When the cat’s away the mice will play. Texas is looking to be a bit less barbaric when it comes to capital punishment now that they’ve sent Mr. Death Penalty on to Washington. Steve Ballmer: “Linux is a cancer.” Other disinformation included.
USA Today has an article on sites programmatically disabling the back button and otherwise trying to hijack their users’ browsers so that they control how their users navigate their site. One possibility that they don’t mention is that some sites use complex, expensive, totally crappy application servers that can get confused when users click on the back button. It wouldn’t surprise me if this were the case with Home Depot’s site, which is mentioned in the article. (Quick note: I checked out Home Depot’s site and I couldn’t find any page where the back button is disabled, so I’m not sure why there were mentioned in the article.) ...
The Republicans in the Senate crammed through the confirmation of Ted Olson as Solicitor General, despite his history of misdeeds. You can see how the votes went down at the Senate web site. Democrat Zell Miller of Georgia voted yea, as did Democrat Ben Nelson of Nebraska. Jim Jeffords and John Rockefeller of West Virginia did not vote. IBM developerWorks reviews JDE, the Java development environment for Emacs. I do nearly all my work using NT Emacs and JDE these days. ...
The beta release of JDK 1.4 is now available from Sun. You can now post to Usenet using Google Groups. The house of cards around Ted Olson seems to be collapsing. He’ll probably be confirmed anyway.
Looks like all those stories about outgoing Clinton staffers vandalizing their offices and stealing things from Air Force One were fiction. The Register has posted the winners of its Email Disclaimer Awards. The big political news story of the day is that Jim Jeffords, the Republican Senator from Vermont, is widely expected to become Jim Jeffords, the Democratic Senator from Vermont. This, of course, would throw the balance of power in the Senate over to the Democrats, giving them a 51-49 advantage. (The Republicans are supposedly putting the full court press on first term Democratic Senator Zell Miller from Georgia in hopes of getting him to defect and even things out again.) Anyway, while you might think that I’d be happy about Jeffords’ defection, it actually makes me kind of sad, because it pounds another nail into the coffin of the “liberal Republican.” There are tons of conservative Democrats in Congress, but there are fewer and fewer liberal Republicans – generally northeasterners who are more liberal on social issues than your standard issue right winger. At one time, these guys dominated the Republican party, but they are hurtling toward insignificance. It’s too bad, really. ...
File under must be read to be believed: Doug Glanville of the Phillies hits two home runs off Curt Schilling of the Diamonbacks as payback for betrayal in Everquest. More interesting stuff: Curt Schilling is not only a top flight pitcher, he’s also a publisher of esoteric board games. Dan Gillmor on Edward Felten’s battle with SDMI and RIAA over his right to publish his research. I know I beat on the DMCA drum a lot, but I find the law so deeply offensive that I find it difficult to pass up any retelling of its perniciousness. ...
William Shatner as the U.S. version of Chairman Kaga? I don’t know, it kind of works.
Sun to drop support for Java after the 1.4 release. FUD or an April Fool’s joke, you be the judge. From one single term President to another: Jimmy Carter tells Dubya to quit exaggerating the energy crisis. I don’t have time to respond in detail to Andrew Leonard’s appraisal of the world of Free Software in a post-Eazel world, but suffice it to say that there’s lots to disagree with in there. Craig Mundie to Linus Torvalds: I see your Sir Isaac Newton, and raise you Alfred North Whitehead, Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, and Henry Ford. ...
A very generous reader sent me a gift from my wish list that I recieved yesterday. They sent it anonymously, so I have to thank them publicly. Anyway, thanks, I really appreciate it. A bunch of people sent me links about the “energy crisis”. I haven’t gotten around to sifting through them all yet because I’m still completely swamped at work, but I promise that I will. Anyway, I appreciate all the stuff people dug up, and I hope to post something here in the near future about what’s driving this whole “energy crisis” thing. I’d like to do it this week, since Dubya has designated this week as energy week. ...
Richard Dawkins laments the loss of Douglas Adams. Now that the Congressional hearing for Ted Olson’s nomination as Solicitor General has started, Salon has opened the floodgates on Olson’s history of scandalous and possibly illegal behavior. Who knew that Olson himself was investigated by an independent counsel for charges of perjury and obstruction of justice, long before he spent millions of dolloars of Richard Mellon Scaife’s money trying to pin the same charges on President Clinton? ...