] The decomposing remains of a 60-tonsperm whale exploded
] on a busy Taiwan street, showering nearby cars and shops
] with blood and organs and stopping traffic for hours,
] local newspapers said.

Random picture of the day - Whale Exploded

] The subway train pulled up, and a man named Marc with a
] floppy blond Mohawk and a crimson sport coat let out a
] welcoming call from the platform. He carried an e-flat
] euphonium under his arm and had a habit of making
] noise, any noise. He was the nonleader of this nonevent:
] a "spontaneous, digitally organized" party on BART, as
] the Bay Area Rapid Transit is known.

SF hacker scene subway party makes NYT.

San Francisco Journal: Last Car. Geek Party. Spread the Word.

] Could the recognition of our imperfect understanding
] serve to establish the open society as a desirable form
] of social organization? I believe it could, although
] there are formidable difficulties in the way. We must
] promote a belief in our own fallibility to the status
] that we normally confer on a belief in ultimate truth.

Wow, this might be the most important thing I've read since MemeStreams started.

First off, despite the title, this is not an anti-capitalist screed. George Soros is an investment banker and the 38th richest man in the country. In fact, this article isn't really about capitalism. This article is about everything. The title is so poor that I almost changed it.

What Soros is saying about Capitalism is that there are people who accept the concept of free trade in a ideological way, in an absolutist way, and that is a problem. The problem with religious states, which requires the separation of church and state, is that when laws are the product of man, they are open to debate, but when laws are the product of God, to question is heresy. If you have a society in which the law cannot be questioned, you have a totalitarian society. It is only a matter of time.

The thing that Soros is saying here is that any absolutist ideology can be abused in this manner. It doesn't matter if your ideology is based on the Bible, or the writings of Marx, or the writings of Adam Smith. If you have a nation of people who believe that their principals are beyond question, ultimately you have a totalitarianism. It is only a matter of time before the inconsistencies your absolutism forces you to ignore cause fissures which break your society down.

Reading this essay caused me to think back across many of the discussions that I've had on this site over the past two years. My instinct that Fukuyama's belief in an ultimate solution was flawed. Being able to see great tragedies of history reflected in the idea of pre-emptive military action and being unable to demonstrate that its not "ok" if you're doing it for Democracy. In our worries about the state of the IT industry. In my various discussions about politics with people from various perspectives.

I've had a really hard time deciding where I fit in the political spectrum. I know what the tests tell me, but somehow I'm never comfortable with the answers. When I talk to conservatives they think I'm a liberal. When I talk to liberals they thing I'm a conservative (or at the least that I've been duped by them). One thing I've come away from years and years of these conversations with is the idea that people usually intertwine their identity and their perspective. They are a certain thing. They believe that thing is right. So they think a certain way. The way they think defines what group they see themselves in, which defines who they are, and we repeat. After years they get quite locked into a c... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

The Capitalist Threat - George Soros

Balls Deep wrote:
] ] Britain is likely to be plunged into an ice age within
] ] our lifetime by global warming, new research suggests.

Here is the BBC version, which includes an interesting graphic about Greenland.

RE: Britain is likely to be plunged into an ice age - BBC remix

If you notice strange monkeys hanging around Google's main page today, that is because it is the chinese new year, and it is now the year of the monkey.

Year of the Monkey

Very pointless...yet somehow compelling.

virtual bubble wrap

] This collection of web pages documents Brad's activity on
] the system and the people who's lives he effected, from
] the first day he logged on MemeStreams to the day he
] passed on.

Brad

Is that our productivity is up but we aren't producing enough.

We've got all of these people who are unemployed or underemployed or who've exited the market. We have all of this potential energy that we aren't applying.

At the same time we're operating a dangerous trade deficit. The world doesn't want what we're selling. Not enough of it anyway. Read Buffet and Gross.

And we're exporting jobs, good ones, which is only going to contribute to that trade deficit.

Economists have been saying throughout the downturn that its not as if consumers are being stingy. If consumers reacted to this crash as the last one we'd be in another depression. We're not, because people are confident in general. What economists are saying is lacking is corporate investment. Companies are not building for the future. They're not creating new products.

Venture Capital is a wasteland. Years later they are still in maintenance mode. They aren't investing in new companies. They are trying to keep their present ventures afloat. No new companies. No new innovation. The VC are trying to give money back to their investors.

Steve Roach responded to discussions about outsourcing by specifically saying that it is critically important that we determine where the growth is going to come from.

Said another way, we're not growing.

Our productivity is up. We're cutting the bottom lines. Everything is on the up and up for business owners, but not in a real positive way. Saving money is only useful if you have a way to apply it. Money is a means and not an end. Money that isn't moving doesn't exist. Economic success is a measure of the velocity of money. Depressions in history were created by individuals who hoarded money. Today it is the leadership who is doing it. The outcome is the same.

Eventually the bottom is going to fall out of this thing. Everyone who should know is saying it. This is not sustainable.

There is but one reasonable way to address this problem, and that is to innovate. We need people who are offering a vision of a better future. There are many technologies we ought to pursue. There are great ideas from the dotcom boom that were run into the ground by people who tried to crunch ten year business plans into 2 years. There are new possibilities in the fields of robotics, new networking technologies, and new biotech. Right now Japan is blowing our doors off in pursuit of two out of three of those things. They are going to end up with a lot of people who know an awful lot about two very important industries in a few years, and we're going to be buying it all from them. They have the patience to see these things through even if they don't have an "exit event" in the extreme short term.

What are we focused on? Healthcare. Yes. Very important. I don't want to disparage that at all. But all this focus on it is rooted in our narcissism. *WE* having an "aging population" but the WORLD does not!!! T... [ Read More (0.1k in body) ]

] Defenses lacking at social network sites
]
] Sites like LiveJournal and Tribe are poised to be the
] next big thing on the Web in 2004, but their security and
] privacy practices are more like 1997.

I'm not sure SSL is really all that useful. It would prevent people from stealing your password over the wire, but I don't think most of these attacks are sniffing related. It would also allow you to authenticate that you are entering your password on my site, but I think most people who would fall for a phoney login would still fall for it. I'll bet if you offered it for a small fee few would buy.

People get into your account because they guess your password, or because you leave yourself logged in and then your friends come over and use your computer, or because you use the same password all over the place. There isn't much that I can do about these attacks as a site manager. I need YOU to use client certificates to login to my site, and you need to keep your certificate on a smart card or ibutton that stays on your person.

Is anyone using technology like this? Would you want to use it to access MemeStreams if it was available? What do you think?

SecurityFocus HOME News: Defenses lacking at social network sites

] Some pictures of Brad Blines (aka CrankyMessiah)

Flynn asked us to host these for a few days because several people have requested them.

Brad Blines Pictures