Incredible!
DARPA today annouced a plan to create a sort of "stock market" where investors could bet on terrorist incidents, including assasinations. The story was reported in the New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/29/politics/29TERR.html). Not long after the plan was annouced, it was withdrawn, due to fierce criticism from both parties.

It turns out that the office that invented the plan is headed by Adm. Poindexter, who is also involved with the "total information awareness" plan and was convicted of lying in the iran/contra scandel.

Some days I feel like I'm living in some sort of alternate reality.

In the news

Iraq: More soldiers killed in Iraq today. I can't conceive how the US can possibly succeed in rebuilding Iraq without international assistance, especially the assistance of other middle eastern countries. The bush administration seems especially ill-suited to the task as they've supported Israel unilaterally, accused Iran of being an axis of terror and associated with folks who publically call Islam a violent religion.

Without touching on whether or not, they're morally correct in their views, it seems to be as if by saying what they've said, and doing what they've done, they've eliminated the possibility of negotiation. I believe that right now, to bring other islamic countries in the region into iraq on US terms, they're going to need to negotiate.

Liberia: Several ships have been positioned off the coast of Liberia. These ships contain marines poised to help stabilize the country, should bush order them in. I'm glad international attention is being paid to the plight of refugees in africa, and I'm glad the US is involved and might help.

I fear for those marines, should the president order them into Liberia. I think that there are some very brutal folks there in Liberia who live to kill and that it will be very difficult to deter them.

Thin military: There have been some news reports lately that have talked about how thinly spread the US military is. I think that there are a lot of people out there who resent the US, and I wonder if we won't see flareups in Serbia, in Korea or in Afghanistan as people try to take advantage of what they perceive as a weakened US military.

I feel like the la times (http://www.latimes.com/) has become more conservative since the gray davis recall movement began. Is a country with two right coasts like a dancer with two right feet?

This whole deal with the shooting in the New York city hall is very strange. Everything just feels much more violent than it used to...every day in the news someone's been shot. Soldiers in Iraq, factory workers in missisippi, families in california...maybe this is the way that it's always been and I just notice more because we're at war and the economy's gone to crap.

I've been working on my java reversi game. It works, sort of, but it's very, very easy to beat. I think I need to revisit my strategy logic. I'm trying to implement alpha/beta min/max and I think I screwed it up.

I'm wondering what's going to happen with Java. I'm betting that Linux/Perl/Java, etc. will beat out Microsoft in the long run because the open source software doesn't have to make a profit and there are a lot of very poor, very smart people in India and Russia (and, and...) that can't afford legal copies of the Microsoft O/S and development tools. Microsoft, due to the faltering economy will have to clamp down on their licensing (they're already doing this with mixed success) and this will make it harder for non-US/Europe folks to obtain the pirated copies that many of them use. They'll turn to open source.

On the flip side, I can't see a profit motive for improving open source software. I think currently a lot of US and European companies pay their developers to work on open source projects. As the economy continues to sink, there will probably be less of this going on.

I like Java, though. Dot Net strikes me as a bit of a kludge in some ways.

I've just set this blog up today. I'll see how well the software works.