Slate has an article on the degree of dissent tolerated in the Bush White House. They keep getting love letters from favorable reporters on staying “on message” and containing leaks, but does this come at the cost of genuine internal debate? Over the past few weeks, Dubya has managed to hang Colin Powell and Christine Todd Whitman out to dry pretty blatantly, and it seems like the more moderate members of his cabinet aren’t being heard on the issues. I personally think that internal debate in the White House is pretty squelched these days.

Instructions on how to customize your Linux desktop for Java and Perl programming. This article was written for me! I should be able to adapt quite a bit of it to work on my Windows 2000 desktop where I run Cygwin and NT Emacs as my development environment.

The record companies are taking an obvious step to crack down on file sharing — logging which files are shared and the IP addresses of the people sharing them. It surprises me that they aren’t also sharing bunches of files that look just like MP3s people want but are actually just recordings of either promos or just garbage. Tracking down and busting the real file sharers and lowering the value of the network by “spamming” it with junk are the steps I’d take if I wanted to get rid of file sharing.

Anyone know of any real (modest to high traffic) sites that have deployed Tomcat as their servlet engine? If so, please drop me a note.

I’m fascinated by Boeing’s decision to move its corporate headquarters from Seattle, not because I really care about Boeing or Seattle, but because of what it says about business. Will this move really save Boeing money in the long run? It seems like typical stupid corporate bullcrap to me, a decision made for the sake of making a decision.

More bad law is coming down the pike in the form of a treaty — the Convention on Cybercrime. All you need to know about this treaty is that it’s the brainchild of the FBI, and that it’s supported by the MPA, RIAA, and Business Software Alliance. The ramifications of the treaty are not only very bad for citizens, but they’re also bad for most businesses as well. In other words, this falls into the UCITA class of citizen-hostile laws.

Slate has a good rundown of the issues working against the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform package. Current campaign finance laws seem very byzantine to me, and it looks like the McCain-Feingold legislation will only make them more byzantine. It seems like we could come up with some simple, transparent rules for campaign finance that would really improve the system. Of course, straightforward rules would never become law because that’s not the way Congress works.

I know everyone is linking to this story about a customer service rep from AOL, but I can’t fight the impulse. I’ve always found the notion of people online acting out their pitiful (often hateful) fantasies as some kind of tonic for their meaningless existences to be more than a bit disturbing, and this story only serves as further confirmation. I don’t know how I feel in general about anonymity online, but I do know that the degree to which some people’s personalities change when they feel anonymous is really sad. Oh, and the last few paragraphs of the story really left me with a strange feeling in the pit of my stomach.

IP.com is working on a partial solution to the software patent problem. They’re allowing open source programmers to record their innovations (for $20) in a database that’s actually consulted by the PTO before they issue patents. Rather than waiting for someone to file a patent and then clubbing them with prior art, you can record your innovations so that they’ll be taken into account before patents are even granted.

I can’t imagine many things more gratifying than the XFL game broadcast on Saturday night achieving the lowest prime time rating ever recorded. As a sports fan, I delight in seeing this garbage go down in flames.