] Libya wants to solve all problems and we want to focus on
] development and advancing our country. This (weapons)
] programme does not benefit our people or country... We
] want to have ties with America and Britain because this
] is in the interest of our people.

Saddam's capture has overshadowed two other major wins for the administration this week. The first was Iran's agreement to allow inspections of it's nuclear facilities. The second was Libya's disarmament agreement. In the wake of the Iraq war a number of our enemies have decided that opposing us is counter productive.

BBC NEWS | Africa | World reaction to Libya's decision

] If hiring an American is noble, surely hiring an Indian or a
] Malaysian is even more so. No matter the current state of
] American job opportunities, such opportunities in
] developing countries are far worse.
]
] Ethically enlightened people should applaud, rather than
] jeer, companies that offer employment opportunities to the world's
] neediest people.

[Politech] Don Boudreaux: Why it's moral for firms to outsource overseas

John Perry Barlow has started a blog!

] Here I am, in the lobby of the highly attitudinal W Hotel
] in San Francisco, creating my very first blog entry.
]
] Joichi Ito, a blog sensei if ever there was one, is introducing
] me to the Blogosphere. I'm wary. Am I too old a dog to blog?
] Am I actually too sick of things virtual to plunge myself
] deeper into electronic immateriality?
]
] We'll see.
]
] But, I am motivated. For years, I've been sending out
] BarlowSpams and then privately enjoying the responses,
] both from friendz and friendz of friendz. Now I will have a
] place to pass to these on to our little community and, with
] luck, grow this into something besides my own little
] personality cult.

BarlowFriendz

] Forester analyst John McCarthy says jobs that are most at
] risk require fewer skills, are automated or are highly
] portable.
]
] Those include computer programming and software
] engineer jobs, that have long been leaving the country.

This article is entertaining for two reasons. The first is the juxtaposition above. I supposed they meant to indicate that programming is highly portable and not that its a low skill job. The second thing that I find entertaining is how different this is from what you read a few years ago. Someone on Slashdot asked if these researchers just take the slope of the graph from the last two years and draw it out without any consideration for how the situation might change? I reached a point during the .com boom where I mentally counter indicated anything that Jupiter Research published. Maybe I should start ignoring these people all together.

Vanishing Jobs - Dec. 18, 2003

In response to the RIAA's suits, users who want to share music files are adopting tools like WINW and BadBlue, that allow them to create encrypted spaces where they can share files and converse with one another. As a result, all their communications in these spaces, even messages with no more commercial content than "BRITN3Y SUX!!!1!" are hidden from prying eyes. This is not because such messages are sensitive, but rather because once a user starts encrypting messages and files, it's often easier to encrypt everything than to pick and choose. Note that the broadening adoption of encryption is not because users have become libertarians, but because they have become criminals; to a first approximation, every PC owner under the age of 35 is now a felon.

The RIAA makes everyone a cypherpunk

He said: "We would not charge for that. We would have no trouble [with that]."

White House Web Scrubbing

] The U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals, in a 2-1
] ruling, said only the U.S. Congress can authorize such
] detentions and it ordered the government to release Jose
] Padilla from military custody within 30 days.
]
] The court said that the government can transfer Padilla,
] a U.S. citizen who has been held incommunicado in a Navy
] prison, to a civilian authority that can bring criminal
] charges against him.
]
] "Presidential authority does not exist in a vacuum and
] this case involves not whether those responsibilities
] should be aggressively pursued, but whether the President
] is obligated in the circumstances presented here to share
] them with Congress," the court said.

ABCNEWS.com : Appeals Court Says Bush Can't Hold U.S. Citizen

Demographic data on the Livejournal user community. Welcome to Castle Anthrax...

Livejournal demographics

] If King remains a one-dimensional grainy black-and-white
] figure who utters the same sunny sound bite year after
] year until it's a cliche, it's because news networks
] won't pay for more, and researchers have been kept from
] delving deep into his papers to tell us something new
] about the Martin Luther King the man, not the statuette.
]
] And his family wants it that way.

And once again we are promoting science and the useful arts by creating economic incentives for people to engage in historical events by preventing people from talking about them.

You need a license to quote Martin Luther King Jr. (phillyBurbs.com)

] "They certainly had access to the two sons, Uday and
] Qusay, who were killed," he says. A "very quick way" of
] identifying Saddam Hussein would be to compare the new
] sample with variable regions called short tandem repeats
] on the sons' Y-chromosomes. As this male sex chromosome
] is passed directly from father to son, it should match.

Ask MemeStreams, get an answer...

New Scientist - Fast-track DNA tests confirm Saddam's identity