It's been one year since Evo Morales became Bolivia's president.  While the goals of his administration - refounding the country on a more equitable foundation - are hard to argue with, his methods and results are disastrous. He's used demagougery and stirred up his supporters to cause civil unrest and blockades around the country in the hopes that his party, MAS, will get its way. All this culminated in bloody confrontations in Cochabamba, between MAS and its opponents, that left 2 people dead and over 100 injured. Today, the country is more polarized, violent, and divided than at the beginning of 2006, with little hope for reconciliation.

Angus Reid has a balanced look at his first year in power: A year of Evo in Bolivia.

In one year, Bolivia has seen protests, violence and an increasing tension between Morales' supporters and opponents. The country is polarized and the threat of a major clash between east and the west, "the rich" and "the poor", is growing. Both sides are becoming more and more radical and less inclined to listen to the other one. A recent push for autonomy in some regions, precisely the ones holding most of Bolivia's natural resources and exporting agricultural businesses, caused major turmoil in Cochabamba last week.

If you have a Tivo, iPod, or anything else that lets you view videos or listen to music on a digital player, you've run up against DRM. You may not be aware of it but its there. It's what's kept TivoToGo from working on non-windows PC's until last month, when the encryption was finally cracked. Its also what keeps you from taking the music you buy from the iTunes store and listening to it on anything but an ipod or in in the iTunes program. Its generally a big pain in the ass for consumers. But its there to protect the artists and producers from unscrupulous pirtaes, right?

Ken Fisher looks at the real point of Digital Rights Management technologies - and its all about protecting business models than fighting piracy. \

Like all lies, there comes a point when the gig is up; the ruse is busted. For the movie studios, it's the moment they have to admit that it's not the piracy that worries them, but business models which don't squeeze every last cent out of customers.

The article was prompted by the Businesweek article, "Why Hollywood Snubbed Jobs at Macworld"

What does Hollywood want from Steve Jobs? For starters, more protection for their films. "His user rules just scare the heck out of us," one studio executive told me. Indeed, under Apple's video iPod digital-rights-management scheme, folks can share their flicks with as many as three other iPod users.

Version 1.1 of my my preferred javascript library, jQuery, was released today.  They have a great motto - "write less, do more" and as far as I can tell, they live up to it. The release notes claim speed improvements of 10-20x for selectors over those in 1.0.4. The release includes some interesting new features - such as passing functions for an attribute or a css property. The flexibility of that is mind-boggling, but it could also lead to some hard to maintain code in the wrong hands.

Why do I like jQuery over say prototype/Scriptaculous? At a very basic level, it probably comes down to personal preference, jQuery was easier for me to grok. But what first got me hooked was its straightforward use of selectors to work on DOM elements.

jQuery selectors are a combination of CSS 1-3, XPath, plus some custom code to glue it together. Essentially, the best parts from both of these query languages were taken, combined, and used to create the final jQuery expression language. If you already know CSS (which most web developers do) then you're going to be fine.