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Salon’s Anthony York has more on the lack of reaction to Trent Lott’s comments by Congressional Democrats. Do I think that Trent Lott was thinking specifically of segregation when he made his comments? No. But the fact that segregation was not the first thing in Lott’s mind when he opened his mouth should tell us something. I’d guarantee that any black person who remembers Strom Thurmond’s 1948 Dixiecrat campaign knows that the entire purpose of the campaign was to prolong segregation. Is Trent Lott a racist? I have no idea. But clearly he doesn’t really care whether he looks like one. ...

Regardless of the outcome of the Eldred v Ashcroft case, one thing it has served to do is spur a lot of discussion in this country about the value of the public domain. Not long ago, it seemed like nobody was talking about the problem of repeated copyright extensions and the idea that perhaps nothing would ever enter the public domain again. Now, the issues have major currency. I offer as further proof the fact that the MacArthur Foundation is granting major dollars to research the preservation of the public domain. ...

Is it just me, or are Trent Lott’s boneheaded and probably heartfelt comments about Mississippi supporting Strom Thurmond’s 1948 pro-segregation candidacy not getting the outraged response that they deserve? It’s times like this that I get a really good laugh out of the idea that we’re somehow burdened with a liberal media establishment. Shouldn’t we be seeing editorials calling for his resignation, or at least some criticism. You can see the quote itself at Slate, and the Washington Post has a reaction piece. It was bad enough that Trent Lott cops to still being proud of supporting Thurmond back in 1948, but it was this sentence that should have ended Lott’s political career, “And if the rest of the country had of followed our lead we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years, either.” Which problems, exactly, Senator Lott? By the way, to get a feel for the lack of coverage of Lott’s statements, check out this Google News search. One thing the Republican punditry excels at is viciously punishing Democrats for anything they say that’s percieved as out of line. Where are the liberals here? He’s catching a bit more flack in the blog world. ...

Iraq’s government has turned over 12,000 pages of documents that declare that Iraq has no weapons of mass destruction. Considering that the UN weapons inspectors were not able to fully disarm Iraq before they were forced out by the Iraqi government in 1998, one wonders where all of the weapons went. Did Iraq unilaterally disarm without telling anyone, despite the fact that doing so would have ended the sanctions regime? That seems unlikely. It seems more likely to me that Iraq’s goal is to bury the UN under a mountain of paperwork that will delay the Bush administration’s march toward war, and that Iraq believes that its WMD programs are well-concealed enough to prevent the current weapons inspectors from finding anything. Is there anyone out there who really believes that Iraq has fully disarmed and has suspended all of its WMD programs? It boggles the mind. ...

My desktop PC at home is running Windows XP, and it has this problem where it hangs on boot all the time. At first I just put it down to basic Windows stupidity and didn’t even try and diagnose it, but after awhile, I tried booting in safe mode and saw that the system always hangs while trying to load the file mup.sys. After searching the Web for awhile and seeing that people were asking about this problem but none of them were getting answers, I turned to Google Groups. This is a problem many people seem to be having, and nobody seems to know the solution. Possible solutions include: ...

Didn’t get a chance to post anything here yesterday because we had a major ice storm that knocked out both power and phone service. One of the most disturbing things I’ve noticed is that nobody here seems to know that when a stoplight is out, everyone is supposed to treat it as a flashing red light. People on the larger road just seem to blow through indiscriminately, and when those people finally do stop, as soon as one person goes many cars behind them go on ahead as well. I’m amazed that this basic bit of driving knowledge appears to be missing completely. The second thing is that my Cingular phone has been in “Emergency Only” mode since the storm and I haven’t been able to make a single call on it. Not very useful when both your power and the land lines are down. ...

Salon Premium has a thoughtful article on Total Information Awareness that offers arguments both for and against the massive data warehouse of everything everybody does. I’m still against it. I said immediately after 9/11 that the failure to prevent the attacks was an IT problem, but I don’t think that the Poindexter solution is the answer.

Russell Beattie has an interesting entry about subject matter for his weblog. What to post and what not to post is a tough decision, I think. You’ll find that I never mention my employer here, the reason for that is I never want to run into a problem where I’ve said something about my employer or their products that they don’t particulary like and have to answer for it to my manager (or his boss). I also try to avoid mentioning competing products as well, but I fail on that front occasionally, much to my chagrin. Other than that, subject matter is pretty much no holds barred, with the exception that I know my immediate family members read this stuff at least some of the time, and I try to avoid saying things that they would find too jarring. The fact that my mother could be reading this at any time leads me to think a bit about the language I use. The other means I have for keeping things compartmentalized is that I’m not “Rafe the guy with the blog” in the non-virtual world. I don’t really talk about the site at work, nor do I discuss it offline with friends and family, unless asked about it specifically. In fact, when I meet people in the physical world and they mention that they know me from this site, it kind of freaks me out. And the really weird thing is that I almost never write about personal stuff here, I can’t imagine disclosing the intimate details of my personal life online and having to meet people for real who had read them. Needless to say, I’ll probably never write a memoir. I guess for me intimacy is more a two way street. I have great sympathy for people who are famous and who have to deal with complete strangers every day who’ve read sordid detail of their lives on the gossip pages. ...

For future reference: bikeshed discussions defined. This is such a useful metaphor that I will try utmost never to forget it. Indeed, I can’t wait to get the opportunity at a meeting to say, “Can we drop this bikeshed discussion?” Of course nobody there will know what the hell I’m talking about, but I don’t care.

You know, various conservative webloggers take joy in skewering the New York Times on a daily basis. Josh Marshall commented brilliantly on this phenomenon the other day, criticizing weblog triumphalism. It’s a hell of a lot easier to publish a blog and throw rocks at specific mistakes (or more often, the alleged political agenda of the writers) from the Times than it is to publish a daily paper that covers as much of what’s going on in the world as is feasible. That said, long time readers will know that I detest News.com. I realize that they cover the whole computer industry and that they have ridiculously short deadlines, but I just can’t resist mocking them for their obvious errors and poor writing. I generally become most upset when I go there looking for real information and find some poorly written piece of crap that contains as much nonsense as actual fact. For example, I read that Mozilla 1.2 had to be pulled due to a JavaScript error, and there’s a News.com story on the problem. The article doesn’t really explain the problem, says that tabbed browsing is a 1.2 feature, associates dynamic HTML mainly with advertisements, and exhibits a level of general cluelessness that’s downright depressing. The sad thing is, I didn’t expect any better. ...