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For future reference: Java programming dynamics, Part 1: Classes and class loading

One thing I really like about the Creative Commons project is that they’re at least encouraging people to think consciously about the power of copyright and how it is applied. Whether a CC license is right for your works is less important than the fact that just presenting people with a number of copyright alternatives encourages them to consider how they want their work to be licensed, rather than just silently accepting the copyright terms that Congress has agreed to in order to help out Disney. Tim O’Reilly is putting his money where his mouth is by jumping on board the Founders’ Copyright project, and even better, releasing the content from O’Reilly’s out of print books under an attribution license. ...

Since I’m considering updating/rewriting the software that powers this site, I’m interested in these proposed requirements for a weblogging system compiled by Matthew Thomas.

In a discussion of the PBS show Manor House on Brad DeLong’s weblog, a reader compared it to Zimbardo’s experiment. The Stanford Prison Experiment, conducted by Dr Philip Zimbardo, recruited some volunteers who participated in a prison simulation. Some volunteers played the role of prisoners, others played the role of prison guards. The experiment was so psychologically effective (in that both the prisoners and guards embraced their roles fully) that it had to be ended after only 6 days. The results of the Manor House were similar. Every time I read about “monsters” like Saddam Hussein and his sons and cohorts, I think about these sorts of experiments. It’s foolish to forget that all people have a varying capacity for monstrous behavior, and indeed for craven submission to the application of authority. To delude ourselves as thinking that criminals, or terrorists, or dictators are somehow fundamentally different from the people we encounter in everyday lives is a dangerous mistake to make. The original comment on DeLong’s weblog mentioned the Milgram experiment, which is the famous experiment that demonstrated that a large percentage of people would torture other people if ordered to do so. ...

I just think it’s totally cool that Tomcat 4 Clustering (which is backported from Tomcat 5) uses IP multicast to share session info across multiple servers in a cluster. I think that approach is totally ingenious.

I was reading Jim Henley’s thoughts on whether libertarians are better served by the Republican or Democratic party, and ran across what the Democrats would have to do to win him over (while still remaing true to themselves): My test is, perhaps, more modest: let the Dems put as much real energy into getting rid of big government they supposedly don't like as adding big government they do. Campaign on ending the drug war and mean it. Dismantle corporate welfare instead of engaging in it. Restore the personal income tax exemption to its level in 1948 dollars while eliminating all or most itemized deductions. Promise to repeal all or most of the USA-PATRIOT Act, the RAVE Act and the DMCA. Stand as firmly for free trade as Clinton did. A party that did these things would still be very much a liberal party. Hell, it would be a more liberal party than the Dems are now. It would still support regulation and tax policies that libertarians hate, but it would have a credible claim to be Kos's "party of personal liberty" in the non-economic sphere. If the Republicans did not clean up their own act, it would be a damned hard Democratic Party to say "no thanks" to. That's certainly a policy approach that I would appreciate.

In an interview with Democracy Now, Robert Fisk speculates that Saddam Hussein (and family) are in Minsk. He also says he believes that the war in Iraq was about oil, which doesn’t engender much respect from me, mainly because it’s a simplistic and obvious analysis that doesn’t fit very well with the facts.

A French philosopher who went to Pakistan to investigate Daniel Pearl’s murder says he was kidnapped for the reasons everybody already knows, but that he was killed because he knew too much. Considering the past ties of Pakistan’s intelligence service with Osama bin Laden, terrorists in Afghanistan, and the terror groups that operate in Kashmir, the report seems credible.

Looks like Saddam Hussein decided to write his own birthday card this year. Of course, if Saddam is grievously wounded or dead, as many speculate, the more interesting questions are who actually wrote the letter, and why they would do so.

Something occurred to me last night about Apple’s new music service. The killer advantage here for Apple is that their DRM locks Mac users into the Mac platform for the long term. Maybe this will change, but right now you can only play the tracks purchased through Apple’s music service on a Mac. Once you’ve bought an iPod’s worth of music, you have several gigs of reasons why switching from your Mac to a PC would be a really, really bad idea. I guess you could go to the trouble of ripping all your songs onto CD and then ripping them back onto your PC as MP3s, but that brings about a loss of quality and is a huge pain to boot. Maybe I’m way off here and soon there will be a PC app that will Apple’s audio files, but in the meantime, this looks like a particularly fiendish way to make sure that people who switch stay switched. Update: a number of people have written to tell me that Apple is hiring people to work on a Windows version of iTunes. That nixes my theory that the record companies only acquiesced to this plan because it was for the Mac only and thus constrained the market size. Of course, maybe the record companies won’t sign on to the Windows version until they see how the Mac market shapes up. Who knows? ...