This makes me furious. Egypt sent foreign minister to Israel to meet with Sharon and other Israeli government officials to work on peace, and while visiting a mosque, he was attacked by a Palestinian mob, needing to be saved by Israeli policemen. Apparently they saw him as a traitor for even talking to the Israelis, and injured him to the extent that he had to cut his trip short. This is absolutely ridiculous -- it's the worst thing that Palestinians can possibly do for their cause. Of course, the mob doesn't speak for all palestinians, and the PA was quick to condemn the act, but this does illustrate a real problem in the conflict -- there are Palestinians who won't accept, and will do their best to sabotage, every attempt at peace. Here's a little hint to that mob... he's not in Israel to celebrate Channukah! He's there on your behalf, and you just totally fucked everything up. I hope you don't mind the continued suffering both peoples in the region are under, because you just made a big contribution. Grr. I think I'm pretty neutral on the idea of the wall, to my surprise. I do wish it were drawn a bit more liberally, but the basic idea of it, if the Palestinians cannot come to enough unity to enact a satisfactory peace, might be an ok means to peace (although I would prefer other, perhaps similarly unappealing to western liberal traditions, in different ways, means to achieve a one-state solution).

SCO posted a list of files that they definitely see as infringing, unrelated to the SMP/NUMA code they were bugging IBM/Dynix about. They mostly boil down to two files, and their architecture-dependant forms for all the systems Linux runs on. The files are kind of embarassing, being mostly definition of constants -- they're not even code. Linus has a response to their claims up... Linus has a response to their claims up...

I learned an invocation some time ago that claims to cure the odd initialization that sometimes happens with my soundcard on my laptop. I don't know for certain that it fixed it (my laptop is usually up for weeks at a time), but I haven't seen it since. In /etc/modules.conf, add: options i810_audio clocking=48000 For google's sake, this is for Linux on an Inspiron 8500.

I had an interesting discussion with Dubin on some aspects of Eudaimonia that I've been chewing on, and ways it might interact with how capitalism might be structured. A brief conclusion is that I think there's a relationship between efficiency and how happy/empowered workers are, and that that relationship takes a different form in large corporate structures and small businesses. Note that I've secularized and twisted the Aristotle's definition around to mix in some ideas of Marx and Nietzsche. We then proceeded to discuss international politics and the use of force. Issues to think about: When, if ever, is military intervention in other countries' internal affairs justified? If revolution is not something to get involved in, what happens when revolution becomes an international issues (e.g. Kurdistan)?

Although I'm a registered Democrat, I'm definitely not this type. Just as there were "Regan Republicans", I'm a "Dean Democrat" -- my loyalty isn't to the party in general, but rather the man and the circumstance.

Looks like, in Norway, Jon was declared innocent in his second trial. Cool!

Some Art and Law for ya. A very funny article on British-Japanese cross-perspectives a friend sent me.

And Pat is in love again. I feel happy.