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Eric Sink wrote an interesting piece about how software developers must deal with the abstractions in their environment to deliver software. Unfortunately, toward the end he goes on a .NET vs. Java jag that really has nothing to do with his piece, and indeed was total and complete flame bait. Unsurprisingly, he follows up today to explain himself. This is one way that the lack of an editor can hurt weblogs. The temptation to digress when writing is intense, but every time you do it, you risk people ignoring the point you were trying to make by focusing on your digression (particularly when it’s inflammatory). In any case, Sink’s piece is worth reading, particularly if you ignore the pointless partisanship at the end. ...

I don’t have much to say about the Apple music store. From what I’ve read, the DRM seems pretty heinous, which caused me to lose interest instantly. This Paul Boutin article isn’t bad.

The Justice Department has pressed charges against Mike Hawash.

Joe Conason busts Thomas Friedman for his WMD flip flop. Friedman, who once talked about things like international legitimacy and going to war under false pretenses, now seems to say that because Saddam Hussein was a brutal, murderous dictator, it’s all good. The truth is that WMD never really did matter, at least to the people making the decisions. They wanted to show the (Arab) world that we’re not to be trifled with, had a major hate going for Saddam Hussein, wanted to help out Israel, and liked Iraq’s geographical location, so they made up a reason for us to go to war, and here we are. Why did everyone at the UN press us so hard on the WMD issue? Because they knew, just like everyone who was paying attention, that the WMD talk was a big lie and being ordered by the US to just suck it up and pretend like it wasn’t a lie pissed them off. Is that really so hard to understand? In a sense, Friedman is right – except in the wrong way. Most people in the world aren’t going to see the war as legitimate regardless of whether or not WMD are found. ...

Henry Blodget, the famous Merrill Lynch analyst/stock shiller who once predicted that Amazon.com’s shares would go to $400 has been banned from the securities business for life. He also had to forfeit a ton of cash, and is probably still richer than I’ll ever be.

One of the many truly evil things Saddam Hussein did was drain the marshes in Southern Iraq as part of a program to suppress the “marsh Arabs” that had lived in that region for literally thousands of years. It looks like there’s talk of restoring the marshes, if possible. It’s going to take a lot of cash, though, and ultimately, the unique culture of the marsh Arabs will probably never be restored. Maybe anthropologists can document it so that it lives on in the annals of history, if nowhere else. ...

Percolating through various channels last week was Larry Lessig’s offer to resign if an anti-spam bill he proposes is enacted and doesn’t reduce the overall level of spam. He’s asked Declan McCullagh to judge whether or not the law (if passed) is effective. Anyway, Declan doesn’t think he’ll get the chance to judge the law’s effectiveness because he doesn’t believe it will pass, the problem being that it’s difficult to define spam. I think that any definition has to include bulk mailing to make sense. That’s the problem with referring to spam as simply “unsolicited commercial email.” If I want to find a job in the computer industry and I go to the trouble of looking up the email addresses for HR contacts at a bunch of companies, and then write each of them a personal cover letter and forward them my résumé, is it spam? Not by my definition. By the same token, if somebody wants me to change hosting providers to their company and sends me a personal email, I don’t have a problem with that. That’s how business is transacted. By the same token, if a hosting company sends email to every address in the whois database or I buy a list of 100,000 HR email addresses and I blast all of them, then that’s spam. ...

Ed Felten has some comments on the Grokster ruling that made news on Friday.

The OSAF has published to the Web a transcript of the Chandler demo from the Emerging Tech conference. I’ve totally drunk the Chandler Kool-aid and am looking forward to watching this application evolve. I’m excited about it for a number of reasons, including: Returning innovation to the email arena. Even though email (and especially email combined with scheduling and other PIM features) is probably the key business application these days, Outlook and Express have brutally murdered innovation in this area. Right now there aren't any realistic alternatives to Outlook for an organization of any size, and Outlook sucked when it was released and hasn't gotten much better since. I'm glad we might have something that can push the state of the art forward here. It's written mostly in Python. Having an example desktop application that's large, complex, and hopefully attractive that's written in a scripting language could force a pretty radical change on the software industry. At some point, we're going to see languages like C and C++ marginalized so that they're only used for the most low level work and performance intensive applications. Microsoft is going to be pushing VB.NET and C# as replacements. Chandler could be the compelling argument in favor of building cross platform apps that look great everywhere using a more open language. It should be easy to extend. Seeing the sorts of things people are doing to extend Eclipse gives me hope that we'll see some really amazing user-contributed improvements to Chandler once it's released. It’s still way to early to know how Chandler will deliver, but I love the ambitiousness of the project. Certainly Mozilla, even though its gestation period was long, exceeded my expectations. I’d be thrilled if Chandler did as well. ...

Given my fascination with Paul Berman and my general fandom of Josh Marshall, how could I resist linking to a Josh Marshall review of Paul Berman’s Terror and Liberalism?