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The Onion's lead headline today: "Bush Sends Troops to West Nile".
WASHINGTON, DC --Vowing to "exact justice for the taking of innocent American lives," a determined and defiant President Bush deployed more than 14,000 ground troops to the West Nile Monday.
Let's just hope the Bejing Daily News doesn't get a hold of this one.
Thomas Friedman of The New York Times, manages, as usual, to sum up the intuition of many intelligent Americans: Why is Bush so determined to attack Iraq, and why now? His article, which is heavily influenced by the thinking he developed in his book The Lexus and the Olive Tree, is that as a nation we should be figuring out how to unravel and reverse the conditions that are creating "undeterrable" menaces like those of 9/11.
"...only by helping the Arabs gradually change their context — a context now dominated by anti-democratic regimes and anti-modernist religious leaders and educators — are we going to break the engine that is producing one generation after another of undeterrables.
Mmmm.... so I tried to use the new Microsoft Windows Media Player tonight. And I think they may have rushed it out before the tech writers were totally done.
Slashdot has an extended interview with Alton Brown, host of Good Eats on the Food Network.
Alton: No matter how much creativity goes into it, cooking is an art -- or perhaps I should say a craft. It abides by absolute rules, physics, chemistry, etc. and that means that unless you understand the science you cannot reach the art. We're not talking about painting here -- cooking's more like engineering. I happen to think that there is great beauty in great engineering (the wing of a Boeing 777, a suspension bridge) but they are not works of art, they are works of science. To my mind art is a matter of personal expression and the exchange of ideas; food is in the end, fuel -- a means to an end.
The New York Times has a major story on how many national governments are encouraging their own agencies to use open source / Linux solutions rather than proprietary Microsoft offerings.
More than two dozen countries in Asia, Europe and Latin America, including China and Germany, are now encouraging their government agencies to use "open source" software — developed by communities of programmers who distribute the code without charge and donate their labor to cooperatively debug, modify and otherwise improve the software.