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Veteran North Carolina political observer Kirk Jones explains why 2008 may really turn out to be a

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A couple of notes for iPhone users. The first is that Web pages you add to your home screen do not automatically update their icons when the creator of a site changes them. I noticed that Google Reader had a new favicon this morning, and guessed that they’d added an iPhone WebClip icon as well. [...]

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As the mortgage crisis unfolds and expands, you see a lot of blame laid on subprime loans, and more specifically, people who signed up for subprime loans. In fact, subprime was voted the word of the year. People are clearly responsible for the contracts they sign, but simply blaming people who took out mortgages they [...]

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Alex Tabarrok posts the best short definition of the law of unintended consequences I’ve seen:

The law of unintended consequences is what happens when a simple system tries to regulate a complex system.

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The Mozilla Foundation is celebrating the ten year anniversary of AOL’s having released the Netscape Navigator source code and creating the foundation. Here’s the original press release. One thing I remember is that Slashdot broke the story of AOL releasing the code before it was announced — it was the first really big story Slashdot [...]

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The Spring Team blog announces that the Spring framework is now a more commonly requested skill for developers than EJB. About four years ago, I started building applications using Spring and Hibernate, even though much of the industry focus was still on EJB. I thought that the approach that I and a number of other [...]

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FP Passport reports that Bill Gates will give a 30 minute speech Thursday at the World Economic Forum entitled “A New Approach to Capitalism in the 21st Century.” He will challenge business and government to do more to address the problems of disease and poverty in the developing world.

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Microsoft’s Monday announcement of the new browser compatibility features in Internet Explorer 8 has set of a torrent of commentary. They described their new approach to markup versioning in an article at A List Apart and on the Internet Explorer blog.

The basic idea is that Internet Explorer 8 will enable you to specify which rendering [...]

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Here’s Salon’s Andrew Leonard on today’s 75 point emergency rate cut from the Federal Reserve:

If Bernanke has been “wrong” so many times, was he wrong Tuesday morning? As of this writing, around 2:20 p.m. EST, the lead headline on the Wall Street Journal declared “Fed’s Deep Cut Appears to Soothe Markets.” After falling [...]

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One assertion I’ve seen David Simon make in multiple places is that newspapers blew it by not charging for online access to their content when they could.

I think he’s just wrong about that, as does former newspaperman Scott Rosenberg:

I always saw print journalism as doomed. I loved it anyway, the way you might [...]

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