Reference:
The invasion and its aftermath have revealed a few hard truths for the Bush administration. The first is that every successful war requires a successful occupation, and those tend to take longer and require more manpower than the combat phase of operations. Right now, the U.S. military simply could not fight another war even if it wanted to: Too high a percentage of active American units are currently stationed in Iraq, and they will not--and should not--be going anywhere for a while. The military's air transport infrastructure is also currently stretched to the limit.

Even if the U.S. could muster the troops, both the uniformed brass and the civilian leadership in the Pentagon loathe the idea of assigning nation-building tasks to the military. For Rumsfeld, such an idea clashes with his vision of a lean warfighting machine. "I think nation-building does not have a brilliant record across the globe," he observed in November 2001. Then after the war with Iraq ended, he concluded, "I don't think anyone can build a nation but the people of that nation." Similarly, the military's objections to non-combat operations are longstanding and have shown no signs of subsiding since 9/11: Over the past six months, the Army managed to shut down the one military institute devoted to peacekeeping. Without alternative forces willing to mop up after U.S. combat operations, the uniformed services will resist any effort to fight another Iraq-style war.
NewRepulic . Drezner

Notes:
If the military isn't going to embrace non-combat operations, be it the tradtional force or Rummy's force, what is the logical purpose for an adventurous military? Because no matter what, you've got that period after the militar operation when things have to be re-stabilized.

Drezner suggests that the US becomes the cops and the rest of the world acts as the social workers. Which means that the US has got to listen to the rest of the world -- either we go in with their support or we end up mopping up ourselves.

If this is the case, then what is the real military need? What are we fighting? The needs of a police force with the pre-dominant physical threat, keeping the peace is far different than the needs of a defensive/offensive miliatry operation against potential equals.

Reference:
People forget that IBM is mainly a hardware and services company. By putting Unix under the GPL they would become heroes to the programmers and system admins and end up selling even more hardware and services. Remember, IBM already invested $1 billion in Linux and claimed to have made that money back within a year. Buying SCO and the Novell IP could be viewed as just the next step of that very smart investment.
Cringley

Notes:
That's a significant difference. MS is a software company only. Its attempts at hardware have been, by and large, a failure. Even though it weighs substantial influence on the PC architecture, it makes no money from the hardware. And in service, it's a joke. (I got the most insulting call today from an MS rep who insisted that his spiel to get me to "educational" classes wasn't a sales call. At least the IBM reps are honest about their sales motives.)

MS requires churn to continue to make money. IBM makes money on expansion and making sure that things keep working, new or not. That's a big.

Extend this to the Trusted Computing Group/Palladium technology. This is the technology where a second CPU with a built-in key is added to the architecture to make sure that everything on-board is what it's supposed to be. It needs a third party to monitor compliance, even if that third party is the user.

IBM doesn't care who the trusted third party is. For the most part, IBM will set up an infrastructure so that the corporate customer can keep track of usage, etc. DRM, MPAA, RIAA? Who cares.

MS cares a great deal because MS is desparate to find a new business that will generate on-going revenue, similar to the IBM service, and of course, without the pesky customers to placate. If MS can become the "trusted" intermediary, espeically with the renting of applications and entertainment, then it has found a new constant currency stream that doesn't depend on churn.

A real threat to MS is that if IBM starts moving Linux out from the server room to the desktop with the OpenOffice suite integrated into Apache, mySQL, PHP, etc., then MS not only has competition in its core business, it looses its chance to capture the rental market. And this is not as unlikely as it may seem. The improvements in OpenOffice, the rapacious MS licensing fees, the growing cluefulness of and scrutiny on corporate executives, and the growing user understanding that all software sucks, just in different ways, works against the "coporate-friendly" perception of the MS applications. Finally, add the growing understanding for the need of open data for real inter-operability, and MS has got potential problems.

Such is the importance of SCO. If MS can float out a "Windex" OS, even as vapor-ware, it further freezes the Linux desktop push and it's strategy has a chance of success. It is already doing this with the recent Connext(sp?) and the anti-virus purchases.

Otherwise, MS risks losing big time. So much of it's dominance is based on the perception of *future* dominance. I'll upgrade to Windows 20xx because it will continue to be dominant. How much money would IBM make in service fees to switch a Fortune 100 to Linux? Lots. How much money could that enterprise save, just in licensing? After the IBM fees, probably enough to make it an acceptable risk. What kind of impact would that have on the perception of dominance? Lots. All of a sudden Grandma with her cheapy Walmart Lindows box might not look so dumb after all.

Reference:
China Telecom is considering purchasing software from iCognito, an Israeli company that invented a program called "artificial content recognition," which surfs along just ahead of you, learning as it censors in real time. It was built to filter "gambling, shopping, job search, pornography, stock quotes, or other non-business material," but the first question from the Chinese buyers is invariably: Can it stop Falun Gong?
....
In the wake of terrorist attacks on America, some of the byplay between Beijing and its entrepreneurial suitors has taken on new significance. According to James Mulvenon of Rand Corp., Network Associates (better known as the producers of McAfee AntiVirus), Symantec (Norton AntiVirus) and Trend Micro of Tokyo gained entry to the Chinese market by helpfully donating 300 live computer viruses to the Public Security Bureau.

The U.S. Embassy has already monitored the picture.exe virus, which worms into a user's computer and then quietly sabotages the widely available encryption software Pretty Good Privacy by sending the personal encryption keys to China.
newsmax.com

Notes:

Reference:
And why not make this a higher profile U.S. policy? Cracking the Chinese firewall is at least as technically interesting as strategic defense.
Newsmax.com

Notes:
Because it is rife with contradiction. The technology that China uses is the same technology developed for corporates to block unwanted surfing and forestall cracking. So I don't think that there's going to be a great movement to fund ways around corporate control.

Which leads, cynically, to whether the current administration actually supports the moves by China. Ashcroft has got to love the surveillance control, and the media people have got to love the message control.

Reference:
"I'm interested," Hatch interrupted. He said damaging someone's computer "may be the only way you can teach somebody about copyrights."
Yahoo News

Notes:
Taken at face value, this seems like Alice in Wonderland. Destroying computers by the private sector for copyright violation? It really seems that this is completely out of perspective of the activity and the costs.

If the record industry is that central to the health of our economy, then we are in a world of trouble.

At the same time, the news is filled with stories on how China is censoring the Internet. I'm beginning to feel that the copyright issue is really a stalking horse for the control agenda. If these limitations can be rammed through based on economic reasoning, then we don't have to deal with the repressive aspects up front.

Reference:
Part of that stemmed from his frustration with the culture of the White House. He was loath to discuss it. His wife, Bonnie, a school administrator, was not: "It's a very closed, small, controlled group. This is an administration that determines what it thinks and then sets about to prove it. There's almost a religious kind of certainty. There's no curiosity about opposing points of view. It's very scary. There's kind of a ghost agenda."
Washington Post

Notes:
Not surprising for the management of a business, really. And that's the problem when you get people in power who try to run government like a business.

We've got a master politician (Bush/Rove) presiding over a bunch of converted zealots with precious little governmental administration or policy implementation experience.

Reference:
The Agonist ran two articles back-to-back:

From Haaretz comes a story about US wanting to use force against Syria.

From Dawn of Pakistan that Iraqi soldiers are threatening armed insurrection unless back wages are paid by the US.
Various

Notes:
Things got tough in Afghanistan, so we moved on to Iraq. Things are getting tough in Iraq, so we are pushing on to Syria and/or Iran?

If this is so, then this administration is creating so much more trouble than they are solving. Can you imagine the repercussion of multiple countries where we laid waste and then up and left?

Reference:
In today's economic slowdown, it has become clear that both the early-'90s pessimists and the late-'90s boosters misunderstood the true source of economic value. Manufacturing and technology generate wealth only when they make matter and information serve human desire. Desire is the true source of economic value.

Competition has pushed quality so high and prices so low that few manufacturers can survive on performance and price alone. To produce value, they must give customers something to please their sensory side. Aesthetics is the killer app.
Wired

Notes:

Reference:
If we posit that filters will improve, then we are looking at a truly disturbing Orwellian scenario: the capacity of organizations -- not just libraries, but any organization, whether it be governmental, corporate, private or public -- to fine-tune levels of access to information with an ease and flexibility simply not possible in the old world of hard copy. Because the Web has made getting everything so easy, it has created a market, and now, a legislative and judicial mandate, for controlling access. As the Net becomes the primary conduit for all information, which it undoubtedly will, it will be easier and easier for would-be bowdlerizers to put curbs on what is available and isn't. Want to eliminate access to the Ku Klux Klan from the Net? Just click a few check boxes. Achieving the same level of censorship in a library full of real books is a whole different order of business.
....
This represents a reduction in freedom, not an advance. I wouldn't think twice of copying a few pages of a library book at my local copy shop, or making a mix CD out of my own legally bought CDs to give to a friend. But if I step on the Internet to do my copying, I should be aware that I'm entering dangerous territory: Those same amazing technologies that give me so much access to information also give others access to me.

That's the greatest paradox inherent in the current societal frenzy over how to shut the digital Pandora's box. The Internet, so full of liberating promise, is turning into an instrument of control. Its threat to the status quo is so great that content owners and governments are demanding unprecedentedly intrusive powers to limit what we do, watch and read, and using the Internet itself to enforce those powers. Maybe in the end, the Internet will be the goose that laid the golden egg -- and then throttled itself.
Salon

Notes:

Reference:
Microsoft could then connect the search engine of its MSN portal to new file technology planned for the next version of Windows, code-named Longhorn, which will make it easier to search e-mail, spreadsheets and documents on PCs, corporate networks and the Web. The result would be a powerful technology reaching from the desktop to the greater Internet that could displace Google as the Web's leading search engine.
....
"The fact that Longhorn is on the horizon raises questions to whether search services will be integrated into the Longhorn experience and what the ramifications will be to other folks," said Michael Gartenberg, an industry analyst at Jupiter Research. "Microsoft has long demonstrated they don't have to be best at something, but they have to be good enough for people to use their default settings."
....
The value Microsoft places on search became apparent more than a year ago when the company began outlining plans for Longhorn, which is scheduled to debut in 2005. The operating system will include a central engine that can search a PC's morass of Word documents, Outlook e-mailings, Excel spreadsheets and PDF (portable document format) files with a single tool--a function that has escaped the PC industry, and Microsoft in particular, for decades.
....
The numbers show why. Overture contributes heavily to the bottom line of MSN, which receives revenue from the search service in return for exposure on the portal's site. Although Microsoft doesn't break out these figures, MSN executives have compared them in scale with Overture's contribution to Yahoo, which amounted to $54 million last quarter, or 20 percent of its total revenue.

At the same time, while commercial search pays the bills, algorithmic search keeps the customer happy. MSN has deals with Inktomi and LookSmart to power its Web search results, though the future of its deal with Inktomi has been questionable since Yahoo acquired the company late last year.
news.com

Notes:
If this comprehensive plan actually works, it begins to raise issues about the ability of the searc engine to not return results.

If the money is in the paid searches, what does that mean for in-house searches. Will we have to pay MS not to see paid hits?