Larry Lessig’s blog has been taken over this week by Virginia Congressman Rick Boucher. Boucher is well known for refusing to toe the moronic, “common sense” Congressional line on copyright and the Internet. In other words, he’s not completely sold out to the movie and music industries.

Being a Texan, how could I not admire famous blowout specialist Red Adair? He passed away this weekend, the Houston Chronicle has an obituary. The Independent (UK) has a good obituary as well.

So this morning I read that John Kerry’s national security advisor has said that the United States would have probably been at war in Iraq right now had Kerry been President instead of George W Bush. Tell me again why we’re supposed to vote in November? I can understand why people think we should stay the course in Iraq given the stakes and our commitment, but who in their right mind would say that the invasion was a good idea in retrospect? I’m not sure whether it makes me madder to think that they believe this is an appropriate form of pandering, or that this is Kerry’s actual position. And as far as staying the course goes, the course we’re on right now heads straight over a cliff. Something has to change, either we come up with an entirely new plan or we just cut our losses.

The Oregonian newspaper has a report on some Oregon national guardsmen who witnessed prisoners of Iraq’s new Interior Ministry torturing prisoners and being ordered by coalition higher ups to leave the prisoners to their fate. Attempting to reconcile what I know about what’s going on in Iraq with what President Bush says at campaign stops makes me ill.

So this morning I took my first stab at integrating Spring with Struts. I found some instructions online and gave it a shot, and lo and behold, everything just worked. The first time. I had to go back through the logs for my Web server to make sure that I wasn’t using an old version of the code by mistake or something, but I did indeed verify that that wasn’t what was going on. If you’re a Java developer and you’re working on server side applications, I can give Spring my unreserved recommendation. I’ve had a better experience than I’ve had with anything else out of the box, including tools I use regularly like Struts, Hibernate, and even Log4J.

I’ve created a spliced feed that contains my del.icio.us links and the content of this site as well, thanks to FeedBurner. You can subscribe using this link. I’ve also added it to the list of feeds on the rc3.org home page. The disadvantage of this feed is that there’s some latency between when I add things to the site and when FeedBurner picks them up, so if you like your rc3.org hot off the presses, the old school feed is probably a better choice.

FeedBurner has introduced a service that lets you splice your weblog’s RSS feed with your del.ico.us links. I’ll be putting up a link to a spliced feed this weekend.

I was raised as a Presbyterian, and I have to say, today I’m pretty proud of that fact. The church has issued a statement officially repudiating the millenialist belief that Israel must control all of its historical terroritory to facilitate the second coming, and has come out in opposition of Israeli settlement activity. Not only am I glad the church is taking what I consider to be a courageous and sensible moral stance against the ongoing violence, but I’m also glad to see a religious denomination demonstrating that there’s more to Christianity in America than giving red meat to Republicans on family values issues.

Tim Bray notes today that everything in the world of software is already patented, which is sort of the same thing as nothing being patented, really.

Salon magazine is back in the black, or in the black for the first time. (Pro forma, naturally.)