I just went and grabbed lunch at Srees, and he had some posters there, the Vegan Tour De Sree, with a funny drawing of him on a bicycle in France. He gave me one -- I'll take a picture and put it up here, if I don't forget.

Last night, I had a dream that I met up with someone who I had some bad blood with in the past, and, having decided to put bad blood behind us, gave him a hug. I asked him what was going on, and he said "Everything's broken". I said "Let's go fix it".

On tuesday, on my way back from Kiva Han, I bumped into someone, and what would've been a hello turned into a very long conversation on politics and philosophy. One of the many things we touched on was an analysis of Communism in Russia, and communism in theory. In particular, he was of the conclusion that communism is inevitably corrupt, as the centrality-focused planning needed to run such a state proves an attractive point for people who would corrupt the system, and even should social factors involved, communism requires a perfect prediction of market needs to function properly. I don't think the second is a strong argument -- at least here, our markets work generally on a certain amount of surplus. I think that the centralized control here isn't being compared to something fundamentally different, just fragmented into seperate stores. However, it does seem valid that, as incompetant people make their way into both systems, when there is not competition, an alternate mechanism must be in place to remove such people from office, as they can't fail in the market if there is none. It's a challenge, but probably not even a very difficult one for someone who is versed in that style of economics. The corruption-centric argument was new to me -- he grew up in communist russia, and had a lot more familiarity with communism in practice there. Given the enormous problems with corruption Russia is going through now, what he says makes a lot of sense, and is a much bigger problem. It is, however, a problem that we share to some degree with portions of our government -- there are a number of nonelected parts of our government, and the marketplace has plenty of that as well. We have no alternative to government, but the marketplace situation, with the exception of when business gets very powerful, is considerably less dangerous. We went into a lot more depth, and covered a lot more ground, but, dear reader, I'm not going to carry around tape recorders or expect people to tolerate them for your sake :)

Version 2.6 of the Linux kernel is just around the corner -- it's entering a hard freeze.. I'm looking forward to upgrading to it. Speaking of techie stuff, my frequent putting my laptop into my computer bag without removing the wireless card has finally bent the card. It still works, but I'm worried that it might break soon.

SCO is being bold, claiming that the GPL is invalid, is asking the judge to declare the license to be unenforcable, and asking for all GPL software to be ruled public domain. I'm amused at their chutzpah, although it looks a little bit like people suing the IRS on constitutional grounds, hoping to avoid paying income taxes.

Here is an interesting analysis of the gender-makeup of the British judiciary. Also on the legal front, the U.S. copyright office ruled against Lexmark, who was using the DMCA to prevent third parties from making replacement ink carts for their printers. Hopefully we'll see more similar rulings -- better yet, hopefully the DMCA will be undone at some point.

I mentioned Galloway in Britain a few entries ago. Here's an amusing precursor, amusingly from Pennsylvania. I do wonder if, at the time of the Continental Congress, Pittsburgh was even around, or if at the time, Philadelphia and east Pennsylvania was the whole thing. Here's a different perspective on Galloway, with an amusing phrase suggesting he's a pimp for the devil. Finally, here's the full text of his recent political rally. I guess we can see why Al Jazeera is giving it so much coverage -- although they're not as exclusively pro-muslim as I thought they might be before I became a regular reader, they are very much pro-palestinian, and he is at least sympathetic to their plight.

Microsoft is talking a lot about their next version of Windows, and how it will be database-enabled in the filesystem, with schemas provided for email and other apps. All their other features, from what's listed on that site, are fluff. We're left with two questions -- is this implementable without making a mess, and will it be a good thing? One of the frustrations I had with OS/2, which is thankfully absent in Linux, is there's invisible (mostly) metadata in the filesystem (extended attributes), and when they went wrong (complex systems with lots of components eventaully do), as they were undocumented and hard to manipulate, the most reasonable thing to do was to reinstall the OS, or live with the problems until it broke entirely. I hope Microsoft doesn't make a system with the same problems. However, the end goal, I think, is a good one. SQL provides a very standard and visible API to data, and with stored procedures can provide well-defined APIs. It's a good cross-language, cross-platform way for data stores to talk to each other in a generic way, so, for example, we might write code to ask our email system in ways not dissimilar to the way Unix folks like myself currently use grep. In other words, SQL-backed stuff is a really good thing (many of my recent programming projects have used PostgreSQL as a data store). If microsoft makes MS SQL Server not suck at some point, then they might actually have a lot to offer developers with this. I hope the schemas will be well-documented and that they provide a commandline SQL tool like most databases do.. Sadly, a lot of the coolness of this will be lost to end users, who don't know SQL.. it's hard to provide the power of that without requiring the knowledge...