Rogers Cadenhead reports on how fraud artists are using TDD services for the hearing impaired to facilitate scams.

Euxx: Eclipse shortcuts for lazy developers

Slashdot reports that the record companies want online music stores to up the prices on downloadable music from 99 cents per track to somewhere between $1.25 and $3. My music downloading habits center around immediate gratification. If there’s a song I want to hear right now, I generally download it. Before the iTunes Music Store, I downloaded songs using Gnutella if I wanted to hear them. Now I buy them for 99 cents. I don’t think the prices would have to go up a whole lot for me to fire up the Gnutella client again (something I haven’t done literally for months).

Related: Ed Felten, A Grand Unified Theory of File Sharing. I fall completely into the sampler category of file sharers (actually no category right now, as I don’t use any file sharing clients).

I’ve been playing with Gmail for the past couple of days, and the first thing I’ve discovered is that it’s a lot better for mailing lists than Thunderbird, mainly because of the automatic conversation threading and the archiving capabilities. I’m migrating all of my mailing list subscriptions to Gmail right now. If you want to send me email to my Gmail address, it’s address is [email protected]. One thing I’ll say for sure is that Gmail’s interface is about 100 times better than SquirrelMail.

Update: after using Gmail for a whole day (or most of a day), I’m really getting a feel for how different it is from every other email client I’ve used, especially with regard to how it organizes threads into “conversations.” Basically it treats all messages in a thread as a single message, and condenses the emails you’ve already read if there are too many to display on one page when you click on a conversation. Really, it’s quite similar to how Google Groups organizes Usenet posts, and makes a lot of sense for handling email in a Web interface. It also hides quoted text so you don’t have to bother with it if you don’t need to. Very slick. Most impressive though is that this is the first email client that I’ve used (maybe ever) that does something completely different with email than the dominant paradigm. I’m glad to see innovation of some kind happening on the email front, and I look forward to having a bunch of email in Gmail so that I can get a better feel for how it’s going to scale.

Jim Henley’s current thoughts on the war are definitely worth reading.

I still haven’t been given a Gmail account to test. That hurts. Really.

Update: Problem solved.

Like some other people, I haven’t been posting much about Iraq because frankly I’m too depressed about the situation. And this post by Josh Marshall is just about the most depressing thing I’ve ever read. I’m not sure what to say about it — war is war. But war makes me want to throw up, especially when every action that took us to this point was completely voluntary on our part.

Update: Here’s Tony Blair on why we can’t give up in Iraq. Eloquent, of course, but missing a lot. The most important question right now is what the plan is to stop the killing in Iraq, and to get the country on the path toward becoming something positive. I have incredible sympathy for the Iraqi people, their country went from being one kind of hell on earth to being a different kind of hell on earth. One thing I’ve surmised from all the news coverage is that there aren’t enough people in Iraq keeping the peace to keep the peace. We can put down the current uprising by violence — when it comes to applying violence, the US military is the best that there ever was. But that’s such a small part of the big picture. My number one source of reticence before the war began was that the Bush administration wasn’t competent to take Iraq from where it was to where it needed to be, and nothing we’ve seen in Iraq has proven me wrong. I desperately want to be wrong.

As I predicted, PlayFair (the application that removed Apple’s DRM from files purchased from the iTunes Music Store) has been removed from SourceForge. I’m sure that means you won’t be able to find it anywhere now …

Via Rebecca Blood, a compendium of political cartoons by Dr. Seuss. They’re all from World War II, and not what you’d expect from the good Dr.

Given Tim Bray’s post on growing interest in blogging in the enterprise, I’m thinking someone needs to hire me for a blogging related job sooner rather than later.