Salam Pax attends the Hutton enquiry in London. “What I really don’t understand is the fixation on the 45 minutes. I mean, what does it matter whether it was 45 or a 100? The real question is whether Saddam had WMDs or not. Because that, in the end, was the main selling-point of the war.” This, of course, states the obvious, but UK politics are Byzantine
The Guardian analyses the impact of its anti-protectionist blog KickAAS in a rather po-faced way. “One of the reasons for the attention that it got could have been the novelty of a “serious” blog with a dedicated political purpose. This was at a time when Blogdom was wondering whether blogs could be use for serious, non navel-gazing purposes. KickAAS was, of course, a predictable failure, and it had no effect at all on the Cancun talks. However, it brought people of all political persuasions from around the world together to discuss policy and tactics. In this way, it may have raised awareness about the potential of blogs to further a cause, but there clearly needs to be a long term-strategy, as well as a tactical website, in place.” KickAAS is certainly not the first ‘serious’ blog, and the fact that it may not have had the impact desired may be…
Ian Davis has been working on URIs that represent places and times. There are 3 types, a single point in time, a span in time and a place. Interestingly this could be used as a standard format for permalinks. In fact if a weblog entry used an event/author standard for its permalink then it could in theory become truly permanent in that it would be portable. More interestingly this could extend the use of a permalink for any object within space or time. PlaceTime.com – URIs for Places and Times
Benchmark and Kleiner Perkins are rumored to be about to put $10M into Friendster. How to win Friendsters and influence VCs | CNET News.com
Via Boingboing: The Gospel of Supply Side Jesus from Al Franken’s latest broadside. I wonder how Bill O’Reilly would treat Jesus if he showed up on Fox: Modern Jesus: “I you are rich you won’t get into heaven.” Bill O’Reilly: “You are an insult to Christianity” Modern Jesus: “I will turn the other cheek to that remark” Bill O’Reilly: “Turn the other cheek? Fight like a man you tree-hugger” Modern Jesus: “I forgive you” Bill O’Reilly: “Yeah, well I don’t forgive you, with a name like Jesus you must be a wetback, go home” Modern Jesus: “I will return from whence I came” Bill O’Reilly: “Well you won’t be coming on my show again” Sound of microphone being ripped off….
In 2001 the polar hole in the Ozone layer stopped growing And in 2002 it actually reduced in size. Normally rational people (heh! – I’ve waited a year for this) concluded that this was: “catastrophic news for environmental doomsayers”. The trouble is that the Ozone hole is now getting bigger again and this year is at record levels. Opinions can be swayed by emotional criteria – I want to debunk all conspiracy theories because I don’t like people whose judgements are based upon paranoia. There may be a certain irritating puritanism about some environmental issues – but to debunk any message because of the character of the messenger is dangerous. Judgements are sound when they are based upon evidence – and there is overwhelming evidence that we are damaging our environment on a macro level.
The difference between the Bush’s first budget plan, for the next 10 years and today’s: $8,000,000,000,000. NYTimes: “The long-term budget forecast has declined as much in the last two years as the total revenue collected by the United States government from 1789 to 1983.” The reason for some of this shortfall is ‘investment’ to stimulate the economy, but tax cuts and sometimes questionably misdirected hostility are not the same as investing in, say, secondary education. I’m a pragmatist and however unfair, this does work, but to a degree. This would be a choice of someone who prefers short term stimulants to longer term health – cocaine versus cardiovascular fitness (and ‘would be’ might actually read ‘was’, if you believed the rumors). In the business world, this is the equivalent of corporate investment in longer term revenue by raising executive salaries and actually encouraging competition from other companies, instead of new…
Is there no electronic ‘Friend or Foe’ PIN enabled transmitter device that could help prevent friendly fire accidents?
Over at Irish Origins we have recently added a database of all the property valuations for the middle of the 19th century. The reason these are important is that the census records were destroyed, making the property records only way to do comprehensive search accross Ireland for as far back as most Irish American’s decendants.
“Analysts have predicted that there will be almost 1 billion camera phones in use within five years, which has led companies such as Samsung and LG Electronics to bar employees from using camera phones in research and manufacturing facilities because of fears over the security of sensitive data.” For the last twenty years, there has been a huge increase in video surveillance, as the required hardware became cheap. Surveillance that has been heavily resisted in the US is commonplace in Europe. The ubiquity of camera phones changes the surveillance equation around. So now everyone gets paranoid – but they shouldn’t. If everyone carries camera phones, then perhap you decentralize and democratize ‘surveillance’. The risk is that you replace a fear of big brother with vigilante paranoia that police neighborhood watch schemes can produce. This all may sound far fetched, but clearly 1 billion people carrying around a camera and the…
Is a SWAT team going to burst through the windows of your house one night and drag you off into the moonlight because they can’t find the CD original of some tracks on your iPod since you threw out the disk when it got scratched? Unlikely. Here’s why I believe that CD’s could pose a bigger threat to the music industry than web-based file sharing. The music industry has three tactics to put people off trading online: polluting networks with false tracks; telling parents that file trading exposes children to porn; suing individuals. This will put people off. Authorized online distribution of digital music files, Apple music store style, will enable copy protection within the files. Hardware devices such as iPods will continue to use protection measures at the hardware level. CDs and CD players don’t have this kind of protection, because CD standards were defined before ubiquitous file trading,…