] Although solving the problems of space and time is
] difficult, these are not the only issues. Work that takes
] place over long distances means that communication will
] often involve different cultures. Participants may be
] surprised by such interactions because they have not
] considered various cultural differences and how they
] impact the daily work of long-distance teams.

Best Slashdot link in quite some time. The impact that various cultural differences have on how international teams approach problems. If you work with people overseas, or you think you might, this is a must read.

ACM Queue - Culture Surprises in Remote Software Development Teams - You can't hide from culture, yours or anyone else's.

] At the nerve center of each MER rover is a 6-by 9-inch
] electronics board containing one computer responsible for
] every process that goes into a mission, whether it be
] monitoring spacecraft health in transit, deploying
] parachutes during landing or roving about the red planet.
] The computer, called a RAD6000, is a tried and true
] component for NASA space mission that has formed the
] brains of past Mars missions in the, as well as the
] recent Stardust comet encounter.

More interesting technical details about the rovers.

Thinking on Mars: The Brains of NASA's Red Planet Rovers

] The decomposing remains of a 60-tonsperm whale exploded
] on a busy Taiwan street, showering nearby cars and shops
] with blood and organs and stopping traffic for hours,
] local newspapers said.

Random picture of the day - Whale Exploded

] If Dean could actually raise enough money online to match
] in aggregate the much larger and fewer donations Bush has
] bought from the plutocrats with his tax cuts, it would
] shake the system to its rotten core. Worse, if
] information from the Web and the Blogosphere were to
] start defining enough personal realities to contest the
] great mass of tube-zombies at the polls, the gazillions
] presently spent on television campaign ads would start to
] wither. An enormous amount of power and money might be at
] stake.

Barlow's argument is similar to one I offered Rattle after Iowa: that the Dems have lost the election because doing so is preferable to loosing control of their party to Dean's new infrastructure. Rattle countered that he thought Dean might have intentionally flamed out and is in the process of handing the infrastructure he built off to the old heart of the party. I'm still not sure which one of us is right.

BarlowFriendz: The Counter-Revolution Has Been Televised

] "I can say that Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar represent
] a threat to the world, and they need to be destroyed and
] we believe we will catch them in the next year," U.S.
] Army Lt. Col. Bryan Hilferty, a coalition spokesman, said
] Wednesday.

CNN.com - U.S. eyes spring offensive in Afghanistan - Jan. 29, 2004

] The subway train pulled up, and a man named Marc with a
] floppy blond Mohawk and a crimson sport coat let out a
] welcoming call from the platform. He carried an e-flat
] euphonium under his arm and had a habit of making
] noise, any noise. He was the nonleader of this nonevent:
] a "spontaneous, digitally organized" party on BART, as
] the Bay Area Rapid Transit is known.

SF hacker scene subway party makes NYT.

San Francisco Journal: Last Car. Geek Party. Spread the Word.

] Could the recognition of our imperfect understanding
] serve to establish the open society as a desirable form
] of social organization? I believe it could, although
] there are formidable difficulties in the way. We must
] promote a belief in our own fallibility to the status
] that we normally confer on a belief in ultimate truth.

Wow, this might be the most important thing I've read since MemeStreams started.

First off, despite the title, this is not an anti-capitalist screed. George Soros is an investment banker and the 38th richest man in the country. In fact, this article isn't really about capitalism. This article is about everything. The title is so poor that I almost changed it.

What Soros is saying about Capitalism is that there are people who accept the concept of free trade in a ideological way, in an absolutist way, and that is a problem. The problem with religious states, which requires the separation of church and state, is that when laws are the product of man, they are open to debate, but when laws are the product of God, to question is heresy. If you have a society in which the law cannot be questioned, you have a totalitarian society. It is only a matter of time.

The thing that Soros is saying here is that any absolutist ideology can be abused in this manner. It doesn't matter if your ideology is based on the Bible, or the writings of Marx, or the writings of Adam Smith. If you have a nation of people who believe that their principals are beyond question, ultimately you have a totalitarianism. It is only a matter of time before the inconsistencies your absolutism forces you to ignore cause fissures which break your society down.

Reading this essay caused me to think back across many of the discussions that I've had on this site over the past two years. My instinct that Fukuyama's belief in an ultimate solution was flawed. Being able to see great tragedies of history reflected in the idea of pre-emptive military action and being unable to demonstrate that its not "ok" if you're doing it for Democracy. In our worries about the state of the IT industry. In my various discussions about politics with people from various perspectives.

I've had a really hard time deciding where I fit in the political spectrum. I know what the tests tell me, but somehow I'm never comfortable with the answers. When I talk to conservatives they think I'm a liberal. When I talk to liberals they thing I'm a conservative (or at the least that I've been duped by them). One thing I've come away from years and years of these conversations with is the idea that people usually intertwine their identity and their perspective. They are a certain thing. They believe that thing is right. So they think a certain way. The way they think defines what group they see themselves in, which defines who they are, and we repeat. After years they get quite locked into a c... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

The Capitalist Threat - George Soros

] This brings up a first major point: legislators do not
] pass laws in the expectation that everybody who violates
] them will automatically be caught and punished. Rather,
] they often pass new laws in order to send a message -- to
] their voters (that they're doing something about their
] concerns) and to the criminals (that if caught they will
] be dealt with harshly). There is a well-known presumption
] that criminals are acting rationally (in the economic
] sense) and their behaviour is influenced by the perceived
] reward for a successful crime, and both the risk and
] severity of punishment. This theory is implicitly taken
] into account by legislators when they draft legislation,
] because in our current state of affairs most crimes go
] undetected and unreported. A panopticon singularity would
] completely invalidate these assumptions.

This article contains little material that ought to be new, although some of the links are nice. I recommend it because I said this exact thing before. People tend to believe you more readily when you can reference someone else who has already said it.

The Panopticon Singularity

Once we built a network
Made it from
Your tax dollars and mine
Once we built a network
Now it's theirs
Buddy, can you spare a dime?

Once we built a Highway
Called the Net
Gigabytes down the line
Now it just runs one way -
Outta here
Buddy, can you spare a dime?

bucy wrote:
] The only thing I know about Kerry is he was one of the
] sponsors of the Key Escrow bill a few years back...

Despite with the Dems may say about civil liberties they sure seem to oppose crypto proliferation.

RE: Kerry Carries 39% of NH