] Hawaiian passengers can already check in over the
] Internet. Using BaggageDirect.com, they can now check in
] luggage from their home, office, or hotel (at least 12
] hours notice is required). When the passenger arrives at
] the airport, they go through security and directly to
] their departure gate.
]
] The goal is no lines, no waiting, and no hassles.
]
] Using guidelines approved by the Transportation Security
] Administration (TSA), BaggageDirect will send a trained,
] uniformed, and TSA-certified "mobile skycap" to retrieve
] the luggage and present the passengers with their
] boarding passes and baggage claim receipts. The cost for
] one person with two pieces of luggage is $30. It is $15
] for each additional person going to the same location.

Fool.com: Airline Eliminates Check-In Hassle [Motley Fool Take] September 10, 2004

] Believe it or not, according to QSR magazine, which
] serves the "quick serve" (a.k.a. fast food) restaurant
] industry, the world's largest toy distributor is...

Awesome.

Fool.com: The Stealth Toy Giant [Motley Fool Take] September 3, 2004

] Academy Award-winning actress Charlize Theron ("Monster")
] suffered an injury while filming the Paramount/MTV movie,
] "Aeon Flux."

I didn't know this was getting made into a live-action movie.

Charlize Theron Injured on Aeon Flux Movie Set

] There's a story of the orphaned lion who was raised by
] rangers in a South African game preserve, and who took as
] his role model their Australian cattle dog. And was very,
] very interested in wild antelope and learned to herd
] them.
]
] His interest in wild antelope was hard-wired. He had lots
] of innate behaviors, like sneaking, crouching and
] pouncing. But he had no idea at whom to direct that, so
] he pounced on his friends when he was playing with them
] -- the dog and the people. He was very interested in
] impalas, but the dog, his role model, herded them, so he
] herded them, too. Not a good way for a lion to make a
] living.

Excellent interview. The basic issue is that more survival behaviors that we would expect are taught rather than innate, and that the role of mimicry and education is critical for preserving wild animals as anything other than physical representations. The notion that reintroducing a naturally exitinct species may genetically be possible but without preserving their "culture" we still lose, was particularly interesting. I'll have to check out this book.

Salon.com Books | When animals go to school

] Perhaps Iraq would have been a disaster no matter what.
] But there's a thinly veiled racism behind such views,
] implying Iraqis are savages.

Makes a good point about the untenable position of the sanctioning of Iraq that most anti-war people don't appreciate but which Kerry seems to get. The point is that it hasn't worked in Cuba, and Iraq is far less isolated and insignificant from the global political space. The question of Iraq really does imply a question of timing and execution. That, I guess, was what was frustrating to me, and made it so defensible -- we had to do something (eventually) and supporting Saddam wasn't plausible -- but that did not say we needed to go into Iraq now, and so on.

MSNBC - Why Kerry Is Right on Iraq

] To get an idea of how Windows got to be such a mess,
] think of it as a house that was built on an island in the
] middle of a lake, deep in the countryside.

It is a good metaphor, except that it excludes the part about Microsoft building it for such an environment, and then marketting it in Shanghai, with big city features making it seem like the appropriate location. One could argue that Window 95 was not a Network-Focused operating system, but by 2000 they were getting in trouble about the webbrowser-as-inextractable-OS-element, and that doesn't make any sense without the intent to put it in a hostile urban environment.

No, he doesn't need to bash Microsoft... but it comes off as praise as expressed.

'SP2' a Must For XP Users (washingtonpost.com)

] German scientists have shown that the changeover from
] free-flowing traffic to a traffic jam (in which cars on a
] highway are greatly slowed or halted, at least
] temporarily) conforms to the well-known physics of phase
] transitions, an example of which is the transition from
] water to ice. In other words, traffic jams are not random
] patterns, but are deterministic in nature; that is, when
] a parameter exceeds a threshold value--such as the flux
] of cars--then local perturbations can grow, possibly
] leading to jams, analogous to the nucleating effect of
] tiny ice grains in a body of water being frozen. Once
] formed the jam moves along the highway as if it were a
] kind of "solid," with identifiable edges and with a
] "vapor" of comparatively free cars in front of and behind
] it. The information gained in this sort of research, the
] researchers believe, might lead to more accurate traffic
] forecasts and could be used in future "intelligent"
] transport systems.

The physics of traffic jams

] But now, according to several groups of researchers in
] America and Germany, there is something that drivers can
] do to take back control over the roads. Get adaptive
] cruise control. And, of course, use it.

Economist.com | Traffic jams

] At this point, the less l33t people would generally give
] up and either 1) do something else or 2) look deep into
] goatse's anus with a 10-yard stare.. The more l33t
] victims would launch ethereal and try to figure out what
] was going on.. Eventually they would mumble something
] about "rogue APs" (WRONG!) or ARP poisoning (WRONG!) or
] DNS poisoning (WRONG!) and do something else..

Goatse at Defcon -- brought to you by airpwn

] A lobby group called Downhill Battle has set up a link
] using file-sharing software to distribute the SP2 update.

Exactly.

BBC NEWS | Technology | File-sharers offer Windows update