“Jonathan clearly wanted to go for it.”

Go for it, he did. Mr. Abrams spurned Google’s advances and charted his own course. In retrospect, he should have taken the $30 million. If Google had paid him in stock, Mr. Abrams would easily be worth $1 billion today, according to one person close to Google. And with Google’s ample resources, Friendster might have solidified its position as the pioneering front-runner in social networking. Instead, Mr. Abrams has the distinction of founding a company that is shorthand for potential unmet.

Can't you hear Nelson's "Ha Ha!" in the background?

Wallflower at the Web Party

If the pope thought the Muslim faith were better than the Catholic faith, he’d be a Muslim. To say that you have beliefs and that they are equal to everyone else's beliefs all the time is to devalue the concept of belief.

I'm a Christian for a variety of reasons. Maybe because it’s easy.

For God and Country - Questions for John Ashcroft

My interest in assisted reproduction is more than academic. In December 2005 I flew to Chicago, underwent general anesthesia, endured a minor medical procedure, and sold 12 ova to a pair of strangers for $10,000. Like thousands of other women that year, I joined in an assembly-line production of a human embryo.

The "breeders" envisioned 20 years ago are now college students selling their genetic material and low-income women renting out their wombs. There is considerable debate about whether they should be allowed to trade reproductive capacity for cash, how they should be compensated, and how far is too far. But the more interesting questions are not regulatory.

... the linguistic equivalent of a doily ...

Ova for Sale: The art of the deal in the gray market for human eggs

The second annual New Yorker Town Hall Meeting, with Omar Ahmad, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Mahmood Mamdani, Azar Nafisi, Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im, and Lawrence Wright. George Packer, moderator.

Islam and the West | The New Yorker: Video

The war I knew was infinitely more complex, contradictory and elusive than the one described in the network news broadcasts or envisioned in the new field manual. When I finally left Baquba, the violent capital of Iraq’s Diyala Province, I found myself questioning many aspects of our mission and our accomplishments, both in a personal search for meaning and a quest to gather lessons that might help those soldiers who will follow me.

We learned that counterinsurgency cannot be conducted from afar.

But did we make a difference?

In theory, security should have improved with the development of capable Iraqi Army and police units. That did not happen. This is the central paradox of the Iraq war in fall 2006.

This paradox raises fundamental questions about the wisdom and efficacy of our strategy, which is to “stand up” Iraqi security forces so we can “stand down” American forces. Put simply, this plan is a blueprint for withdrawal, not for victory. Improving the Iraqi Army and police is necessary to prevail in Iraq; it is not sufficient.

Counterinsurgency is more like an election than a military operation.

Waging War, One Police Precinct at a Time

As we approach a billionth of a cent per byte of storage, and pennies per gigabit per second of bandwidth, what kind of machine labors to be born?

How will we feed it?

How will it be tamed?

And how soon will it, in its inevitable turn, become a dinosaur?

The Information Factories

Vaguely McLuhanesque.

It is a neat coincidence — perhaps a wrapping up of things by the fates — that YouTube had its big payday exactly half a century after it was found that a sequence of action could be documented cheaply and easily, viewed immediately, disseminated widely and replayed endlessly. But it is also a sign of something America has lost; not our innocence, but instead our sense of awe — the idea that technology should be used to challenge our creativity rather than as a crutch for quick fame or easy laughs.

We Are a Camera

Decius wrote:

This is interesting but I think its unfair. Can I trust anyone who talks about "real faith" to present an objective view of a competing philosophy?

No one re-recommended my post on George Packer's article, The Moderate Martyr, in a September issue of The New Yorker.

This article is predominantly a study of Islam from the inside, from the point of view of would-be reformers, past and present.

This is how the article ends (abridged slightly):

The hollowness at the core of Sudan, and the widespread cynicism about Islamist rule, with its enforced ideology and rituals, is reminiscent of Eastern Europe in the years before the fall of the Berlin Wall. But if you spend time in an Islamic country you soon realize that the Communism analogy runs dry. For Islam, unlike Marxism, is deeply rooted and still present in everyday life in profound ways. ... The Islamic revival, and its attendant struggles and ills, is less like the eighteenth century in Europe than like the sixteenth, the age of Luther ...

... Ever since the night Naim attended Taha’s lecture as a young law student, he has believed that Muslims must find a way out of the predicament in which their own history has placed them—if not by accepting Taha’s vision, then by working toward another.

"I don’t really have high hopes for change in the Arab region, because it is too self-absorbed in its own sense of superiority and victimhood," he said. His hope lies in the periphery—West Africa, the Sahel, Central and Southeast Asia: "They are not noticed, but that’s where the hope is." The damage done to Muslim lives under the slogan “Islam is the solution,” and Islamism’s failure to solve their daily problems and answer people’s deepest needs, has forced younger Muslims in countries like Indonesia, Turkey, and Morocco to approach religion and politics in a more sophisticated way. ... "The Future of Sharia" amounts to a kind of secularism: it proposes not a rigid separation of politics and religion, as in Turkey, but, rather, a scheme in which Islam informs political life but cannot be introduced into law by an appeal to any religious authority. Otherwise, Muslims would not be free. "I need a secular state to be a Muslim," Naim said. "If I don’t have the freedom to disbelieve, I cannot believe."

Two days after we spoke, Naim flew to Nigeria to give a series of lectures, based on the new book, in the northern states that have imposed a particularly harsh form of Sharia. He plans to travel next year to Indonesia and, if possible, to Iran. Two years ago, when he lectured in northern Nigeria, a quarter of his audience of eight hundred people walked out on him, and he had to slip away through a side door. He acknowledged that violence, even murder, might be the response this time. But Naim believes that, despite the ev... [ Read More (0.1k in body) ]

RE: Freedom: True and False - New English Review

Freedom is a word invoked constantly in America as a descriptive term for self-government and the concept of sovereignty of the people. Less understood is the fact that the mujahadeen are also fighting for freedom, but a freedom very differently defined.

The freedom Muslims are promised is of course entirely delusional for the reality of Islam is utter slavery -- physical, psychological and spiritual -- without balm, without rest, without peace.

Freedom: True and False - New English Review

The deal is done.

A profitless Web site started by three 20-somethings after a late-night dinner party is sold for more than a billion dollars, instantly turning dozens of its employees into paper millionaires. It sounds like a tale from the late 1990’s dot-com bubble, but it happened yesterday.

"If you believe it’s the future of television, it’s clearly worth $1.6 billion," said Steve Ballmer.

"There are some issues with YouTube," said Sumner Redstone.

... considering testing a pre-roll ...

Dot-Com Boom Echoed in Deal to Buy YouTube