The license plates can be ordered at www.dmvnow.com ...

Does this supersede the flag-on-antenna and back-window/rear-bumper stickers? Or do I still need those even with an FT plate? (Proper Patriotism Procedures can be so confusing.)

Show Your Solidarity With a 'Fight Terrorism' License Plate [JPG]

From this working paper by the Center for Strategic and International Studies:

The US must plan its Homeland defense policies and programs for a future in which there is no way to predict the weapon that will be used or the method chosen to deliver a weapon which can range from a small suicide attack by an American citizen to the covert delivery of a nuclear weapon by a foreign state. There is no reason the US should assume that some convenient Gaussian curve or standard deviation will make small or medium level attacks a higher priority over time than more lethal forms.

Any structured intellectual approach to describing this situation -- and planning for it -- is so uncertain that a valid structure can only be developed as an exercise in complexity or "chaos" theory.

I, however, would like you to think about the biological threat in more mundane terms. I am going to suggest that you think about biological warfare in terms of a TV show called "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," that you think about the world of biological weapons in terms of the "Buffy Paradigm," and that you think about many of the problems in the proposed solutions as part of the "Buffy Syndrome."

Finally! All those hours of research are beginning to pay off!

Biological Warfare and the 'Buffy Paradigm' [PDF]

Blonder warns that a new innovation crisis is brewing. For a decade we've been planting too little "seed corn" -- the basic scientific discoveries that can take 20 years or more to commercialize. And he sees new technological challenges from China and India.

Congratulations! You may have already lost!

'Everyone Wants to Be a VC' | BusinessWeek

This document is intended to familiarize the investigator with various methodologies and tools available to perform a forensic examination of a RIM (BlackBerry) device. The procedures and tools presented are by no means all encompassing, but are intended to elicit design of custom tools by those more programmatically inclined. The methods contained within have been tested using an Exchange Edition RIM pager model 950 and an Exchange Edition RIM handheld model 957.

Computer Forensics: Hacking for Cops.

Forensic Examination of a RIM (BlackBerry) Wireless Device [PDF]

Lanier: A while back I was asked to help Steven Spielberg brainstorm a science fiction movie he intended to make based on the Philip K. Dick short story "Minority Report". A team of "futurists" would imagine what the world might be like in fifty years, and I would be one of the two scientist/technologists on the team.

DJ Spooky: Sonar is one of the largest festivals of electronic music in Europe. Aside from the U.S.'s "Burning Man" Festival that occurs in August, it's one of the main places that international DJ culture can explore the outter limits of mix culture. But that's an understatement. To put it bluntly: it's THE festival that determines the taste and style of the currents of electronic that flow through the world's underground and avant-garde music in the early 21st century.

Review of _Linked_: We all know our world is held together through a vast network of connections, and we're all coming to realize that it's becoming more connected and interdependent with every passing day. The question is how? In what ways are we altering our lives with this network, and how do we deal with the negative aspects of the overwhelming connectivity?

Enter Albert-László Barabási and his new book, Linked: The New Science of Networks. Underneath our online world of seemingly random connections, the cells of our bodies and our social ties lies a network of hubs and ever-growing links with surprisingly not-random patterns.

On a related note, DJ Spooky has an excellent new CD (released in late May) called "Modern Mantra" that fans of drum and bass, hip-hop, ambient, dub, jazz, and other good music will enjoy. (Spooky has a copy of Douglas Hofstadter's _Godel, Escher, Bach_ on his bookshelf!)

Jaron Lanier, DJ Spooky and Albert-Laszlo Barabasi in 21C Magazine

John Frankenheimer, director of such Hollywood classics as "The Manchurian Candidate" and "Birdman of Alcatraz," died Saturday. He was 72.

Director John Frankenheimer Dies

Sims writes: "Since John Gilmore chooses to use my name in his imaginary history of how we got to where we are, I thought it would be appropriate to lay out the real facts. ... Perhaps Gilmore once had something to offer of value, but that does not include either political science or history. ... [Gilmore's] greedy lawyer canard ... simply reveals [his] lack of understanding of the law business.

ICANN: Response to John Gilmore from Joe Sims

In _The Selfish Gene_, Richard Dawkins sought to describe cultural evolution in biological terms with the newly coined term "meme." Here, Cambridge anthropologist Robert Aunger theorizes on the nature of this so-called "thought gene." In doing so, Aunger coins a term of his own, "neuromemetics," proposing that memes are in fact self-replicating electrical charges in the nodes of our brains. The author explains that the shift in perspective from Dawkins's purely social memetics to a memetics working at the intercellular level is akin to sociobiology's view of social behavior as a genetic trait subject to evolution. This is an ambitious book on a par with Susan Blackmore's The Meme Machine. Unlike the handful of pop-culture treatments out there, Aunger steers clear of the popular image of the meme as a VD-like brain parasite passed by word of mouth. That said, this book is that rare hybrid of crossover science writing that carries enough intellectual punch to warrant thoughtful peer review, and yet should appeal to those ambitious general readers who are in the market for a megadose of mind candy.

This rocks! 400 pages of serious thought about memetics. Amazon offers up the book's introduction for your review.

Electric Meme: A New Theory of How We Think and Communicate

TCPA got you down?

Worry not. Bill Gates still gets it.

Click Here To Renew Your Faith In Microsoft

Too much control can be a bad thing, particularly when innovation is a critical source of competitive advantage.

The stakes just got higher. In today's NYT, Berkeley professor Hal Varian (author of _Information Rules_) rails against Palladium in particular and DRM in general.

Varian is a bellwether for the wider response among academia and corporate enterprise. I suspect he'll publish a similar, perhaps more quantitative rant in an upcoming issue of Harvard Business Review. And another in CACM, alongside Pamela Sameulson's rant. And an editorial in the Wall Street Journal.

I'm calling it -- time of death, oh six hundred hours, 4 July 2002.

Microsoft can afford to be wrong on this -- to them, it's just code. Pay the 'softies to spend their weekends at the office, and it keeps getting churned out. Plenty of cash flow to screw around for a few years under the protective umbrella of the Office suite.

Intel and AMD can not afford to be wrong. At this point it takes many, many billions of dollars to set up a fab line for a new microprocessor. If they build it and no one comes, it will take them years to dig out of the hole. The IBM/Motorola/Apple team will not fail to capitalize on the situation.

'Palladium Sucks, Don't Buy It'