] The space shuttle Columbia broke up as it descended over
] Texas Saturday toward a planned landing at Kennedy Space
] Center in Florida, showering debris across southeastern
] Texas and into Louisiana.

This might sound like a shitty thing to say, but I want to observe that this just doesn't seem as important as it did last time. Maybe its because I'm older. Maybe its because there has been so much bad news for the past few years that you don't really care anymore. You get numb after a while...

CNN.com - Columbia shuttle breaks up over Texas - Feb. 1, 2003

BellSouth will stop offering residential customers its DSL Talking service next week, ending one of the first attempts in the United States to sell phone service over digital subscriber lines.

Sure we're deploying advanced data services in exchange for access to the LD market

] President Bush has approved the White House's
] long-awaited national cybersecurity strategy, a landmark
] document intended to guide government and industry
] efforts to protect the nation's most critical information
] systems from cyberattack.
]
] In an e-mail sent Thursday to White House officials,
] cybersecurity adviser Richard Clarke said that the
] National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace has received
] Bush's signature and will be released to the public in
] the next few weeks.

After all the controversy about possible revised versions of this document, you mean to tell me that they fucking approved it without allowing public comment on the final draft?! If this thing is significantly different from the version they posted online in October, then you can rack this up as the administration giving the security industry, and the public at large, a big middle finger. This is NOT democratic, and if they think for one second that they have all the right answers we are in a lot of trouble.

(Slightly reminded of the military establishment's opinion of Rumsfeld.)

Bush Approves Cybersecurity Strategy (TechNews.com)

] The shuttle is scheduled to be landing at 6:16AM Pacific
] Time in Florida early Saturday Morning, after a reentry
] that will cross just north of the Bay Area of California
] and then continue eastward before sunrise.

People in California might want to stay up late tonight.

[IP] Rare opportunity to see shuttle reentry in western USA

] I think what happened here is that the filmmakers were
] fascinated by the original article, did some research
] that hooked them on this world, and then trusted the
] world would be enough to power the movie. It isn't. We
] need a stronger conflict, as we had in "The Fast and the
] Furious," and better and more special effects (the
] crashes all seem to happen at a distance).

I.E. Its not enough to provide a look at the biker culture. The main characters have to make their money dealing drugs, and they have to kill about 300 people on screen before the movie is over.

Honestly, this movie does sound like it makes some stupid mistakes in terms of how it manages the audience's emotions, but what the critics are most unhappy about, it seems, is the fact that the characters sound like they approximate real people, and not whacked out machine gun bearing movie super criminals.

An interesting contrast here to most media about "computer hackers" and how people in that scene feel about how they are protrayed. I wonder what the motorcycle scene will think about this movie.

The people demand unrealistic super criminal depictions of sub cultures, and are angry when they don't get it, and yet on the other hand when they do get it, they then actually expect real people who are involved in said subcultures to fit their unrealistic super criminal movie depictions, and hold them responsible as if they did.

Its gotten to the point where "suspension of disbeleif" kicks in because there AREN'T enough explosions.

Media hates BIKER BOYZ because its realistic

Please read and rerecommend. I want this to get as much coverage on the site as possible, and I want feedback.

Currently the privacy policy says that your reputation tables are private. This reflects the fact that I think what you read ought to be your own business.

However, what you recommend is not exactly the same as what you read, and this is reflected in the reputation data. When you recommend something you are telling the site that you like it. Telling the site implies that you don't mind the site knowing. In fact, you want the site to know. If I do a little digging I can see who you got an article from, directly. This is a bit of an oversite. Something that can be "matured" out of the code. Thats one direction to go in from here. Keep the reputation data as private as possible.

However, if I monitor the site, and I see a certain person recommend an article, and then you rerecommend it, I'll know where you got it from. I do this often enough, in an automated fashion, for long enough, and I'll get a pretty good understanding of who you are reading. The site can't protect you from this. By recommending articles you are making them public. By making them public, you are giving up some of your privacy.

The only way to truely protect the fact that you are reading someone's recommendations is to never recommend their recommendations. They will still show up in the agent, but this information, I think, is private and ought to stay that way.

However, and as I've hopefully illustrated, the recommendations are public in a very real way. What I want to ask the site is if the recommendation DATA ought to be public too.

The reason I want to ask you this is because Rattle has assembled another visualization. This visualization is interactive. You can see a graph of the people who are highly connected to you, click on their names, and see a graph of the people who are highly connected to them, and so on.

Right now this data is amusing but not all that rich. There are about 15 people who regularily post to the site, and they hold all the reputation capital. Everyone's graphs look pretty similar, because we are all really recommending content from the same 15 people, even those of us who don't often recommend content and who aren't often read.

This is going to change.

As this site scales, clusters are going to form. I think the one that currently exists will always exist, but there will be others. People will begin to have different perspectives on the data, based on their interests. Thats what this site is designed to do.

And as those different communities of interest begin to form, the maps of the reputation data rattle is developing will become richer, and you will be able to surf through MemeStreams via the reputation system, hopping from person to person in search of interesting ideas.

I think this is a very compelling feature set, and I want to enable it. But, I've promised to keep your reputation data private. All of it. This promise may not have been very well thought out, but I did make it. So I can only break it with your permission, and that is what I am asking for.

I want to publish your recommendation related reputation data. Your clickthrough related reputation data will stay private. What is published is the number of times you have rerecommended articles from another person on the site, in the form of a graph.

Its similar to the graph on the "Visualizing Memestreams" page, but it is labelled, and interactive.

] "It's scary, okay?" he says. "Let's face it: There are
] guys at the Pentagon who have been involved in
] operational planning for their entire lives, okay? . . .
] And for this wisdom, acquired during many operations,
] wars, schools, for that just to be ignored, and in its
] place have somebody who doesn't have any of that
] training, is of concern."

Schwarzkopf on the impending war. There is a lot of interesting content in this article, and there is a lot of journalistic fluff. Read the quotes from Schwarzkopf himself and the commentary at the end about heros. Skip all the stuff in the middle about Schwarzkopf's reputation. Its a labored attempt to find an unrelated reason to discount his opinion and it fails.

Desert Caution (washingtonpost.com)

] Through most of the 19th century, the British Navy
] exhibited that kind of thing. But it was quite
] interesting the way they did it. They tended to let other
] countries, mainly France, do the early experiments and
] come out with new kinds of ships. If something looked
] like a good idea, they could come in and quickly overtake
] the innovator. They seemed to do that as a way of
] capitalizing on their advantage and saving resources.

A small but interesting interview with an 81 year old military futurist known as Yoda.

Wired 11.02: The Marshall Plan

] As of next Monday I will be on tour. So, in an effort to
] cut myself some slack from the few precious civilian days
] remaining, I'm opting to post the following talk, which
] I gave last year at the Vancouver Art Gallery. VAG had
] mounted an ambitious if oddly titled (The Uncanny) show
] around the theme of "the cyborg". Since this seemed to be
] "the cyborg" as academics understand "the cyborg", and
] not just a cyborg, or cyborgs, as you or I might
] understand cyborg(s) I took it upon myself to lower the
] tone of the proceedings with the following.

What were things like before television?

William Gibson: In the Visegrips of Dr. Satan (w/ Vannevar Bush and Google)

] Iraq will chair the United Nations' most important
] disarmament negotiating forum during the panel's May
] session.
] At the rules-minded United Nations, it's not a country's
] status with international weapons inspectors, but the
] letters in its name that determine which member state
] chairs the Conference on Disarmament.
] "The irony is overwhelming," a U.S. diplomat said.

Iraq to chair U.N. disarmament conference