As you can see, Pajiba is a mess. We were as surprised as anyone when the site went down yesterday, but based on the limited information we have, it looks like the Department of Homeland Security has seized the disk drive on which our site was hosted, and apparently they’ve also taken the backup files. So for the time being, Pajiba has no data, and we don’t think the DHS has any intention of returning the hard drive to our hosting company anytime soon. I suppose we shared server space with some punk who threatened the President or something, and now anyone on that server has to suffer the consequences. Frankly, the entire debacle is pretty heart-wrenching for us and, thus far, completely out of our control. We have no idea when, or if, the disk drives will be returned.

I wouldn't bet on it. What bullshit. I'd like to believe there was a good reason, such as a credible threat or lead, but these days, I really just don't have that much faith in our government or legal system.

Maybe that's the idea. Get everyone to hate government. Good job... it's working.

The Department of Homeland Security Has Shut Us Down

Amnesty International UK director Kate Allen said: "It's appalling that a British man is apparently attempting to sell gallows to President Mugabe's government [in Zimbabwe].

Agreed.

Now, I have a question. HOW THE FUCK STUPID ARE THESE DICTATORS THAT THEY HAVE TO *BUY* A GALLOWS!?!?

It's rope and a fucking simple gantry. For Fucks sake.

They can "run" a country but can't find some dudes to bolt together some wood and tie a noose? Evil *and* incompetent. And evil. Really really evil.

Boing Boing: British farmer supplies gallows to totalitarian governments

Great idea - bring the bazaar of ideas (ala Linux) to the marketplace.

LIKE many top executives, James R. Lavoie and Joseph M. Marino keep a close eye on the stock market. But the two men, co-founders of Rite-Solutions, a software company that builds advanced — and highly classified — command-and-control systems for the Navy, don't worry much about Nasdaq or the New York Stock Exchange.

Instead, they focus on an internal market where any employee can propose that the company acquire a new technology, enter a new business or make an efficiency improvement. These proposals become stocks, complete with ticker symbols, discussion lists and e-mail alerts. Employees buy or sell the stocks, and prices change to reflect the sentiments of the company's engineers, computer scientists and project managers — as well as its marketers, accountants and even the receptionist.

Cool idea.

I immediately liked the concept of InnoCentive as well when I saw it first. There's some mild concern that the logical limits of such a system has everyone being a freelance worker, competing with everyone else. In the current world, of course, once you've got your job, you're not really competing fairly with everyone else... you've got an advantage due to locality and overhead and so forth.

I wonder if there's enough work available for everyone to be freelanced... does our system depend on inefficiency to maintain the employment rate?

Bringing the bazaar of ideas to Business

This is the coolest thing I've seen in a while. You can have a skeleton tattooed on your skin that only shows up in blacklight. Rock.

That's damn cool.

UV Ink Tattoos?

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The government has abruptly ended an inquiry into the warrantless eavesdropping program because the National Security Agency refused to grant Justice Department lawyers security clearance.

The Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility, or OPR, sent a fax Wednesday to Democratic Rep. Maurice Hinchey of New York saying it was closing its inquiry because without clearance it could not examine department lawyers' role in the program.

How outrageous. Here's the summary as I see it :

The Press : "The Prez is spying on you, but it's pretty much cool. He said it's ok, because, you know, war. Some people are pissed, but, whatever."

The People : "Um, what? Is that alright? Oh, American Idol time..."

The Prez : "What's wrong with you people? I'm 'protecting you'. The 'Constitution' shouldn't stand in the way of that, should it?"

The DOJ : "Ok, we're gonna investigate... this is wack."

The NSA : "Um, no. No, we think it'd be altogether better if you went back to the office and had a coffee. We'll be over here doing whatever we want."

The DOJ : "But... oh, ok, whatever. I *am* tired, lets get some Grande Mocha's."

The People : "*snore*"

CNN.com - Domestic spying inquiry killed - May 10, 2006

Why the anger? It can be summed up in one run-on sentence: We have lost two towers in New York, a part of the Pentagon, an important American city called New Orleans, our economic solvency, our global reputation, our moral authority, our children's future, we have lost tens of thousands of American soldiers to death and grievous injury, we must endure the Abramoffs and the Cunninghams and the Libbys and the whores and the bribes and the utter corruption, we must contemplate the staggering depth of the hole we have been hurled down into, and we expect little to no help from the mainstream DC press, whose lazy go-along-to-get-along cocktail-circuit mentality allowed so much of this to happen because they failed comprehensively to do their job.

George W. Bush and his pals used September 11th against the American people, used perhaps the most horrific day in our collective history, deliberately and with intent, to foster a war of choice that has killed untold tens of thousands of human beings and basically bankrupted our country. They lied about the threat posed by Iraq. They destroyed the career of a CIA agent who was tasked to keep an eye on Iran's nuclear ambitions, and did so to exact petty political revenge against a critic. They tortured people, and spied on American civilians.

You cannot fathom anger arising from this?

A fabulous rebuttal to Cohen's quite honestly absurd arguments from a few days ago.

William Rivers Pitt | An Open Letter to Richard Cohen

Our tools are very powerful. It's almost like they're too powerful. If you give people this huge beautiful blank canvas, where do they start?

Conceptually, I kind of like their point of view, but it doesn't seem useful to me. Then, I don't have a MySpace profile either.

Imeem has replicated, it appears, the functionality of Blogger, Flickr, a few other web services and, of course, IM. They apparently use a custom IM application to connect with the various IM services, which is going to mean getting people to switch from iChat, AIM, Trillian, etc. That may be the most challenging thing for them.

I'm skeptical of convergence as a rule, but perhaps it will appeal to people who'd rather not have to manage multiple logins and so forth, I don't know. To me, it seems like trying to be everything is a good way to do a lot of things poorly.

imeem: IM-Based Social Networking

BELIEVING that God created the universe in six days is a form of superstitious paganism, the Vatican astronomer Guy Consolmagno claimed yesterday.

Brother Consolmagno, who works in a Vatican observatory in Arizona and as curator of the Vatican meteorite collection in Italy, said a "destructive myth" had developed in modern society that religion and science were competing ideologies.

[ Emphasis mine. Thank you Brother... nice to get support from the clergy on this one. -k]

Scotsman.com News - International - Creationism dismissed as 'a kind of paganism' by Vatican's astronomer

The first images have turned up from Electroma, the first cinematic effort from the electronic music duo Daft Punk. A press release briefly described the story as follows, except in French:

Daft Punk' s Electroma is visual and musical which follows the history of two robots in their search to become human.

To make things more bizarre, the film contains no dialogue, only music, allowing the images of bondage robots to speak for themselves. While fans of the musicians have expressed a great deal of interest in the film, they're still way more excited about glowing, flashing jewelry and pacifiers.

Fuck yeah! I mean, this could be total art-wankery or it could be super cool like Interstella 5555, but I'm looking forward to it anyway.

I Watch Stuff! - Daft Punk's Electroma Stills

Spuds Mackenzie lives to party again thanks to google video!

[Holy shit. I forgot how awful the 80s really were. -k]

1987 - Spuds Mackenzie commercial - Google Video