One of the file sharers caught up in the most recent RIAA dragnet was a 12 year old girl who lives in a housing project in New York. The RIAA was kind enough to let her off after wringing only $2000 out of her mother. I don’t think I’m going to be buying any more CDs from RIAA members.

Update: Emmett Plant is organizing a pledge drive to raise $2000 and give it to the family.

For all the complaints about the Patriot Act, the truth is that it isn’t very well understood. Slate is trying to change that, and has put Dahlia Lithwick on the case. She’s written the first part of the four part series, which discusses Section 215 (the section that authorizes the government to subpoena your records simply by claiming that the search protects against terrorism). It raises red flags for me because it’s not subject to judicial oversight and is completely secret.

Presidential Character. This New York Times editorial really says it all. Liberal though I am, I can understand the allure and rationale of conservative political positions. But what I fail to understand is how anyone can, at this point, support Bush.

Update: Oh, and here’s a helpful visual aid for the $87 billion war money request. As everyone with any sense is saying, we have to put up this cash because we already have both feet in the middle of it in Iraq, but it’s important to remember that there are plenty of people who aren’t surprised by the big numbers Bush is now putting up. The only people who didn’t expect expenditures like this are the ones who didn’t want to believe in them.

Paul Boutin explains why the RIAA’s amnesty offer is bogus.

Gavin King is offering $100 to anyone who can prove that pure JDBC calls are significantly faster than Hibernate in the Hibernate Performance Challenge.

Via Don Box:

In general, I would be very hesitant to encourage anyone to pursue this career path. Like writing a book, the only people who should do it are those who can’t not do it. I’m hopeful however that there will be many generations worth of funding for those few people who absolutely must live in the world of executable abstractions. Whether we’ll outnumber (or out-earn) doctors and lawyers is another matter altogether.

He also uncovers the great secret of interviewing programmers. The secret to hiring good IT folks is to differentiate between those people who want a paycheck and those people who can’t see themselves doing anything other than working with computers. The other secret is that the only people who can tell the difference are people who fall into the latter category. So, once you’ve polluted your organization with people who just wanted a job, you’re basically relying on luck to see you through.

Here’s an article that bears extensive further consideration: Why getter and setter methods are evil, by Allen Holub. I confess that I’m a huge user of getter and setter methods, for any number of reasons. In my own code, I use getters and setters exclusively when accessing member variables in the classes in which they are defined to make it completely obvious that I’m not dealing with a local variable or an argument. That problem is just as easily addressed, though, by adopting a naming convention for member variables. I also commonly find myself using systems that are heavily dependent on accessor methods — both Struts and Hibernate are heavy users of accessors. That said, the principles in the article could still be applied by ignoring the accessors where appropriate and using the objects in the manner that he describes. What I wish is that the article came with some sample code that illustrated the abstract points discussed within. Maybe Holub’s forthcoming book will include such code.

Holub’s other article (on the extends keyword) is interesting as well. In fact, in reading the two together you can see how you might design programs more flexibly by leaving all of the accessors out of your interfaces but putting them into your implementation classes, and then being disciplined about using the interfaces as much as possible.

The Apache Geronimo project (the new open source J2EE application server implementation) has released a status report. This is a great project to jump in on if you’re looking to build some major J2EE cred. I really need to finish up all my side projects and quit taking on new ones so I can join in on something (if not this).

President Bush was honest enough to tell us yesterday that our efforts in Iraq are going to be a heck of a lot more expensive than he’s ever been willing to admit. Honest assessments of the situation (in other words, those produced outside the White House) gave us an idea of how much this was really going to cost us, but our President was never willing to level with us. From what I’ve read, I don’t think that the $87 billion in additional funds is going to do the trick either, there’ll be another request for more money later. At the same time, President Bush started pushing last week for all of the temporary tax cuts that the Republicans have granted to their rich patrons to become permanent. Every observer knew that this was the other shoe that was waiting to fall, but those tax cuts had to be initially enacted with sunset clauses so that Americans wouldn’t fall out of their chairs when they saw what permanent tax cuts would do to our revenue picture. So now the President says that we’re spending more than ever (and that we’ll spend as much as it takes to continue the perpetual war), but also continues to attack the revenue base of the government. Anyone care to speculate on the long term objectives?

Don’t let the version number scare you. Mozilla Thunderbird 0.2 is out, and I’m going to upgrade to it as soon as I get home. (I’ve been using it as my primary email client since before it even had a version number.)