] NHL veterans Chris Pronger and Jim McKenzie think this
] lockout is far worse than the one that wiped out half a
] season 10 years ago.
]
] They don't think they'll be playing again until 2006.
]
] "I think you're looking at, at the very earliest, January
] '06 for the start of a season," said McKenzie, a forward
] with the Nashville Predators.

Veterans Pronger and McKenzie don't think hockey will return until 2006

This rules.

Exotic Guitars - Skeletar

] The San Jose Mercury News reports that "Gary Webb, a
] former Mercury News investigative reporter, author and
] legislative staffer who ignited a firestorm with his
] controversial stories, died Friday in an apparent suicide
] in his suburban Sacramento home. He was 49."
]
] The Mercury News says that "Webb, an award-winning
] journalist, was ... perhaps best known for sparking a
] national controversy with a 1996 story that contended
] supporters of a CIA-backed guerrilla army in Nicaragua
] helped trigger America's crack-cocaine epidemic in the
] 1980s.

Hacker Con circuit speaker Richard Thieme gives some personal comments on the passing of investigative journalist Gary Webb. Maybe of interest...

Richard Thieme: My Last Talk with Gary Webb

] The foreign militants are flush with cash, use a highly
] sophisticated code when communicating, travel in small
] groups at night, are disciplined and have access to
] laptop computers, Pakistani military officials say. The
] network has even sent e-mail messages, letters and DVD's
] to Pakistani soldiers fighting in the tribal areas urging
] them not to kill their fellow Muslims on behalf of
] America, according to Western diplomats.

More rumors of sophisticated technology in the hands on Al'Q leadership...

The New York Times - Intelligence: A Hostile Land Foils the Quest for bin Laden

noteworthy wrote:
] If I were an IBM board member, or anyone who cared about
] the long-term health of IBM or the US technology industry or
] the whole blooming US economy, I'd be unspeakably
] depressed.
]
] Know this for sure: Some company will build all this and more
] into a radically more powerful, radically simpler PC. Will it
] be an American company? Don't count on it.

I guess I violated the point of this blog by actually reading this article. Its silly. Everything this person asks for is software, which has nothing at all to do with selling PCs (and a lot of what this person asks for is incredibly naive).

There is little room for innovation in the PC market. These are standardized goods. Some companies are in it just because it generates a lot of revenue, at volume, but its not central to IBM's business. Its possible to make PCs poorly, and IBM does it well, but in their history they have tried several times to innovate in this market and they have failed consistently, because this market is about standardization and innovation makes you incompatible.

Outsourcing PC making to China is no more a threat to American competitiveness then the outsourcing of the manufacture of the components within, which has already moved to Asia.

The competitive markets in the PC world are media PCs, which are tied up by intellectual property issues and will most likely be dominated by consumer electronics firms, and mobile devices, which are also far removed from IBM's business. Both markets have significant American players, but neither is lead domestically.

A more significant threat to domestic leadership in technology comes from our technology adoption rate. Europeans and Japanese make good cellphones because people in those places buy them up more rapidly then we do. Japanese and Koreans are going to make more interesting internet media technologies because they have more bandwidth at home. On the other hand, we're going to do VOIP, because our vast country has a more immediate need for it.

On the whole, we're clearly going to pass the point where American know how gives us a technological edge. We're entering a period where the unique cultural identities of a nation impact the technologies they create. I don't think any one country is suited to dominate this. You can do some things with policy and funding to drive things, but only to an extent. Accidents of geography and perspective will have much greater effects.

RE: How to Build a Better PC, by David Gelernter

] In the early 90's, Kramer became interested in the idea
] that the public might do a better job of protecting its
] rights than the courts. He became convinced that the
] framers of the Constitution expected it to be interpreted
] not by unelected judges but by the people themselves --
] through petitions, juries, voting and civil disobedience.
] Several years later, he was astonished to find the
] Supreme Court striking down laws one after the other and
] claiming to do so in the name of the founders' vision.

Frankly, the people of the United States are not particularly interested in freedom, nor do we seem to understand it very well. We want to be safe from the scary things we see on our televisions. We want to control things that we don't like. Whether they are administrated by the federal, state, or local governments, tort/civil cases, or voluntary mandatory contractual arrangements like employment contracts and homeowners associations, laws regulate every aspect of our lives, from when you can buy a beer, to what color you can paint your garage door.

The freedom that we have consists of a vauge choice between two extremely entrenched political parties, the ability to pursue most economic business with comparatively little restriction versus many other societies (assuming you have the means), and a precious few fundamental rights which are enshrined in the Constitution and defended only by the court system.

The later rights are extremely controversial as a practical matter. They've received quite a battering as people have argued time and time and time again that the thing they want to control really isn't the thing that the founders were trying to defend. If the court's ability to uphold the bill of rights and act as a check upon the power of our popularly elected government was done away with, great swathes of our culture would be banned on short order, and our anti-terrorism efforts would see us rapidly deteriorate into a police state.

This observation isn't anti-populist. Its realist. I wish that I found myself in a society that valued freedom. I don't. America values wealth over freedom; safety over freedom; religious morality over freedom; even aesthetics over freedom. It is natural now that we turn to wrapping our calls for a tyranny of the majority in the rhetoric of populism. Its the only way we'll be able to smash those miserable amendments for good. This effort isn't populist. Its anti-freedom.

The argument presented here is tortuous in its logic. The court system is the only institution in our government that respects fundamental rights, so people who are interested in protecting fundamental rights ought to work to limit the power of the court system? This seems an attempt by the right to build sympathy from some of the duller minds on the left for its ongoing campaign against checks and balances.

Popular Constitutionalism

It's that time of year again.

An annual compendium of ideas from A to Z.

This is a huge collection of short articles. I'll list a few that are particularly insightful. I've tried to cull as much as possible. Best get a star...

Acoustic Keyboard Eavesdropping
'Acting White' Myth, The
Augmented Bar Code, The
Do-It-Yourself Attack Ad, The
Feral Cities
Fertile Red States
Foolproof Death Penalty, The
*Hawkishness as Evolutionary Holdover
*Income-Variability Anxiety
Invitation-Only, Incentivized Campaign Rally, The
Kill Midlevel Terrorists
Land-Mine-Detecting Plants
*Lawfare
*Listening for Cancer
Making Vaccines Good Business
**Popular Constitutionalism (I'm going to separately meme this...)
*Professional Amateurs
Purple-State Country Music
Strategic Extremism
*Wal-Mart Sovereignty

The Year in Ideas

] When I pointed out to the officials that they only had
] authority to search for threats to the aircraft, one of
] them, a bug-eyed, crew-cutted troglodyte, declared that,
] if I had taken any of these substances, then I would have
] endangered Flight 310. That such an obviously ungifted
] person was capable of so imaginative a conceptual leap
] remains a marvel to me.

Barlow is contesting charges stemming from the discovery of drugs in his baggage by airport security personnel, claiming that the search was unconstitutional because it was not limited to what is minimally needed to discover explosives.

BarlowFriendz: A Taste of the System

] NewsKnowledge and The Hive Group have joined forces to
] bring you News Maps, visual maps of the NewsIsFree
] headline database. News Maps allow you to quickly scan
] dozens of news articles and instantly understand what's
] being reported all over the world.
]
] Each square in the News Map is an article. You can obtain
] additional detail on each article by moving your mouse
] over it. You can read an article by clicking on it.
]
] The Hive Group's Honeycomb algorithm organizes news
] headlines by source. Size and Color information indicate
] article age and popularity (described below). You can
] easily filter and rearrange you results to view articles
] that meet certain criteria, or that contain certain text.

Very cool!

NewsIsFree: NewsMaps - in collaboration with The Hive Group

] Students at one of the area's largest Christian schools
] are reading a controversial booklet that critics say
] whitewashes Southern slavery with its view that slaves
] lived "a life of plenty, of simple pleasures."
]
] Leaders at Cary Christian School say they are not
] condoning slavery by using "Southern Slavery, As It Was,"
] a booklet that attempts to provide a biblical
] justification for slavery and asserts that slaves weren't
] treated as badly as people think.
]
] Principal Larry Stephenson said the school is only
] exposing students to different ideas, such as how the
] South justified slavery. He said the booklet is used
] because it is hard to find writings that are both
] sympathetic to the South and explore what the Bible says
] about slavery.

This is an interesting story. Is this a good idea or a bad idea? Its difficult to tell. Does this "Christian" school teach "different ideas" about Religion? If so, then I'd say this is no different. If not, then I'd say they are being selective about what to indoctrinate and what not to indoctrinate.

newsobserver.com Christian School teaches multiple views on Slavery