Bill Frist is not a hero...

He's a douche.

Look, I'm strongly in favor of stem cell research. It holds a lot of promise for people with terrible illnesses, most of the embryos from IVF clinics will be destroyed one way or the other, and it's silly to restrict our basis of research on the basis of a viewpoint that's strongly in the minority (and yes, I understand morality isn't a votable concept, but in this case the issue is far from clear to most citizens and the views of the polity are the only basis for judgment).

But changing his stance on this issue doesn't make First a hero. It makes him the first official candidate for the GOP nomination in 2008. Even though he's pissed off some key Republican constituencies, as we've seen on a number of issues, it's more important to win than to be pure. By early 2007, when campaigning will begin in earnest, this issue will have lost its partisan venom for Frist, but the air of compassion and pragmatism will still linger about him, hopefully (from Frist's viewpoint) obscuring the pathetic image of Frist's pandering to right-to-lifers in the Terri Schiavo case.

After having vehemently opposed stem cell research for so long at the behest of the Bush Administration and the absolutist pro-life right wing, Frist's change in position is nothing more than blatant pandering, positioning himself for post-nomination general election politics, with what he gauges to be the smallest impact on his chances of gaining the Republican nomination. That doesn't make him courageous, it makes him a snivelling, pandering douche.

Rockstar Games sued

So the lawsuits over Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas have begun. An 85-year-old woman bought the game for her 14-year-old grandson and is now pissed to find out that the game contains graphically depicted simulated sex.

But wait, wasn't GTA:SA rated Mature? That's for... 17 years of age and older. Yet this woman bought the game for her 14-year-old grandson. This dumb ass is all up in arms about the bad stuff contained in a game that she never should have bought for her fucking grandson in the first place! These labels aren't subtle, people. If you're too fucking stupid to figure it out, you don't get to complain later.

It's only in the window between Mature and Adults Only, i.e. 17 year olds, that could conceivably have a legitimate gripe. And of course that doesn't address the fact that apparently this woman thinks it's OK for her 14-year-old grandson to play a game simulating shooting cops and stealing cars (again, not subtle: the name of the game is GRAND THEFT AUTO), but she's aghast that he might see something resembling sex (if you've seen the video of Hot Coffee or actually played it, you'll know it's not the most titillating sexual experience to come down the pipe).

Damn it, I really hate pathetically stupid people.

What version of a class or resource am I using?

I end up working with lots and lots of different Web applications, fat-client applications, and server extensions, meaning that I get various versions of various bits of code scattered all over the damned place. This becomes a real problem when you're basically learning things on the fly and modifying stuff heavily. A really good example is working with log4j. After lots of changes and extensions, I'm reasonably happy with our current configuration. However there are lots of log4j.properties files floating around and sometimes my apps end up getting one of these older configurations, which leads to heartache. So how can you figure out which version of a particular resource you're getting?

The code below shows how you can use the Java VM itself to tell you where items are coming from:

ClassLoader cl = Thread.currentThread().getContextClassLoader();
while(cl != null)
{
   java.net.URL loc = cl.getResource("/log4j.properties");
   System.out.println("Search and destroy --> " + loc);
   cl = cl.getParent();
}

It's worth noting that your classes will end up using the first version found in the class loader (assuming all classes in the same process space). The other versions found, if any, will be obscured by the first version.