“I think it’s sad that President Carter’s reckless and personal criticism is out there,” Mr. Fratto said. “I think it’s unfortunate, and I think he is proving to be increasingly irrelevant with these kinds of comments.”

What's the saddest thing in the world? That the White House didn't say, "we disagree."

White House Says Carter Criticism of Bush Is 'Sad'

T-Mobile has abandoned the “walled garden” approach to selling services that requires customers to use proprietary products, choosing instead to use the Internet itself and Google as service and content providers.

Much Ado About Apple’s iPhone

So when is MemeStreams going to have these kinds of problems?

I am a big believer that begging is not the right business model," says Mitch Kapor.

He must be a Chooser.

Firefox and the Anxiety of Growing Pains

The ruler of Dubai, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, says he is giving $10bn to set up an educational foundation in the Middle East.

The money is meant to improve the standard of education and research in the region, and aims to stimulate job creation, Sheikh Mohammed said.

It is thought to be one of the largest charitable donations in history.

From Al Bawaba:

According to human development reports, literary and intellectual books published in the Arab world represent only 0.08% of the world's output, less than those published in Turkey alone. For every 100,000 books published in North America, there are 42,000 published in South America, and only 6,500 books published in the Arab world.

The thing is, most of those in North America are "Dummies" books, celebrity tell-all memoirs, fad diet HOWTOs, obscure academic treatises, etc.

The most alarming indicators are the 18% illiteracy in the under-15 age group and the 43% illiteracy among females in the region.

For something (but not much) beyond the press release and factoids, consider this op-ed from The Brunei Times:

Our first comment is this: "It's about time".

It goes beyond simply purchasing books for the research centres as shoving information down the throat of students does not a scholar make.

Instead, we wish to see that more people in the Middle East return to the tradition of knowledge rooted in the understanding that mankind is first and foremost a creation of God, and which makes no distinction between women and men in intellectual pursuit.

Dubai ruler in vast charity gift

Now that you mention it ... It's a deceptively powerful phrase, that off-hand remark. It suggests permission to proceed, subject broached, time to take off the gloves.

NOW THAT I think about it, there was something noteworthy that occurred at last week's Republican presidential debate.

"From the beginning, there has been evil in the world."

He added: "Pornography and violence poison our music and movies and TV and video games. The Virginia Tech shooter, like the Columbine shooters before him, had drunk from this cesspool."

Now that I think about it, we'll probably hear it from just about anyone who gets the nod.

In the Jersey City Salvation Army Home John J. Daggett walked in his sleep, walked through a second story window, fell to the ground, awoke. He walked upstairs, reported the accident, lit a cigaret. An ambulance surgeon saw smoke escaping from John Daggett's neck, found his windpipe had been nearly severed. Said Smoker Daggett: "Now that you mention it, I noticed I wasn't getting much out of this cigaret."

The central, vexing paradox of smoking: that in return for death, cigarettes give pleasure. Justifiable pleasure? Of course not. What Kant deemed "negative pleasure"? Perhaps. But pleasure nonetheless.

"I am really tired of the way red heads are portrayed, in literature, in movies, in advertising. Now that I think about it, every off beat, quirky, venal, sadistic, bad-tempered and lascivious character is a red head."

Gillian Anderson hates TV. I mean, she really hates it. Oh, to be good at something you hate. Wait: Now that I think about it, maybe Gillian is on to something.

"Now that I think about it, it might be good with peaches," she said.

"It's a colloquialism." She compared it to a figure of speech: "Like asking someone, 'Are you high?' when you're actually saying, 'Are you serious?' "
When the term's connection to spousal abuse was pointed out, she seemed surprised. "Now that you mention it, I'm like, damn!" she said.

Now that I think about it, I guess there is an ove... [ Read More (0.8k in body) ]

Since 2001, Congress has provided the Department of Defense (DOD) with hundreds of billions of dollars in supplemental and annual appropriations for military operations in support of the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT).

DOD’s reported annual costs for GWOT have shown a steady increase from about $0.2 billion in fiscal year 2001 to about $98.4 billion in fiscal year 2006.

So far in fiscal year 2007, Congress has provided DOD with $70 billion in annual appropriations for GWOT.

To continue its GWOT operations, DOD has requested an additional $93.4 billion in supplemental appropriations for fiscal year 2007 and $141.7 billion in appropriations for fiscal year 2008.

The United States’ commitments to GWOT will likely involve the continued investment of significant resources, requiring decision makers to consider difficult trade-offs as the nation faces an increasing long-range fiscal challenge.

Do you think al Qaeda has a GAO? How do they manage without one?

Global War on Terrorism: Reported Obligations for the Department of Defense

Steven Levy ponders, what makes it sticky?

I had some bad news for Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson, the founders of MySpace who now run the business for Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. They'd lost my son's high school.

DeWolfe and Anderson, who sold to News Corp. last year for $580 million, didn't ask why. Instead, they cited statistics that showed that their numbers were strong and opined that the exodus might have been a geographical anomaly; East Coasters seem to skew toward Facebook. Anyway, Anderson said, even if some teens did jump to Facebook for their main online socializing, they would still keep coming to MySpace because of its flexibility in design and all the media it offers.

It was an interesting window into where their hearts are.

"We're working on 10, 15 different things," said Anderson. But none of the ones we discussed seemed to address the problems that led my son and others to go to someone else's space for social networking, be it Facebook or Bebo or somewhere else.

The conversation turned to upcoming MySpace features like weather reports and a video service to counter YouTube. The defection of my son's school didn't come up again. I guess they'd forgotten about it.

If your site is not being mass-adopted in waves, it is probably not sticky. If your site has never been mass-abandoned in a wave, then it probably never was.

Is Facebook Catching Up With MySpace?

This bill deserves support, but one wonders about the political wisdom of this proposal. What constituency are they trying to win here?

U.S. Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Sam Brownback (R-KS) today proposed legislation to keep Internet radio alive by vacating a Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) decision that could increase Internet radio sound recording royalties by 300 percent to 1,200 percent.

“I am alarmed by the recent Copyright Royalty Board decision and the effect it will have on Internet radio – especially small Webcasters with limited revenue streams. I am hopeful that with this bipartisan legislation Internet radio will continue to flourish,” said Brownback, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Read the bill:

To nullify the determinations of the Copyright Royalty Judges with respect to webcasting, to modify the basis for making such a determination, and for other purposes.

The Internet Radio Equality Act of 2007

Welcome to the Darwin Correspondence Project’s new web site. The main feature of the site is an Online Database with the complete, searchable, texts of around 5,000 letters written by and to Charles Darwin up to the year 1865. This includes all the surviving letters from the Beagle voyage - online for the first time - and all the letters from the years around the publication of Origin of species in 1859.

Darwin Correspondence Project

Vectors maps the multiple contours of daily life in an unevenly digital era, crystallizing around themes that highlight the social, political, and cultural stakes of our increasingly technologically-mediated existence. As such, the journal speaks both implicitly and explicitly to key debates across varied disciplines, including issues of globalization, mobility, power, and access. Operating at the intersection of culture, creativity, and technology, the journal focuses on the myriad ways technology shapes, transforms, reconfigures, and/or impedes social relations, both in the past and in the present.

Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular