Being that Clarence Thomas never asks questions during Supreme Court hearings, people often wonder what goes on in his pea-sized brain. The fact that he always sides with Scalia provides an indication of his far right bent, but anyone who was at the “conservative prom” now knows exactly what a radical right winger Thomas really is. What a disgrace to the Supreme Court he is. Ugh, this recounting of his speech reminds me that the nomination of Thomas to the court was one of the grossest acts of political cynicism in memory.

Just in case you weren’t convinced that CRPM is utterly moronic and destructive, Bruce Schneier discusses its problems in the latest Crypto-Gram.

Looks like the OpenSSH project is going to have to change its name, since it’s violating the trademark on SSH held by none other than SSH Communications Security. Tatu Ylonen, the guy who originally wrote SSH and filed for the trademark, has been a good citizen of the online community for a long time, and I think it would be discourteous for the OpenSSH folks to ignore his request.

Looks like the Amazon one-click patent is running into trouble in court. An appelate court overturned a preliminary injunction granted by the District Court that precluded Barnes & Noble from implementing a system similar to one-click. The full facts of the case have not yet been presented, but if the District Court judge shows up to hear the case sober, I can’t imagine he’ll rule in Amazon’s favor.

Has anyone been able to get color in the mail client mutt to work in SecureCRT? I’ve gotten color working in other applications before, but I can’t seem to get it to work in mutt. I find this frustrating. (Update: I figured out how to make it work by manually setting $TERM to xterm-color. It seems to work, and I haven’t yet run into any bad side effects.)

The New York Times has a great article today about the desperate conditions faced by Mexicans working for American companies in maquiladoras. The article focuses on workers at an Alcoa plant across the border from Del Rio, Texas, who make about 80 bucks a week. The American companies have sweetheart deals that allow them to pay no taxes, and local labor officials are paid off so that the workers are unable to form unions. Sounds great, doesn’t it?

In Europe, there’s a plan afoot to add a surcharge to any computer component that can be use to copy music so as to proactively compensate record companies that have the potential to be ripped off. That’s got to be the stupidest thing I’ve ever read.

There’s an interesting ongoing discussion on the content management mailing list about the lack of a “CPAN for Java,” and someone pointed out the Jakarta Taglibs Project. I checked it out quite awhile, but hadn’t been there lately. They’ve really added quite a few useful taglibs. It’s no CPAN, but it’s a start.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

Reuters is reporting on Saint Isadore’s nomination as patron saint of the Internet two years behind the times.