] Since the earliest research into the the English Language
] as spoken in North America was begun by Noah Webster in
] the early 18th century, the regional variations in
] dialect have always been the most challenging and
] difficult to explain field. Since the development of
] carbonated beverage in 1886, one of linguistic
] geography's most important and least investigated
] phenomena has been the sharp regional divisions in the
] use of the terms "pop" and "soda." Due to the domination
] of hard-line conservative lingusitic geographers in such
] leading institutions such as Harvard, Yale, Stanford and
] the University of the West Indies, this dilemma has been
] swept under the rug . . . until now. Using the new
] technologies of the Internet and the World Wide Web, I
] and my colleagues at the California Institute of
] Technology and Lewis & Clark College are undertaking a
] bold new research into this fascinating area.

Great maps to go along with this.

The Pop vs. Soda Page

] If all nuclear weapons vanished tomorrow, the world's
] current military situation would not be affected one
] whit. The U.S.A. would still be military top boss.
] Yet we'd be much less likely to wake up one morning
] to find Paris or Washington missing.

This is just plain ignorance. Without nukes for instance, whats to stop a billion Chinese from storming the far east of Russia, which is resource rich and EMPTY? The United States has enough formidable conventional power that nukes aren't really neccesary. For a nation to openly attack the US is paramount to suicide. Other nuclear nations cannot boast such conventional power, and nuclear weapons still act as a deterrant for aggression against these states.

Ten Technologies That Deserve to Die

] HARRIS: The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) laws,
] in the Internet world, are almost as controversial as the
] Patriot Act, because they tread on rights, contain
] draconian penalties, and can be abused in order to shut
] people up. What DMCA does is criminalize copyright
] issues. They were pushed in by the recording industry to
] prevent music piracy, but they have since been used for
] many other things.
]
] The provision that was used against us was an abuse of
] the DMCA pull-down-demand- process. Using this, a company
] can claim they own copyright to something, write a letter
] to your Internet service provider (ISP), demand that the
] offending page be removed. The ISP must pull the page
] immediately or risk losing everything. These pull-downs
] almost always take place without a court order.
]
] Now, in our case, Diebold didn't even claim we had a
] copyrighted document on our site, they complained that we
] had a LINK to an unrelated site which, in turn, had LINKS
] to documents which they claimed copyright to. And in our
] case, our ISP overstepped its bounds. We do not know the
] extent to which it was pressured to do so by Diebold or
] whether there were other types of political pressure. Our
] ISP not only pulled the offending link, it pulled the
] page the link was on, then it pulled our whole site down,
] then it removed access to the files on our FTP site so
] that we couldn't even relocate the files to another
] location. We have been told the site must remain down for
] 10 days, and we need to file a letter disputing their
] claim and bleed lawyer's fees to litigate this.
] Fortunately, David Allen, who knows about these things,
] had a techie-to-techie conversation with a rep at the
] ISP, and they decided their attorney had been wrong and
] granted us access via FTP, though the site is still not
] up.

Electronic Voting Machines: Interview with Bev Harris

] 2.13 x 0.94 x 0.08 in
] (54 x 24 x 2.1 mm)

The picture of this thing that appears on my monitor is larger then the device itself. 802.11 is now small enough for use in bugs.

Socket Communications: SDIO Wireless LAN CF Card

] Each person drank two glasses of champagne per session.
] Ridout adjusted the exact intakes so that everyone drank
] the same amount of alcohol per kilogram of body mass.
] Sure enough, alcohol levels rose much faster among the
] bubbly drinkers. After just five minutes, they had an
] average of 0.54 milligrams of alcohol per millilitre of
] blood. Those drinking flat champagne averaged just 0.39
] milligrams of alcohol.

Champagne does get you drunk faster

] Preliminary research on the new drug suggests it could be
] much better at preventing breast cancer than tamoxifen,
] an earlier cancer "wonder drug". Tamoxifen reduces the
] risk of breast cancer by about a third. But crucially,
] anastrozole also has a much lower risk of side-effects,
] say researchers.

Interesting comparison of tamoxifen to anastrozole.

Major trial tackles breast cancer prevention: Anastrozole vs. Tamoxifen

] "I think this study is very important," says Mark Pagel,
] an evolutionary biologist at the University of Reading,
] UK. "What they are trying to show is that human mating
] patterns, wealth inheritance and dominance systems
] respond to ecological variation in the same way that we
] would expect animal populations to behave."
]
]
] Bride wealth
]
] Holden believes reason the acquisition of cattle led to a
] switch to male-dominated societies is most probably
] linked to the system of "bridewealth". This tradition, in
] which a bridegroom gives cattle to a bride's family, is
] particular to the Bantu speaking regions of
] sub-equatorial Africa.
]
] "If a man's got lots of cattle he can have lots of wives.
] So if you have cattle it makes sense to give it to sons
] rather than the daughters," she says. The fundamental
] reason for this is that wealthy, and therefore
] attractive, sons are likely to have more children than
] daughters, because while women must bear each child a man
] need only impregnate a woman.

Feminist Cows Moo: Eat more Chiken.

Cattle ownership makes it a man's world

] So the fact that she's been undercover for three decades
] and that has been divulged is outrageous because she was
] put undercover for certain reasons. One, she works in an
] area where people she meets with overseas could be
] compromised. When you start tracing back who she met
] with, even people who innocently met with her, who are
] not involved in CIA operations, could be compromised. For
] these journalists to argue that this is no big deal and
] if I hear another Republican operative suggesting that
] well, this was just an analyst fine, let them go
] undercover. Let's put them overseas and let's out them
] and then see how they like it. They won't be able to
] stand the heat [...]

Daily Kos: Plame's former classmate vents

] In a hotly contested lawsuit before a federal appeals
] court, two peer-to-peer companies are about to gain a
] vast army of allies: America's librarians.
]
] The five major U.S. library associations are planning to
] file a legal brief Friday siding with Streamcast Networks
] and Grokster in the California suit, brought by the major
] record labels and Hollywood studios. The development
] could complicate the Recording Industry Association of
] America's efforts to portray file-swapping services as
] rife with spam and illegal pornography.
]
] According to an attorney who has seen the document, the
] brief argues that Streamcast--distributor of the Morpheus
] software--and Grokster should not be shut down. It asks
] the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to uphold the April
] decision by a Los Angeles judge that dismissed much of
] the entertainment industry's suit against the two
] peer-to-peer companies.
]
] Among the groups signing the brief are the American
] Library Association (ALA), the Association of Research
] Libraries, the American Association of Law Libraries, the
] Medical Library Association and the Special Libraries
] Association. The American Civil Liberties Union, in one
] of the group's first forays into copyright law, has
] drafted the brief opposing the Motion Picture Association
] of America (MPAA) and the Recording Industry Association
] of America (RIAA).

Librarians to the rescue!

BusinessWeek Online: News from C|Net.com

The official website of the X Prize competition. The chairman suggests that the Prize could be won in the next few months.

X P R I Z E