I don’t find it surprising me that a lot of the information about the Total Information Awareness program is disappearing from its Web site, because it was deeply disturbing. Declan McCullagh reports that the Web site is shrinking over time. First, information about some of the staffers disappeared. Since then, both the wierd illuminati logo and slogan have been taken down, along with some of the pages on the site.
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. One thing that’s slightly frustrating about the article is that it seems to focus on the pro-life issue. Trent Lott didn’t get into trouble for opposing abortion, he got into trouble for parading his ignorance of racial issues in front of the American people, which enabled his tainted past acts to come home to roost. Frist is a Republican favored by the Bush administration – he’s a conservative. The question is whether Frist is a real escape from Lott’s good old boy-ism. I think we can be fairly sure that Frist isn’t as ignorant as Lott, if nothing else. ...
So I read an article about why JSP sucks, and this was the first response: This is why I don't recommend Java for web development, and just use PHP. With many template implementations out there for PHP, it's simple to have someone use dreamweaver and just put little {MY_VAR} where the data goes! How is this in any way better than <%= myVar %> or ? To me, it's not. And you're throwing out the other 8,000 things that make J2EE a great platform for writing Web applications. In any case, this person is obviously utterly ignorant. The reason they don't recommend Java for Web development is that they don't understand it. PHP has its advantages, too. I don't pick out one crappy feature in PHP and post to my weblog saying that I don't recommend it due to that feature (in fact, I use PHP). I'm not being defensive of Java here, but I get tired of seeing tons of this shoot from the hip sort of crap every day.
If there’s one thing that remains a constant in politics, it’s nepotism. It kind of makes you wonder whether there’s a genetic predisposition toward monarchy in the human race. People love to put the children of politicians in office, and there are still plenty of monarchists running around in the world. In Hawaii, for example, there are plenty of people who want to secede and restore the Hawaiian monarchy. Why? It baffles me. And for what it’s worth, I can’t think of any politicians that have done such a good job that I would eagerly cast a vote for their kid. ...
Jabber is making a list of applications that could serve as prior art when it comes to fighting the AOL (ICQ) patent that covers instant messaging.
Colin Powell on Iraq: It’s go time.
In my previous item, I overzealously tarred abstinence programs unfairly. Mark Hershberger sent me an email pointing out that abstinence programs have enjoyed some success in Africa, which, in fact makes sense to me. Clearly abstaining from sex until you decide you actually want children is incredibly effective at preventing unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. Furthermore, I can see that in cultures that do not encourage abstinence, or even communicate to people (women in particular) that abstinence is an option, doing so would prove effective. Indeed, my overall problem with the Bush administration’s position is that I don’t believe that they have come to it through empirical evidence, but rather through religious or moral conviction, or even worse, through political expedience. Deciding how to best tackle the population crisis (and STD crisis) in the developing world based on what will get you votes two or four years down the road is cynical in the extreme, and it pisses me off. However, that’s not really an excuse for going all Michael Moore, drawing broad and misinformed generalizations, and trying to pass them off as common knowledge. I’ll do better. ...
One of the ways you know IntelliJ IDEA is a killer product is that every time you open it, the tip of the day actually teaches you something rather useful.
Slate has a photo essay on various displays of the Ten Commandments on public grounds and discusses the constitutionality of each. The most interesting thing I learned is that the big Fraternal Order of the Eagles Ten Commandments monuments were paid for in part by Cecil B DeMille to market his commandments movie.
Charles Miller wrote an item item today about AOL’s patent for instant messaging (courtesy of ICQ). In it he says he thinks IM is patentable because it was something completely new and innovative. The problem is, if it is patentable, ICQ should not be the one with the patent. Back in 1995, I worked for a company called InSoft that you have almost certainly never heard of. Our key product was called Communique! – a desktop videoconferencing tool that ran on high end Unix workstations with really expensive video cards. As PCs became more powerful, InSoft came out with a Windows version of the product, and wound up coming out with a lightweight product that would run over low bandwidth connections. We released this product under the name CoolTalk, and were acquired by Netscape not long afterward (for a brief period of time, CoolTalk was actually part of the Netscape install). Anyway, one of the features of our products from the high end product down to CoolTalk was that you could maintain an address book of people who you conferenced with (think buddy list in AIM), and when you wanted to start a conference, our tool showed you who on your buddy list was currently online so that you didn’t bother to invite people to your conference if they weren’t running their conferencing tool. The real kicker here is that our product had a number of tools built in. It had video and audio, but it also had a file transfer tool, a shared whiteboard tool, and something we called the text tool. It had a window with two panes, the bottom one was for typing new messages, and the top pane showed a history of the messages you’d exchanged with the other person (or people) in your conference. In other words, the very same window that’s used in every IM application that I’ve ever seen. The ironic thing from my standpoint is that we had all of the parts of a truly killer application buried underneath the video and and audio conferencing veneer. We thought the killer features were multimedia, when it turned out that the killer feature was letting people see their friends online and talk to them using text. When I wrote the docs for the text tool, I suggested that users could use it to help diagnose audio and video problems in their conferences. As it’s turned out, seven years later people still seem satisfied with just using the boring old text tool. My point here is that despite the overwhelming success of ICQ in particular and IM in general, there’s really no excuse for giving AOL that patent. I have anecdotal evidence from one obscure startup that did what ICQ did before the patent was filed. I’m sure plenty of other people have similar stories as well for just about every software patent that’s been issued. I would like to note that I haven’t read the patent itself, maybe it covers an obscure technical point that our product didn’t have. And, to further crank up the irony meter, the work we did at InSoft was purchased by Netscape which is now owned by AOL, so our prior art wouldn’t count anyway. ...