On my first weekend last fall, I eagerly shut it all down on Friday night, then went to bed to read. (I chose Saturday because my rules include no television, and I had to watch the Giants on Sunday). I woke up nervous, eager for my laptop. That forbidden, I reached for the phone. No, not that either. Send a text message? No. I quickly realized that I was feeling the same way I do when the electricity goes out and, finding one appliance nonfunctional, I go immediately to the next. I was jumpy, twitchy, uneven.

I Need a Virtual Break. No, Really. - New York Times

Posted a code update tonight with the following changes:
Fixed some minor bugs related to preview and searching for users on the post page.
The interface for adding meme recipients to a circle after a post has been simplified in hopes that it is now easier to understand.
Sorting the memebox makes more sense now. Nickname based sorts are done correctly, you can sort on read and unread messages, sort state survives deletes.
You can see who a memestreams inbox message was CCed to, and you can "reply all."
You now have a sent items folder in the MemeBox. All items you send privately will appear there from now on, but no effort has been made to recreate content from what you've sent in the past. I'll make a few more tweaks to this soon. I realize you'd prefer to sort it based on who messages where sent to rather than who they are from, and I realize the message you are getting when the folder is empty is confusing.

As always, let us know if you run into any problems with these updates.

Stefanie wrote:
I would add this to the liberal myths...

7. Health care is a right.

This is what I'd really like to talk about. I'm not convinced that it isn't. Its not a recognized right in the United States today, but that may be because the US is behind the curve and not because its not actually a right.

Its obviously not a Constitutionally protected right, but I don't think anyone is arguing that. Could it be? Many federal Constitutional rights are constraints upon society. But can there be rights which create an obligation and not a constraint? What about the obligation to provide defense counsel in criminal trials? What about state constitutions that guarantee a right to a primary education?

So how do we decide what rights we should and shouldn't have. How do new rights become recognized? What makes something so important that it ought to be considered a right?

I like to think of healthcare like a society of boat people. Each person has their own boat. Randomly, the boats develop holes, and sink. Your boat has just developed such a hole. No one who owns one of the boats near you is willing to pick you up.

You have a choice, you can either force your way onto one of the boats, or you can die.

Is it immoral for you to save yourself by imposing yourself on another boat by force? Is there any reason you wouldn't choose to fight your way on to a boat if drowning is otherwise certain?

Do rights not exist when those who are denied those rights have no choice but war?

Put in this light, I'd say healthcare is more a right in need of recognition that speech. Ultimately, your choice to go to war to defend your freedom of speech is less clearly forced than your right to access healthcare. You CAN survive in a censorous society. Billions do. If you are dieing of cancer and you cannot afford treatment, you'll die.

In the middle ages, you'd have died anyway, and so healthcare was not enshrined as a right in English legal traditions. Today the situation has changed, and fundamental technological changes can change the structure of social relationships.... they can create new rights where they did not exist before....

For example, today, people who are cryonically frozen are legally dead, and it is illegal to cryonically freeze someone who is not legally dead. Its murder. But imagine if in the future it is a trivial matter to revive someone who is cryonically frozen. Would people who were cryonically frozen still be considered legally dead? Of course not. Technology would have changed the social status of those people.

RE: FIVE CONSERVATIVE MYTHS

From a user perspective it’s pretty simple: You hand the web service unstructured text (like news articles, blog postings, your term paper, etc) and it returns semantic metadata in RDF format. What’s happening in the background is a little more complicated.

Using natural language processing and machine learning techniques, the Calais web service looks inside your text and locates the entities (people, places, products, etc), facts (John Doe works for Acme Corp) and events (Jane Doe was appointed as a Board member of Acme Corp) in the text. Calais then processes the entities, facts and events extracted from the text and returns them to the caller in RDF format.

Of, course, they picked a name that sounds like one of those male enhancement drugs.

Calais - Frequently Asked Questions

Each year, Technology Review publishes its list of 10 emerging technologies that its editors believe will be particularly important over the next few years. This is work ready to emerge from the lab, in a broad range of areas: energy, computer hardware and software, biological imaging, and more. Two of the technologies--cellulolytic enzymes and atomic magnetometers--are efforts by leading scientists to solve critical problems, while five--surprise modeling, connectomics, probabilistic CMOS, reality mining, and offline Web applications--represent whole new ways of looking at problems. And three--graphene transistors, nanoradio, and wireless power--are amazing feats of engineering that have created something entirely new.

Technology Review: The 10 Emerging Technologies of 2008

Space Sunset

Cyan is in a rock video. I believe this defeats Virgil's appearance on the Colbert Report for coolest thing anyone on this site has ever done. (U: Turns out this is a competition entry so she only wins the cool award if this actually does end up on MTV. Wait, do they even show videos anymore?)

MC Chris - Nrrrd Grrrl | Cyan is cooler than any of us

President Bush says the foreign intelligence surveillance program is in the national interest and is legal.

In the video at this link George Bush says "We wanna know who is calling who... from over seas into America we need to know... in order to protect the people... it was legal, and now all of a sudden... plaintiff's attorneys, class-action plaintiff's attorneys, you know [inaudible] try and get inside their head, I suspect they see, you know, a financial gravy train... are trying to sue these companies, just its unfair, it is patently unfair..."

The fact is that if the program that the Bush administration asked the phone companies to assist in was legal, there would be no crime for which to grant them immunity. The fact is that if there is an ongoing risk that the phone companies would refuse to cooperate with the administration without this immunity than the program is still not legal. The fact is that the attorneys at non profit civil liberties organizations like the EFF are not in it for the money.

It is absolutely shameful, in my opinion, that Bush stoops to this sort of patently disingenuous rhetoric, telling these sort of lies about good, patriotic people on national television, in order to avoid taking responsibility for the fact that he has completely undermined and subverted the system of checks and balances that form the bedrock of our society. It was not necessary to undermine those checks and balances to protect America. The Administration had every opportunity to work with the Congress and the courts to build an effective, safeguarded system, and they did not because, fundamentally, they do not believe in these checks and balances. These facts are widely established by Administration insiders.

Assurances from the President that people's civil liberties are respected are absolutely not satisfactory in light of the history of willful abuse of intelligence surveillance powers for domestic political purposes in this country. Clearly, conservative lawyers believe that the balance reached in the 1970's was the wrong one. Even if they are correct, they do not have the right to merely cast it aside without any process or dialog simply because they do not like it! We are a country of laws, and we have a process through which laws are created, and razor thin electoral majorities do not empower Presidents to rewrite those laws arbitrarily as they see fit!

George Bush thinks the Electronic Frontier Foundation sees "a financial gravy train" in spying suits.

THE Iraq war has cost the US 50-60 times more than the Bush administration predicted and was a central cause of the sub-prime banking crisis threatening the world economy, according to Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz....

The spending on Iraq was a hidden cause of the current credit crunch because the US central bank responded to the massive financial drain of the war by flooding the American economy with cheap credit.

"The regulators were looking the other way and money was being lent to anybody this side of a life-support system," he said.

That led to a housing bubble and a consumption boom, and the fallout was plunging the US economy into recession and saddling the next US president with the biggest budget deficit in history, he said.

Iraq war 'caused slowdown in the US' | The Australian

[1] Meet up with us next Wednesday (March 5th) to go to Nashville and protest! (5:00 AM - March 5th) we will have a bus - we will leave at 5AM in Knoxville (meet at COPYSHOP).

Gather at 8AM (if you can get there by yourself)
on the corner of 6th and Union St in Nashville!

The primary broken thing about the rule being protested here is that it would require Universities to institute a surveillance system that watched network traffic and identified transfers of copyrighted content.

Copyright protest in Nashville March 5th - COPYFIGHT NOW!