Steve Levy talks about the next generation of GUIs — Mac OS X, Microsoft .NET, and Eazel’s Nautilus. In case you didn’t know it, both .NET and Nautilus are being designed by former Apple employees.

I’ve been watching with interest the ongoing power generation problems in California. It looks like the California PUC is going to approve a rate hike that will raise the average family electric bill by about 10%. The problems have come as a result of an ill-conceived deregulation plan which, ironically enough, was supposed to lead to lower prices through competition. Unfortunately, the prices charged to consumer and power plant construction are still heavily regulated, so the anticipated competition was completely stifled, and the guys in the middle (the power companies) got completely pinched after they sold off all their existing power plants. I find it all fascinating.

The more I read about John Ashcroft, the more pissed off I get. I really hope that the Democrats don’t give him a free ride into confirmation, but I’m willing to bet that they will.

Looks like Katherine Harris is going to be rewarded for her loyal service to the crown with a diplomatic position that, conveniently enough, doesn’t require Senate confirmation. Cynicism certainly seems like the rational stance.

There were big problems with the Diablo II realms over the weekend. Someone figured out an exploit that allowed them to access any character stored on the server, as long as they knew that character’s name. Needless to say, everyone listed on the ladder was raided immediately. Ironically, Blizzard came up with the idea of storing characters online in order to make the game fairer by securing character data so that people couldn’t hack on their characters locally and then use them to play online.

Anyone need another reason to oppose the death penalty? Yesterday, Salon published a devastating article about how the death penalty effects jury selection, skewing juries toward the prosecution’s side. The way it works is simple — prosecutors can legally dismiss any potential juror who is not in favor of the death penalty if the death is a potential sentence in the case. So they ask for the death penalty in as many cases as they can, and they filter out everyone who’s not a wholehearted death penalty supporter. Unfortunately for the defendants, that also enables the prosecution to get rid of lots of people who believe in things like reasonable doubt and the presumption of innocence. What a travesty.

O’Reilly Network: Designing JSP Custom Tag Libraries.