licentious radio

Saturday, February 16, 2002
[12:36:43 PM]

No silly political jokes today, I think. Actual events are so colossally ridiculous that jokes are redundant. I'm thinking of SBC whining about MS being anti-competitive, at the same time we see a database of fines the big phone companies have been paying, rather than follow laws and regulations intended to promote competition. Republicans say "it's a financial scandal" and point out some democrat got $2,000 from enron in the previous milenium -- without mentioning Phil Gramm's $120k in comparison.

Enron's not such a big deal. They only gave Little George $500k or so in soft money campaign contributions. Big media companies totaled way over a million, and all they got for it was the AOL-Time Warner merger and Michael Powell. Oh, I'm sorry. As Ari Fleischer would say, they got *nothing* for their campaign contributions. Even Enron's $300k for Bush's party falls short of big media's $400k for a Congressional Mardi Gras party.

[11:49:18 AM]
Idle curiousity: how much did AOL put into Colin Powell's pocket? Google turned up a few hints: 20,000 shares, 320,000 options, $9 million.... I don't seem to care enough to track down the final numbers.

Interestingly, Colin Powell resigned from AOL the same day the FCC -- headed by his son -- approved the AOL-Time-Warner merger. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

[10:44:58 AM]
Microsoft's recent Internet Explorer patches cause ie to crash on some websites built with Microsoft website software.

The obvious lesson is that it will take a *long, long* time before MS can fix their security problems. It took them two years to make a web browser as good as Netscape's, and that was much easier. It's easy to build a new product, especially when you can do it without regard for security (or budget). It's much harder to make secure software, and it is outrageously difficult to take software designed to be insecure, and try to patch security into it.

And remember, the insecurity of MS products was part of their approach to eliminating Netscape. (Think of ActiveX -- incorporating the OS into the browser -- and the ability to run viruses from the email client.)

[10:15:07 AM]
MS ordered to give source code to dissenting states [reuters at yahoo]: "It seems to me that if your side has access to it, then the other side, frankly, should have access to it."

[10:11:28 AM]
The Bush gang and Enron money... Kevin Phillips in the LA Times:

"How much the Bush family and its close political entourage actually collected from Enron and its executives since the company was organized is a matter of definition--reportable political contributions, soft money for the Republican Party, finders' fees, joint investments, inauguration funding, presidential-library donations, speech money, capital gains, consulting fees, directors' fees or what? If you combine what the multiple Bush generations received with what loyalists Vice President Dick Cheney, Baker, Mosbacher, political advisor Karl Rove, economic advisor Lawrence B. Lindsey and U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick got, you certainly have $6 million to $8 million, and depending on the success of the Baker-Mosbacher-Enron joint investments, perhaps $20 million to $30 million."