Posts

Here’s a must-read op-ed from the Jamaica Gleaner (unearthed by stonefishspine) that makes a great argument against the doctrine of pre-emptive war that the Bush administration has espoused. One tasty bite: This Doctrine, which proclaims the right of the United States to intervene in any country it deems a threat, is one which can be used by any country to intervene in the sovereign affairs of any other state it subjectively deems a threat. No recourse to the United Nations or any external authority

In the LawMeme article I linked to today, there’s a site called The Political Compass that assesses your political views on two axes, left/right and authoritarian/libertarian. It’s more interesting than most of the silly quizzes that you see on the Web. I wasn’t surprised to find out that I skew somewhat to the left and strongly toward the libertarian.

If there’s one thing I love, it’s bitter corporate politics. That’s why I found the story of SWT (the GUI toolkit IBM developed as an alternative to Swing) to be so interesting. The fact that some or all of the story may very well be fiction is completely irrelevant – we are talking about an anonymous mailing list posting here. (Link via Blogging Roller.)

The Laurie Garrett email fiasco is turning into an event of major proportions (at least in the small pond of blogging). You may remember that I linked to her email to friends about Davos the other day, mainly as a springboard for my own thoughts about what imminent events might do to the global economy, and how that scares the crap out of me, but the meta-story around the email itself is pretty compelling on its own. Here are some links: ...

Josh Marshall has finally posted part two of his interview with Ken Pollack (author of The Threatening Storm, a book that discusses our options with regard to Iraq), and even better, the whole interview on its own web page. Pollack is probably the best articulator of the pro-war case out there right now. On the other side of the coin, the weapons inspectors are complaining that our tips on what too look for in Iraq are worthless. ...

Salon picked up the voting machine story this week, which is a good sign. The next thing you know, it will actually be reported in the major media. If nothing else, what should come out of this story is that all voting machines should produce a physical record of each vote. The idea that electronic voting machines would only tabulate votes electronically is absolutely amazing to me, because there are just too many ways to game the system and if there’s no physical record, then it’s impossible to go back and audit the results. Honestly, I think that each vote should be assigned an ID, and that two physical copies should be produced, one of which can be taken home by the voter if they choose to do so. But at minimum, they physical vote that is produced should be in a human readable format that can be checked by the voter before they leave the booth and put the vote into a ballot box. Computerized touch screen voting is a good idea, you can create much simpler user interfaces that way, but they’re worthless without a physical audit trail. Oh, and it goes without saying that we ought to be checking into the conflict of interest issues raised in this story as well. ...

I’ve updated how the RSS feed works. If you notice any problems, please send email.

I’ve decided that the time has come to do something more sensible with my RSS feed. Right now, the code that generates my RSS feeds just strips all of the tags out of my items, which means, basically, that they contain now outbound links or formatting. As you know, many of the entries on this site do, in fact, contain both formatting and outbound links when you read them with your browser (though, ironically enough, this post contains neither). The reason I originally did what I did to the RSS feed was to make sure that it is always valid XML and to prevent all you people from just reading the site with your RSS tool and never coming by to visit in person, thus damaging an ego that you perhaps thought was unassailable. However, you readers are the consumers of the site and more importantly, of the RSS feed, and I want to make it better for you. I’m definitely going to stop stripping out the tags, and I’m deciding whether to post excerpts of each entry to the feed, or just copying the whole posts into the feed. I don’t know of anyone misusing the feed (by just running it on their own site without my permission), so I’m tempted to just spew out the entire posts to the feed and let the chips fall where they may with regard to unique visitors per day. If you have an opinion on this, please let me know. ...

SpamAssassin 2.50 is out. This is the big release with the Bayesian filter and a bunch of other new spam trapping features. I’ve already installed it and tested it, and it appears to work. It seems to me that spammers are starting to try to evade SpamAssassin’s ruleset, or try to make their spam shorter and less spamlike in general, and more of it was getting through. Hopefully the new release will let less spam fall through the cracks. (I have to say, though, that even though things had gotten worse, SpamAssassin was still probably catching 90-95% of the spam that I get.) Update: It looks like there’s some work to be done to get the Bayesian filter working. I have to dig a bit more into that. ...

Blogger Kevin Werbach wrote an interesting piece for Slate today that provides a more nuanced analysis of FCC chairman Michael Powell’s regulatory agenda. I’m up for anything that will get a tech industry out of the crapper.