The prosecutions against the three soldiers and one civilian accused of various forms of espionage at Camp Delta at Guantanomo Bay continue to fall apart. The Air Force has now dropped three of the most serious counts against the Syrian-born translator Ahmad I. al-Halabi. The specific charges dropped include aiding the enemy, e-mailing information about detainees, and transmitting information to unauthorized recipients. Ten charges had been dropped in November. There are 17 counts still pending against al-Halabi, though I'm not sure how serious those counts are. They include espionage, failure to obey an order, retaining documents without authority, making false official statements, and executing a fraudulent credit application scheme. I continue to believe three of the four prosecutions are racially and religiously motivated, while the fourth is likely just a colossal fuck-up.
The Eclipse Project has posted the sixth milestone beta of Eclipse 3.0, an open source integrated development environment (IDE) for Java. It also doubles as a base platform for your own applications, an alternative to the AWT and Swing, and a powerful floor wax and dessert topping. New features since milestone 5 include
A recent crash had trashed some of my previous Eclipse installation so it could no longer debug. Rather than reinstalling 2.1, I took the opportunity to install this beta. Some of the new features turned up minor problems with throws clauses, JavaDoc comments, and extraneous local variables, methods, and statements. However, overall 3.0 is much slower than 2.1 on the same hardware, OS, and VM. Simple code edits can cause several second pauses. Scrolling is often disabled, and then speeds madly to catch up when Eclipse finally notices I've been pressing the scroll button for several seconds. Overall, this is not nearly as smooth a user experience as 2.1 was.