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I watched the debate tonight. There was a lot of tut-tutting about 32 pages of rules and the game being rigged so that Americans wouldn’t really get a chance to judge the candidates, but thanks in large part to the networks tossing out the rulebook and showing both candidates on a split screen, we got to see everything we needed. There was enough substance there both in what was said, how it was said, and how Kerry and Bush reacted to one another for people to judge the candidates. A firm grasp of current events was a big help, because there were plenty of assertions made that demanded a comparison to events on the ground. I feel pretty mellow about the election right now. The evidence is out there for people to weigh, we’ll wind up with the President that we deserve. ...

Java 5.0 (1.5) is out. Now in only two or three years we’ll start deploying applications based on the new JVM.

Yesterday I cited positively some discussions in favor of sprawl. There’s another side to the story, though, which I touched on in a discussion last week of global warming. In defending sprawl and car culture, John Tierney eloquently defends sprawl in terms of land use, but sort of waves his hands when it comes to air pollution and resource consumption. He dismisses those problems by saying that technology will rescue us. That answer, though, is inadequate. Sprawl make work well for America right now, but the American suburban lifestyle cannot scale given today’s technology. We can’t produce enough fossil fuels on a day to day basis to enable everyone in the world (or even a much larger percentage of the world) to use as much energy per capita as Americans do. One of the reasons oil prices are going up is increased demand for oil – if people in more countries could afford cars, houses in the suburbs, and long commutes, oil prices would go up even more, in turn, making our sprawlophilic lifestyle significantly more expensive. I’m not an economist, but it sure seems like these problems should have been addressed in the article. ...

The Washington Post has a long story today on the Bush administration’s record on missile defense. The other day I was having a conversation with a Bush supporter who says that the missile defense system we’re deploying has been fully tested and will protect us from nuclear attack. That was depressing.

I’m finding a lot of interesting writing about the suburbs today. Here’s Jane Galt on how the idea of smart growth clashes with real life. Inspired by John Tierney’s article in this weekends NY Times Magazine, The Autonomist Manifesto. I grew up in something approximating the suburbs, and I live in the suburbs now. (I’m moving to the city, though.) I confess to being a big fan of “new urbanism” and “smart growth,” but these pieces do a good job of pointing out the downsides. It’s hard to overcome the basic aesthetic unpleasantness of big box stores and generic suburban neighborhoods, but I don’t think that the fact that this mode of living is incredibly popular is an accident. People like living in the kinds of neighborhoods that most people choose to live in (even people who can afford to live anywhere they like), and who am I to tell them any different? ...

Another aspect of the Presidential campaign that has been on my mind lately is the factor to which building a cult of personality plays into it. To be blunt, there is no John Kerry cult of personality. There are people who are trying to create one – for example, I’m seeing pro-Kerry web sites refer to him as “Big John” more and more. There’s already a strong George W Bush cult of personality, and both Howard Dean and Wesley Clark seemed to have similar cults during the Democratic primary season. Obviously no American politician enjoys a personality cult like the ones described in the Wikipedia article that I linked to above, but there are people who become so reverent about politicians that they no longer worry about how the politician proposes solving particular problems or how they perform on their job because of the level of trust they have developed. They simply assume that their leader will do the right thing, and thus absolve themselves of the need to verify that the leader is actually doing the right thing. I don’t want to see any leader that way. I don’t care if the President is a Republican or a Democrat, my assumption is that they’ll probably screw just about everything up to some degree. Our political system is at its best when people see things that way. I fear that the George W Bush cult of personality is what’s going to win him this election. At the same time, if Kerry has to build a personality cult to defeat Bush, I’d just as soon as see him lose. Why can’t we live in a country of grown ups? The President is a man with a job to do, not a cure for all that ails us. ...

Microsoft is not going to backport the new version of Internet Explorer from Windows XP SP2 to previous versions of Windows, so if you want a “secure” browser, you have to cough up the cash to upgrade your operating system. The article points out that 200 million people are using older versions of Windows. On one hand, people who don’t want to pay to upgrade their OS to get a better browser seem like perfect candidates to use Firefox. On the other hand, are people who don’t bother to upgrade their OS going to find and download a new Web browser? It seems unlikely to me. ...

I’m a huge fan of The Daily Show, and I was gratified to learn this morning that viewers of that show are more informed about the Presidential candidates than people who don’t watch it.

I’ve been generally fatigued by the Presidential campaigning lately (I’ll post more about that a bit later), and I’ve been trying to think about the real differences between the candidates and about how that would actually affect our lives over the next four years. I realized that one of the biggest differences between the two is the degree to which they are visionaries, and you’ll be surprised to learn that I think that of the two, President Bush is the visionary. I don’t really agree with his vision for America, but President Bush does have a vision for the country that includes taxation, education, the legal system, and, obviously, foreign policy. I think his vision is utterly frightening, but the bigger problem is that he seems too incompetent to realize his vision. He’s gotten massive tax reform passed, but it hasn’t helped the economy as much as he would have thought, and it hasn’t helped out many Americans. He got his education reform through, but thanks to underfunding and poor conception, it has been a flop. He got his war with Iraq, but that has been a disaster. He talks about promoting democracy, but I don’t see many people around the world looking to America for direction in that regard these days. That said, I think that many voters really connect with President Bush because he offers a vision for the country that he genuinely believes in and that sounds good on paper to about half of the voters. Probably even more than half, in fact. It’s just that many people know that Bush’s vision and reality don’t necessarily cross paths. I think it’s hard for John Kerry to run against President Bush because he does not have a vision to offer, really. He has a number of specific policy proposals, most of which make sense. He’s obviously a smart guy, he’s shown physical courage in the past, and he’s won plenty of campaigns. But voters still say they don’t know where Kerry would take the country. I think that’s because Kerry doesn’t necessarily have somewhere he wants to take the country. People don’t hear a Kerry speech and think “I want to live in Kerry’s America.” This is also a sharp difference with his running mate. John Edwards has a vision for America and uses that vision to sharply critique the Republican platform with his “two Americas” theme. One thing to remember, I think, is that the White House isn’t necessarily the best place for a visionary right now. We need a competent manager who is obsessed with identifying and fixing our country’s problems right now. The federal government is solely responsible for fixing the situation in Iraq, and the massive deficit spending that President Bush has introduced. The federal government can help to address the health insurance crisis in this country. The best President for America is a guy who can focus his administration on addressing these problems. In that sense, John Kerry might be the right guy for these times. ...

I’m revisiting IntelliJ IDEA this week. I haven’t used since version 3.0 (it’s up to version 4.5), for various reasions, including having worked for a company that not only made competing products but also once employed the original creators of IDEA and thus not being able to get authorization to buy it. I’m eager to see how much IDEA has improved since the last time I used it. In the intervening period, Eclipse has made massive improvements, so I can only imagine what the folks at IntelliJ have done. Update: This experiment is over before it started. I tried to migrate the webapp I was working on from Eclipse/MyEclipseIDE to IDEA and ran into all sorts of weird problems. I was also put off by the ugly Swing interface and the fact that it seemed to screw up the screen fonts when it displayed them. Finally, it didn’t integrate as smoothly with Tomcat as MyEclipseIDE does. I’m certain that IDEA remains the best product for editing actual Java code, but the supporting infrastructure really disappointed me. ...