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Two legal challenges to the DMCA went down in flames yesterday. That’s very disheartening news. I feel like the judges don’t really understand the issues involved, but that could just be because they don’t agree with me. Yesterday, President Bush spoke at the US Attorneys conference. When he talked about the military tribunals that he authorized, the attorneys applauded: I have also reserved the option of trial by military commission for foreign terrorists who wage war against our country. Non-citizens, non-U.S. citizens who plan and/or commit mass murder are more than criminal suspects. They are unlawful combatants who seek to destroy our country and our way of life. And if I determine that it is in the national security interest of our great land to try by military commission those who make war on America, then we will do so. (Applause.) ...

The human rights community is quite astir about the deaths of the Taliban prisoners at Mazar-i-Sharif. It’s an accepted fact that the Taliban prisoners smuggled grenades into their prison, attacked their captors, siezed weapons, and fought for three days – after they had supposedly surrendered. Despite that, human rights groups are concerned that the US air raids on the fortress and Northern Alliance attacks on the prisoners that resulted in the deaths of all of them were not proportional. Frankly, I’m glad that the human rights groups are looking into this. If they accept our word at face value, they also have to accept the word of every tinpot warlord in the world when they claim that they didn’t kidnap and kill dissidents or raze villages or slaughter innocent civilians. ...

Somebody has gotten KDE 2.2.1 running under Windows using Cygwin. I’m not sure I understand why someone would do that, other than for the “because it’s there” factor.

How do you turn a terrorist into a regular old citizen? The PLO did it by getting the terrorists to start families. The English did it by showing them what they were missing out on by spending their lives in prison. Bruce Hoffman’s Atlantic article recounts these successful programs for reforming terrorists (link via Ken Layne). I’ve often told people that I think the way to put an end to many of the senseless civil wars and conflicts around the world is to figure out a way to get the participants into the good old middle class. Let’s face it, people with a house, a couple of cars, and a nice little family don’t have much interest in rioting in the streets, shooting at members of rival ethnic groups all day, or being a martyr for the cause. ...

I successfully followed up on this item from last year by not travelling for Thanksgiving this year.

McAfee denies working with the government to prevent their products from detecting FBI-created trojan horses like Magic Lantern.

Today, the New York Times has a story on Laili Helms, the self-appointed US envoy to the Taliban. She’s been working the United States on behalf of the Taliban for years, and is surprised to find that she has few friends now. (I first discovered her back in September when I saw a Village Voice article about her.) Even today, when it’s obvious that Osama bin Laden provided the military punch for the Taliban through his foreign troops, she makes excuses for them: ...

Yesterday I linked to an Economist article by Bjorn Lomborg in which he debunks (or, I should say, attempts to debunk) many commonly held beliefs among environmentalists. In it he challenged the ideas that the world faces problems of overpopulation, pollution, global warming, and mass extinction. That’s actually an oversimplification of his argument, but you can read it as well as I can. Anyway, some readers pointed out that Lomborg has plenty of critics, who probably ought to be read as well. Here’s a list of reader submitted links: ...

Lawrence Kaplan asks why the State Department won’t give the Northern Alliance its due. Contrary to widely held fears that the US would ignore the past crimes of the Northern Alliance, we’ve in fact been obsessed with them since the war in Afghanistan began. While I have utmost respect for organizations like RAWA that are fighting for the human rights of Afghanis, you can’t change the fact that the Northern Alliance is responsible for liberating Afghanistan from the Taliban. They’ve also largely avoided the crimes against humanity that marked their past rule, and have done a better job than conquering forces in most tinpot countries at maintaining order and stabilizing the places that they’ve liberated (yes, I use that loaded term intentionally). Kaplan says that most fears of the Northern Alliance were sown by Pakistan: ...

Courtesy of Snopes.com: the day after Thanksgiving is not the biggest shopping day of the year. I love it when something that everybody knows is true isn’t. For those of you who might be interested, I didn’t shop at all on Friday. This New York Times article has lots of quality information on the prison revolt near Mazar-i-Sharif, which apparently is still ongoing. You’d think that the Afghans would disarm their prisoners, but apparently a lot of them managed to smuggle weapons into the prison. The article also clears the air about the reported massacre of Taliban soldiers in a school in Mazar-i-Sharif. I quote: ...