] Diana Duyser's mystical grilled cheese sandwich is for
] sale -- again.
]
] The massive online auction house eBay admitted Tuesday it
] made a judgment error in taking down Duyser's sale item:
] half of a 10-year-old grilled cheese sandwich that she
] says has an image of the Virgin Mary on it.
]
] An e-mail Duyser received from eBay had said the sandwich
] broke eBay's policy, which ``does not allow listings that
] are intended as jokes.''

Herald.com | 11/16/2004 | eBay calls pulling ''Virgin Mary'' cheese sandwich from bidding ``a mistake''

] "Business should get used to paying taxes and
] observing the law and not seek ways to avoid paying
] taxes," Mr Putin said in his speech to the Russian
] Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs.

Sounds less sinister when Buffett says it of American companies... why? Oh yeah:

] "The state will guard the interests of reputable
] business, and large-scale investigations, including tax
] probes, should not be regarded as a signal that every
] newly founded company poses a threat to the state's
] interests," he said.

Because "State's Interests" mean "Putin's Interests", not 'the good of Russia' or its economy.

Times Online - Markets

] Randy Voland, project engineer at the Langley Research
] Center in Hampton, Va., another NASA site, said
] preliminary data indicated the X-43A was traveling at
] Mach 9.7, or 9.7 times the speed of sound, when it
] separated from its booster rocket at 111,000 feet about
] 90 seconds after launch. At that point, he said, the
] plane sustained its speed at Mach 9.6, or about 6,600
] miles an hour, during its 10-second engine burn.
]
] "It looked really, really good," Mr. Voland said of the
] flight. "In fact, it looked like one of our simulations."

The New York Times : Science : NASA Jet Sets Record for Speed

Today is National Computer Security Day in Ireland. The message is simple: get up-to-date antivirals, a firewall, and patch your box. A good message.

National Security Day - Home

] WASHINGTON (Reuters) - EarthLink Inc. ELNK.O and Yahoo
] Inc. YHOO.O said on Monday they would begin tests of a
] new anti-spam technology that encodes digital signatures
] into customers' e-mail as a way to separate legitimate
] messages from unwanted spam.
]...
] Yahoo's DomainKeys embeds outgoing messages with an
] encrypted digital signature matched to a signature on the
] server computer that sends the message.

In the absence of a consensus, we will again have a competition of who carries the most weight and includes the most users. This is a good start toward that. If AOL comes onboard, we'd have a significant percentage of usage; considering that Microsoft, the other big player, has worn out its welcome, that may be enough to be declared Critical Mass.

Reuters | Latest Financial News / Full News Coverage

] The design gap between computer-as-box and
] computer-as-door persists because of a diminished
] conception of the user. The user of a piece of social
] software is not just a collection of individuals, but a
] group. Individual users take on roles that only make
] sense in groups: leader, follower, peacemaker, process
] nazi, and so on. There are also behaviors that can only
] occur in groups, from consensus building to social
] climbing. And yet, despite these obvious differences
] between personal and social behaviors, we have very
] little design practice that treats the group as an entity
] to be designed for.
]
]
] There is enormous value to be gotten in closing that gap,
] and it doesn't require complicated new tools. It just
] requires new ways of looking at old problems. Indeed,
] much of the most important work in social software has
] been technically simple but socially complex.

This is a strong essay that I couldn't quite find the right hooks to quote to convince you to read it -- but you should. It nicely summarizes -- in a way I haven't seen before -- why some of the new group stuff works, and why some of the common group phenomina is endemic to the mediums as presented. We talked to Clay on our radio show one day -- and he was great. We at least mentioned Memestreams, and it would be interesting if he's familiar with it and how it would be positioned within this essay.

This also adds ammunition to the design of one of my future works, collaborative desktops -- graphical wikis, kind of. Imagine your desktop as a virtual desktop, your various friends a spacial scroll away -- look at what they are doing right now, what their environment looks like, place things in their attention, onto their desktop...

Shirky: Group as User: Flaming and the Design of Social Software

] Yahoo! Hires WSJ.com Founder
]...
] Dow Jones Acquires MarketWatch, Deal Consolidates Online
] Financial News Market

It was actually expected that Yahoo! might buy MarketWatch; this is kind of a funny mix of daily news (Dow Jones' MarketWatch competitive/complimentary page is WSJ.com).

MediaDailyNews 11-15-04

] Energy drink maker Red Bull has completed the purchase of
] the Jaguar Racing team from automaker Ford. The new team
] will be branded Red Bull Racing and will be powered by
] engines supplied by Cosworth.
] ...
] The sale brings to an end Ford's disastrous four year run
] in Formula One. Jaguar entered F1 after buying out the
] Stewart Ford team but has been unable to compete with the
] likes of Ferrari, McLaren, Williams, Renault and BAR-Honda.

Ferrari, McLaren... Red Bull. Sounds like the same league, right?

(Yes, it is only a money and individual-talent game, not a matter of owner-corporate-competence in the racing sector)

TSN.ca - Auto Racing - Canada's Sports Leader

] An upcoming Microsoft software product for clustered servers
] won't run on Intel's high-end Itanium 2 chip, according to a
] report first published on News.com. Instead, it will be
] optimized for a more mainstream type of server chip from Intel
] and rival Advanced Micro Devices

I would say this is yet another set back for Intel:Itanium, except that in real clustering environments -- compute loads where the difference between an Itanium and a Xeon is significant -- Microsoft is almost completely irrelevant. Microsoft was at Supercomputing this year, with a two-story booth... and almost no attention. I saw Linux support touted by the hardware vendors far more (10:1?) than any mention of Microsoft products.

Microsoft Nixes Intel's Itanium Chip

] His final wager had Alex Trebek scratching his head, but
] Kermin was clearly sending a message to fellow computer
] nerds. His wager:
]
] $1337

Yeah CMU.

Thousand Robots: Jeopardy College Tournament Game Won by