Don’t look forward to meainingful campaign finance reform in the future. Halliburton received 2.3 billion dollars in government contracts and 1.5 billion dollars in government loans while GOP veep nominee Dick Cheney was CEO, and they doled out 1.2 million dollars in political contributions during his tenure. Cheney managed to balloon his personal fortune up to $50 million in the meantime. Al Gore’s fund raising adventures are also well documented, so perhaps we’ll have to wait at least 4 more years to have any hope of decreasing the amount of palm greasing that goes on in Washington.

Lawrence Lee sent along a pointer to this interview with Anders Hejlsberg, the architect of C#. There’s lots of interesting stuff in the interview, and it looks like Hejlsberg (and Microsoft) have built some pretty neat stuff into both C# and .NET. One small point I found particularly interesting was that the team at Microsoft that designed C# and wrote the compiler consisted of 9 people. Not larger, really, than most open source projects.

It’s impossible to overstate the level of sleaziness in the tobacco industry … the Washington Post reports that the industry engaged in a campaign of dirty tricks to subvert World Health Organization efforts to curb smoking in developing countries. They even went so far as to place moles on WHO committees to subvert their efforts.

Educated people laugh and sigh whenever news stories appear that report on surveys that test people’s basic knowledge of science, history, and other subjects that are taught from elementary school through college. Unfortunately, this widespread ignorance exposes the pathetic state of our educational system. The fact that teachers are poorly paid gets lots of attention, but another huge problem is the miserable state of modern teaching materials. The New York Review of Books published a review of current history textbooks that illustrates how bad these books are, and how consolidation in the textbook industry and forced pandering to moronic special interests have conspired to insure that children get a poor education in our schools. The crux of the article is that a grandmother from Virginia produced a better history text by herself than any of the designed-by-committee books currently being adopted by most school systems.

The beta of BookSense.com, an online retail site created by a coalition of independent booksellers is now online. If you’re one of those people who hate Amazon.com because they’re killing off the indie booikstores, now you can order online.

The FTC has issued its report on online profiling. The FTC praises the industry’s attempts at self-regulation through the Network Advertising Initiative — the principles seem OK, but like almost all attempts at industry self-regulation, the NAI has no teeth.

IBM developerWorks has an article on XML transport protocols.