Slate has a good rundown of the issues working against the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform package. Current campaign finance laws seem very byzantine to me, and it looks like the McCain-Feingold legislation will only make them more byzantine. It seems like we could come up with some simple, transparent rules for campaign finance that would really improve the system. Of course, straightforward rules would never become law because that’s not the way Congress works.
More bad law is coming down the pike in the form of a treaty – the Convention on Cybercrime. All you need to know about this treaty is that it’s the brainchild of the FBI, and that it’s supported by the MPA, RIAA, and Business Software Alliance. The ramifications of the treaty are not only very bad for citizens, but they’re also bad for most businesses as well. In other words, this falls into the UCITA class of citizen-hostile laws.
I’m fascinated by Boeing’s decision to move its corporate headquarters from Seattle, not because I really care about Boeing or Seattle, but because of what it says about business. Will this move really save Boeing money in the long run? It seems like typical stupid corporate bullcrap to me, a decision made for the sake of making a decision.
Anyone know of any real (modest to high traffic) sites that have deployed Tomcat as their servlet engine? If so, please drop me a note.
The record companies are taking an obvious step to crack down on file sharing – logging which files are shared and the IP addresses of the people sharing them. It surprises me that they aren’t also sharing bunches of files that look just like MP3s people want but are actually just recordings of either promos or just garbage. Tracking down and busting the real file sharers and lowering the value of the network by “spamming” it with junk are the steps I’d take if I wanted to get rid of file sharing.
Instructions on how to customize your Linux desktop for Java and Perl programming. This article was written for me! I should be able to adapt quite a bit of it to work on my Windows 2000 desktop where I run Cygwin and NT Emacs as my development environment.