Code Monkey Ramblings

Rather than viewing the lawsuit as an attack on open source, analyst Al Hilwa described it as a "standard [intellectual property] protection lawsuit and protection of the value of Java from fragmentation."

He's right. An essential selling point of Java has been its write-once, run-anywhere capability for certified Java software. It all should run on a Java virtual machine on any platform. But Android attempts an end run around the Java certification process while still being Java-like.

It appears that Oracle is looking to make more money off of Java than Sun ever did. Sun's prowess (more accurately, its lack thereof) at monetizing Java had been a question mark for years. Oracle, however, does not seem to have had any problems making money. That's given Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, for his part, the wherewithal to become widely known for the pricey sport of yacht racing and for being narrowly thwarted recently in his attempt to buy the Golden State Warriors NBA basketball team. [Source]

Oracle will make money off of Java like gangbusters in a way Sun never did because it bought BEA in 2008. That is the company that was famous for WebLogic, one of the two most commonly used Java application servers out there. Now that Oracle owns them, Oracle commands some of the highest ground in the Java development world as far as enterprise software sales are concerned. As a result, Oracle has already earned more money in less than two years on Java than Sun ever did.

I am inclined to agree with the analyst who said that it's just an IP licensing issue because no one at Oracle can be stupid enough to believe that Google would suddenly become a licensor of JavaME in good standing. This is typical Oracle thinking: drain every last drop of revenue possible from a product.

In the long term for Oracle, this will be problematic because eventually people are going to get sick of licensing WebLogic for things than Tomcat does well enough. Eventually Tomcat + web services + Spring (+ Hibernate) will become the norm for most Java projects as the economy continues to sour and companies don't have the funds to pay a metric ton of cash for unnecessary software. Therefore, at some point, Oracle will regard much of the leaders in open source Java as a serious threat. What Oracle will do to them at that point remains to be seen, but it is naive to make it sound like Oracle has no reason to clamp down open source Java wherever it can get away with it.

As a disgruntled Java developer, I sincerely hope that Google is building a C++ and/or Go-based fallback plan for killing off Java on Android.

It's no secret that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act makes breaking any digital rights management system a crime except in the areas where the Library of Congress creates exceptions. It is also no secret that the industries that rely on intellectual property are constantly lobbying Congress for ever stronger copyright laws that restrict individual freedom even more. Just recently, the RIAA publicly condemned the DMCA's solonic compromise which protects ISPs and websites from prosecution if they cooperate under the terms of the DMCA's safe harbor provision. That is just another example of the rapacious conduct of these industries and their trade associations.

As computerized components have been steadily integrated into most electronic devices, the law has not changed to recognize this union of physical and intellectual property. 50 years ago, a home theater system didn't have any computerized components and thus fixing it was entirely a physical process, but what about a modern home theater system? Suppose the software that is provided for accessing networked storage is terrible and the buyer wants to write their own fixes or replacements. To do that, you would either need the code for the bundled software or to reverse engineer the platform to learn enough about it write your own. The computer industry is subtly, but meaningfully, fighting the legality of reverse engineering in a variety of ways from end-user license agreements to patents. Someone who does this, especially someone who releases their fixes for other buyers of the product to buy, could be in serious legal jeopardy.

The freedom to tinker and modify is an integral part of property ownership. Even if most people never want to jailbreak their iPhone, rip a DVD or put a custom build of Android on their phone, the principle is ultimately much larger than that. When your right to modify your property is formally crippled by law, others gain power over you by having a legal right to determine what you do with your property. They can do that without a contract and without any law that can be challenged in court because they control the design from conception to the time the product is thrown away. At that point, you are a custodian, not an owner.

• If this story is true, it's an awesome example of what a can-do spirit and the Internet can accomplish.
• I think this kitten actually did pretty well...
• There is now a web site where women can pay to have access to eligible bachelors currently at or from Harvard. No, it's not Facebook.
• The Indian government, not content to make RIM open up the BlackBerry to them, is going after Skype, Google Voice and VPNs. That last one, which opens up corporations to having their communications bought and sold by those who can bribe Indian government employees to spy on the VPNs, could turn the whole outsourcing to India thing into a self-correcting problem.
• Concubinage starts to rear its head once more in the United States.
• This is not how you write a setter method.
• Google is offering a number of free programming courses, including ones on Android.
• Why American culture has to reform before our government can.
• Hating your countrymen is the new patriotism.

• Perl has an incredibly fast compiler.
• Women will bear the brunt of the damage when Britain institutes deep cuts in public spending and employment. Sorta balances out the way men bear the brunt of the damage from divorce...
• One in four British lap dancers have a college degree...
• Here's a run-down of how Mormonism is different from biblical Christianity.
• The MPEG LA has extended its free streaming license for H.264. Some are speculating that it is a preparation for a renewed fight over patents with Google.
• Hannspree's upcoming Android tablet may not have all of the software to be a complete iPad replacement, but it's looking pretty close!
• Twitter is preparing to bring down the axe on anyone still using basic auth to access their service APIs.

• A Phillipino prosecutor lost a case because he or she cited Wikipedia as an authoritative source.
• This is a far more accurate description of high-level and low-level languages than the professor wanted to admit.
• Some interesting new developments in cloud computing, such as Red Hat making a major open source contribution to the Apache Foundation that will help avoid vendor lock-in.
• A prosecutor wrote into Instapundit with an interesting perspective on the War on Photography.
• Middle and upper management, not end users, tend to be the reason why companies stick with older approaches to email than systems like Google Apps.
• Paul Allen, patent troll?
• Woman gets arrested after she is stopped in traffic and the police find she was masturbating to a porno movie.
• Freedom of speech won a victory of sorts... in the Middle East.
• Mormon bishop murdered in California. Who wants to bet it was over Proposition 8?
• This picture says a lot about why Obama's presidency is in the state that it is in...
• NYPD cop, while off duty, calls his precinct for help when thugs arrive at his party. He gets beaten by his fellow officers in the process.

The resisting-arrest conviction last week of Felicia Gibson has left a lot of people wondering. Can a person be charged with resisting arrest while observing a traffic stop from his or her own front porch?

Salisbury Police Officer Mark Hunter thought so, and last week District Court Judge Beth Dixon agreed. Because Gibson did not at first comply when the officer told her and others to go inside, the judge found Gibson guilty of resisting, delaying or obstructing an officer.

<snip>

Post: What is “resisting arrest” or “resist, delay, obstruct an officer” in the performance of his/her duties?

Collins: “These are basically the same charge. Some call the charge simply “resisting arrest,” and some call it by its longer and more official title. This crime can be found in the North Carolina General Statutes under chapter 14, subsection 223 (G.S. 14-223).

“This crime is considered a Class 2 misdemeanor and involves:

“Any person who shall willfully and unlawfully resist, delay, or obstruct a public officer in discharging or attempting to discharge a duty of his office.

“Obviously, this charge is rather broad and can encompass many different types of actions that are designed to, or serves to hinder a law enforcement officer as he/she performs their duties.

“This charge is most commonly used in situations where a person who is being arrested refuses to cooperate and either passively or aggressively resists an arrest or tries to run away. [Source, read it, it gets worse]

Since Gibson was just observing the arrest from her porch, there is no credible claim that she was "obstructing" or "delaying" the officer. How can she "resist" the officer in discharging his or her duties when she is simply present, at a distance? Of course she can't "resist" the officer because being able to order a non-obstructive observer to stop observing would not make even a small amount of sense except in a case of public indecency.

If the judge had any sense of her role in maintaining the respectability of the law itself, she would have called the cop a neurotic powermonger who had abused the law. All she did was provide one more soundbite of evidence to support the increasingly common view that "the rule of law means the cops are always right."

• Writing for Reason, Steve Chapman actually sides with the federal judge who blocked the use of stem cells in federally-financed research, and he did so based on ethics, not just financial considerations. Dare we hope that mainstream libertarians might start to finally realize that a genetic standard for human life, not a philosophical one, is the most effective way to protect human rights?
• Will the left resort to false flag operations to discredit the Tea Party movement?
• Hackers frequently end up sending their code to Microsoft when it crashes their systems and they (accidentally?) click on the "send report" button in the crash dialog.
• Some hilarious error messages.
• Developer finds his app is on The Pirate Bay. Developer downloads the app through the torrent. Developer finds that the cracking job sucks. Developer demands that the Pirate Bay keep the torrent alive so other users can mock the cracker.
• An interesting interview with one of the creators of Go.

Overview

In the spirit of Billy Mabray's Movable Type Money series, I bring you news of what's been going on in the world of Movable Type plugin and theme development.

Open Source Plugin Releases and Updates

• ConfigAssistant (Byrne Reese/Endevver). This is a powerful new plugin for theme designers which helps them set up a blog's configuration to work as they expect it when a user installs their theme via a plugin.
• ThemeManager (Endevver). This brings Movable Type 5-level theme management to Movable Type 4 and Melody. It requires ConfigAssistant to be installed first.
• Comment Subscribe (Endevver).
• "ExtraTags" kitchen sink/swiss army chainsaw package for extra tag functionality (Endevver).
• Image Cropper (Endevver).
• Ajax Publishing Plugin (Endevver). From the GitHub description: A Movable Type and Melody plugin that adds support for publishing entries via AJAX without leaving the entry listing screen.
• MacLeod (Endevver). From the GitHub description: A plugin and command-line utility for Melody/Movable Type to reliably and intelligently facilitate blog consolidation.
• PubOffline (Dan Wolfgang/Endevver). From the GitHub description: A plugin for Melody and Movable Type that allows administrators to publish a site to a different directory for the specific purpose of creating a version of the site appropriate for offline distribution (e.g. a USB key fob).
• HashTag (TheComposingStick). This plugin brings in some good Twitter integration into Movable Type and Melody.
• Future Post Job (Mark Carey). From the GitHub description: A plugin for Movable Type and Melody that publishes scheduled entries via a TheSchwartz job, rather than relying on a scheduled task.
• Mark Carey's User Profiles plugin was open sourced.
• GeoType (SixApart). From the GitHub description: GeoType is a plugin for Movable Type that uses the Google Maps API to tie geographic coordinates to an MT object.
• BuildTracer (SixApart). From the GitHub description: A Movable Type plugin that shows how long each tag takes to publish in an individual template.
• Community Action Streams (SixApart).
• reCaptcha (SixApart).
• ActionStreams 2.3 (SixApart), now with GitHub repository.
• Google Translate (Me). Version 2.0 with caching and even Haitain Creole support.
• WordPress Style Tag Cloud (Me). Generates a WordPress-style tag cloud with a single template tag (if you build a widget around this, you will need to cache it!)
• Gravatar (Me, sort of). I took over and updated the old MT Gravatar. If you're using it already, one reason to switch is that it uses a config.yaml file instead of a Perl file to define it (meaning less memory).
• Flicker Photos List (Taiju).
• TinyulrUti (Hiroyuki UENISHI).
• XmlrpcSync (Hiroyuki UENISHI).
• AtomSync (Hiroyuki UENISHI).
• Foursquare Action Stream (Hajime Fujimoto).
• Retweet (macminiosx).
• Checkfront Online Booking Plugin (Checkfront).

News

• More documentation has been created for MT 5.
• First sneak peak of MT 5.1.
• The MT 5.1 presentation in English.
• ActionStreams has been updated to officially support Mt 5.
• Did you know that there is a theme contest for MT 5? In this economy, if you're a site designer, wouldn't you like a crack at a free copy of the Adobe CS5 tools?!

Tips

• How to get old versions of Movable Type.
• How to discover within MTML if your template is in preview mode in the editor or not.
• How to get all entries that use an asset.
• How to set the display options for all users of a blog.
• How to write PHP in the body of a Movable Type entry (with screenshots).
• How to figure out if the current page being shown in a loop. This is particularly handy when you need to do something like create a page listing that shows a special CSS class for an element if it points to the same entry/page as what is currently in the browser.
• Here is an overview of the workflow involved in converting a typical WordPress theme into a Movable Type theme (ConfigAssistant+ThemeManager theme).
• How to root around the registry if you are writing a plugin.

Theme Releases

ArjunaX | Demo | Download

AzSands | Demo | Download

BeBack | Demo | Download

Carrington Blog | Demo | Download

Connections, Reloaded | Demo | Download

Disconnected | Demo | Download

Gotham Nights | Demo | Download

Ink and Wash | Demo | Download

iNove | Demo | Download

Motion | Demo | Download

Pixel | Demo | Download

Poetry | Demo | Download

Shine | Demo | Download

Traction | Demo | Download

Agregado | Demo | Download

Carrington Mobile | Demo | Download

Melody

Melody, the community-developed fork of Movable Type 4.3, has had numerous incremental test releases that closed a number of bugs, added new features, updated the included Perl modules to more recent versions from CPAN and increased the performance of the admin console. While technically not ready for daily use by the average user, it is ready for developers, designers and the adventurous to test.

Misc.

If you encounter bugs in any of the themes or plugins shown here, head over to GitHub and message us directly. Do not post in the Movable Type Forums. GitHub is free and takes almost no time at all to get an account, and unlike the official forums, lets you talk directly to the developer. Doesn't that sound a lot better than posting a comment on a third party forum hoping we notice it?

Writing for the National Association of Broadcasters, Dennis Wharton provides what he calls "a fact-based response to the critics of radio-capable cell phones." What he conveniently leaves out is that most of the "critics" are objecting to the fact that there are now calls for a FCC mandate to provide a feature, even if customers don't want one. His arguments for "choice," by which mean he likely means that no one will ever have to "choose to not have the feature" are the following:

• We are not dying as an industry, we are growing, so take that you people who insist a "dying" industry should not be protected by the government.
• When customers have the choice, they often like having the radio capabilities built into cell phones.
• Radio is useful in times of crisis like during terrorist attacks or severe whether (he never really explains, despite using them as examples, how radio would have helped the students at the VA Tech shooting or how it would help people caught up in extreme weather without a car, which presumably has a radio already).
• The cell phone industry was supposed to role out a 90 character-based emergency system already, but has failed. So now the NAB thinks extending radio to all cell phones would take out two birds with one stone.
• Cell phone users apparently have a rights/justice claim on the provision of FM radio capabilities against their cell phone suppliers.
• A lot of people in Congress like it (any technical spec that is enthusiastically supported by over 60 members of Congress should make any conservative shriek "kill it with fire" with regard to the proposed text.)
• Everyone else is doing it too, such as most MP3 players.
• It shouldn't use up much power from your cell phone's battery.
• "Americans deserve better."

Since we are talking mandates here, how about an equal mandate that requires all manufacturers thusly regulated to get a quota of free primetime advertising on the NAB's members shows? If RIM, Apple and HTC have to pay to get FM hardware tightly integrated because of the NAB, then surely the NAB can show them a little love in return.

Of course, it's not about choice because it's a mandate. It won't be free because the cost will be passed onto the customer. They will pay for the additional silicon, the additional testing, the additional software, the additional energy.

• Firefox 4 beta 4 introduced some new eyecandy to how it handles tabs. It has some real potential for making Firefox more usable.
• "Bad Flash drives" were blamed for a major infosec in the DoD.
• File I/O samples in virtually every remotely popular programming language. The lolcode sample is the best. Someone needs to make a compiler for that language... it could be the next enterprise language!
• Drunken mortgage company employee shoots a server with a .45.
• The federal flood insurance program has done some real doozies to taxpayers like paying closing in on $700,000 worth of repair claims for a $69,000 house that had to be repaired a dozen times or so. Local officials in the more egregious flood zones also often flout the federal requirements on rebuilding the houses to make them more flood resistant.
• After being smacked around too much by Apple, it looks like Google is giving up on native iPhone apps in favor of web apps.

• Windows 95: It sucks less.
• DIY projects by those under 35, when they go wrong, tend to cost 3x more than if done by someone over 45.
• The news must be slow because the Washington Post is trying to tell federal employees that the Hatch Act applies to things they do over social networks that would otherwise be regulated by the Hatch Act if not done on social networks. This is sort of like reminding bus drivers that drunk driving laws still apply to them while they're working their route.
• Thanks to Cash for Clunkers, the price of used cars is now up by about 30%.
• A Canadian hospital has decided to dehydrate a disabled man. Only, unlike Terri Schiavo, the man is hardly catatonic. The judiciary is even backing the decision by saying that whoever takes over as his guardian must agree with the decision.
• "Lookalike tubes" are allegedly killing people in hospitals. Now, there is something to the argument that tubes should have specialized connectors so that tubes used for stomaches won't accept devices meant for veins, but the real problem in at least the first example was that the nurse either didn't pay attention or simply had no way of telling that the tube connected to the patient's vein.
• The rate of pre-teen girls hitting puberty around seven is staggering. 25% for black girls, 15% for latinos and 10% for whites!
• Blizzard has officially confirmed that they are now in full swing on developing the Heart of the Swarm expansion to Starcraft II.
• Is this what Internet Explorer 9 will look like?
• Motorola went after a group offering custom Android 2.2 images for some of its products.
• A sober look at why the Department of Justice is looking to hire ebonics translators.
• Harassing emails, phone calls and even death threats have been sent to Dick Armey's FreedomWorks organization as it partners with the Tea Party.

While most of us were getting ready for the iPad's arrival in January and Patently Apple hard at work preparing our major series called the Tablet Prophecies, a major iMac Touch patent was being quietly published in Europe. And while some of the graphic figures of today's patent did slip out in Europe, we were never able to verify whether they were legitimate or not. Well, today we finally get to post the Mother Lode of all information concerning the iMac Touch and it's absolutely brilliant! Ironically we had just posted a report on Saturday titled "Apple Patents Point to Future MacBooks with IPS & Touch Displays" when we discovered the European Filing. The naysayers will have to eat crow on this one, because Apple's method of transitioning from OS X to iOS is clearly outlined for both the iMac and MacBook - and it's a grand slam home run. Imagine having an iMac on your desktop one minute and a gigantic iPad the next. Imagine playing iGames on this dream machine - Wow! Imagine reading a double-page book on this - Unbelievable! Apple takes the mystery out of how OS X could finally co-exist with iOS on a Mac and you've got to see this one to believe it. [Source]

Over at Slashdot, some of Apple's defenders are denying that Apple has any plans to kill OS X and to some extent, they're correct. Apple has no intention of rendering itself a vendor of shiny tablets, phones and set top boxes, which is precisely what would happen if they literally took a path to kill off OS X. They do need a platform to build iOS programs on, and OS X is perfect for that. What Apple is going to do is they are going to marginalize OS X and promote the heck out of iOS at the expense of developing for OS X outside of certain high end apps.

I figure what'll happen is that eventually Apple will bring touch screens to the iMac and MacBook, exactly as described at patentlyapple.com. Apple will bring a lot of the touch capabilities back to OS X, along with the DRM that'll enable software sold through its store to be heavily controlled on those traditional OS X platforms. Apple won't force users to use the iOS side of that future version of OS X, but it'll give them too many good reasons to use it. Games will just work, like they do on the iPhone. A lot of the Apple eco system will be made to feel at its most natural in the iOS interface. Apple is not going to literally force users to use iOS, rather they'll do every sneaky thing they can to make you feel like you're an outsider.

In all seriousness, though, iOS could be a great extension to OS X Server. If Apple could cost-effectively put a touch-based console for common server functions on every rack, that would be something.

• The 20 somethings which are moving back in with their parents after college in order "to find themselves" are unwittingly restarting a more ancient practice.
• A whole heck of a lot of corruption at the North Carolina SBI crime lab. Not a whole heck of a lot of prosecutions.
• Outsourcing is coming to the legal profession. It might actually clean out a lot of the big law firms in the process.
• Facebook is the first major firm to start looking into a wholesale shift to ARM servers. Smooth-Stone and Marvell are working hard to bring enough performance to the ARM architecture to make it a viable platform for servers.
• The secret to how one big law firm in Britain keeps so many women as partners: 82 holidays a year at equivalent pay to help women balance motherhood and work.
• Did the Phoenecians, Hebrews or Greeks visit New Mexico a few thousand years ago?

• A Japanese inventor has developed a machine that can convert plastic back into oil. The next war for oil soon to be launched over the Great Pacific Trash Patch.
• How the Internet is undermining Britain's attachment to the European Union in favor of the Anglosphere.
• Julian Assange of Wikileaks could be a prime target under the federal Espionage Act for the release of all of those classified DoD documents.
• New Jersey is the first state to be sued by the SEC for the handling of its bonds. This will hopefully be the first of many federal actions against local and state governments that deceived investors about their prospects for raising enough funds to cover their expenses.
• Barry Goldwater and the 9/11 Mosque.
• Fisking Roger Ebert's career.
• You know the liberals are getting desperate to protect Social Security and Medicare from their inevitable demise at the merciless hands of mathematics when they resort to twisting the 14th amendment's text about civil war pensions into a defense of those programs.
• According to the National Park Service, devices like cell phones and GPS units are enabling unprecedented quantities of stupidity at national parks.
• Not long after Oracle announces its intention to go after Google over Android, MonoDroid brings .NET support to Android.
• An example of why some developers should never--ever--be taught how to access databases.
• And people wonder why Africa is so messed...
• The federal government has open reqs for ebonics translators.
• Philadelphia has become the first city in the United States to directly tax people for blogging. Their claim that is that if there is any way for you to earn any money from your blog then it is a business.

Google claims Oracle's actions are "an attack on the Java community," but that would only be true if Google were promoting Java. To the extent that Android and the Dalvik VM are a divergent implementation that flouts the established Java standards, however, Oracle is right in describing Android as a competitor to pure Java. And as the owner of the Java intellectual property, Oracle has the right -- and, perhaps, the responsibility -- to defend the platform against such a competitor.

But let's not kid ourselves. The comparison to Darth Vader is hyperbole, but nobody ever accused Oracle of being a white knight, and it's certainly not acting out of selfless motives here. At the end of the day, this is all about the money. With Android now a well-established platform, Google can little afford a protracted legal battle. Oracle expects Google to settle, and the end result will be a Java coffee-cup logo on every Android smartphone and a nice, new revenue stream for Oracle. What's more, the suit will further cement the idea that the path to Java lies through Oracle, and Java implementers avoid that path to their peril.

Still, is that so terrible? The Java community needs a leader. Sun's attempt to push Java governance into the loving arms of the community has proven to be like so many other ideas that came out of that failed company: academically sound, diplomatically prudent, but ultimately unworkable. Google's Bloch was right in calling for Oracle to take a firm hand on the reins. Maybe he should have been more careful what he wished for.

Mind you, a legal victory for Oracle is not assured. The specific patents named in its complaint have raised many eyebrows and much skepticism.

There's time yet for Google to dodge this bullet -- and the easiest way might be to dodge Java itself. So don't be surprised to hear that a future iteration of Android will be the first platform based on Google Go. [Source]

McAllister makes it sound like all Google has to really do is change up a few things about Android, and then it'll be ready to reenter the fold or just drop Java altogether. Android is way too dissimilar from JavaSE or JavaME for anything short of either a rearchitecture of Android or Google creating a costly, buggy, bloated compatibility layer that few would use (especially use well). At its heart, Android is a platform that happens to use the Java programming language as its main tool, and that's about it.

Java itself is a combination of three things: a virtual machine, a programming language and an API. All Google has done is implement support for the language and some of its standard library, and I emphasize some. It is not fundamentally any different from IKVM or J# which which implement the Java programming language and some of its standard libraries for the .NET platform. In those cases, like Android, Java developers are choosing to say that they do not wish to use the JVM and standard libraries. I would not be surprised if Oracle decides to take action against the IKVM project in the future as well.

The reason for this lawsuit is very simple: JavaME is the only part of the Java IP that Oracle bought from Sun that is making any real money, and Android is a threat to that business. This battle is not between "the Java community" and Google, but between two competing visions for Java where one side demands the freedom to write Java code in whatever way it wants and a purist version that wants to put down opposition to the "write once, run anywhere" snake oil promulgated by Sun. One of the reasons why .NET has done so well on Windows is that it is designed to be accessible for native development. Android, in many respects, offers Java developers the first real chance to write high quality, native apps on a major commercial platform.

So really, in every sense other than their legal rights, Oracle is wrong here. Oracle is not on the side of Java developers or their interests. It doesn't harm standard Java in any way for developers to choose to write Java-based software for Android. If anything, it keeps Java relevant as other languages attack it from every angle. In case Oracle hasn't noticed, Java is not the hip and happenin language it was in the 1990s. Rather, it has so thoroughly lost mindshare that the only things that are really keeping it going outside of the cloistered enterprise market are other languages that happen to run on the JVM like Scala, Clojure and JRuby. Oracle has Google to thank for creating a mobile platform that makes young developers actually want to use the real Java programming language.

• The RIAA is trying to get network neutrality arguments framed to allow systematic monitoring of content, claiming that network neutrality would be harmful to anti-child port efforts--and other efforts like anti-piracy. Right, because we all know the RIAA's primary concern is really "the children."
• Groklaw has a good take on the Oracle vs Google lawsuit over Android. At this point, if I were a Google exec, I would be instructing the Android development team to find ways to bring the API to Go as a fallback plan.
• Even as American Muslims and the left rights to defend the 9/11 Mosque, leading authorities in the Islamic world are condemning the very idea of this mosque on the ground that it implicitly links Islam with 9/11, and no pious Muslim should support something like that.
• While the US Postal Service is losing money left and right, the New Zealand Postal Service is profiting handsomely, and without a state-backed monopoly like our postal service!
• Apple scored a patent on remotely disabling jailbroken phones.
• If the rumors are true, RIM (makers of the BlackBerry) is planning on releasing a tablet based on software developed by the makers of QNX (which they acquired a little while ago). Does that mean we will have a RTOS tablet platform coming soon?!
• A City Administrator blatantly tells a citizen: I will drop the charges (related to criticizing him in public with a sign in the defendant's yard), only after you stop criticizing me.
• Slate demolishes some of the bogus trends of the moment about sex.
• 10 year old accidentally shoots himself while attempting to commit an armed robbery.
• A provocatively titled, but interesting blog post: What it's like to teach black students.

• Having already profited handsomely from his relationship with them, Barny Frank wants Fannie and Freddie to be abolished.
• Man gets caught ejaculating into his coworker's water bottle. Apparently, he's a repeat offender.
• A possible biological cure for homosexuality takes another step toward reality.
• It's amazing what gets through the censors in kids' cartoons, especially in some of the older ones.
• Proof that musical mashups can be more than the sum of their parts.
• Man decides to masturbate in a police interrogation room when the cops step outside.
• This is an awesome photo collection that shows the average level of wealth in various parts of the world.
• French police bust parisian "booby trap" gang of teen girls that went around flashing guys while they robbed them.
• Charges have been filed against a police officer who shot a dog playing roughly with his dog at a dog park. If convicted, he could face up to nine months in jail for animal cruelty and unlawfully discharging a firearm too close to a residential area.
• Denver police are in trouble for arresting and beating a man for the "crime" of walking up to someone who was at a traffic stop, telling him that he would testify in his defense and taking a picture of the arresting officer with his cell phone camera after the officer (angered by the offer to testify in court) demanded to see his ID.
• Are federal judges beginning to wake up to the fact that Corporate America frequently gets preferred treatment from the federal government when it comes to punishing large corporations for felonies?

First, there's this:

Music labels and radio broadcasters can't agree on much, including whether radio should be forced to turn over hundreds of millions of dollars a year to pay for the music it plays. But the two sides can agree on this: Congress should mandate that FM radio receivers be built into cell phones, PDAs, and other portable electronics.

If the RIAA and NAB get their way, and the RIAA has a very strong record of getting its way in Congress, there will soon be more unnecessary hardware in your cell phone and other portable devices. That means more time testing, more time integrating, more hardware costs and more power draw, even if you have no desire to have that in your device.

Then, there's this:

Blind and deaf consumers, who have fought to make home phones and television more accessible, say they are being left behind on the Web and many mobile devices. Touch-based smartphone screens confound blind people who rely on buttons and raised type. Web video means little to the deaf without captioning.

But legislation is in the works to put pressure on consumer electronics companies that revolutionized an earlier generation of technology for the vision- and hearing-impaired.

This comes on the heels of the Department of (in)Justice squashing a pilot program at a handful of universities to test the feasibility of replacing traditional textbooks with devices like the Kindle. The DoJ apparently also has plans in the works to try to get the Internet in general declared a "public accommodation" under the ADA (the result of this would be that even bloggers could be charged for having sites that are insufficienty "accessible.")

The ADA will be a back door mechanism for large, moneyed interests to not only shut down competitors, but silence dissent. Make a device that threatens the iPhone too much but that doesn't do accessibility that well? The Department of Justice will accuse you of discrimination. Make a website that poorly implements HTML accessibility or has videos that fail to include the deaf (through subtitles or that fail to work with speech-to-text software) and that criticizes incumbents too much? Better watch out, you're denying access to the handicapped.

The left is making it very clear that it will not allow individual freedom to get in the way of creating a egalitarian utopia.

• The jQuery project has announced a new mobility toolkit aimed at competing with Sencha Touch.
• Oracle, has already done tremendous damage to the open source legacy of Sun by simultaneously killing off the OpenSolaris project and suing Google for using Java in Android. In the Google case, Android isn't even using a real Java VM, as Dalvik is a completely different virtual machine that doesn't even run Java code unless it is converted from Java bytecode to Dalvik bytecode.
• How different types of programmings write a factorial function. The "enterprise programmer" one is just painful because it is so true...
• Internet Explorer turns 15 today. Hard to believe that there was a time when the competition was so bad that Internet Explorer was considered the must-use browser.
• In case you were wondering, no, this is not how you implement role-based security.
• Remember this the next time someone tells you that you are just being an extremist for calling most liberal democrats in Congress Socialists.

• James Lilek, writing tongue-in-cheek, thinks it would be fun to create vindictive taxes that target the left like a tax on tenure for college professors. He might have a point there on that one...
• Walmart is starting to raise its prices again. I guess they discovered that practices that border on dumping at times are almost as bad for their profits as they are for their competitors and vendors.
• 10 things that an employer cannot ask you during an interview. Notice how many of them happen to be things which might just as easily make a candidate attractive like "why no, I am in great health, therefore if you hire me, your group policy rates will go down compared to hiring candidate B."
• In tribute to Senator Stevens, here's a quick break down of how the man went from one of the poorer senators to one of the richest by the time he died.
• The IMF basically says that the US is bankrupt.
• Quote of the day: Being a pedestrian in DC is like living inside a game of Grand Theft Auto played by a drunk 14-year-old with anger issues
• When police videos go missing. Funny how there are no consequences for the police when they destroy evidence of their criminal conduct.
• About 70% of all American middle school students "exhibit misconceptions" about the equal sign. Yes, you read that right. They don't truly "get" "=."