You Say You Want A Revolution.... America may be on the verge of needing a revolution. Not sure what type of revolution, but I am sure it won't be pretty...What's even scarier about all of this is that more Americans than ever (1 in 2) feel that the First Amendment goes too far in the rights that is grants. [All Things Java]

Recall that one of the reasons the interviewee attributed the public's sense that the First goes too far was the general dislike of news sources and journalists.  Everytime the First Amendment comes up, I'm reminded of the feelings of the man who started all this. 

Long ago, [Thomas] Jefferson the philosopher of reason had written from Paris, "The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people...were it left to me to decide whether we have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter."  Twenty-five years of politics and governing later, Jefferson had another view of the press.  He had come to "deplore" the "putrid state into which our newspapers have passed, and the malignity, the vulgarity and mendacious spirit of those who write for them." [Willard Sterne Randall: Thomas Jefferson: A Life]

This was also the guy who once said that America should undergo a revolution every twenty five years or so.

Later, thinking about this, I realized that some of the men considered to be the greatest US Presidents have conducted some of the greatest attacks on the First Amendment.  Lincoln and FDR (wartime Presidents) both instituted policies aimed at curtailing dissent.

Thinking more about this, I wonder how the average person would do on the other 9 articles in the Bill of Rights, or on the rest of the US Constitution in general.  I get the feeling that people seem to think that the first 2 amendments to the Constitution (and maybe #4 and 5) are the only part that matters.

In addition to the realignment, Galileo will reduce layers of management and streamline the decision-making and product-delivery processes as it completes its integration into Cendant. This action will displace approximately 8 percent of the 2,650 Galileo global workforce, primarily in The Americas region. This is a culmination of several actions initiated when Cendant acquired Galileo in October 2001. [Bloomberg]

I haven't been paying much attention to the daily newsletter. Today was the day; a couple people I know were let go. I'd thought that we were past all that, but I guess things are worse than I thought. It's been nearly a year since Cendant acquired Galileo, hopefully the news gets better from here.

I can't believe that Xerces actually allows me to do this. Actually, I can't believe that Xerces requires me to do this to do this if I want well-formed XML. Since when is xmlns an attribute?

Document bookingRequest = builder.newDocument();
 Element gwsTrip = 
 bookingRequest.createElementNS("http://ns.galileo.com",
 "gi:GWS_Trip");
 gwsTrip.setAttribute("xmlns:gi",
 "http://ns.galileo.com");
 

[Later] Jason Diamond schooled me on the history of xmlns.  I could swear that there's parsers out there that explicitly disallow this behavior.  Oh well,  learn something every day.

Actually, I found a quote from Elliotte Rusty Harold yesterday that made me think that this is a bug in the first place:

The lack of namespace declarations and possibly the lack of a DOCTYPE declaration is a result of bugs in JAXP implementations. I’ve reported the problem to several XSLT processor/XML parser vendors and am hopeful that at least some of them will fix this bug before the final draft of this book. As of May, 2002 GNU JAXP and Oracle include the namespace declaration while Xerces 2.0.1 leaves it out. So far no implementation I've seen includes the DOCTYPE declaration.