I hate Java; along with notes on other things

Annoying fact of the day: Java has no easy way to right align numbers, so creating a table like this:

  
  34  127
 234   23

is pretty much impossible without doing a lot of work (or at least, much more work than I'm willing to put in). You'd think the NumberFormat and DecimalFormat classes would do things like this, but you'd be wrong; I'd never imagined that I would find a language that would make me long for printf().

The Atlantic has a very interesting article this month by Richard Clarke called "Ten Years Later". It's told as a lecture given ten years in the future reflecting on the increase in terrorist attacks on the United States and what we could have and should have done to prevent them. In short, our foreign policy and our focus on making ourselves feel good instead of actually doing something about terrorism will cause serious problems in the years ahead. Definitely worth reading if you can find a copy.

Finally, yet another argument against excessively long copyrights: Beatallica. Lessig has it right - the future always builds on (or "steals from") the past, and it's a damn shame that most of the great rock in the past 50 years won't enter the public domain until I'm old and gray. I don't mind people making money from their "intellectual property" (I certainly do), but if you really can't think of something new within 14 years, do you really deserve to continuing profiting off your one good idea? Maybe a lot of these artists could do better for themselves if they learned some financial management.

The thing of it is that this goes far beyond music, movies, software, and TV shows (though a Daily Show archive would be nice). I think the greatest loss comes from the books, newspaper articles, and papers that never enter the public domain. Perhaps, part of my annoyance is my inability to easily get papers that I need for my thesis, many of which were published in the 1930s, 40s and 50s. Granted part of it is that digitizing much of this material is difficult at best, but I'm fairly sure that the AIP (American Institute of Physics) would come after me if I started circulating these papers; so much for research for the general good. How small does the public domain have to get before people really start paying attention to this problem?