Apparently so-called “phone phreaks” are being blamed for voting massive numbers of times for the contestants that they prefer in American Idol. They blame broadband lines in part for the problem, which doesn’t make much sense to me, unless they’re talking about broadband lines that are being used as many voice lines as opposed to one fat data pipe. In any case, a real phone phreak would hack the system to block or divert all of the calls to contestants other than the ones they wanted to win. That’s a much more elegant approach than just voting thousands of times.

The Caucho Web site has the clearest explanation of how to set up a servlet mapping I’ve seen anywhere. Why is there no such page on the Tomcat site? (Probably because Tomcat is mostly a volunteer effort, so never mind that.)

In response to the ongoing problem of lack of investor confidence in the stock market, President Bush proposes tax cuts, tax cuts, tax cuts, and tax cuts. The tax cuts take a variety of different forms, some of which are friendlier to regular people and others which are more friendly to rich people, but they’re all tax cuts.

The other day, someone forwarded Dave Farber an email from an FBI agent who is investigating warchalking. I’m not sure whether this is more or less inane than the big FBI investigation into a house of ill repute in New Orleans that I read about a few weeks ago. Don’t these people have bigger fish to fry?

Steven Den Beste wrote a provocative item about transnational progressivism yesterday (and followed up on it today). He also pointed to an article that looks interesting, but that I haven’t yet read. The item is worth reading, even if you don’t agree with it. This might surprise some people, but I agree with a pretty good sized chunk of it. The bottom line is that I don’t blindly trust anybody, especially anybody that’s invested with power. I don’t trust the politicians in the US, even the ones that I vote for. I don’t trust the management and directors at big companies, even the ones that I work for. I hope that they’ll do the right thing, but I watch them like a hawk to make sure that they’re doing the right thing.

The thing that generally freaks me out about international law is that it invests power in people that are not accountable to me, or really to anybody. If you read Den Beste’s writings, this is his strongest point. If there’s no feedback loop for the governed, then they’re pretty much screwed. Regardless of the fact that in many cases I agree with the technocrats, I don’t want them to be in a position to run things in a top down fashion, at least to a greater degree than they already are.

The thing is, I can certainly see the temptation of transnational progressivism. All too often national governments (like their citizens) are belligerent, myopic, and hypocritical. Nations often define their national interest in a way that’s bad for their own citizens, and certainly disastrous for other countries around them. There’s also a tendency to compromise the long term in favor of the short term. Every thinking person sits and thinks that things could be better if they were more carefully planned and thought out. I think though that if you give in to that temptation, you just end up mucking things up worse than you ever would have thought. As they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. I think that Yasser Arafat, Jonas Savimbi, and most other bad dictators throughout history would claim that they had the best interests of their people at heart.

I confess that I’m really just getting started thinking about this issue, and I’m not in favor of nationalism, per se. I am, however, in favor of transparency and accountability, and am strongly biased toward systems that favor those qualities.

The Bush administration has responded to Egypt’s sentencing a pro-democracy advocate to 7 years in prison on trumped up charges by saying that until he’s released, Egypt will recieve no additional aid from America. The key word there is “additional,” we’ll still be writing those checks for $2 billion in annual aid we’ve promised, we’re just not going to consider upping Hosni Mubarak’s allowance. Back on August 4, Thomas Friedman castigated the Bush administration for not taking action against Egypt for utterly rejecting the basic principles of democracy and free speech in this case. This, I assume, is the non-response.

Brendan Nyhan of Spinsanity clearly and calmly explains why Media Whores Online simply isn’t worth reading. I have no tolerance for right wing publications and pundits that constantly spew a vicious, Manichean view of the world, and I don’t tolerate it on the left, either. Oversimplification is for the weak.

The Navy is considering changing the status of a pilot shot down over Iraq in 1991 from Missing in Action to MIA-captured. Until January 2001, he was considered to be killed in action. It sure looks like this move is another way to beat the drums of war with regard to Iraq. Perhaps we can reuse the fictional story of Iraqi soldiers tossing out babies in Kuwaiti neo-natal ICU incubators soon, too.

The New York Times has the full story of the hearing for Yaser Esam Hamdi, the so-called unlawful combatant who is being held without access to an attorney in federal custody. Never mind that there’s no evidence that’s been presented that Hamdi ever fought against the United States, or that he’s a US citizen, or that it has never been clearly explained what makes him an “unlawful” combatant rather than just a regular old enemy soldier.

I was thinking this morning about how much we’ve learned to live with Microsoft’s monopoly. I was thinking specifically about email, and the general awfulness of Outlook and Exchange. They’re absolutely horrific, and even worse, they haven’t gotten appreciably better in years. I don’t know of anyone who feels any urgency to upgrade from Outlook 97 or whatever it was to Outlook XP, nor have I heard of one decent feature that makes the upgrade worthwhile. And there are certainly no messaging systems out there that are even positioned to compete with Microsoft. The thing is, though, I don’t even see people clamoring for something better. That’s frustrating. The fact is that competition has stalled in so many areas of the software industry that people don’t even know what rapid innovation even looks like any more. If you take a look at the progress being made on the hardware front, where there’s great competition in RAM, video cards, CPUs, case design, and just about everything else, the pace of progress is amazing. In the software industry, it’s crap. Sometimes I hate this sorry industry. (One great exception is tools for software developers — there’s a lot going on there between Java and Microsoft and all of the free tools that are available.)