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Coca Cola is following Warren Buffett’s lead and putting an end to issuing quarterly earnings forecasts. The Motley Fool’s take is that this makes sense as a measure to take the focus off of the constant pressure of focusing on the current quarter and actually returning to building for the long term. One of my great complaints for years has been the focus among businesses on quarterly results to the exclusion of everything else. Hopefully this will enable Coca Cola to build a better business and provide an example to companies in other industries (particularly the high tech industry) to drop their earnings forecasts as well. Unfortunately, Microsoft, the leading company in high tech, is absolutely masterful at manipulating the market by lowballing its forecasts and doctoring its revenue results to consistantly beat estimates every single quarter. I imagine that’s a habit that would be hard to kick. ...

Via Oblomovka, this New Yorker piece musing about what Philip K Dick would think of the Ministry of Information run by the reptilian John Poindexter. If the Information Awareness Office is allowed to progress on its present course, my prediction is that 5, 10, or perhaps 20 years down the road, it will implode after a huge scandal, a series of absurd but earnest Congressional hearings, and a multitude of promises that the government will never behave in such a manner again. In the meantime, people generally classified as America-haters will investigate and critique its bizarre and sociopathic methods to no avail. At least they’ll get to say “I told you so.” ...

Google News has gotten mixed reviews, but its introduction has actually improved my quality of life. I hear lots of rumors and unsubstantiated assertions, and if I’m going to post about something here, I generally like to have it from one reliable source, and preferably more than one reliable source. (That means an exclusive in a British newspaper never, ever cuts it.) Anyway, running down these stories used to be a huge pain for me. I’d hit Yahoo News, the WaPo, the NYT, and then if that didn’t pan out, several other papers to see if I could source stories properly. Now I just plug in the appropriate search terms into Google News to see what comes up. It also lets me compare and contrast between sites that are running the generic wire story and sites that provide more detail that their reporters actually dug up themselves. I feel like this has both improved the quality of the stuff I post and saved me a lot of time. When I needed to get the exact quote Trent Lott uttered back in 1980 about Strom Thurmond, plugging “trent lott 1980” yielded it in seconds. When I wanted to find out more about the rumors of Microsoft acquiring Rational or Borland, “microsoft borland rational” got me all I needed to know. Dave Farber sent a couple of copy and pastes of news stories out this morning without the URLs to see them on the Web, and digging them up via Google News was a breeze as well. The Google News home page is much maligned (even though it does a good job of letting you know what’s really widely reported), but to me, the value is in the search engine anyway. I’ve always been envious of people who have access to Lexis/Nexis and other news archives, and Google News gives me a little bit of that. ...

William Saletan on Trent Lott: How many conservatives who denounced Lott this week appreciate the civil rights movement? How many have made careers out of deriding feminism, as though the women's movement achieved nothing? How many worship Ronald Reagan, who helped defeat the Equal Rights Amendment? How many defend Helms, who in 1990 defeated a black opponent by complaining in an ad that whites were losing jobs to blacks because of quotas? How many speak congenially to people who support them for what they know are ugly reasons? How many worry about the overlap between the positions of segregationists and the positions of people such as themselves, who defend the rights of states, neighborhoods, and private institutions? How many refuse to see that you can't be nice to racists without being callous to the people they despise?

Here are a couple of items from elsewhere that you ought to read: Tim O'Reilly on piracy. It's amazing to me that so many people understand this issue so well, and yet so few of them are on the payroll of companies that have so much to gain and lose by understanding it. Scott Rosenberg has a column on Kevin Werbach's Supernova conference on decentralization.

Ed Felten posted a frequency chart for use of the terms “fair use” and “copyright” in various articles over the past 20 years or so to his weblog. It definitely seems like people are paying more attention to copyright issues than they once were.

One thing I’ve noticed is that certain developers are not big fans of Struts, a framework for Web applications in Java. Dave at Blogging Roller found a succinct list of why some people don’t like Struts (and a rebuttal). I know there are frameworks other than Struts, but honestly I’ve never looked into them. The main reason I use Struts is that it’s popular and well documented. Not only does that make things easier from a maintenance standpoint, but I believe that the popularity of Struts insures that many of the good ideas developed for other frameworks will eventually be subsumed into Struts. Struts isn’t perfect, but it’s good enough for the work I do, and its strengths match up well with my requirements. ...

Well, after I complained here that the Trent Lott gaffe/self-immolation wasn’t getting any press, it started getting tons of press. (Correlation definitely does not imply causation in this case.) This is looking like one of those snowballing affairs where the story kind of takes on its own momentum. People are unearthing all sorts of nasty bits from Lott’s past: an amicus brief in favor of Bob Jones University (a racist institution that many Republicans pander to), a comment from 1980 where Lott said basically the same thing he said just a few days ago about Strom Thurmond’s 1948 Presidential campaign, and all of that Council of Conservative Citizens stuff that should have drummed Lott out of the Republican leadership years ago. In the meantime, Lott has issued several utterly bogus apologies which haven’t helped him a bit. The New York Times ran an editorial today under the headline Fire Trent Lott. In any case, I feel like my work here is done. I’m going to stop linking to Trent Lott items. Josh Marshall has been following the story with fervor, so if you, like me, can’t take your eyes away from the Trent Lott train wreck, visit Talking Points Memo regularly. ...

Brad DeLong casts Lawrence Lindsey as a victim of general Bush administration incompetence in a piece published in his online journal (found at Scott Rosenberg’s blog). Basically, DeLong says that the administration never used any of Lindsey’s, so he’s not really to blame for the big mess that the administration has made of the economy.

An Australian court has ruled that Dow Jones & Co can be sued under Australian law for defaming an Australian businessman in Barron’s, which is published on the Internet (and on dead trees, of course). Despite the fact Barron’s is a US publication, the Australian court has ruled that it is subject to Australian jurisdiction. Needless to say, for any Internet publisher, this is scary stuff. Australia, like many other countries, does not require the same high standard of proof for libel that we require in the United States. Someone like me could write something about an Australian and be sued in Australian courts. Needless to say, even that is relatively benign when you consider countries like Saudi Arabia, Zimbabwe, or North Korea. This is the dark side of publishing in a global medium, and the really disturbing thing is that there’s no way to clean it up. The only way to start is to get an international treaty ratified, and most countries in the world aren’t going to accept US libel laws (shame on them for it). ...