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Matthew Levitt in CounterTerrorism Blog reports on the Treasury Department’s identification of four individuals who are a part of the Abu Ghadiyah Network.

While we focus on the terror on the ground, it is a truism that money is the lifeblood of this modern incarnation of evil. The article notes that as early as 2003, Italian security forces identified the network and its methods, and the Treasury’s actions allow the government to seize the assets of the leaders and limit business dealings with them.

Politics

Google’s Google Apps and the ready availability of broadband internet service makes “distributed computing” seem closer than ever.

I’ve always liked having a PC with plenty of power and memory, but to be honest, I know plenty of people who never use 1/10th the power and memory for the applications they actually use. Sure, they end up with slow running systems because they click “OK” on every message promising to install the Wham-Blam Toolbar and Free PC Spyware Scan. But what they mostly do with their computers is … surf the net, play some music, chat, and read email.

So why not use Google’s “cloud” … their computing power … instead of your own? Especially for a second or third computer (or your grandmother’s first computer). There are now some options that look promising.

Asus has a neat little ultra-small notebook, the Eee 4G Surf, that looks perfect for using on your wireless network and reading email on-line from the family room.

At only $349 list, the handheld looks pretty promising to me. There is a less expensive model, the 2G at $299, but it lacks a processor cache and is said to slow down a bit when loading graphics-intensive sites. The 4G seems worth the extra $50.

Also on the forefront is an adaptation of the Linux Ubuntu operating system called gOS, for “green OS”. Everex is selling a basic system for just $199 at WalMart, with the operating system, a 80GB harddrive, and a DVD drive. Opensource applications are pre-loaded, and with the gOS and a broadband connection, this could be a very serviceable PC for newbies (or anyone sick and tired of the MicroSoft/PC bloatware that is out there).

I like these trends, especially the one toward small, inexpensive laptops that connect to a home’s wireless network. I’ll have to see what else is on the horizon (Everex is rumored to be coming out with a Asus eee competitor soon).

Business, Tech

The proposed “redeployment” of American troops out of Iraq on a published timetable, and Sen. Obama’s assertion that the United States would reserve the right to re-enter Iraq after a withdrawal of US forces to hunt down Al-Qaeda militants, is remarkably similar to the situation prior to the recent counter insurgency policy.

Obama’s plan would have the same effect of the “whack a mole” policy so roundly (and deservedly) criticized in 2005 and 2006 by Sen. McCain and a few … very few … others. Withdrawal of forces allows an insurgency to gain power. The re-insertion of American forces would be done against a much stronger enemy, with far greater casualties on all three sides … Al-Qaeda, American and the innocent civilians … than continuing the present counterintelligence strategy.

We saw that policy fail with American forces going into selected areas in Iraq, clearing them, and then leaving. It didn’t work. And it cost more lives.

The problem is greatly complicated if Al-Qaeda in Iraq takes control of the sovereign government. An invasion of a sovereign is more complicated, although Sen. Obama has shown a lack of understanding in this regard (readers are reminded of his pledge to invade Pakistan).

John McCain was correct to note that Obama’s plan bears the mark of a bad compromise: Al-Qaeda is already in Iraq, and fighting us. If we “redeploy” we would have to re-engage very quickly to prevent Al-Qaeda from gaining strength, sending our troops on a bazaar imitation of a Chinese Fire Drill.

Politics

Stats are like mushrooms; they always pop up, but you never know if they are OK … or poison.

CEO pay is roundly criticized, with folks like the AFL-CIO lamenting that the S&P 500 CEOs made an average of $15.06 million in total compensation in 2006. But, as usual, the dramatic stats might just be a toadstool rather than a mushroom.

There are quite a few companies in America, and most don’t pay anywhere near what the S&P 500 pay. In fact, if you look at average CEO pay for companies with over 100 employees in various cities, it is hardly “astronomical” or “a scandal”. They are paid well, that’s for sure:

Atlanta: $224,000
Boston: $254,000
Denver: $186,000
Miami: $199,000
Minneapolis: $229,000
New York City: $289,000
Phoenix: $229,000
Seattle: $197,000
San Francisco: $270,000
San Diego: $240,000

(I recommend everyone get their MBA and become a CEO, because the pay is good.)

Does anyone know what the head of the AFL-CIO earns? I can’t seem to find it on-line. I’ll bet it is more than the averages above.

Michael Moore, who is sympathetic to those decrying corporate excesses after tasting “first blood” with “Roger and Me”, earned $21 million dollars for one of his movies, Fahrenheit 9/11. While decrying “war profiteers”, that paycheck made him one of the largest individual “war profiteers” according to Moorewatch.

I’m less inclined to complain about these things. I make a good living considering the choices I made … I don’t have a MBA from an Ivy League school, and I haven’t struck out to build a business from scratch. But it seems to me those that are complaining about it could start by fixing the problem of which they are a part … and one good solution is for them to give away all their money to a worthy charity, such as the Salvation Army.

Do they really need to earn more than $40,000 a year?

Business, Politics

Google loves sitemaps, and webmasters love Google. But who wants to code a sitemap, with its weird listing of all the URLs on your site? Time is money.

GSiteCrawler from SOFTplus crawls your website and creates the sitemap for you, uploads it and notified Google that you have a new sitemap. Its pretty slick, and freeware to boot.

It is not without its own requirements, though. You want to check the URLs it is adding to your sitemap, and verify that you want them passed through to Google. The program makes it easy to do this. There are some examples of the filters to use for forums, where each thread can be referred to by different URLs. Duplicate content is not looked upon favorably by Google, so you want to pay attention to this. CMS sites like Joomla and Drupal will also need some attention paid to the URLs. A nice feature is that you can specify a portion of a URL that will be excluded, so “?search.php” can prevent the GSiteCrawler spider from indexing thousands of URLs that are redundant.

Along with signing up for Google’s free Webmaster Tools, GSiteCrawler can help get you indexed in Google and Yahoo fairly easily. And that’s a good thing.

Tech