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Strong opinions, weakly held

Month: July 2001 (page 1 of 11)

I was reading Fast Food Nation last night, and one of the things discussed in the book is the increase of corporate promotion in schools. Coca-Cola’s big payoff to schools in Colorado in exchange for advertising space has been well publicized. There are also plenty of schools with fast food outlets in them, and these days it’s common for corporations to provide slanted education materials to educators and even sponsor textbooks in exchange for product placements in them. Anyway, the reason schools have been selling out in the worst possible way to corporate interests is because their revenues are down due to lack of tax dollars. The biggest entities pushing for lower taxes are corporations. It strikes me as amazingly perverse that corporations fight for lower taxes, thus putting schools in a pinch, and then take the money they save and use it to push their product and/or propaganda onto students. I can’t imagine that any sane person would choose to have corporate dollars go to pay for education through marketing and promotion rather than through taxation, but that’s really what we’re looking at these days.

There are rumors floating around that General Electric chairman and CEO Jack Welch ordered NBC News to call the election for Bush. (GE owns NBC, for those of you who aren’t keeping track of the world of media consolidation.) California Democratic representative Henry Waxman is trying to get NBC to turn over tape of Jack Welch making these demands. NBC says, of course, that there is no such tape.

JavaSoft: Creating Your Own Exception Classes

Wired News has an article on Microsoft’s backpedalling on their statement that allow PC makers to decide what to put on the Windows desktop on new PCs. Strangely, about 10 years ago some friends of mine lived next door to Allan Van Fleet, the attorney quoted in the article.

Oh, to be a fly on the wall at the Republican caucus on Capitol Hill. I can just see Denny Hastert now, “Damnit, Dick, you made Shays cry.”

Taking a look at Dan Bricklin’s photo album from Internet Summit 2001, the only thought that crossed my mind was, “Gee, our industry is really chock full of blowhards and assholes.”

So I’ve been using the Helma XML-RPC classes for Java at work lately, and the only comment I can make is that it’s amazing that code this bad has become a de facto standard for something important. I have a feeling that as soon as I get some free time, I’m going to essentially rewrite them so that the code actually makes sense.

I’m always a sucker for a story on the environmental and health problems in the Silicon Valley that result from the manufacture of computer hardware. I think these stories are important to follow, because the computer industry is generally regarded as a “clean” industry. Indeed, before I read about all of the big pollution problems associated with the chip fabs out West, I felt pretty smug about my job. No electrons were harmed in the creation of this post, right?

Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig has an op-ed piece in today’s Net York Times about the evils of the DMCA. You probably don’t need to read it, since you already know that the DMCA is an utterly and completely broken law, but I’m glad that New York Times subscribers will get to see what Congress enacted on behalf of its corporate masters.

Officials Fight ‘Code Red’ Attack, urge system administrators to install FreeBSD and Apache on their servers. I wish. Apparently they’re going to fight the worm by holding a press conference.

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