It looks like the worst nightmare for those who hope for democratic reforms in the Muslim world is coming true — Islamists keep getting elected. First, an Islamic party won a sweeping victory in Turkey, and now, hard line Islamists are winning regional elections in Pakistan. What remains to be seen is whether wielding actual power has a moderating influence on these parties. As getting re-elected takes precedence over shoving their agendas through, hopefully they’ll be forced to put aside some of their more controversial policies.

Amnesty International has prepared a list of IT companies whose products are being used by the Chinese government in its efforts to censor Internet content and round up dissidents. The question is, of course, whether these companies are morally compromised. Personally, were I a shareholder in one of these companies, I wouldn’t be happy that they were profiting from this sort of activity. On the other hand, the Chinese government could just as easily use Linux and other open source tools for this sort of thing. Should people not work on Linux because it can be abused? Obviously not.

Could it be true that the next big Republican issue could be the unfairness of allowing poor people not pay federal income tax? The Wall Street Journal is apparently complaining that poor people aren’t sympathetic to the high taxes paid by rich people because they don’t pay federal income tax themselves. One contrarian position is that poor people don’t sympathize with rich people because they’re poor.

Mike has released javablogs.com, a directory, aggregator, and search tool for blogs concerned with Java programming. It is truly an awesome resource.

Speaking of intellectual property being both input and output, Jason Levine has added a cool search term highlighting feature to Q Daily News that he took from Adrian Holovaty. I worked on highlighting search results from my own homebrewed search engine (but kind of put it on the back burner after I ran into some issues), but doing so based on the search terms in referrers is something that hadn’t occurred to me. Just recently, I’ve been paying a lot closer attention to my referrers and I’ve realized just how many hits to my permalink pages come from Google. I think I’ve driven that number further upward by including my pithy little link titles in the title tag on my permalink pages. In any case, this gives me something to think about over the long weekend.

Richard Posner, one of the intellectual luminaries of the right, gave a lecture criticizing copyright extension and other intellectual property chicanery. I’d like to think that the value of the public domain is something everybody could agree on. As Posner says, intellectual property is both input and output for the IP industry. The companies that are trying to extend copyrights and destroy the pubic domain are the same ones that have repurposed material already in the public domain repeatedly and turned it into millions of dollars. Or do people really think that Pinocchio, Snow White, The Little Mermaid, and Aladdin are all stories that originated at Disney’s studios?

Mozilla 1.2 is out.

Today I ripped off a really cool, extremely elegant bit of DHTML menu code from Gazingus.org today. When you look at most DHTML pulldown menu scripts, they’re about 1000 lines long, impossible to follow, and broken on about half the browsers you use. Not so with this one. I need to tweak it a bit more to make it just perfect, but it’s a great starting point.

Adrian Holovaty, the guy who thinks hard about how news should be presented on the Web and does some damn fine writing about it, has gotten a new job. I’m curious as to whether he got the job based on his weblog. I’d like to think so. Perhaps I should write more of my big thoughts about software engineering and less about politics …

Spinsanity’s contract with Salon has come to an end. The bad news is that this means less money in the pockets of Spinsanity’s fine writers. The good news is that all of Spinsanity’s content is free right away again. Anyway, you should be reading Spinsanity, unless you’re an editor, in which case you should be paying them to write something. (They’ve also added an RSS feed for those of us who can’t manage to follow sites without syndication these days.)