There Bush goes being all multilateral again

TCS: Tech Central Station - Mr. Multilateral (to read). Via Insta. Stuff about the Proliferation Security Initiative and the Caspian Guard I hadn't heard about before.

For all the abuse that the Bush administration receives for its conduct of the war on terrorism, the Proliferation Security Initiative and Caspian Guard stand as examples of the other side of the war as conducted by a serious administration that knows we are all in for a long twilight struggle. Only by removing or intimidating terror-sponsoring states into renouncing terrorism, and only by stopping the spread of nuclear and other mass killing technology in its tracks, can the free world hope to win this war without incredible loss of life. Bush administration critics and the media -- often one and the same -- consistently fail to take the existence of the PSI and its start-up sister Caspian Guard into account when assessing how we are doing in the war. The existence of these organizations indicate that for all the squabbling over Iraq, most of the world's major powers do regard terrorism and weapons proliferation as serious conjoined threats, and are willing to band together to do something about it. And they are willing to be led by the unilateral cowboy from Texas who defied several of them to topple Saddam Hussein.

Fascinating article, read the whole thing.

Permalink | 2 Comments | Tags: Opinions/Politics | id 5077

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Hilarious plumber picture

Got this in a forward. I'm pretty convinced it's not photoshopped:

That's extremely creative advertising.

Permalink | Comments? | Tags: Random | id 5076

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IronPython released as open source, author goes to work for Microsoft

IronPython 0.6 has been released as open source timed to coincide with OSCON, and the author, Jim Hugunin, is going to work for Microsoft to work on the CLR.

It was a little less than a year ago that I first started investigating the Common Language Runtime (CLR). My plan was to do a little work and then write a short pithy article called, "Why .NET is a terrible platform for dynamic languages". My plans changed when I found the CLR to be an excellent target for the highly dynamic Python language. Since then I've spent much of my spare time working on the development of IronPython.

The more time that I spent with the CLR, the more excited I became about its potential. At the same time, I was becoming more frustrated with the slow pace of progress that I was able to make working on this project in my spare time. After exploring many alternatives, I think that I've found the ideal way to continue working to realize the amazing potential of the vision of the CLR. I've decided to join the CLR team at Microsoft beginning on August 2.

At Microsoft I plan to continue the work that I've begun with IronPython to bring the power and simplicity of dynamic/scripting languages to the CLR. My work with Python should continue as a working example of a high-performance production quality implementation of a dynamic language for the CLR. I will also reach out to other languages to help overcome any hurdles that are preventing them from targeting the CLR effectively.

Ed Dumbill has comments. It turns out he was able to take the source code for IronPython (which is written in C#) and run it directly on Mono with no changes. That's excellent!

John Udell has more:

"When you think about it," Hugunin said, "why would the CLR be worse for dynamic languages than the JVM, given that Microsoft had the second mover advantage?" And in fact, while he had to do plenty of extra work to support dynamic features that the CLR doesn't natively offer, he notes that the massive engineering resources invested in the CLR make it highly optimized along a number of axes. So, for example, the CLR's function call overhead is apparently less than the native-code CPython's function call overhead, and this is one of the reasons why IronPython benchmarks well against CPython.

All of this is great news. Discussion at Lambda.

Permalink | Comments? | Tags: IronPython, Microsoft | id 5067

12:23 (utc-4)
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Suicide Bomber Kills 68 In Iraq

Suicide Bomber Kills 68 In Iraq. One of the first things I thought when this happened is that this is the the first visible result of the 6 million dollar ransom the Philippines paid to the terrorists. The Philippines injects 6 million into the terrorist economy, and a week later there's a huge suicide bomb. There's no way to be sure that this attack was a result, but that money is going to be used for terrorism. Gloria Arroyo has blood on her hands.

Update: Mohammed in Iraq has comments along the same lines:

They’re cooperating with the criminals and they make it easier for terrorists to increase their activities in Iraq and elsewhere. This is the goal of terror and this is what these countries offered the terrorists on a gold plate. They’ve said clearly "do more of your work, as it will definitely bring an outcome that satisfy your sickness and illusions".

Perhaps it’s become obvious that the failure of terror is getting closer, and tightening the control over its resources is what made terrorists adopt this new strategy of asking for millions of dollars as ransoms for each hostage...

This reveals the fact that the terrorists’ resources are no longer sufficient to their expenses and this is what made them seek financial support through these criminal operations.
Ok, we know now that they’re close to bankruptcy and here come two countries to reinforce the terrorists position by withdrawing from Iraq. And people here in Iraq believe that Manilla paid several millions of dollars to free the hostage just like what the Egyptians did when the Egyptian embassy announced that the operation was more about money than about politics.
Do you know what this means?

Millions of dollars mean hundreds of victims. They’re funding terror in one way or another and I find it very stupid that negotiations take place through the help of a highly under suspicion-group like the "Sunni Muslim Cleric Council".

There’s a deal to fund terror in a different way than before and there are groups and countries who support this and maneuver to override the obstacles.
Negotiating with those thugs provides them with legitimacy let alone submitting to their demands and funding them.

Emphasis mine.

Permalink | 7 Comments | Tags: Opinions/Politics | id 5066

11:52 (utc-4)
edited: 2004-07-31 12:53 (utc-4)

 

I love my linkblog!

OH MAN I love my new linkblog. It was so easy. All it took was adding a category to my weblog, adding a few lines to the appropriate template, and then sprinkling in some CSS.

Matt, seriously... thanks for the idea.

All linkblogs should be inline with the main content of the blog. Otherwise you just tend not to look over. Like, Jeremy recently mentioned his linkblog, and I had completely forgotten he had one. Simon's I manage to read though since it sticks out enough.

Now I can finally get rid of the del.icio.us powered linkblog in my right nav. It's nice to now not have to be limited to 255 characters and be able to put links and whatever else I want in.

I'm really glad that in the creation of my linkblog I didn't have to have a separate URL structure along with a different set of pages. It's funny to look back and see what I was writing about linkblogs 7 months ago.

Permalink | 4 Comments | Tags: This website | id 5056

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