The government is striving to prevent Kevin Mitnick from earning a living in any reasonable way. It’s pretty bad that he’s not allowed to use any computer equipment, or work in the computer industry in any capacity. Now the government wants to keep him from writing about computer magazines and speaking about information security on the lecture circuit. How can we expect people not to return to a life of crime if we deny them their best opportunity to earn a living when we let them out of jail?

If there’s one thing I hate, it’s a hypocrite, and the hypocrisy of the Republicans in the Elian affair has been truly staggering. Thank goodness we have Michael Kinsley to keep track of it.

The Economist sums up my views on the Elian Gonzales matter perfectly.

The Mozilla people is working on adding support for Scalable Vector Graphics to Mozilla. This could have interesting implications for people who are dedicated to Macromedia’s Flash platform. Of course, if SVG does become very popular, Macromedia will just rewrite their tools so that they can export files in the SVG format and life will go on virtually unchanged for everyone.

If you think that Linux distributions are for the weak of heart, check out Linux From Scratch. Hey, some people like to build a car out of parts.

The Emacs JDE is a useful package for people who use Emacs as their editor to write Java code. Forget those IDEs.

Joel give a stupid Upside columnist a piece of his mind about employee benefits. If you’re a technology executive and you’re reading my page (something that’s pretty unlikely, no doubt) the takeaway is this: talent is scarce (and therefore expensive). You have to suck up to smart people these days if you want them to come work for you, and you have to treat them like they’re important to get them to stay. (By the way, if you’re a Java programmer and you want to work for a cool company in Raleigh, NC, send me a note.)

Theo de Raadt (of OpenBSD fame) is a hard, hard man. I have a broken down SparcStation LX at home that I bought through EBay that I’m going to install OpenBSD on as soon as I buy some memory and find a bootable CD-ROM drive to hook up to it.

Dahlia Lithwick covers the huge Supreme Court case concerning Miranda rights for Slate. This provides me with the perfect opportunity to launch into something that’s been stewing for awhile. I personally believe that your Miranda rights should be read to you when you’re taken into custody by the police (the Supreme Court is deciding the constitutionality of a law that overrides the former Miranda ruling), and that furthermore, in the case of minors and mentally disabled people, it should be mandatory that an attorney be present for questioning. I don’t believe that most minors understand their Miranda rights, and thus are unable to exercise their fifth amendment rights and wind up offering confessions that should be thrown out. I’m thinking specifically here of the person who confessed in the West Memphis Three case. The boy was in high school at the time, and is by all accounts mildly retarded. That didn’t stop the police from questioning him for 12 hours (only the last 2 hours were taped). He was convicted on the basis of that confession, and the other two suspects were picked up on that basis as well (and later convicted, without the confession). No physical evidence tying the accused to the crime was ever found. I think that we should set up a clear rule that prevents potentially coerced confessions from being used as evidence in these cases.

A problem I’ve been thinking about recently is mapping objects (like Java objects) to relational databases. As soon as I realized that this is a big problem, I realized that it’s probably a problem lots of other people have solved. I found a number of papers published on the Web about it, like Foundations of Object-Relational Mapping. If anyone has any pointers to other methods of solving this problem, let me know.