigrants, and European nationalism in general. ...
I pay close attention to what’s going on in Israel and the occupied territories, but I still don’t fundamentally understand the nature of the relationship between the Palestinians and the Israelis. The Palestinians and IDF seem to be close to reaching a compromise that will end the siege in Bethlehem. The terms of the settlement will be that the 6 most wanted men holed up in the church will be exiled to Italy, another 35 will be sent to the Gaza Strip, and the rest will go free. If the 6 men are terrorists who have killed Israeli citizens, why is Israel going to let them, in essence, go free? Why would Italy accept these highly dangerous individuals? How much better is it to have terrorists in the Gaza Strip than in the West Bank? Then there’s the issue of Marwan Barghouti, the Palestinian head of the Tanzim militia, who Israel has in the past tried to assassinate. Barghouti is currently in Israeli custody and word is he’ll be tried for terrorist attacks in which he was allegedly involved, but there’s also talk that Israel sees him as a future replacement for Yasser Arafat and that he might ultimately be sent to the Gaza Strip. I confess that I don’t understand a bit of it. ...
C# looks like it’s gaining popularity. That doesn’t surprise me though, since it’s a language designed by one of the world’s great language designers, and is moving into a space that is dominated by C++ and Visual Basic. Yech.
Here’s a more mainstream media source that talks about Dick Armey advocating war crimes on MSNBC: “I’m content to have Israel grab the entire West Bank,” said Representative Dick Armey, the majority leader from Texas in an appearance on MSNBC’s “Hardball” on the eve of the vote. He added flatly under questioning, “I happen to believe that the Palestinians should leave.” The interesting fight over the Crusader artillery piece stepped up a notch yesterday, as Donald Rumsfeld had Paul Wolfowitz announce his intent to cancel the project (which has already spent $2 billion and is slated to spend $11 billion total). Congress moved immediately to save the project, for the usual reasons: pork, campaign contribution paybacks, etc etc. I love this for all the dramatic reasons: the project’s champion is Secretary of the Army Thomas White, a former Enron exec. The Crusader is to be built by a company that’s a subsidiary of the Carlyle Group, which is rife with former officials including the former President Bush. The Congressmen working hardest to save the project are from Oklahoma, where the giant hunk of metal is supposed to be built. The history of the project is interesting as well. It was originally designed to blow up advancing Soviet forces in the next great war in Europe, but since that no longer looks like it’s going to happen, the tank’s advocates have come up with all sorts of other scenarios where it might be used, and have even included Afghanistan among them. How we could have rapidly deployed a 38 ton artillery piece into a landlocked country half the world away is unclear to me. ...
Over at Advogato, Simon St. Laurent has posted a huge batch of links covering an ongoing discussion of web services. Maybe I’ll have time to dig through them today … There’s a Mozilla Calendar project. I did not know that. Looks like there’s yet another local interests versus global content controversy brewing. The German rail system, Deutsch Bahn, is suing Google for providing links to and caching articles from an outlawed publication that discusses railroad sabotage. (The lawsuit is off. Tara sent me this article which says that both Google and AltaVista caved in.) ...
Here’s why I love K5. Today they published an article on cheap, healthy alternatives for making your own lunch. K5 is truly the ultimate site for the well-rounded geek. The Economist has a story on the big sham election in Pakistan. A lot of people were willing to cut Pervez Musharraf slack when he supported the United States over the Taliban and started reigning in the Islamist lunatics in Pakistan’s intelligence services, but I don’t see how we can continue to give him our unqualified support. He could have held out for another year or two before calling a legitimate general election, but he has chosen instead to go the “President for life” route and hold a referendum that allows Pakistanis to vote for or against another 5 year term for him. Bear in mind that there are no other candidates, the options are Musharraf or a president to be named later. I guess that whole “he’s a military dictator but he’s a good military dictator” line of reasoning is looking a bit naive now. ...
The EFF is encouraging us to thank Gateway for its very public stance in favor of basic fair use rights when it comes to music. OK, here’s another bill we all have to fight. Fortunately, it was introduced by South Carolina Senator Fritz Hollings, so we don’t have to do much analysis to know it’s bad news. It’s called the Online Personal Privacy Act (s.2201) and basically it legitimizes all existing spyware. Jerks. ...
Rogers sent along a link to Iraq Watch, a US-based anti-nuclear group that is keeping track of Iraq’s efforts to build weapons of mass destruction. You don’t have to do much digging to find that there are all sorts of open sources gathering intelligence about whatever interests you and posting it on the Internet. As Robert Young Pelton pointed out in his Salon interview, the media is pervasive and well funded. The problem is keeping track of everything that’s published all around the world. Fortunately, there are topical outfits that take care of the aggregation for generalists like myself. Sometimes the results are flawed studies like professor Marc Herald’s infamous compilation of Afghan civilian casualties, or providers of grist for ideologists of a particular stripe, like MEMRI. Others, like the Federation of American Scientists and Iraq Watch, are more intriguing. ...
The scuttlebutt according to Talking Points Memo is that Karen Hughes is really leaving for the reasons she says she is. He also has some juicy stuff on Ari Fleischer’s impending demise. It also seems to be the general consensus that Fleischer is both loathesome and incompetent – I’m glad I wasn’t alone in thinking that. AT&T; is shutting down the research lab at Cambridge University that it bought from Olivetti. Yet another sad story in the demise of corporate R&D.; For all the bad things you can say about Microsoft, one of the good things the company does is pour a lot of money into pure research. They pay a lot of smart people to just sit around and think. It’s a shame to see a working lab like the Cambridge Lab get shuttered. The lab is probably best known among geeks for creating VNC. ...