Gnod is my experiment in the field of artificial intelligence. It's a self-adapting system, living on this server and 'talking' to everyone who comes along. Gnod's intention is to learn about the outer world and to learn 'understanding' its visitors. This enables gnod to share all its wisdom with you in an intuitive and efficient way. You might call it a search-engine to find things you don't know about.

Gnod Music: Discover new bands and artists. Let gnod find out what music you like and what you don't like.

Gnod Books: Get to know new authors and find out what other people like you like to read.

Gnod Movies: Discover new movies, travel the world of film and discuss it all in the forums.

The music map is cool, but it works best in Internet Explorer.

Gnod - The global network of dreams

Dear President Bush:

This is to inform you of my decision to retire from my position as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States effective upon the nomination and confirmation of my successor. It has been a great privilege, indeed, to have served as a member of the Court for 24 Terms. I will leave it with enormous respect for the integrity of the Court and its role under our Constitutional structure.

Sincerely,
Sandra Day O'Connor

O'Connor is a moderate, or in the parlance of Republicans an "unreliable conservative." They will not accept a similarly unreliable replacement, like Gonzales. The end result of this will almost certainly be a shift to a more Conservative court.

The political firestorm will kick off immediately, but why care? It will not impact the final outcome. It is merely a marketing campaign, wherein Bush will attempt to show the radicals that he is a serious conservative and the moderates that the liberals are unreasonable. The liberals will attempt to show the moderates that Bush is a radical. Its all posturing for the next election and only useful if you haven't been paying attention.

Bunnygrrl had some thoughtful comments on O'Connor's resignation.

As for me, well, she came down on the wrong side of the CDA court case, which puts her (along with a large majority of Congress and the Senate include John Kerry) on my long term mildly irrational grudge list. She writes:

The universe of material that is "patently offensive," but which nonetheless has some redeeming value for minors or does not appeal to their prurient interest--is a very small one. Appellees cite no examples of speech falling within this universe and do not attempt to explain why that universe is substantial "in relation to the statute's plainly legitimate sweep."

This is one of the most ignorant things that has been written in any modern Supreme Court dissent. I think she should be required to listen to a selection of the most abrasive and angry punk, industrial and hip hop at a high volume until she decides to die her hair flourescent orange or she realizes what was at stake in that case.

Sandra Day O'Connor Announces Retirement - July 1, 2005

Days beforehand, I had made an internal report of unethical and apparently illegal behavior by the company: Use of open proxies for web harvesting to avoid blockage by web site operators. HMS apparently decided that working with me to address their use of open proxies was not an option.

Health Market Science is a large corporation with, compared to me, effectively infinite resources. My legal bills have topped $40K already over just two months. If HMS succeeds in tarring me with their false accusations, what's to stop your employer or client from doing the same to you, should your relationship sour?

Slashdot | Perl's Chip Salzenberg Sued, Home Raided

"Open source would be succeeding faster if the GPL didn't make lots of people nervous about adopting it." From the article: "I don't think the GPL is the principal reason for Linux's success. Rather, I believe it's because in 1991 Linus was the first person to find the right social architecture for distributed software development."

Eric Raymond has said a lot of things that I strongly disagree with. This time, however, I think he is exactly right. There have been sparse few who've contributed to open source projects because they had to, and none of that "had to" code has been fundamental to the success of the system. On the other hand, the GPL has held projects back.

Slashdot | We Don't Need the GPL Anymore

This intent standard...will invite all sorts of strategic behavior that will dramatically increase the cost of innovating around these technologies.

Lessig on Grokster.

The answer a web search engine delivers is what it believes is the correct answer for the majority of users – often referred to as "the tyranny of the majority". For example, when you search for 'apple', the first result on most search engines is Apple Computer. But you may have been searching for information about the fruit or Apple Records.

Wow, that sounds like something that I might have said several years ago. In fact, I'm almost certain that I made the exact same statement in my talk at Phreaknic 6, but I used unix people and "cat" as the example rather then talking about apples. Shame I didn't say it online somewhere but I don't think I ever did.

Yahoo made MemeStreams. Sort of. Really, Yahoo made a better del.icio.us with some MemeStreams like features. I'm sure the del.icio.us people are fucking estatic about that given that they just took on some funding. There have been many attempts in the past from various parties to make something which was a lot like what I was trying to make. This is the first one that has significant potential in my opinion.

I wonder if someone from Yahoo has seen MemeStreams. Tim Oreilly recently said that "Hackers are teaching the industry what to do." Of course, he turned down a talk on MemeStreams at the first Emerging Technologies Conference. I'm pretty sure the above "apple" comment was in my proposal.

We don't have the resources that Yahoo has, but we've been at this a hell of a lot longer and I'll bet we get it a hell of a lot better. So, if you've got a million dollars burning a hole in your pocket and chip on your shoulder about Yahoo, I'll bet I can turn it into 10 million while beating the pants off of them in the process. Until such time as someone like that arrives this project will remain a weekend hobby with slow code and design updates.

10 years from now when the entire internet looks like MemeStreams I will still probably be totally unknown and slaving away in a cubicle somewhere, but at least I'll be able to look back and say I told you so.

Yahoo! Search blog: Search, with a little help from your friends

ibenez wrote:

Sadly, Mr. Bush wasted his opportunity last night, giving a speech that only answered questions no one was asking. He told the nation, again and again, that a stable and democratic Iraq would be worth American sacrifices, while the nation was wondering whether American sacrifices could actually produce a stable and democratic Iraq.

Sure dude. Your hatred for Bush makes you say really stupid things.

I understand your confusion now. There have always been people wondering whether American sacrifices could actually produce a stable and democratic Iraq. The question is whether this reflects the opinion of the nation broadly. The recent Senate hearing seemed to indicate that even Republicans felt that it does reflect the opinion of the nation. Why has this point of view been rejected by Republicans until just now? Has there been a sudden shift in public opinion? I don't sense that there has been.

It has taken me a few days to digest this hearing. I think I understand now.

There is a specific reason that this point of view is suddenly being accepted, and it is because its in our interest to accept it now. The more Americans are unhappy about their involvement with the Iraq war, the more it will look like we're going to pull out. The more it looks like we're going to pull out, the more Iraq will realise that they are going to have to deal with the domestic security problems on their own, or live with them forever. The faster they get that, the faster they'll become a strong, independent nation. If we let their government hide behind our skirt they'll never have the strength to deal with the difficult international politics in the region.

Nations are founded upon shared experience. They didn't overthrow Saddam. They won't be able to look back on their history, as we do, and say "we did it." They need a formative experience. This insurgency is that experience. If they can overcome it, it will shape their national identity. We can't do it for them. If we do their country won't mean anything to them.

I'll bet the Republicans would be willing to sacrifice the 2008 presidential election if it meant scaring the Iraqis into taking responsibility for themselves, but in any event if they have to do something with makes them look bad politically, like getting a large precentage of Americans to think that Iraq is not a good place for our military to be, now is the time to do it, when they've got several years before having to face public opinion in the ballot box.

You're going to hear more of this kind of thinking. Frogs boil slow, this hearing was the first step.

RE: President Bush's Speech About Iraq - New York Times

Acidus wrote:
It is clear what the Iraq war is about: securing vital oil resources that we need to remain a super power. Human rights and "democracy" are just as worthless of an excuse as Germany saying it invaded Poland because of Polish saboteurs.

Is it? This has been a favorite theory of the left since the start but I have never found it particularly compelling. The logic is:

1. Bush says there is an imminent threat that Saddam will give WMD to Al'Q.
2. Turns out there probably wasn't a significant amount of WMD and the connections between Saddam and Al'Q were tenuous at best.
3. The real reason for the war MUST be [insert my favorite conspiracy theory here].

Obviously, 3 does not follow from 2, regardless of what 3 is. 3 must have its own justification which exists independently from the validity or invalidity of 1.

In fact, I don't think taking over Iraq would have significantly reduced our price for Iraqi oil, if all other things were equal. The primary reason the oil wasn't available is because the international community wasn't buying it from Saddam, because Saddam was a problem. If this was all just a greedy resource grab we could have simply not embargoed him in the first place and the resource would be far more available then it is now. We embargoed him because he was a problem. Ergo, even if we really DID go in there to free up the oil, it was really about Saddam, and not about the oil per say. Were Saddam not a bastard there would have been no need for a "resource grab."

I think 1 is oversimplified. I'm not convinced that the war was justified. However, I'm not convinced it wasn't either. The trouble with the dialog is that no one on the right is willing to accept 2, and everyone on the left is convinced of 3. I think the reality is that 1 was not totally unreasonalbe but not compelling enough to justify a war, and that 3 is totally unreasonable, but because we can't let both theories go we can't really have a national dialog about what the hell we ARE actually doing.

And this has gone on long enough now that it really doesn't matter anymore. The damage is done. We're in there. And frankly, we need to stay engaged until the situation is sustainable. It doesn't matter why we went in the first place. We cannot simply withdraw because we decide we're no longer happy with our original justification.

I think the recent Senate hearing and Bush's statement which was discussed here was orchestrated to put pressure on the Iraqi government to take more responsibility for domestic security. I don't think that after all of this, people in South Carolina are now suddenly wondering whether we ought to be in there, nor do I think the Republicans would be taking such a sentiment seriously if it weren't in their interest to do so. You're going to hear more about how the American people are getting tired of Iraq. You might even see a return of the protests. This is how we're going to negotiate with the Iraqi's. They rightly think its our mess to clean up, but if we're unwilling to do that they have to do it or live in it. They'll do it.

Our next problem will be keeping them from hating us for making them do it.

RE: CNOOC: Unocal Bid Not About Politics - Yahoo! News

Thirteen Kutztown Area High School students are facing felony charges for tampering with district-issued laptop computers.

According to parent testimony and confirmed by an otherwise vaguely-worded letter from the Kutztown Police Department, students got hold of the system's secret administrative password and reconfigured their computers to achieve greater Internet and network access.

Berks-Mont Newspapers - Kutztown Area Patriot - 13 teens face felonies

Since we, as a society, have decided that the public sector is not the most efficient way to do many things we have relied on the emergence of the "public-private" partnership. This is the way that most new roads are being looked at and almost every redevelopment project is done...

...It seems to me that the folks that are screaming the most
are those that most deeply embrace the idea of a much smaller public
sector with a greatly expanded role of the private sector.

This is rebutable but its an interesting observation.

[IP] Libertarians and Kelo