As the open source operating system turns: way back in March, 2000, BSDI bought Walnut Creek CDROM, and thus took over the stewardship of FreeBSD development (to go with their BSD/OS operating system, which is proprietary). In April of last year, Wind River bought out BSDI, getting both BSD/OS and FreeBSD. Now, Wind River is selling the FreeBSD stuff to FreeBSD Mall, which is owned by Bob Bruce, the original founder of Walnut Creek CDROM. ...
Andrew Leonard weighs in on the Enron scandal for Salon Premium: There’s no doubt that a special prosecutor should be named. But will it make any difference? The real outrages committed here don’t fit well into a special prosecutor’s purview. The mutual embrace between the entire political system and Enron goes so deep that to ask whether the government could have (or should have) prevented Enron’s collapse is pointless. Enron’s woes aren’t really a scandal at all – instead, they’re a magnifying glass allowing us to see clearly exactly how government and business operate today. You spend enough money on campaign contributions and lobbyists to buy influence and get the laws changed on your behalf, and then you sit back and count your stock options. Enron did it on a bigger scale than anybody else in recent memory, and ultimately, on a more incompetent scale than everybody else, but that doesn’t make it exceptional. ...
How big is the Enron scandal going to be in the end? I’ve read a ton of stories I wanted to link to, but I’m not linking to any of them. Some highlights: Enron’s former CFO has hired David Boies to represent him. Seems like he made plenty of cash before the implosion, and sees himself as being in real trouble. The Democrats are bludgeoning President Bush with this scandal, but Enron doled out plenty of cash to both parties over the past few years. I guess when it comes to taking cash handouts, there’s plenty of bipartisan cooperation. Arthur Andersen is in real trouble because its auditors destroyed documents that people are now very interested in seeing. Some people are speculating that this could be the end of Andersen altogether. They doled out plenty of cash to politicians in both parties as well. The New York Times reports that 29 Enron insiders sold off 17.3 million shares of stock starting in 1999 and ending in mid-2001, worth a total of $1.1 billion. ...
On the op-ed page of the New York Times, Bill Keller gives Jesse Helms, Phil Gramm, and Strom Thurmond a fitting sendoff. Pakistan’s military dictator Pervez Musharraf gave a the speech of his life last night, in hopes of placating India without losing his job of Pakistan. He decried terrorism and intolerance, but continued to refuse to turn Pakistani citizens over to India and refused to end support for Muslims living in Kashmir in their insurgency against the Indian government. He did annouce that terrorism by Pakistanis at home or abroad would no longer be tolerated. ...
If there’s one phrase I could stand never to read again, it would be “If this were (Hillary|Bill) Clinton.” It’s used to equally annoying effect by people who hate the Clintons and people who defend them. Here’s an Israeli human rights group report criticizing the IDF for killing Palestinian civlians. Two things: the first is that it’s pretty obvious that the IDF is out of control, whether this came with Sharon or before him is unknown to me. From routinely humiliating the people who pass through their checkpoints around the occupied territories to demolishing houses to gunning down Palestinians, the IDF needs more discipline. The second thing is that too many Arabs would refuse to believe that this report even exists because it doesn’t jibe with their “all Jews hate us” worldview. ...
Kevin Kelly: The Web Runs on Love, Not Greed In our disappointment of grand riches, we have failed to see the miracle on our desks. Ten years ago, it was easy to dismiss visions of a wondrous screen in our homes that would provide the whole world in its magical window. The idea of a universal information port was considered uneconomical, and too futuristic to be real in our lifetimes. Yet at any hour of today, most readers of this paper have access to the full text of the Encyclopedia Britannica, precise map directions to anywhere in the country, stock quotes in real time, local weather forecasts with radar pictures, immediate sports scores from your hometown, any kind of music you could desire, answers to medical questions, hobbyists who know more than you do, tickets to just about anything, 24/7 e-mail, news from a hundred newspapers, and so on. Much of this is for free. This abundance simply overwhelms what was promised by the most optimistic guru.
A Norwegian court has indicted Jon Johansen, the Norwegian programmer who wrote DeCSS, and he could face up to 2 years in jail for writing a program that enabled him to watch DVD movies on his computer running Linux. (Insert profanity here.)
Here’s something I’ve noticed a lot recently. When I click on links to people’s Amazon wish lists, I’m often taken to my Amazon wish list. My first reaction is shock that I’m not the only person who’s interested in Jay Farrar’s latest album and The Oxford History of Islam, then I quickly realize that I’m at my own wish list. The problem is that when you go to Amazon and click on the Wish List link, the URL in the address field is not unique to your wish list, it just means “the currently logged in user’s wish list.” Finding the absolute URL to your own personal wish list is a bit trickier. The way I got mine was to click on the “Tell people about your Wish List” button and send an email to myself with the URL for my wish list in it. Maybe, there’s a better way, but I don’t know what it is. ...
You know, the problem with keeping secrets is that people assume you’re doing so because you have something to hide. For some reason, Dick Cheney refused to disclose who he consulted with on his energy policy recommendations, and now it’s kind of blowing up in his face. It turns out that Cheney and his aides met with Enron executives a total of 6 times last year to discuss energy policy and the energy crisis in California. I have no idea whether anything inappropriate occurred, but Enron certainly had good access to the White House (they paid enough for it). ...
NYRB: Manual for a ‘Raid’. This is a detailed analysis of the documents carried by the hijackers on September 11. Zimbabwe’s president Robert Mugabe is providing a great illustration of the difference between democracy and “democracy.” He has proposed new laws which will basically eliminate any sort of free press (and political opposition to his regime) in Zimbabwe. Chris Byron savages the outcome of the Time Warner/AOL merger for MSNBC (link via Media News). ...