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.”

How Linus stays sane

By not getting worked up the way geeks usually do. “My basic strategy has always been to not care too much. It actually ends up working wonders – avoiding confrontation by just walking away. The thing is, I don’t usually feel as deeply about some of the issues they feel strongly about, and that makes it easier just to ignore the politics – and as a result, the political consequences. That also allows me to concentrate on the things I do enjoy, namely the technical discussions.

Q: How long will that work? Well, it’s worked so far. Every once in a while an issue comes up where I have to make a statement. I can’t totally avoid all political issues, but I try my best to minimize them. When I do make a statement, I try to be fairly neutral. Again, that comes from me caring a lot more about the technology than about the politics, and that usually means that my opinions are colored mostly by what I think is the right thing to do technically rather than for some nebulous good.”

[Wired interview.]

What is SCO playing at?

“In an escalating legal battle, the SCO Group announced yesterday that it was revoking I.B.M.’s license for software essential to a multibillion-dollar business and that it had asked a federal court to block that business permanently.

The SCO action focused on the license for AIX, the I.B.M. version of the Unix operating system. But the legal dispute is stirring wider concerns in the computer industry because it has the potential to affect the many corporations now using the GNU Linux operating system, a close relative of Unix….”[NYT report.]

Pentagon opts to go for IPv6

According to this report, the Pentagon has decided that all its systems will have to be IPv6 compliant by 2008. That should push a lot of people off the fence. Long overdue IMHO.

Ellen Ullman goes mainstream

Well, at any rate the NYT has reviewed her novel, The Bug. Flattering review, too. Quote:

“Ullman has already established herself as an indispensable voice out of the world of technology in her memoir, ”Close to the Machine” (1997), and in her essays for Wired, Salon and Harper’s Magazine, where last year she published a remarkable essay titled ”Programming the Post-Human,” about robotics and the spark of life. She is neither a booster cum franchiser of the latest terms and gadgets nor a Luddite with an ax to grind — Ullman is a knowledgeable skeptic reporting from inside the walls of a holy city closed to most of us and, to top things off, she is an accomplished stylist.”

Coincidences

One of the great things about living and working in Cambridge is the way one unexpectedly runs into all kinds of interesting people. Yesterday, for example, I was invited to lunch in Churchill College, and an elderly but sprightly lady plonked herself down opposite me in the dining hall. It turned out she was Winston Churchill’s daughter, Mary Soames. She’s writing her memoirs and is here to look up family papers in the College’s Churchill Archive. We talked for a time about her parents, and about the public perception of them as distant and abstracted. She says their letters to one another about the children do not confirm this image. Nor, it seems, do her own memories. But this may have been because she was the only child not to be sent away to boarding school. She also found letters in which Winston and Clementine agonise about their son, Randolph.

As well they might: everyone I know who had anything to do with Randolph regarded him as a monster. There’s a famous story about Evelyn Waugh in this context. It seems that Randolph developed a tumour and was operated on to remove it. Waugh was sitting in White’s (a right-wing men’s club in London) when someone came in with the news that Randolph was going to be OK because the tumour had been found to be benign. “Ah”, said Waugh, “the wonders of medical science — to have found the only piece of Randolph that was not malignant — and remove it!”

UK government launches inquiry into risks and potential benefits of nanotechnology

Guardian report. “The government today launched an independent study into the benefits and risks of nanotechnology, the science of manipulating ultra-small particles.

The Royal Society and the Royal Academy of Engineering have been commissioned to look at this emerging area of science, engineering and technology to see how it should be regulated as it develops. “

Interesting that public concern is growing. According to an earlier Guardian story, “Nanotechnology research is on the increase – growing in the US from £270m to £378m in the last five years, and in western Europe from £79m to more than £219m. But it is Japan that is really going all out to harness the new science, with a six-fold leap in spending from £75m to £470m.”

A Toronto Thinktank suggests that it may not be entirely daft to worry about the potential pitfalls ahead. Quote: “In a paper published in the Institute of Physics journal Nanotechnology, Canadian researchers, from the University of Toronto Joint Centre for Bioethics (JCB), claim that although the research into extremely small devices is still in its early stages and most applications may be decades away, it is already arousing alarm about people’s privacy and security.

Hailed as the first major scientific revolution of the 21st century, nanotechnology will make possible invisible microphones, cameras and tracking devices. And although it holds out hope of cheap, pollution-free production, little has been done to assess possible impacts on the environment when nano-materials are released. “

Wonder if any of them have read Michael Crichton’s Prey?

The Segway saga gets better

Now it even involves Dubya. Here are some wonderful photographs of the Leader of the Free World trying to master this user-friendly transportation device. Thanks to Denny Henke for the link.

Update: CNN has a report (and a picture) of Bush pere et fils riding round like zombies on Segways while Barbara very sensibly walks alongside.