Noms are out.

Academy Awards® for outstanding film achievements of 2005 will be presented on Sunday, March 5, at the Kodak Theatre at Hollywood & Highland® and televised live by the ABC Television Network.

Also available at NYT with links to reviews, showtimes, etc.

From the AP overview:

The cowboy love story "Brokeback Mountain" led the Academy Awards field Tuesday with eight nominations. Three films were tied with six nominations each, "Crash," "Good Night, and Good Luck" and "Memoirs of a Geisha," though "Geisha" was shut out in the top categories.

"Munich," which had fallen off many awards analysts' best-picture picks after a lukewarm reception, scored well with five nominations, including director for Steven Spielberg. "King Kong," directed by "Lord of the Rings" creator Peter Jackson, earned only technical nominations, losing out in the major categories.

George Clooney picked up three nominations: as supporting actor for his role as a steadfast CIA undercover agent in "Syriana" and best director and co-writer for his Edward R. Murrow tale "Good Night, and Good Luck."

Nominations List | 78th Annual Academy Awards | Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

"Let me say the conclusion that the Army is broke or the Army is stretched severely thin, we don’t agree with, um, ‘thank you very much for your point of view, but we don’t agree,’ because today’s Army without a question is the most capable, best trained, best equipped, best led and most experienced force this nation has fielded in well over a decade, so I can tell you the Army is performing magnificently."

Does that "well over a decade" caveat strike anyone else as rather odd? Basically, he is saying that the Army suffered from the "peace dividend" in the early 1990's, but that the force of the 1980's was more capable, better trained, better equipped, better led, and more experienced than the one we have today.

Last year we had the highest retention rate in the Army we’ve had in five years ...

Pay no attention to the stop loss orders [1,2,3,4] ...

[From 4] The Army's Stop-Loss program, initiated in November 2002, allows it to indefinitely extend the term of active duty soldiers past their scheduled release date.

That means that for thousands of soldiers, the contract they signed pledging 8 years of service no longer holds any weight.

DoD News: Secretary of the Army Francis J. Harvey Interview with the Rush Limbaugh Show

Burn, flip, burn. It's that simple to create customized laser-etched labels using LightScribe Direct Disc Labeling technology*—in the same drive that burns your data.

Cool. (Although the LightScribe DVD media are currently twice the price of regular blank DVDs.)

LightScribe technology - HP Digital Entertainment

This is an update to an earlier story about Locatecell.

In response to disclosures about phone records being sold on the Internet, politicians want federal regulators to verify that the biggest service providers are adequately protecting their customers' information.

Locatecell.com was offline Thursday, its site replaced with a message from GoDaddy.com asking the site's owner to call the domain registrar. Meanwhile, Celltolls.com had a note on its site saying that it was not currently accepting queries regarding Cingular Wireless phone numbers.

Occasionally, Congress works?

Politicians call for better phone record privacy | CNET News.com

Why is Google the lone holdout? It is worried about protecting itself.

Nielsen/NetRatings says that p*** sites attracted 38 million unique viewers in December -- or a quarter of all Internet surfers.

Why Google Won't Give In | Forbes Magazine

Is there such a thing as an ethical spy?

One wonders if Spielberg is secretly behind this.

"There's a lot of pandering at the CIA," said Melvin A. Goodman, a CIA analyst from 1966 to 1990.

An Exotic Tool for Espionage: Moral Compass

This book presents an assessment of the importance and content of network science as it exists today. The book also provides an analysis of how the Army might advance the transformation to network-centric operations by supporting fundamental research on networks.

[...]

Research on networks is fragmented. It is supported in disciplinary stovepipes that encourage jargon, parochial terms, and local values. Fundamentals of network structure, dynamics, and simulation are being rediscovered by different groups that emphasize uniqueness rather than a common intellectual heritage and methodologies. The fragmentation is aggravated by funding-agency policies and procedures that reward narrow disciplinary interests rather than results that are demonstrably usable for addressing national problems. Nor is funding focused in areas with widespread application, such as the development of predictive models of social networks, which could directly impact vital national problems, from secondary education in urban slums to military command and control.

Although researchers, especially the best researchers, are reacting rationally to the incentives placed before them, these incentives reflect poorly the national interests of the United States in a globally connected world.

Network Science | National Academies Press

Of the Hamas victory, President Bush said: "Obviously people were not happy with the status quo. The people are demanding honest government. The people want services."

Obviously. Obviously it was the services that brought victory for Hamas. I'm sure it had nothing to do with corruption in Fatah.

Now all they need is a Hamas Book Club.

The Hamas victory was the fifth case recently of militants' winning significant gains through elections. They included the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Hezbollah in Lebanon, a radical president in Iran, and Shiites backed by militias in Iraq.

Do they have book clubs yet? I see a growth opportunity!

"The Hamas victory is a disillusioning result showing that democracy and American interests don't always coincide," said the editor of The National Interest.

A senior State Department official said recently that the Bush administration, five years ago, inherited what he called the old model. "But that's a story that we can no longer accept," he said, speaking on condition of anonymity because of rules prohibiting him from publicly explaining administration policy.

Ha! That's a good one.

I have a suggestion for the first month of the new Hamas Book Club: The Failure of Democratic Nation Building.

Bush Defends His Goal of Spreading Democracy to the Mideast

The films are arranged chronologically. Date and location are provided for each film. He really liked the classics, but his taste in new releases was questionable, often steering toward popularity rather than quality.

Here's a sampler:

810620, Camp David, For Your Eyes Only
810828, Camp David, The Postman Always Rings Twice
820122, Camp David, Adam's Rib
820123, Camp David, Grand Hotel
820319, Camp David, Das Boot
820613, Camp David, Notorious
820625, Camp David, Poltergeist
820627, Camp David, E.T.
820731, Camp David, Rocky III
820808, White House, Stagecoach
830602, Camp David, Return of the Jedi
830604, Camp David, War Games
830723, Camp David, North by Northwest
830805, Camp David, Some Like it Hot
830806, Camp David, Spellbound
831029, Camp David, Big Chill
831202, Camp David, Yentl
831203, Camp David, Terms of Endearment
840107, Camp David, To Be or Not To Be
840113, Camp David, Singing in the Rain
840225, Camp David, Witness for the Prosecution
840309, Camp David, Rear Window
840316, Camp David, Vertigo
840622, Camp David, Bedtime for Bonzo
840623, Camp David, Star Trek III: The Search for Spock
840630, Camp David, Karate Kid
840714, Camp David, Ghostbusters
840907, Camp David, Red Dawn
850705, Camp David, Cocoon
850726, Camp David, Back to the Future
850914, Camp David, To Catch a Thief
860117, Camp David, Place in the Sun, A
860119, Camp David, Color Purple
860131, Camp David, Rocky IV
860301, Camp David, Iron Eagle
860510, Camp David, African Queen
860530, Camp David, Top Gun
860607, Camp David, Short Circuit
860613, Camp David, Karate Kid II
860621, Camp David, Ferris Bueller's Day Off
860712, Camp David, Magnificent Seven
861108, Camp David, Red River
861205, Camp David, Crocodile Dundee
861220, Camp David, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
870314, Camp David, Meet Me in St. Louis
870320, Camp David, Raising Arizona
870523, Camp David, Harry and the Hendersons
870530, Camp David, Maltese Falcon
870724, Camp David, Living Daylights, The
870725, Camp David, Roman Holiday
870912, Camp David, Ninotchka
870919, Camp David, My Life as a Dog
871003, Camp David, Princess Bride
871113, Camp David, It Happened one Night
871211, Camp David, Three Men and a Baby
880115, Camp David, Throw Momma from the Train
880122, Camp David, Moonstruck
880205, Camp David, Santa Fe Trail
880206, Camp David, Bad Day at Black Rock
880219, Camp David, Yankee Doodle Dandy
880220, Camp David, Treasure of Sierra Madre
880507, Camp David, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
880514, Camp David, Searchers
880610, Camp David, Crocodile Dundee II
880702, Camp David, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
880729, Camp David, Big
880918, White House, Yankee Doodle Dandy
880924, Camp David, Gorillas in the Mist
881209, Camp David, Destry Rides Again
881210, Camp David, North by Northwest

Films That President and Mrs. Reagan Viewed

In this book, Somit and Peterson argue that humans are social primates with an innate tendency for hierarchical and authoritarian social and political structures, and that democracy requires very special "enabling conditions" before it can be supported by a state, conditions that require decades to evolve. As a result, attempts to export democracy through nation-building to states without these enabling conditions are doomed to failure.

The Failure of Democratic Nation Building