] The Federal Communications Commission is trying to clear
] the road for new Internet technologies to prosper today
] and in the future. Unfortunately, they are trying to
] accomplish this under rules defined in the
] Telecommunications Act of 1996, a law that was drafted
] before the rise of Internet services not carried via
] traditional copper telephone lines.

a short, but interesting commentary on pending VOIP FCC comment period, that will deside how this all ends...

--Abaddon

Ars Technica: VoIP poses a regulatory challenge to the FCC

Someone explain to me how they film 0g scenes again. Is this whole movie going to be close cropped? I think Ender's Game would make a better anime then a movie. But I'm still excited.... Also, this is yet more evidence that all the good pop culture is coming from the geeks.

News about Ender's Game: The Movie

] Asked about the 2.6 million jobs forecast, McClellan
] said, "The president is interested in actual jobs being
] created rather than economic modeling."
]
] He quoted Bush as saying, "I'm not a statistician. I'm
] not a predictor."

I almost memed this. How long has it been since that interview? Thats fairly fast turn around time for a backpedal! I wonder if he blurted out the wrong number and they are running damage control.

CNN.com - White House downplays job predictions - Feb. 18, 2004

In case you didn't figure it out. This doesn't really work well if the Pepsi is cold.

MacMerc.com: How to never lose Pepsi's iTunes giveaway

] Today my candidacy may come to an end--but our campaign
] for change is not over.

Dean throws in the towel

] One balmy May evening back in 2000, Dudley was standing
] around minding his own business when all of a sudden, a
] policeman pulled-up and demanded that Dudley produce his
] ID.  Dudley, having done nothing wrong, declined.  He was
] arrested and charged with "failure to cooperate" for
] refusing to show ID on demand.  And it's all on video.

An entertaining site about a supreme court case that will decide whether Police can demand ID for people stopped under "reasonable suspicion."

papersplease.org :: Hiibel

] The current VOIP conversation at the FCC and in state
] commissions is as if government responded to Henry Ford's
] new invention of the automobile by discouraging the
] construction of roads, and instead taxing cars in order to
] subsidize canals and railroads. As a former government official
] I can only say: We can do better.

tingilinde: reed hundt on broadband

] There is no shortage of people to do any kind of
] decent-paying work in India, period. The Army turns down
] at least 19 out of 20 applicants who want to be enlisted
] soldiers, and turns down 49 out of every 50 officer
] candidates, who must have college degrees even to apply
] in most cases.
]
] This goes back to that whole "one billion people" thing.
] If a million of them work in "offshore" positions, that's
] only one out of thousand. Make it 10 million, and it's
] still only one percent of the population, and as the
] prosperity created by the 10 million working for offshore
] companies wends its way through the economy, more
] children will be able to go to school longer, which will
] make the workforce progressively more educated, which
] will increase the supply of potential employees for
] "first world" companies.

This is an interesting, sobering look at life in india.

Slashdot | Indian Techies Answer About 'Onshore Insourcing'

Siemens will move most of the 15,000 software programming jobs from its offices in the United States and Western Europe to India, China and Eastern Europe.

Most Siemens Software Jobs Moving East

] This uncontrollable unraveling of reversibility is the
] true victory of terrorism. It is a victory visible in the
] underground and extensive ramifications of the event -
] not only in direct, economic, political, market and
] financial recessions for the whole system, and in the
] moral and psychological regression that follows; but also
] in the regression of the value system, of all the
] ideology of freedom and free movement etc... that the
] Western world is so proud of, and that legitimates in its
] eyes its power over the rest of the world.
]
] Already, the idea of freedom, a new and recent (sic)
] idea, is being erased from everyday lives and
] consciousness, and liberal globalization is being
] realized as its exact reverse: a 'Law and Order'
] globalization, a total control, a policing terror.
] Deregulation ends in maximal constraints and
] restrictions, equal to those in a fundamentalist society.

Baudrillard is perhaps living proof that the opposite of art is politics. I don't find myself standing with him in his world, but I find an honesty in his observations that perhaps those who stand with me are afraid to exhibit. There is an artistic purity to this essay. Like that feeling you get staring at a Rothko, or reading Hakim Bey. He makes a stark observation upon the radicalization that terrorism births, and the inevitable hypocrisy of attempting to secure the world while claiming to stand for freedom.

He also offers a unique cultural answer that I haven't seen yet, but which he feels is impossible in this case. Consumption. Assimilation. As one who strove for years to surf the edge of culture, and one who feels exasperatingly suffocated in recent years as I've found myself sliding back from it, I know the process well, as do many others on this system. Culture consumes; from Sex Pistols to Blink 182... from Nine Inch Nails to Janet Jackson... from the Computer Underground to Hackers: The Movie... There used to be a revolution on Haight street. Now there is a Gap and a Ben and Jerry's. Culture consumes everything... Nothing can escape it... The reason liberal culture is so successful is because it is like the borg. Died haired spiky metal leather jacket fuck you is boiled down and put in church with the rest of the sheep. Only the symbols remain... The style shucked from it's meaning. Again and again and again...

Baudrillard is wrong. We'll do it to fundamentalist Islam too... Those left wing kids that keep flying over there to act as human shields are actually our little cultural ambassadors, much to their chagrin. They are the first wave.

The Spirit of Terrorism -- Jean Baudrillard