Posts

UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh is all over the Ninth Circuit ruling today that held the Pledge of Allegiance unconstitutional due to the “under God” bit. I find the arguments that removing this phrase from the pledge will lead us down a slippery slope that requires us to banish various important parts of our cultural history to be interesting, and perhaps persuasive. As all the stories point out, the “under God” thing was added to the pledge in 1954 at the behst of the Knights of Columbus (a Catholic organization). I don’t have a problem with it being sent out of town on a rail. On the other hand, I don’t think we ought to expunge things that are important parts of our history, like the words of the Star Spangled Banner or the text of the Declaration of Independence. I agree with the dissenting judge’s idea that there’s such a thing as “ceremonial Deism,” but I don’t think that the “under God” phrase falls under that category. If things in 1954 were anything like they are today, there was a political agenda behind the Knights of Columbus campaign, not unlike the stupid movements to tack up copies of the Ten Commandments all over the place. On the other hand, many other invocations of a supreme being are really are there to add gravity and solemnity to whatever they’re included in. ...

This Thomas Friedman column is too good to pass up. You have to love the irony of being Iran right now.

Now that a remote exploit in OpenSSH was discovered, the OpenBSD project has had to update the tag line on the project home page: One remote hole in the default install, in nearly 6 years! Still pretty impressive.

Joining the ranks of companies to commit massive accounting fraud is WorldCom, which also happened to use Arthur Andersen as its auditor. It turns out they lied about $3.8 billion in expenses, claiming them as capital expenditures when they were really operating expenditures. It seems there’s a good chance this will destroy the company. It’s really no surprise that the economy is in the crapper – do you feel safe believing the financial statements of any company these days? Unsurprisingly, WorldCom’s CEO claims to be shocked at these revelations. I’ll bet he is. ...

I just saw the footage of Martha Stewart answering questions about the allegations that she made an insider trade while making a salad on some morning show. I have no idea whether she’s guilty of insider trading, but I was amazed at her answer when asked how she felt about all of the media attention associated with the scandal. She managed to get in the fact that she was a model through high school and college and that she is the CEO of a Fortune 500 corporation in the same breath. Such arrogance. ...

Nicholas D Kristof attacks conventional wisdom on sweatshops in a New York Times column today, arguing that working in a sweatshop is better than most alternatives for people in developing nations. I don’t agree with companies from rich countries exploiting the poor in other countries in order to increase profits, but at the same time one person’s view of exploitation is another person’s view of opportunity. The main thing that concerns me with sweatshops is not low pay, but rather unsafe working conditions. It’s often forgotten that the US went through a sweatshop phase during the industrial revolution where we were providers of cheap labor under miserable conditions (and there are still plenty of people working in miserable conditions in the US today, sometimes for less than minimum wage if they’re illegal). That, of course, begat the labor movement and in the end led us to being the world’s greatest industrial power. I don’t know if there’s a shortcut from poverty-stricken agrarian state to modern industrial state, or if that path is inevitable, but I don’t think that pulling business out of the world’s most wretched countries is good for them in the long term. Of course, I’m also of the opinion that “subsistence farmer” is the most rotten job in the world. (Well, maybe shipbreaking is worse.) ...

For the detailed wrapup of yesterday’s big decisions handed down by the Supreme Court, we turn to Howard J Bashman.

Zimran makes the obvious but necessary point that a government committee can’t possibly set a fair price for broadcasting songs over the Internet, or anything else, really. Didn’t we learn this from nearly every failed economy in the twentieth century? Let the Web radio folks negotiate deals with the people they want the broadcast, and whether the price comes out higher or lower, at least we’ll know it is, in some sense, fair. ...

Newsweek has an article on Microsoft’s new security architecture for their operating system, Palladium. It sounds like an amalgam of public key encryption, digital rights management, and security implemented in hardware. A lot of this stuff is well known and well understood, but it remains to be seen how it will all work together in Microsoft’s world. When I read about things (like DRM) being implemented in hardware, I tend to freak out. I really don’t want anybody controlling what happens on my home PC but me. (Via Hack the Planet.) ...

When Sun came up with JSPs, it was pretty obvious that they were a Java-centric takeoff on Microsoft’s ASP. Reading this migration guide for users moving from ASP to ASP.NET, it looks like Microsoft is stealing many of the good ideas from JSP and putting them into ASP.NET. Isn’t competition a wonderful thing?