Amazon Web Service is launching a new web service tonight called S3 - which stands for “Simple Storage Service”. It is a storage service backend for developers that offers “a highly scalable, reliable, and low-latency data storage infrastructure at very low costs”.

They’ve built the back end for the number one requested company that I wrote about late last year - reliable and cheap online storage. I’ve been watching this space very closely, even profiling a number of new entrants, and I have to say that S3 changes the game entirely. Move over Google Drive, Amazon just stole your thunder (for now).

TechCrunch » Amazon: Grid Storage Web Service Launches

Leet.

Google Mars

NEW YORK (AP) -- Isaac Hayes has quit "South Park," where he voices Chef, saying he can no longer stomach its take on religion.

Hayes, who has played the ladies' man/school cook in the animated Comedy Central satire since 1997, said in a statement Monday that he feels a line has been crossed.

Too bad.... The creators make an interesting point at the of the article about why he's quitting, though.

11Alive.com: Atlanta Entertainment - Isaac Hayes Quits 'South Park'

It has the face of a rat and the tail of a skinny squirrel -- and scientists say this creature discovered living in central Laos is pretty special: It's a species believed to have been extinct for 11 million years.

CNN.com - Rat-squirrel back after 11-million-year absence - Mar 9, 2006

Like a lot of people, I find that the web is becoming my main source of news. Some of the sites I read are published by individuals, but I find the most informative sites are those published by groups of writers/editors/correspondents, including those put out by Main Steam Media (MSM). However for the past three months my main source of "what's new" has been a new breed of website that collaboratively votes on the best links.

This genre does not have an official name yet, but each of these sites supplies readers with pointers to news items that are ranked by other readers. None of these sites generates news; they only point to it by filtering the links to newsy items. Using different formulas they rank an ever moving list of links on the web. The velocity of their lists varies by site, but some will have a 100% turnover in a few days. I check them daily.

This is a nice overview of the competition (minus reputation...)

Cool Tool: Consensus Web Filters

The idea behind attention is very simple. I know, because it's my idea. Doc Searls introduced me to Dave Sifry at a party, and Dave and I sat in the corner for two hours and brainstormed how to turn that idea into reality. Later, I came down to Technorati's office and fleshed the idea out, describing what I do (did) with NetNewsWire and how I wanted to do it better. Dave sat there, taking notes, debriefing me in a classic deconstruction of what I did with RSS data, what I found important, and what the inforouter (my name for an aggregator on steroids) could do to improve information transfer.

Soon the outlines of a spec emerged; who, what, and for how long feed data was being consumed. I insisted that OPML be used as the first bootstrap of subscription data. Sifry, in the throes of establishing a business out of Technorati, seemed to sense the value of attention, but had to fit it in with many other priorities in allocating resources. In my role as a member of the Technorati Advisory board, I evangelized what I saw as attention's profound value proposition as RSS adoption accelerated the need to deal with a second order magnitude of information overload. I also surfaced the idea on a series of blogs, first at CRN, then at eWEEK, and lately at ZDNet/CNET.

» Waiting for Attention… or something like it | Steve Gillmor's InfoRouter | ZDNet.com

Hijexx wrote:
Basing sentencing on motive alone seems like a slippery slope to thought crime.

I've been thinking about this. I agree that sentence modifiers aren't a deterrent with respect to crimes of passion rather then profit. However, FineThen did a good job of convincing me that a hate crime, such as a cross burning in someone's yard, is a substantially different thing from an act of vandalism. It has a greater emotional impact on the victims and a greater impact on the community at large. Can these things be reconciled?

Its not illegal to burn a cross according to the Supreme Court. You have a First Amendment right to hate that cannot be infringed by any legislature in the country. But you cannot intimidate the community. Your cross burning cannot be posed as a threat. This case is a good presentation of how to draw the line between these two cases.

In a state of nature, all ideology which disagrees with the establishment is inherently violent, because violence is the only means through which the establishment can be changed. In a democracy, ideology is inherently nonviolent, because the establishment can be replaced through nonviolent means through the process of persuasion on the merits. So in a democracy, you can have an inalienable right to your ideology... it can be legal to hate, because hatred is not inherently violent. You can, in fact, be a neo-nazi without hurting anyone.

However, once you commit a crime with the intent of furthering your ideology, you have peirced the democratic veil, and moved back to a state of nature, in which ideas are imposed by force rather then persuasion. This is a serious crime in a democracy, and it is not the same as random vandalism, or another non-ideological crime. If your ideology opposes a minority, we call this a hate crime. If you ideology opposes the majority, we call this terrorism. They are two sides of the same coin. Either way, they should not be considered simple acts of expression, or compared with other crimes merely on the basis of the physical damage done.

As far as this case is concerned, the article is really too vauge to be useful. There seems to be a basic dispute of fact in the case. If the officer did prevent the man from providing medical aid, was this a crime? Would it have been a crime if there really was a risk to the man? Assuming it is a crime, was it based in ignorance or avarice? Lets assume the officer pulled the guy off and said something like "He's a gay, those people often have AIDS, you shouldn't touch him." Could this be considered an attempt to further an ideology of hatred, or was it an honest attempt to protect that man rooted in extreme ignorance. Thats what I think is more challenging here. Can you accidentally commit a hate crime simply because you acted on a prejudiced assumption about someone and you didn't know that prejudice was unreasonable? I don't think so. Hate crime laws are not a prohibition on being an idiot or an asshole. Now, if he instead said "He's a gay, those people are wrong before god and you shouldn't save them," it might be a different story. Figuring out which situation you're dealing with could be really difficult in a court room.

RE: Suit: W.Va. Police Chief Denied Gay Man CPR - Yahoo! News

dmv wrote:

Newsvine combines the best features of a number of companies and products like Digg and Google News with great features like chat and blogging-style comments. The result is a perfect news site (note that new competitors, like spotback (mentioned here) are aiming to overthrow Newsvine already, however).

The result is a really wonderful social news experience.

Memestreams sinks lower...

Honestly, I'm not all that impressed. With the amount of money and brains behind newsvine I had expected something a bit more than Digg with pictures. Where is the technology innovation here? We've done a lot more with a lot less for a lot longer, but of course, we don't have time to work on the project, much less money to hire people, so our site isn't pretty and we don't get covered by the press.

The value of this site today is simply the people here, not the technology. The technology is simply a ruler by which you can measure what other people are doing. If one of these guys actually builds something that really works, is fun, and encompasses everything we've thought about, then great. I won't need to worry about it anymore. Otherwise we'll eventually be in a position to work on this again. In the mean time, I have a feeling a bunch of this stuff is simply going to die on the vine from overcapitalization and oversaturation... It feels bubbly.

RE: TechCrunch � Newsvine is Perfect

finethen wrote:

But until you see "Syriana," nominated for best screenplay (and George Clooney, for best supporting actor) you have no idea how self-flagellation and self-loathing pass for complexity and moral seriousness in Hollywood

UGH. So this is the new right-wing rant? Hollywood is out of touch with the rest of the God-loving country? Fuck that.

This is a regular subject on AM radio. Apparently they don't like the "immoral" images that hollywood sends people about how to live. Secretly some of them are probably worried about the societal influence of people on McCarthy's list.

I didn't really get this take from Syriana, but its at least interesting enough to mention. This almost makes me want to watch it again. I didn't really think that any of the people in the movie were heros. I thought that was the point.

I'm somewhat disturbed by the characterization of this film and Munich by conservatives as "morally confused" because they portray Americans or Isrealis as complex people who are not always right about everything. The idea that Americans must not be protrayed in a critical light is childish at best, and fascist at worst. Will the new movie awards I link above be a short lived and widely ignored experient, or will they become a central institution, like Fox News, growing in influence until what is today declared immoral is declared illegal?

Failure to allow serious criticism is weakness. Totalitarianism is where weakness leads.

RE: Oscars for Osama

The dispiriting drumbeat of these events - punctuated by the savage sectarian violence convulsing Iraq - are causing even temperate voices to wonder if the world is really careening into some fundamental clash of civilisations.

It's easy to predict the impact if the US decides it does not trust a company owned by even an ostensibly friendly Arab government to operate facilities at US ports. Many in the Islamic world would surely take that as a sign that America sees itself in a clash of civilisations, - and in that interpretation, the Islamic world might well be correct.

I think this port controversy is bull shit. The security of the ports is and will remain a domestic responsibility.

How fear is controlling US thinking - Opinion - theage.com.au