] 'Bring them on!" President Bush challenged the early
] Iraqi insurgency in July of last year. ... Almost
] every day, in campaign speeches, Bush speaks with
] bravado about how he is "winning" in Iraq. "Our strategy
] is succeeding," he boasted to the National Guard
] convention on Tuesday.
]
] But, according to the US military's leading strategists
] and prominent retired generals, Bush's war is already
] lost.

[ There's not even a single key quote to meme here. Every single paragraph is damning. Ret. Gen. Odom led the NSA, Ret. Gen. Hoare headed Cent. Com., Jeffrey Record and W. Andrew Terrill are professors of strategy at two US war collges.

These aren't armchair pundits like we are... they know a few things, and they bring up failures on a ton of fronts. Go read it. -k]

Guardian Unlimited | Guardian daily comment | Far graver than Vietnam

This is like iChat's voice capability, that works between PCs and Macs. The audio is good. Someone should setup a memestreams server for conference calls, so we can hear Vile talk shit. Very nice. Its free, but it costs 1.7 cents a minute to call a real phone number from your PC.

Skype: Cross Platform, Full Duplex, Conference Call Capable, Voice IM System

] Among Putin's reforms announced Monday: the country's 89
] regional governors will no longer be elected by popular
] vote. Instead, he will appoint them and regional
] assemblies would approve the appointments.
]
] He also announced on Monday that seats in the Duma
] (Russia's national parliament) allocated to single-member
] constituencies will be replaced with a fully proportional
] system. The move "could see the few remaining independent
] voices forced out of the federal parliament"

This isn't as serious as it might seem, in a way. Most Russians figure that Putin will never leave office... and most still vote for him. And the legislative branch hasn't had any real power since Putin took office. Its more like that he is formalizing the way things work in practice. So... no real change here. Next he'll cancel the term limits. It is all very predictable. The Russian people have chosen dictatorship over corrupt democracy/oligarchy. Putin is a facist, but his strength is reassuring. After the debauchery of the Yeltsin years... you can hardly blame them.

Puntin uses school attacks to cripple democracy in Russia.

Zifty.com is a Atlanta-only version of Kozmo.com. They delievery pretty much anywhere inside the perimeter (and noticeably north of I-20...) with the typical Kozmo-ish stuff: Foods, snacks, movies and games.

update their delivery space is more midtown centered. Map is here: https://www.zifty.com/deliveryarea.html

On the cool side, all the food is from local businesses, like Jakes' ice cream, etc.

Me: $5 for cigarettes... if you're drunk and there's no store near, its nice. Food is a bit overpriced, and takes 90 minutes if its from a restaurant, so plan ahead. Snacks are quick, though.

Zifty.com - Localized version of Kozmo.com

Kaiju Big Battel is a live event series that revolves around tournament-style performances, which are a tongue-in-cheek hybrid of American pro-wrestling, Japanese-monster-movie mayhem, and lowbrow pop-culture. Click here for the full "About Kaiju Big Battel".

What is Kaiju Big Battel?

Reputation Systems Blow?

presnick: When Reputation Systems Are Worse Than Useless

My education has been greatly inhibited by so often being limited to the abstracts unless I go to the library and track the journal down. Sneaker net sucks.

Science Publishing Needs to be more open

Truly decentralised peer-to-peer (P2P) software can't be held accountable for its misuse, according to a US federal appeals court.

US Circuit Court in Los Angeles, threw a major brick in the path of entertainment companies which have been trying to have the courts shut down companies running the P2P networks.

"From the advent of the player piano, every new means of
reproducing sound has struck a dissonant chord with musical
copyright owners, often resulting in federal litigation. This
appeal is the latest reprise of that recurring conflict, and one
of a continuing series of lawsuits between the recording
industry and distributors of file-sharing computer software."

"[W]e live in a quicksilver technological
environment with courts ill-suited to fix the flow of
internet innovation....The introduction of new technology is always disruptive to old markets and particularly to those copyright owners whose works are sold through well-established distribution mechanisms," the court wrote.

National Business Review (NBR) - Business, News, Arts, Media, Share Market & More

The Movie that inspired Timothy McVeigh!

] At the outbreak of World War III, midwestern high school
] students turned refugees slowly organized themself into
] an effective guerilla force to turn back the tide of
] Soviet invaders.

Red Dawn (1984) | Coolest Movie Ever

] A new type of pump to help failing hearts will undergo
] clinical trials in autumn 2004 in the UK. Its design
]
] is intended to solve the problems of mechanical failure
] and blood clotting that have bedevilled artificial hearts
] and pumps since they were invented.
]
] The pump also has a curious side effect: people implanted
] with the device have no pulse.

weird.

Simpler pump boosts failing hearts