My favorite kinds of useful programming tips are those that make me say, “I can see how you would make that mistake,” but at the same time give me the satisfaction of knowing that I have never, ever made that mistake. (Via decafbad.)

I was going to write a bunch of generalizations about liberals and conservatives here that probably would completely fall apart under close scrutiny, so I’m just going to say this instead. Conservatives would be way, way better off if Eve Tushnet were famous instead of Ann Coulter. She’s the kind of conservative that I can read and appreciate, even though I don’t agree with her on all that many things. For example, her thoughts on same sex marriage are downright interesting and thought provoking. Your run of the mill conservative pundit seems to me to be more interested in provoking anything but thought. (Whoops, I had to let that generalization slip in.)

Congratulations, Mozilla. New site design, and more importantly, self rule.

I didn’t want to have to be the one to say this, but Pat Robertson is going to Hell (via Dangerousmeta). A plausible alternative explanation is that we’re all already in Hell, and Pat Robertson (and Jerry Falwell) are just the most obvious proof.

There’s a piece by a group calling themselves “Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity” that must be read as a timeline and explanation of the entire Niger uranium debacle. It’s not until you put all the pieces together that you realize why this is so much bigger than one line from a speech. It’s emblematic of the way our intelligence capabilities were used and abused to exaggerate the threat posed by Iraq and justify our decision to invade Iraq.

Tim Bray has posted a follow up to his piece on sharecropping in the software industry.

Salon’s Farhad Manjoo has an article about the economic impact of the national do not call list that was instituted recently. Some estimates claim that the new regulation will put two million people out of work. Granted, those two million people spent their time at work annoying the rest of us, but given our current high unemployment rate, adding in two million more people who probably can’t convert easily to other professions doesn’t sound like it will aid in our long awaited economic recovery. (Maybe we can conscript them and send them to Iraq to keep the peace.) The article is one of those that enables you to think about a complex problem in a different light. For what it’s worth, I signed up for the “do not call” list as soon as I could.

I think that the flap over the President’s bogus use of bad intelligence in the State of the Union address deserves its own catchy nickname. My suggestion is “the radioactive lie.” William Saletan posted a rundown of who deserves the blame for the lie and makes some clever and timely comparisons to the standards this administration claimed when it came to lies by the previous administration. (Josh Marshall remains the authoritative voice on this scandal. If you’re interested in the big picture of what’s going on, who’s covering it, and what it might mean, he’s your guy. Slate’s Today’s Papers also continues to do a brilliant job of sifting through the media coverage of this affair and pulling out the juicy bits.)

The Economist article on Microsoft’s decision to kill stock options has been posted. Unfortunately, it’s only available to subscribers.

Brent Simmons has a response to the assertion that developing for a captive platform is sharecropping. Needless to say, as an independent developer for a captive platform, he disagrees.