] What is fascinating is that before filing the defence
] brief, the prosecutor, that is the general counsel's
] office at the US Defence Department, approved it. As they
] are employees of the military, the department would have
] had to approve the press conference held on Wednesday by
] Mori and the others.

The DOD is trying to be a nice guy now that it is about a month or two from getting its ass handed to it in the Supreme Court.

A legal black hole in Cuba threatens to suck in some precious rights - www.smh.com.au

If you notice strange monkeys hanging around Google's main page today, that is because it is the chinese new year, and it is now the year of the monkey.

Year of the Monkey

] Second, sometimes smashing someone in the face is
] necessary to signal others that they will be held
] accountable for the intolerance they incubate. Removing
] the Taliban and Saddam sent that message to every
] government in the area.

This is a good series. This article offers a sound bitey version of why we went to War in Iraq.

War of Ideas, Part 5

] Anyway, for this we also needed something moving or
] changing very fast, so we decided to build a bolt gun. Of
] course, bolt guns aren't very fun unless you can see, in
] great detail, the object they are hitting explode, so
] these two projects seemed like a match made in nerd
] heaven. With the aforementioned micro-controller, we
] simply had no choice but to build a flash timing
] mechanism to capture images of hot bolt-on-food action.

The tale of what evils can occur when 3 nerds from MIT are bored over winter break. They build a bolt gun power by a BASIC stamp, that takes cool bolt-traveling-through-fruit-at high-velocity photos

Fruit Killing bolt gun powered by BASIC!

] We lost 437,000 information-services jobs between January
] 2001 and December 2003. That is 80 percent of the number
] we actually added between January 1998 and December 2000.

In other words, the economy has added 109,250 IT jobs since 1998, and 546,250 people to compete for them. This interview is with someone from the AFL-CIO... I don't like her tact on solving the problem, which is essentially violent from a libertarian perspective (use force to take money from rich people, use force to coerce organizations to employ us). However, her understanding of the problem is solid regardless of your political leanings.

MSNBC - A Serious Jobs Crisis

Wild lays the smack down:

] Inside the United States, where the war began, we
] must continue to give homeland security and law
] enforcement personnel every tool they need to defend
] us, the president said, noting that key provisions
] of the Patriot Act were set to expire next year.
]
] The terrorist threat will not expire on that
] schedule, he told lawmakers. Our law
] enforcement needs this vital legislation to protect our
] citizens. You need to renew the Patriot Act."

Fuck you Ashcroft. We are not interested in more Patriot Act. We do not live in the middle east. We live in America. We have rights and civil liberties built by our forefathers. You strip those from us and leave us with only what our forefathers would be rolling in their grave to learn about. You are not making me safer from terrorism by reading my bank account statemets without court concent but by dropping bombs on tents where terrorist reside. Also, you are not providing due process to those terrorist that reside in the United States. You only lock them up and throw away the key. Why not show the world our court system and due process and what happens to people/groups that carry out evil deeds.

Let the Patriot Act die is deserved death and bring on the guns and bombs where the real war of terrorism is fought.

MSNBC - Bush makes case for second term

Very pointless...yet somehow compelling.

virtual bubble wrap

Rattle's comments:

For several months now, work has been underway building the next version of MemeStreams. It has been necessary to recode most of the site from scratch, so its taking awhile. At any given time the trials of life, lack of funding, bad timing, hardware failure, and general bad luck is screwing up the works. However, we _are_ making progress.

Just before the new year, I hit the point in the development process where new capabilities of mining and graphing social network data were becoming available. I decided to go off on a little tangent, embrace the milestone, and do something to show our technology's progress. The result is the Year in Graphs 2003. Over the course of putting this together I've wound up fixing all kinds of problems with our database conversion code and wrote much of what will become the new graphing engine. I even had a really good "eureka" moment in relation to some of our network theory.. Its been time usefully spent.

That being said, this is all very kludgy. I did not spend that much time crossing I's and dotting T's.. The fonts in the nodes are hard to read, some of the graphs look "squished", its missing the "Show Links" feature the current Social Network portion of the sites has, etc.. There is much room for improvement with our graphing. I look forward to additional feedback.. :)

While these graphs may be fun to look at, the data they are built with is what's really exciting.. The same thing that allowed me to make these graphs is what's going to lead to improvements in the capabilities of the Reputation Agent.

Anyway, I hope you all enjoy browsing through this review of the past year!

MemeStreams - The Year in Graphs 2003

] This collection of web pages documents Brad's activity on
] the system and the people who's lives he effected, from
] the first day he logged on MemeStreams to the day he
] passed on.

Brad

] Nokia will make an internal version of the Perl scripting
] language for Series 60 smartphones available to its
] developer community, Lee Epting, Nokia's VP of Developer
] Relations, tells us. Nokia acknowledges a demand for more
] developer options as Nokia's Symbian-based Series 60
] platform reaches mass market volumes.

This qualifies as "rad".

The Register | Nokia to release Perl for smartphones