Tens of thousands of slogan-chanting Taiwanese took to the streets to protest rival China's military threats against the island.

"The great Taiwanese people oppose annexation and invasion. We protect democracy and care for Taiwan... and say no to China," President Chen Shui-bian told the rally organized by his Democratic Progressive Party (DPP).

"Taiwan is an independent sovereign state. It belongs to the 23 million people on the island and its future should be decided by the people here rather than by the 1.3 billion people in China," Chen added.

The DPP said the rally was intended to highlight the increasing threat from China, which has some 780 ballistic missiles targeting Taiwan.

The protestors, estimated at 150,000 by the organizers, shouted slogans such as "Loving Taiwan, opposing annexation!" and "Loving peace, opposing missiles!".

"We oppose ultimate unification as the sole option for Taiwan people as it runs against the principle of democracy," Chen said.

He also pledged to lead "Taiwan to walk the right and its own road" while saying the road may be bumpy.

Here are some pictures of the crowd showing how they feel about china.

Also, check out this editorial in the Taipei Times which reflects on the 10th anniversary of the Taiwan Straits missile crisis.

AFP | Thousands of Taiwanese hold anti-China rally

Some have described the situation in Iraq as a tightening noose, noting that "time is not on our side"and that "morale is down." Others have described a "very dangerous" turn of events and are "extremely concerned."

Who are they that have expressed these concerns? In fact, these are the exact words of terrorists discussing Iraq -- Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his associates -- who are describing their own situation and must be watching with fear the progress that Iraq has made over the past three years.

The terrorists seem to recognize that they are losing in Iraq. I believe that history will show that to be the case.

Fortunately, history is not made up of daily headlines, blogs on Web sites or the latest sensational attack. History is a bigger picture, and it takes some time and perspective to measure accurately.

Donald Rumsfeld has an article in the Washington Post to mark the three year mile mark in Iraq. Its not all that great of an article, but due to who wrote it, its worth pointing out.

Here are some stats on the current Iraqi forces from the man himself:

Today, some 100 Iraqi army battalions of several hundred troops each are in the fight, and 49 control their own battle space. About 75 percent of all military operations in the country include Iraqi security forces, and nearly half of those are independently Iraqi-planned, Iraqi-conducted and Iraqi-led. Iraqi security forces have a greater ability than coalition troops to detect a foreign terrorist's accent, identify local suspects and use force without increasing a feeling of occupation. It was these Iraqi forces -- not U.S. or coalition troops -- that enforced curfews and contained the violence after the attack on the Golden Dome Shrine in Samarra. To be sure, violence of various stripes continues to slow Iraq's progress. But the coalition is doing everything possible to see this effort succeed and is making adjustments as appropriate.

Rumsfeld: What We've Gained In 3 Years in Iraq

Something extremely weird is going on over on Digg.com. Today for the third time in a short period, a story got promoted to the front page where a blogger raises a baseless rumour about Google buying Sun. And as is explained further down, it appears that this is the result of a coordinated effort to fool Digg into promoting the story.

The blog author has no sources, zero credibility and most importantly his reasoning is completely erratic.

Silicon Valley Sleuth: Scoop: Digg is used for Sun stock manipulation

China is stepping up military training in Latin America because of a law that limits U.S. military support to nations in the region, the general in charge of the U.S. Southern Command told Congress yesterday.

"If we are not there and we can't provide this opportunity, someone else will," Gen. Craddock told the Senate Armed Services Committee.

"Other nations are moving in. The People's Republic of China has made many offers, and now we are seeing those who formerly would come to the United States going to China."

"Some of these countries are critical -- Peru, Ecuador, Brazil, Bolivia," Gen. Craddock said, noting that in several nations, "we are losing the opportunity to bring their officers, their senior noncommissioned officers, to the United Sates into our schools."

The lack of training has prevented sharing U.S. military "attributes and characteristics" with foreign militaries, including concepts of military subordination to civilian leaders, and principles of democracy, he said.

China has also offered to sell its new FC-1 jet fighter to Venezuela, after last year's sale of three JYL-1 mobile air-defense radar units.

"We know almost nothing" about Chinese military and intelligence activities in the region, a Pentagon official said.

So much for the idea of China having no reach... Aren't they building aircraft carriers now? Making a play to start getting a footprint on both sides of the rim? What exactly is "almost nothing"? What came out of Rummy's recent trip over yonder that pertains to this?

Chinese military trains in West - The Washington Times, Reverend Moon's Newspaper

Michiko Kakutani calls Fukuyama's new book "tough-minded and edifying."

In "America at the Crossroads," Mr. Fukuyama questions the assertion made by the prominent neoconservatives Mr. Kristol and Robert Kagan in their 2000 book "Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign and Defense Policy" that other nations "find they have less to fear" from the daunting power of the United States because "American foreign policy is infused with an unusually high degree of morality." The problem with this doctrine of "benevolent hegemony," Mr. Fukuyama points out, is that "it is not sufficient that Americans believe in their own good intentions; non-Americans must be convinced of them as well."

That's where the General Memetics Corporation comes into the picture.

Fukuyama writes:

"Bureaucratic tribalism exists in all administrations, but it rose to poisonous levels in Bush's first term. Team loyalty trumped open-minded discussion, and was directly responsible for the administration's failure to plan adequately for the period after the end of active combat."

Fukuyama is getting hell from people for what they perceive as him changing his mind. First, I'm not sure that's completely the case. I was happy to see Saddam go down as well, even though I thought our timing and approach was way off. I also do not think its contradictory to be anti-war and applaud the downfall of Saddam at the same time. You can be happy about ends and still think that means suck. You can also want a particular end, but have a different set of means in mind to get there. However, all these things involve complex arguments. Most people don't like complex arguments that actually require a few levels of thinking. Meaningful ideas are like onions, they must grow a few layers before they are edible and taste good. The outer layers don't have as much flavor, but they can also easily be peeled off.

Since I've followed Fukuyama's works, I'm looking forward to reading his new book and seeing where he goes with it. I don't always agree with him, but I consistently find some great insight in his writings.

This interview is also worth a read. Dare I say it ends on a note that makes Fukuyama look like an intellectual snob?

NYT Review of 'America at the Crossroads,' by Francis Fukuyama

Unwriting a book is one thing. Unreading it is something else. What are we to make of the following verdict, from a reader in Australia? “Fascinating, but at times I wish I could unread it . . . On one level, I can share in the sense of wonder Dawkins so evidently sees in the workings-out of such complex processes . . . But at the same time, I largely blame The Selfish Gene for a series of bouts of depression I suffered from for more than a decade . . . Never sure of my spiritual outlook on life, but trying to find something deeper — trying to believe, but not quite being able to — I found that this book just about blew away any vague ideas I had along these lines, and prevented them from coalescing any further. This created quite a strong personal crisis for me some years ago.”

I have previously described similar responses from readers. A teacher reproachfully wrote that a pupil had come to him in tears after reading the same book, because it had persuaded her that life was empty and purposeless. But if something is true, no amount of wishful thinking can undo it. As I went on to write, “Presumably there is indeed no purpose in the ultimate fate of the cosmos, but do any of us really tie our life’s hopes to the ultimate fate of the cosmos anyway? Of course we don’t; not if we are sane. Our lives are ruled by all sorts of closer, warmer, human ambitions and perceptions. To accuse science of robbing life of the warmth that makes it worth living is so preposterously mistaken, so diametrically opposite to my own feelings and those of most working scientists, I am almost driven to the despair of which I am wrongly suspected.”

Richard Dawkins on the history of The Selfish Gene

The prankster decides to unwittingly enlist his cat in the fun. The cat has a subdermal pet ID tag, which the attacker rewrites with a virus using commercially available equipment. He then goes to a veterinarian (or the ASPCA), claims it is stray cat and asks for a cat scan. Bingo! The database is infected. Since the vet (or ASPCA) uses this database when creating tags for newly-tagged animals, these new tags can also be infected. When they are later scanned for whatever reason, that database is infected, and so on. Unlike a biological virus, which jumps from animal to animal, an RFID virus spread this way jumps from animal to database to animal.

I ignored this article this morning but its actually pretty cool. SQL injection, CSS, and buffer overflows from data stored in RFIDs is a vector that few people have really looked at. I wonder if the new U.S. Passports are vulnerable?

RFID Viruses: Is your cat infected with a computer virus?

At the core of Trac lies an integrated wiki and issue/bug database. Using wiki markup, all objects managed by Trac can directly link to other issues/bug reports, code changesets, documentation and files.

Around the core lies other modules, providing additional features and tools to make software development more streamlined and effective. Our goal is to help programmers focus on the important stuff: Developing software.

We've been using Trac internally at Industrial Memetics for about a month now, and aside from one issue with one of the default reports, we have nothing but good things to say about it. The Trac/Subversion combination is highly recommended to anyone currently using CVS/CvsWeb/Wiki/Bugtrac..

Edgewall Software: Trac

The last three questions of this CircleID interview with Vint Cerf came from MemeStreams founder Tom Cross. Read on...

Q14: Years ago it was often argued that consumers in the United States were confused by domain names in TLDs other than .com… Has the popularity of search engines, and particularly search bars in web browsers, changed playing field in terms of consumer’s ability to use alternate TLDs and the amount of traffic seen by sites in alternate TLDs from U.S. consumers?—by Tom Cross

Vint Cerf: That’s a good question. There isn’t much doubt that “.com” became a kind of symbol for domain name registrations in the US. My honest impression is that search engines have tended to diminish the importance of “guessing” domain names although I understand that a substantial number of people still try that—and if they fail, they likely turn to search mechanisms. A more serious problem has been that JAVA programmers for web pages often don’t know that there are more than seven gTLDs and that many of them have more than three letters. That leads to rejection of email addresses and other entries into web forms that make reference to domain names. We need some educational outreach to fix that.

Q15: Does ICANN view the bulk domain monetization business as a legitimate activity that contributes constructively to the Internet as a communications tool?—by Tom Cross

Vint Cerf: As an engineer, I must admit that this particular “business” has been a surprise for me. However, it seems to fit within the present framework allowed by domain name operation. Advertising seems to be the primary driver here and it is argued by interested parties that advertising is an important form of commercial communication and therefore qualifies as a constructive Internet application.

Tom Cross (CircleID comment): In particular, with regard to question 15, if you replace the words “domain name” with the word “email” you have an answer to why Spam is good for the Internet. One need not make a general indictment of all commercial speech in order to observe that a practice which increases the street price of domain names by several orders of magnitude while providing comparatively little value in return might not be the most effective use of an artificially scarce namespace. This is where your justification for broadening the number of TLDs lies.

Q16: How much of an impact does the bulk domain monetization business have on the revenue that registrars, registries, and ICANN generate from the domain name system?—by Tom Cross

Vint Cerf: That’s a good question and I don’t know the answer. Probably a key metric is the ratio of bulk domain registrations vs. registrations that are related to resolvable addresses leading to web pages, email boxes, etc. Perhaps some of the registrars and registries who are reading these Q&As would be willing to respond to that question.

At the time of this posting, none of the registrars or registries have chimed in.

Answers from Vint Cerf: The Road Ahead for Top-Level Domains

"Whitedust is running a very interesting article with the DEF CON speaker and cryptographer Elonka Dunin. The article covers her career and specifically her involvement with the CIA and other US Military agencies."

Elonka continues to prove why she is the most famous user on MemeStreams. Rumor also has it she has been accepted into the Industrial Memetics Institute...

Go Elonka! I truly cannot wait till I have a copy of her upcoming book. I expect it to be very well recieved by a very wide audience. I think the result will be suprising...

Elonka should wind up on the talk show circut. We need to get Elonka on Oprah after her book comes out! It's imperative.

Slashdot | Interview With Cryptographer Elonka Dunin