Mr. quite contrary, Hitchens, has a go at the 10 commandments:

“I wonder what would happen if secularists were now to insist that the verses of the Bible that actually recommend enslavement, mutilation, stoning, and mass murder of civilians be incised on the walls of, say, public libraries?”

Anil Dash’s quip about the Talabamaban is more economical: ‘protestors decry removal of golden calf monument’.
There goes commandment number 2.

Oh, and now that some (toothless, banjo-playing?) politicians in Mississipi want the two tons of bad art, I guess that’ll be breaking the last commandment.

The Commandments and immorality

“There are more slaves today than were seized from Africa in four centuries of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.”

21st-Century Slaves - National Geographic Magazine

via Zeldman

New Scientist has some very nice Hubble pics of Mars.

We’ve seen pictures of Mars in similar detail before, however. In fact we’ve had photos of Mars from three feet away because NASA landed cameras on the surface.

Not that long ago, I seem to remember it being a shock for scientists to discover ice on Mars. Call me old-fashioned, but wouldn’t the things which look just like large polar ice caps (which are in fact large polar ice caps and not cotton wool or marsh mallow) have been clearly visible from a telescope a century ago?

Clearly I am missing something.

If Google, AOL, poss Yahoo and then prob MSN have weblog services, there is a possibility that the weblog space will Balkanize, if the precedent set by the various instant messaging systems is anything to go by.

Such an outcome would threaten any standards for weblog API’s and syndication far more than internecine struggles within the existing weblog community ever could. It would also prevent analysis tools or weblog search engines such as Technorati and Feedster from providing comprehensive coverage.

Increasingly it is becoming apparent that what makes a publishing system or search/analysis tool a weblog tool is the ability to be part of an open system enabling publishing, syndication and real-time search results. As such, if such Balkanization does occur, then I would suggest that systems that don’t allow this shouldn’t really call themselves weblog services. To enable this means defining publicly what a weblog service is, perhaps now is a good time to do this.

Web Advantage:

“Rumor has it that Yahoo is about to break into the Blog market and perhaps dominate, taking advantage of Google’s Blogger being overrun with blogs without a sound customer service program or feeling of community.”

Hmm, this doesn’t sound like a rumor, but an anonymous snipe from a Google competitor.

Microdoc picks up on the same problem of lack of diversity within networks, outlined in my last post. Microdoc: Email, Google, Microsoft and the Lack of Diversity

If this threat is real - and I believe it is, I also think that it can be modeled so that notional danger thresholds can be set for when the code in any one market varies by less than a certain percentage.

The danger threshold would fluctuate over time according to two variables: the density (degree of connectedness - of machines connected to the Internet , not links within the Internet - which being one directional would reduce this factor by a half) and trends in viral activity (i.e. the amount of malicious code).

In order to provide provable evidence and monitor results an industry independent organization could provide empirical evidence and suggest anti-trust measures to protect against the specific dangers of the combination of homogeneity and connectedness within networks.

Is the lack of variety in computer software not merely a threat to the marketplace, resulting in poor innovation and high prices, but actually dangerous, as more and more of our everyday life depends on healthy functioning systems that are based upon the same underlying code with the same weaknesses?

The computer industry is regulated by standard anti-trust measures to prevent monopolies

The Moonie owned Washington Times reports: British asylum problem ‘out of control’

The source of this is a poll carried out by Britain’s most popular newspaper, the Sun (same owner as Fox), which has been using misleading information to whip up paranoia about immigrants.

Subsequent to a propaganda campaign against asylum seekers, the Sun conducted a poll which showed that a majority of readers thought that immigration was the most important political issue, four times more than those who thought that the

The Enola Gay has been reassembled and put on display at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, under the curatorship of Dr. Strangelove Dik Daso.

Whatever the justification, killing 140,000 civilians with an atomic bomb, 42 times the number that died during 911, is nothing to be celebrated. Surely an exhibit based on this event is an opportunity to demonstrate the gravity of the situation that lead to it, along with a pertinent reminder of the seriousness of weapons of mass destruction?

“The current text for the Enola Gay exhibit does not include casualty figures from Hiroshima or show any photographs of the devastation the bomb caused.

Daso told Reuters that death toll estimates varied widely and the exhibition space did not lend itself to a complicated display including details of the human cost.”

Reuters | Latest Financial News / Full News Coverage

If you fill in a form to create a weblog post that has a permalink then you are creating something that is RDF-like by nature.

Subject = the Post itself, which is pointed to by a permalink.
Predicate = the label of any field that you have to fill in.
Object = whatever you type in the field.

The RDF/XML syntax can be hard - but the model is not, and no matter what the disputes surrounding its use are, weblog posts are an almost perfect application of some of the most important ideas behind RDF.

An RDF statement is like a form field and its label (e.g. name: david) that are a property and value of something unique, like a person. Conveniently, if there is a URL that is that something, or is the identifier for that something then the properties pertain to that URL.

When people post weblog entries, they often attach a unique url to that entry via a permalink. The weblog post, unlike a webpage, which can be a temporary rendering of the output from a database, is an item which contains meaning. Information is being published and retrieved in chunks where meaning, semantics, are being created or stored.

The fact that weblog publishing arrived here via a separate route surely validates some of the principal ideas of RDF, even if there is some debate about the specifics.