A lot of people aren’t aware, but there was an effort by the Bush administration to protect communications companies from being held accountable for committing illegal acts, assuming they were committing the illegal acts in the course of trying to make the government happy. So, in other words, they were being given permission to do illegal things as long as they could blame it on a government request.

There is no way in which this is good. Sen. Dodd proposed some legislation which would remove that protection, but it was soundly defeated.

Despite that defeat (which must have been pretty obvious), Obama voted in favor of civil liberties. Hillary didn’t vote. Norm Coleman voted against civil liberties, as did McCain. (cite)

I knew this wasn’t going to fly — it’s just too direct an attack on the corporatists that run both parties. It didn’t even make it into the media or blogosphere, so it wasn’t a hotly watched race. Specifically because it was a lost cause which could be quietly swept under the rug, I have been watching it as key way to see who takes civil liberties seriously. More than anything else, I want a President who will restore civil liberties and will lead us toward healing from this culture of fear. And that’s definitely not going to be Hillary Clinton or John McCain.

Popularity: 5% [?]

The change-over should be transparent to the outside world, except that I’m going to close comments on the old site. This may mean that you won’t see any new comments or posts for a couple of days, and you may not be able to comment on the old ones for a couple of days, depending on how good your DNS is at honoring timeouts.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Since it was easy enough to do, I just created a GroovyCacheMap, which takes a Groovy Closure (see info at “Closures“).

Someone with a Groovy background wanna make sure that it’s sufficiently groovy-esque for users, and start fishing for those really horrible surprises?

I should really be working on the pipelines. But there’s a lot of annoyance there, and I miss being productive.

Popularity: 5% [?]

I’ve decided to change a bit of direction with JConch’s CacheMap. Due to difficulties with Generics (which have caused some people to really hate on them), I’ve decided to offer two kinds of CacheMap: the standard CacheMap, and the new Generics-free ObjectCacheMap.

For the record: the standard CacheMap uses a new typed transformer functor, whereas the ObjectCacheMap can still use Commons-Collections Transformer.

So if you don’t want javac’s half-assed typing help, you now have a version of the CacheMap which lets you. And you can always do funny stuff like assigning an ObjectCacheMap to a typed CacheMap, which gives you one place where the warning is but still lets you use all the TransformerUtils.

Enjoy.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Jamie Thingelstad is fishing for interest in MinneWordCamp — an unConference for WordPress users in MN (like yours truly). If you’re interested, add your name to the Sign Up Sheet.

Popularity: 3% [?]