Can I just say how stupid it was for Israel to kill the military leader of Hamas by blowing up his apartment with a one ton bomb in the middle of the night? Clearly Sheikh Salah Shahada is a legitimate military target — I wouldn’t even call killing him an assassination, as Hamas would openly state that it is at war with the state of Israel and he was a military leader. I also don’t believe the line of crap about the supposed Hamas cease fire that was coming until the killing. But Ariel Sharon and Benjamin Ben-Eliezer (who I praised for his smarts the other day) clearly could have foreseen that an apartment building in the incredibly overcrowded Gaza Strip would be chock full of people at any time of day, but especially so in the middle of the night. It’s obvious that the decision makers thought that killing Shahada was so important that anyone who happened to be nearby would have to pay the price. I wonder if they’d agree with that assessment today. Clearly Hamas is a barbaric and inhuman organization, but it doesn’t benefit Israel to equal that inhumanity. The best our miserable President could do was condem the attack as “heavy handed,” although I guess anything more strident would invite accusations of hypocrisy given our wedding party airstrike of a few weeks ago.

Salon rounded up a bunch of economics eggheads and asked them how to fix the economy. All the article really proves is that nobody knows the solution (not a surprise). Some people say that we need to control deficit spending, other people say that we need to blow out the deficit and stimulate the economy through public spending. One of the logical ideas that is proposed is using federal money to prop up the various state and local governments that are really struggling for air right now.

The last person mentions that we need to help people out with consumer debt, and that deflation is currently a much bigger risk than inflation. I tend to agree that a bit of inflation would be helpful right now. It seems that we’re a nation of debtors currently, and inflation is great for people with debt. It hammers the people who have a lot of cash assets, but that’s not our biggest worry right now (in my unlearned opinion). I shudder to think that we may find ourselves in a Japan-like situation where capital is essentially available for free and there’s just nothing to spend it on.

The BBC has an article on the Ragefire spawn in EverQuest. If you don’t know what that is, then consider yourself lucky.

The New York Times has an article on what an attention-obsessed freak John Ashcroft is in today’s edition. There was an article along these lines in the Washington Post not that long ago, too. One can only hope that Ashcroft’s eagerness for the spotlight will shorten his career as Attorney General and put an end to his reign of madness.

There’s a new email virus that infects WebTV boxes. It reboots the boxes and then has them dial 911. Police have actually responded to the calls.

blogs.salon.com goes live this evening. Salon is hosting Radio UserLand-based blogs. Scott Rosenberg is going to be blogging there as well.

Michael Thomas complains in Salon today that the big problem for IT companies isn’t the accounting, it’s the products, which often don’t work. This certainly jibes with my experience. I’ve found that the more a software product costs, the less likely it is to work properly, and the harder it will be to implement. In the Java world, for example, I’ve used Tomcat, Resin (a cheap servlet engine from Caucho Software), and BEA WebLogic. Of the three, WebLogic was the hardest to get up and running, the hardest to deal with on a day to day basis, and was the most expensive by an almost unbelievable factor. I’d be willing to accept that BEA offers a lot of features that the others don’t, but frankly I’ve never run into limitations in the other products that sent me looking for more.

NPR has revised its linking policy to be in line with expected Web usage.

Mozilla 1.1 Beta is out. The alpha seemed a bit plagued with bugs (which makes sense), but the nightly build I downloaded a few days ago has been working well. Hopefully the beta will be even better.

It’s looking like there may be a real peace deal in the Congo. I’ve been following this ongoing conflict for years now, and I’m glad to see that it might actually be coming to an end.