I got a two for the price of one deal on interesting op-eds on the Atlanta Journal-Constitution editorial page today. I went looking for Jay Bookman’s followup to the piece in which he coined the term Pax Americana. It’s here. (The original piece is, unfortunately, no longer available at the old link.) The special bonus piece states plainly that Karl Rove led the nation to war to improve George W Bush’s political prospects.

I was hoping somebody would write about what a poor idea challenge-response systems are for getting rid of spam, and indeed, John Levine has.

Well, there was an item that ran in the Washington Post this weekend about the ongoing search for WMD in Iraq. Unfortunately, we’re coming up dry:

Leaders of Task Force 75’s diverse staff — biologists, chemists, arms treaty enforcers, nuclear operators, computer and document experts, and special forces troops — arrived with high hopes of early success. They said they expected to find what Secretary of State Colin L. Powell described at the U.N. Security Council on Feb. 5 — hundreds of tons of biological and chemical agents, missiles and rockets to deliver the agents, and evidence of an ongoing program to build a nuclear bomb. Scores of fruitless missions broke that confidence, many task force members said in interviews.

Update: This David Corn piece argues that the search for WMD has not yet begun in earnest, and yet the article linked to above indicates that the search is all but over. I’m not sure what to make of that. In any case, the idea that we faced a dire, immediate threat from Iraqi WMD now looks like nothing more than a sickening ruse. For a time, I was sort of convinced that the losers in the White House had started believing their own bullshit, but I don’t think that’s the case any more.

Read for yourself what Warren Buffett has to say about the Bush tax plan. Oh, and wait til you see what he has to say about spurious lawsuits. He says he’s more concerned with the number of plaintiffs that have legitimate grievances against corporations. Our country would be in much better shape if more bankers and executives were like Warren Buffett. I wish someone would explain to me why I had to read about this in a British paper. Maybe someone in the liberal media could talk about how America’s most successful businessman seems to crapping all over the Republican economic agenda.

Tim Bray posted a nice little piece on flaming this weekend. I have a confession to make: when I was younger, I loved to flame people. Loved it. For me, it was the reason to go online. I have improved myself and now consider it to be an exhibition of personal weakness when I flame people, even if they deserve it, and even if I’m clever about it.

I have high hopes for FeedDemon, Nick Bradbury’s entrant into the crowded field of RSS readers.

I’m going to bite on the issue of Google overvaluing posts on weblogs in its index. I think it’s a problem, but it’s not a huge problem. I look through my referrer log every now and then and see what sorts of hits I’m getting from Google (and I do get a bunch of hits that way), and in nearly every case my item has a link to something that the person who typed the query was probably looking for. In those cases, I think that items on this site are adding value to the index rather than muddling it. There’s also the unseen advantage of weblogs helping to set the value of other pages in the index. It may call for some adjustment to Google’s indexing algorithm, but I don’t think it’s really worth getting worked up over.

Eric Sink: Small ISVs: You need Developers, not Programmers. I’ve never worked as a programmer, and wouldn’t ever want to.

Lots of smart people seem to be convinced that with comprehensive unit tests, static typing in a programming language is not a key feature for maintainability. One of the things that really thrilled me about moving from being primarily a Perl programmer to being primarily a Java programmer was strict typing, and more structuredness in general. Maybe I’m behind the curve though. Recent commentors include:

• Bruce Eckel: Strong Typing vs. Strong Testing
• Robert C Martin: Are Dynamic Languages Going to Replace Static Languages?
• Tim Bray: Language Fermentation

Mozilla 1.4 Beta was released this week, and I installed it yesterday. It has some nifty new features, and the Alpha was rock solid. Unfortunately, when I installed the Beta under Windows, it was broken in a number of ways. Mainly copy and paste weren’t working right and I couldn’t use the cursor keys in input fields or to scroll the browser window. I did what’s probably exactly the wrong thing and downloaded and installed the latest daily build, but it seems to be working, so I’ll stick with that.