Lots of coverage has been given to the Council of Europe’s proposed treaty that would require any Web publisher to provide a “right of reply” to anyone that they criticize. Declan McCullagh has some useful background info on this, as well as explanation of a why it’s such a bad idea. This is exactly one of those “road to hell is paved with good intentions” scenarios that makes libertarianism so appealing. ...
Matt Haughey has a first hand account of the hinternet. John Beimler told me that he helped people out by burning a CD for them with Mozilla on it, which is a great idea given that many of my family members who use the hinternet also have modem connections. I find it relentlessly depressing that what to me was a medium for freedom and self expression is to unscrupulous people a willing pool of suckers waiting to be exploited. ...
I wrote a really simple application at work last quarter, and this quarter it needs to be rewritten with a bunch of new features. Rather than doing things the same old way, I’m going to use Hibernate for persistence, and rather than writing a bunch of mapping files, I’ve decided to employ XDoclet to save myself some labor. Unfortunately, picking up both of these technologies at once is seeming a bit daunting to me. Not in terms of how they work, which is perfectly clear to me, but getting to the point where I have a piece of running code that proves I have everything from build to deployment set up properly is a bit trying. My hope is that the time I’m investing up front will pay big dividends later. I’m ready to join the camp of “I’m not writing SQL any more” Java developers. ...
Scott Rosenberg has a funny take on a recent Bill O’Reilly anti-Internet rant.
The Washington Post has two interesting articles today. One is a massive retelling of the Jessica Lynch story, a mega-correction of sorts. The other describes some successful rebuilding projects in Afghanistan, funded by Iran.
I’ve followed with interest the case of University of Washington football coach Rick Neuheisel. He was fired last week for participating in an NCAA basketball pool, which is against NCAA regulations. His infraction and firing have gotten saturation media coverage (mainly because everyone knows he’s had it coming for quite some time). However, every article seems to miss the most important piece. Neuheisel’s defense is that the University of Washington had given its coaches permission to participate in pools, which was wrong anyway, since it was illegal according to NCAA rules. The catch here, and what hasn’t been reported very well, is that Neuheisel was not participating in the sort of pool that most people are familiar with. I wonder if journalists know that? Usually an NCAA pool involves everyone picking the winners of every game in every round in the tournament, with the pot going to the person who picks the most games correctly. From what I’ve read, I get the sense that Neuheisel was in the sort of pool that serious gamblers participate in. It involves basically investing in a single team, and I’m not entirely confident in my understanding of the mechanics of the betting or how the winnings are awarded. The bottom line is that if he’d participated in a regular old pool, he’d probably still have his job. For what it’s worth, I’m pretty sure that Neuheisel’s pool was conducted using Calcutta-style betting. Unfortunately, I haven’t found a good clear explanation of how it works on the Web. (It basically involves auctioning off teams and then paying out from the proceeds of the auctions according to how the teams do in the tournament. A few years ago, a mail room clerk on Wall Street got in hock hundreds of thousands of dollars in a Calcutta-style NCAA tournament pool, because in that pool people traded shares in each of the teams once the tournament and he made a number of bad trades with money he didn’t have.) ...
Teresa Nielsen Hayden has what could possibly be termed the authoritative post on the current state of the controversy surrounding items from Iraq’s national museum that are missing or destroyed. At this point, we know that “everything is gone” is no longer the story, despite the fact that everyone reported it that way initially. We also know that some artifacts are gone, and that the US did nothing to prevent that from happening. I want to add that it’s a cheap and lame bit of misdirection to point to the changing number from the specific museum that has been most talked about rather than acknowledging the fact that the Koranic library in Baghdad was looted and burned to the ground, and plenty of other items and places of historical significance are forever lost. ...
If you put stock in the Observer, then it’s final that those mobile weapons labs really are meant to produce hydrogen.
Last Friday I travelled by air for the first time since around Christmas. It was a one day trip, so I didn’t have to deal with the hassle of checked luggage, but overall, things seemed less out of whack than they did 6 months ago. The security procedures were relatively streamlined, and while it was a huge pain in the butt to take my laptop out of its bag and remove my wallet, keys, watch, shoes, and belt, the line moved fairly briskly given that everyone was going through a similar procedure. There seemed to be many fewer people being called aside to be searched after they went through the metal detectors as well, so it seems like we’re becoming better trained livestock over time. I also flew Southwest for the first time in a long time, and I was quite pleased with their choose your own seat boarding procedure. It seems like the last time I flew Southwest, I hated that aspect, but this time it seemed quite orderly on both the departing and return flights, and I got pretty decent seats both times. For both my departing and returning flights, I got to the airport two hours early, and I had lots of time to kill in each case, so it seems like overall things are going pretty well in terms of efficiency in the air travel industry, based on the smallest possible sample size. Update: Sam Ruby had a different experience with air travel this weekend. ...
I finally got around to reading the plan for Eclipse 3.0. They definitely seem to have a handle on the problems that I have with Eclipse. However, the fundamental problem with Eclipse right now is a lack of mature plugins for Web-related stuff. I’ve tried a number of JSP editors (for example), and they just aren’t where they need to be when compared with the integrated editors built into IDEA and JBuilder. ...