] The retired politicians have agreed to revive the
] "Point-Counterpoint" segment on "60 Minutes,"
] television's most popular newsmagazine.
]
] In the two-minute debate, the two will face off on a
] subject of their own choosing. Sunday's segment was the
] first, and Clinton chose to talk about his successor's
] proposed tax cut; Dole gets to choose the next segment.]

Wow, actually looks like some interesting network TV...

Clinton VS. Dole: The Final Battle

] This section involves two tools, one for Windows, and one
] for OSX, which allow you to select text in any
] application, hit a hot key, and receive search results
] for that text. Both tools perform Google searches, and
] both have been adapted to perform MemeStreams searches as
] well.
]
] The power of these tools is that they extend searching
] such that it becomes a kind of augmented knowledge
] system. When you are reading or writing something, and
] you come upon a subject that you want more information
] about, you can get access to more information at the
] touch of a mouse.

MemeStreams makes you smarter!

I found this interesting. Olga Utkina, a female bodyguard. Talks about how females are now competitive, as clients in Moscow have gone from wanting "bruisers" to "shooters". Muscles don't so much matter when you got ace gals with gats.

This reminded me of Molly in Neurmancer in a pleasant way.

A Female Bodyguard Fights Back

] The only point of this site is to find out as much as
] possible about a North Korean military nuclear
] installation disguised as a subway.

Wow, looks like they could come from the Moscow Metro. Heavy Soviet influence. I guess it figures that communists make the best looking metros.

The Pyongyang Metro

] So who will perform the function of Microsoft in the
] Linux world?

More spiel from the interviewer here than from the interviewed, but still okay. Part 3 should be interesting.

Sony's Idei - Part 2 :: AO

] It's not that I'm bitter. Oh alright then, I am. When I
] was doing a weekly round-up of interesting web links in
] 1996 (still the top search result for the phrase "GLR
] jokes", if you'd like to check), I found myself using
] something very similar to what experts now call the
] weblog format. And was I hailed as the pioneer of a brave
] new form of distributed grassroots journalism? No, I was
] not.
]
] I was regarded - quite rightly, as it turned out - as
] some sort of nut who re-used the same HTML to update his
] home page every now and again. Don't get me wrong: I'm a
] huge fan of fanzines, home pages, and the whole
] do-it-yourself attitude. But because publishing one of
] these usually requires some element of effort, sometimes
] that's reflected in their contents.
]
] On the other hand, it's getting so easy to update a
] weblog that some users seem to type in their thoughts
] willy-nilly, posting unimaginable banalities, like a
] nation of Alan Partridges trying to fill an internet's
] worth of dead air: CDs they're listening to,
] scintillating accounts of their day at work, URLs of
] sites they feel they should acknowledge, despite having
] nothing new to say about them. It is like one of those
] terrible Christmas family newsletters for every single
] day of the year.

I love the conclusion of this article. It's so true:
"People used to worry about the government compiling a database of everything they knew about you and everything you did. But who'd have thought we'd be so keen to keep updating our own entries?"

Guardian Unlimited | Online | A blogger is a stalker's dream

] Three weeks ago, in a stunning raid, Russian hackers
] seized control of the servers that support one of the
] Internet's largest online gaming operations, demanding a
] ransom. It was a real-life, high-tech version of the
] movie Ocean's Eleven. By the time the ransom was paid,
] one key server -- the one containing all operational data
] for 120 Internet gaming sites and a long list of
] consulting clients -- seemed to be stripped of its data.
]
]
]
] At stake were all the operational records of a gambling
] empire. "We didn't even have the names of customers,"
] says Juan Bonilla, executive vice-president of Grafix
] Softech F.A. of San Juan, Costa Rica. "We lost
] everything." To make matters worse, little, if any, of
] the data had been backed up off-site. Grafix Softech was
] losing an estimated US$75,000 a day in profits, and the
] incident left it open to lawsuits from customers whose
] businesses relied on Grafix Softech's services. What
] could have been a major disaster became a bump in the
] corporate road. In an amazing feat of ingenuity, CBL Data
] Recovery Technologies Inc. of Markham, Ont., managed to
] recover all the lost data. It was a close call, admits
] Bill Margeson, president of CBL

Russian hackers raid largest online gaming operation

You've probably noticed that the look of the site is dramatically different. My goal with this is to make the site a little easier on the eyes.

The biggest change in this release is the Social Network Maping. If you click on the Social Network links around the site you'll be able to see who is linking who. The maps are interactive; you can move through the network from link to link by clicking on people's names.

This data is all based on Recommendations (not clickthroughs). It provides an excellent way to get feedback about the links you are providing. As the community is small, most people are connected to a small group of frequent posters. However, as the site grows, this feature should provide an interesting way to surf through the social network on the site in search of interesting people. Rattle deserves all of the credit for this feature.

The MemeBox has been updated. The frames version was a little cramped. This should be more comfortable to use.

New users will not show up in the recent posters list until they've recommend an article. I also fixed a bug with selecting multiple paragraphs of text with the bookmarklet.

02/16/03: UI Changes/Social Network Mapping

] NASA engineers are now almost certain that the space
] shuttle Columbia was destroyed when super-hot ionised air
] leaked through a puncture somewhere in the craft.

New Scientist

quoted:
====
Stella Liebeck of Albuquerque, New Mexico, was in the passenger seat of her grandson's car when she was severely burned by McDonald's coffee in February 1992. Liebeck ordered coffee that was served in a Styrofoam cup at the drive-through window of a local McDonald's.

After receiving the order, the grandson pulled his car forward and stopped momentarily so that Liebeck
could add cream and sugar to her coffee. (Critics of civil justice, who have pounced on this case, often charge that Liebeck was driving the car or that the vehicle was in motion when she spilled the coffee; neither is true.) Liebeck placed the cup between her knees and attempted to remove the plastic lid from the cup. As she removed the lid, the entire contents of the cup spilled into her lap.

The sweatpants Liebeck was wearing absorbed the coffee and held it next to her skin. A vascular surgeon determined that Liebeck suffered full thickness burns (or third-degree burns) over 6 percent of her body, including her inner thighs, perineum, buttocks, and genital and groin areas. She was hospitalized for eight days, during which time she underwent skin grafting. Liebeck, who also underwent debridement treatments, sought to settle her claim for $20,000, but McDonald's refused.

During discovery, McDonald's produced documents showing more than 700 claims by people burned by its coffee between 1982 and 1992. Some claims involved third-degree burns substantially similar to Liebeck's. This history documented McDonald's knowledge about the extent and nature of this hazard.

FACT SHEET: MCDONALD'S SCALDING COFFEE CASE