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I noticed that yesterday Yahoo Sports launched a new redesign. Unfortunately, they blew it. The site is much prettier now, but they took away information that separated them from every other sports site on the Net. It used to be that they had the important scores of the day for every major sport in the left hand column of the front page. You didn’t have to drill down at all to see what was going on. Then, on the home page for each specific sport, they had the scores for today and yesterday in the left column. The quick access to the most important information that can be found on the sports page was incredibly useful, I hate to see it go. They’ve added in some customization features, but they don’t enable you to get back to the way things were. I always find it odd when the people who run sites fail to see what it is that makes them better than other sites. At Yahoo, it was the massive amount of information that was all stuffed onto one page. Now they’re just like every other site, which kind of stinks. ...

I’m pretty excited about the Shaq v Yao face off tonight, and I think it shows just how badly the NBA needs good centers. There’s a level of excitement about this game that I haven’t seen about a regular season NBA game in years. Seeing the NBA’s future premier center face off against the current king of the hill is exciting stuff. My prediction is that Shaq will score at least 40 points, I just hope that Yao manages to block one of his shots (preferably a dunk). ...

I was just thinking this morning that the killer feature for IntelliJ IDEA (the uber Java IDE) would be a set of skins to make it look like other popular IDEs. The advantage here is that when your company mandates that you use other more expensive products, you can buy IDEA with your own money and run it surreptitiously to get your work done. Sort of like boss mode, except better. ...

Remember when AOL acquired Time Warner, thus proving once and for all that new media was on even footing with old media. Well, would the last AOL exec to depart lock the door? A Time veteran has replaced Steve Case as chairman of the combined entity. It seems like this should have been predictable, but I don’t know if I predicted it.

If you needed to learn the rudiments of Delphi in, oh, a week, where would you turn? I have no Delphi experience at all but I’m inheriting a piece of software written in … Delphi. Pointers to crash courses would be greatly appreciated.

Hey, did you hear there’s a new Harry Potter book coming out and George W Bush opposes affirmative action? Sorry for the lack of action here, I’ve been absurdly busy with mergers and acquisitions.

The New York Times article on the Eldred v Ashcroft decision provides a solid summary. It breaks my heart that the Supreme Court decided to rule that basically, Congress can do whatever the hell it wants when it comes to copyright law. A 95 year duration on corporate copyrights is fundamentally indistinguishable from eternity, especially when you consider that when the big copyrights from the early 20th century are up for expiration, the lobbyists will slop the hogs in Congress again and we’ll see another extension. ...

The Supreme Court ruled 7-2 in favor of the government in Eldred v Ashcroft. Larry Lessig has commented on his blog. This sucks.

The Register publishes claims that the RIAA paid a hacking group to create a virus, worm, trojan, or something to infect hosts that participate on P2P networks and report back to the mother ship. After reading the description (posted to Bugtraq by the hacking group that ostensibly did the RIAA’s dirty work), I’m highly dubious.

The New York Times has an article today on the Tamil Tigers, the suicide bombers who showed everyone else how it was done. The Tamil Tigers have mounted over 200 suicide attacks, and literally succeeded in bombing the Sri Lankan government to the negotiating table. Anyone interested in confronting terrorism ought to look at Sri Lanka very closely. One of the most troubling facts about the Tamil Tigers is that they’re a secular group, and are not Muslims. ...