This book was published in March by Brookings Press. Excerpts from the first chapter:

Movable type presses were available in China as early as the eleventh century, but they were little used and had essentially no influence. The European invention of the printing press transformed Europe because Europe was ready to be transformed.

We are now, potentially, at a similar turning point. Information technology may once again be poised to transform politics and identity. If the print revolution made possible the nation-state system and eventually national democracy, where might the digital revolution lead us? Can it help us create new, and possibly better, ways of running the world?.

This is an idea that I have a lot of interest in.

The Coming Democracy: New Rules for Running a New World

The MemeStreams site code has been updated to fix a number of issues with RSS.

1) All feeds are now RSS 2.0.
2) Links in meme descriptions have been slightly reformatted for clarity.
3) The main page's RSS feed now includes the author of the post.
4) Browsers such as Safari will now detect RSS feeds.

RSS feeds are not just for news readers. It is possible to power an external website using your RSS feed. My website is an example of this. There are numerous libraries available that allow you include content from your RSS feed in other webpages. I'm currently using a PHP library called OnyxRSS, which no longer appears to be available. Magpie may currently be the best option available to others looking to do something similar.

MemeStreams Site Update: RSS Improvements

SCOTUSBlog Becomes RAICHBlog: Marty Lederman of SCOTUSblog has come up with the interesting idea of getting a bunch of bloggers together to blog about today's Raich decision.

Those of you interested in the "pot case" might find the current discussion on SCOTUSblog to be interesting. Linking indirectly...

SCOTUSBlog on Pot case

We show that network theory, combined with the analysis of roll-call votes using singular value decomposition, successfully uncovers political and organizational correlations between committees in the House.

A network analysis of committees in the US House of Representatives [PDF]

flynn23 wrote:

If Apple has licensed QuickTransit for an Intel-powered Mac, all current applications should just work, no user or developer intervention required.

If this is indeed true, then the world will be turned upside down on Monday.

Well, it appears half true. Apple is making an Intel powered mac. The QuickTransit Tangent seems a figment of this reporter's imaginination though... at least without anything to substaniate it.

o Since no OS will be married to any hardware platform, all bets are off.

I think this decision is a lot less important then most people are making it out to be. Even if I had QuickTransit it doesn't mean my commodity PC will instantly run OSX. OSX depends on lots of particular hardware being present. If I'm going to make computers that have all the right hardware, along with a QuickTransit chip... Well why don't I just go ahead and do that right now with a PowerPC chip? I think there is some sort of legal reason why people don't make cheap OSX compatible computers, and I don't think its likely to change. Even if Apple goes to Intel procs in its computers this does not mean I'll be able to run OSX on non-apple hardware. From a consumer perspective, nothing has changed.

RE: Hollywood Orders: Apple Wed Intel

Mike the Usurper wrote:

In the court's main decision, Stevens raised concerns about abuse of marijuana laws. "Our cases have taught us that there are some unscrupulous physicians who overprescribe when it is sufficiently profitable to do so," he said.

While I certainly understand what Stevens is saying here, what I don't understand is how it applies. In this case they are talking about growing your own, not someone trying to make a profit.

This is a good question. In general the media consistently misreports Supreme Court decisions. Don't listen to them. The subtleties of this stuff are over the heads of the imaginary idiots the news media thinks its readers are. A good example is the Hamdi v. Rumsfeld decision, which was largely misreported as "a strong affirmation of the rights of the accused," which I think is hardly accurate.

This Yahoo article raises a question about the distinction between federal laws related to "gun free school zones" and federal pot laws, but doesn't answer it. The answer to that question, and yours, are quite clearly spelled out in the decision. [PDF]

RE: Court Rules Against Pot for Sick People - Yahoo! News

Is it possible in America today to convince anyone of anything he doesn't already believe? If so, are there enough places where this mingling of minds occurs to sustain a democracy? The signs are not good.

Is Persuasion Dead? - New York Times

Employers added 78,000 non-farm payroll jobs in May, the smallest gain since August 2003 and a sharp slowdown from the 274,000 added in April, the Labor Department said.

On the matter of last month's jobs numbers...

U.S. Economy Continues to Produce Jobs, At Slower Rate

The creation of the .xxx net domain has come under fire from net veterans.

The decision was called "obscene" by Karl Auerbach, former board member of Icann which approved the .xxx plan.

The controversy over the XXX domain is getting MSM coverage. The thing that goads me is that while this is a really bad idea, so are the whois requirements. In fact the whois requirements are about 1000 times worse. And yet no one cares. People have been taught to believe in freedom of speech, but not in privacy.

BBC NEWS | Technology | Net porn plan labelled 'obscene'

First seen live at The Technics World DMC DJ Championships 2005 UK heats (minus the outfit !!)

Werd!

Keltech strikes back, star wars scratch video, empire strikes back