Why the WMD issue is so important

Excellent, thoughtful article in The Atlantic by Clive Cook. Concludes: “Deliberately misleading voters, even in a cause as good as the destruction of Saddam Hussein, is bad in itself. It may very well prove counterproductive as well — especially if America and its allies are right to suppose that the war against the West’s enemies is only just beginning. In prosecuting this long war, the electorate’s trust is a vital strategic asset. George W. Bush’s stock of credibility with voters seems ample, for now. But what happens next time when Tony Blair, clutching bulging dossiers of intelligence, asks Britain to trust his assessment of national security and to go to war? Unless danger by then is staring them in the face, his audience is going to take an awful lot of convincing.”

SCO gets loonier by the minute

As it thrashes around to find a way of extracting money from IBM and other Linux providers, SCO has now taken to attacking Linus Torvalds. SCO’s amended suit against I.B.M., filed on Bloomsday, contends that Linus appears to have a casual attitude toward intellectual property rights.

NYT story reads, in part: “SCO, based in Lindon, Utah, sued I.B.M. in March, contending that the computer company improperly copied Unix code into Linux.

SCO bought the source code and license rights to Unix in 1995. I.B.M. denies the allegations and counters that SCO is vastly overstating its contract rights.

‘As I.B.M. executives know,’ the filing states, “a significant flaw of Linux is the inability and/or unwillingness of the Linux process manager, Linus Torvalds, to identify the intellectual property origins of contributed source code that comes in from those many different software developers.'”

Wow! How to lose friends and influence. This case is clearly run by ambulance-chasing lawyers. It’s a bit like opening a suit in an ecclesiastical court by suggesting that the Pope beats his wife.

Hurrah for Microsoft!

Eh? Well, on one subject (spam), Bill Gates and I see eye to eye. And Microsoft has started to throw its formidable resources into the battle against spammers. According to the NYT, the company filed lawsuits on June 17 against 15 groups of individuals and companies that it says collectively sent its clients more than two billion unwanted e-mail messages.

Unwanted e-mail, commonly called spam, has been a fast-growing problem for many e-mail users. The Hotmail service from Microsoft, with 140 million users, has been a fat target for spammers.

The company estimates that more than 80 percent of the more than 2.5 billion e-mail messages sent each day to Hotmail users are spam. It now blocks most of those spam messages.

All of the large Internet service providers, including America Online, Earthlink and Yahoo, have started filing lawsuits against e-mailers that they say are sending spam.

Microsoft’s suits represent the largest number filed at one time, and reflect Microsoft’s willingness to devote some of its considerable resources to fighting spam. It promised more such actions to come.”