] Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld will now personally
] sign letters of condolence to families of troops killed
] in action, after the Pentagon acknowledged signing
] machines had been used in the past.

How to look like a complete jerk.

noteworthy wrote:
] ] If you are taken in by all the fanfare and hoopla
] ] that have attended Google's latest project, you would think
] ] Sergey and and Larry are well on their way to godliness.
] ]
] ] I do not share that opinion.

Nor do I, but for entirely different reasons then this author.

Google is getting a lot of attention for doing something that a lot of other people have been doing for years. Thats the point where you are too famous to be cool.

But this author seems to be confused about the greater point, which is that books and buildings full of them are rapidly going the way of the horse and carriage.

The old romance of books was always tied to the information that they contain. But as the information is moved online the romance continues, shucked of its meaning, and we see people who love what books are rather then what they do. These people are going to be very disappointed as time goes on.

Brewster Kahle, who ought to be celebrated by the mainstream, instead of Google, for this kind of work, gave a wonderful talk at the Library of Congress on monday which was carried on CSPAN under the heading "Digital Future" which I memed previously. (Search my memestream for "span" and you can probably watch the video online.)

The fact is that you can print a bounded book, and digital paper technologies mostly elminiate the need. Neither of these things are in widespread adoption, but they are available, and you'll have them soon. The ability to search, sort, organize, recontextualize, and recommend this information with computers will be a vast improvement on row after row of dusty, decaying stacks of paper that previously served as our information infrastructure. The ability to provide instant access to all of this information anywhere in the world will be a revolution in many quarters of the planet that have suffered for lack of knowledge. No longer will your social status prevent you from learning if you are sufficiently motivated, and the motivation to learn will be the greatest determining factor in the quality of one's life.

This is the potential of human knowledge coupled with information technology, and to oppose it for aesthetic reasons is despicable.

The reasonsable objection raised here is that of Intellectual Property. But what common sense cannot kill in a court room history will kill in the marketplace. People will use the information they have access to, and there is a lot of really valuable stuff which is unencumbered by copyright. As this change carries forward the information that matters will be the information that is free. The LA Times is not often blogged simply because it requires registration. By requiring registration they deminish their value in the blogosphere. The WSJ, a really good paper, is almost never blogged, because no one can afford to access it. Online, the WSJ doesn't matter.

There is a substantial need to pay people to produce information products full time. Figuring out how to do that in the context of the new technologies is hard. Our process thus far has consisted of a power struggle more then a dialog. Those who want to get paid have yet to feel particularly incented to present a reasonable way of doing so that doesn't skuttle the value of what they are being paid for. The changes I discuss here will press the issue further. Over the course of several decades the tables will turn, and those who make their living by keeping information bottled up will be forced to find an answer or become irrelevant and die.

RE: Google and God's Mind

] The defense claimed that the search at the airport in
] 2003 was not "reasonable" and therefore that evidence
] obtained from it should not be admitted. The Superior
] Court of California, County of San Mateo, is accustomed
] to dealing with cases that arose at the San Francisco
] Airport, but it's not particularly used to constitutional
] challenges to aviation screening procedures, nor to
] having multiple camera crews turn out for a single
] pre-trial evidentiary hearing in a misdemeanor drug
] possession case.

The outcome was as expected, it will be ongoing.

People vs. Barlow, recount

Very cool ...

A matrix giving the traffic volumes between origin and destination in a network has tremendously potential utility for network capacity planning and management.

Unfortunately, traffic matrices are generally unavailable in large operational IP networks. On the other hand, link load measurements are readily available in IP networks.

In this paper, we propose a new method for practical and rapid inference of traffic matrices in IP networks from link load measurements, augmented by readily available network and routing configuration information.

We apply and validate the method by computing backbone-router to backbone-router traffic matrices on a large operational tier-1 IP network -- a problem an order of magnitude larger than any other comparable method has tackled. The results show that the method is remarkably fast and accurate, delivering the traffic matrix in under five seconds.

Fast Accurate Computation of Large-Scale IP Traffic Matrices from Link Loads

] At least one senator hopes Congress will let the new rule
] stand. "The issuance of FASB's new rule marks a victory
] in the decade-long battle to reform an egregious
] accounting practice that contributed to the worst
] corporate accounting scandals in our nation's history,"
] Illinois Sen. Peter Fitzgerald said in a statement
] Thursday. "In the aftermath of Enron, WorldCom, Global
] Crossing, Tyco, Adelphia and other corporate scandals,
] Congress should be trying to ensure that corporate
] earnings reports are more, not less, reliable."

Such significant changes based on such disingenuous analysis...

Stock option expensing required next year

] For every $100 given to these groups in the month of
] December, Downhill Battle will send one lump of coal to
] the RIAA and MPAA. This is not a joke-- we are literally
] going to look up their addresses and send them coal.

Send the RIAA and MPAA a lump of coal for Christmas!

] Human beings, it turns out, are wired to make dumb
] investing mistakes. What's more, we are wired not to
] learn from them, but to make them again and again. If
] there is consolation, it is that it's not our fault. We
] are born suckers.

Born Suckers - The greatest Wall Street danger of all: you. By Henry Blodget

The battle is on for the swaying of hearts and minds of the Muslim masses. Its chief focus for now is the Middle East, but Pakistan and Afghanistan are very much on the radar screen of the Pentagon.

I thought this article was particularly interesting in that all of this military propaganda reminded me of how domestic political dialog has changed.

Odds are even in the 'information' war

] Artists produce visual art, writers produce words to tell
] stories, musicians produce songs. All of these things
] require at least four things the way I see it.
]
] 1) Perseverance - These people must be able to keep
] trying, even if they do not like how something they are
] working on is turning out. They don't just decide
] they can't do it and quit because it's too
] hard.
]
] 2) Creativity - These people have to obviously have
] something in their heads that they want and know how to
] get out onto a media that they can share with the rest of
] the world.
]
] 3) Balls - They also aren't afraid to put their work
] out there for the world to see. They aren't afraid
] of being laughed at because they know that its the best
] they could have done, and what does it mean if someone
] else makes fun of them?
]
] 4) Drive - They continue to work, learn, and grow at
] their skill by never being satisfied. By always pushing
] the limits of their abilities.

baudburn.com: Geeking in Style.: Comment on On Creation and Perseverance.

An interesting scramble of RSS feeds related to Nashville 2600. One MemeStream in there...

Planet Nashville 2600