] Welcome to the Internet's most extensive E-Meter site.
] The device above is a Hubbard electro-psychometer
] (E-meter): a crude lie detector used by Scientology
] auditors (counselors) to examine a person's mental state.
] Scientologists claim the device allows people to "see a
] thought". In the hands of a trained auditor, they believe
] it can uncover "hidden crimes".

Bonus points go to the hacker who brings an e-meter to the con this weekend.

Secrets of Scientology: The E-Meter

] The advantages are spread widely. For the entertainment
] industry itself, recommendations are a remarkably
] efficient form of marketing, allowing smaller films and
] less-mainstream music to find an audience. For consumers,
] the improved signal-to-noise ratio that comes from
] following a good recommendation encourages exploration
] and can reawaken a passion for music and film,
] potentially creating a far larger entertainment market
] overall. (The average Netflix customer rents seven DVDs a
] month, three times the rate at brick-and-mortar stores.)
] And the cultural benefit of all of this is much more
] diversity, reversing the blanding effects of a century of
] distribution scarcity and ending the tyranny of the hit.
]
] Such is the power of the Long Tail. Its time has come.

] Rule 1: Make everything available
] Rule 2: Cut the price in half. Now lower it.
] Rule 3: Help me find it

This article might as well be a summary of much discussion here on MemeStreams about the future of media sales.

Wired 12.10: The Long Tail

] It works like this: The calls are recorded by
] geo-stationary spy satellites and listening stations,
] such as the UK's Menwith Hill, which combine
] satellite-intercepted calls and trunk landline intercepts
] and forward them on to centres, such as the US' Fort
] Meade, where supercomputers work on the recordings in
] real time.

] A SAM-650 product is called a 192 GFLOPS DSP
] supercomputer by TMS. It is just 3U high and has 24 DSP
] chips and is positioned as a back-end number cruncher
] controlled by any standard server - a similar
] architecture to that used by Cray supercomputers. There
] are vast streams of information coming from recorded
] telephone conversations. The ability to have the DSPs
] work in parallel speeds up analysis enormously. Spinning
] hard drives can't feed the DSPs fast enough, nor are they
] quick enough for subsequent software analysis of the
] data. Consequently TMS uses its solid state technology to
] provide a buffer up to 32GB that keeps the DSPs operating
] at full speed.
]
] A cluster of five SAM-650's provides a terra flop of
] processing power; one trillion floating point operations
] per second.

Techworld.com - Want to know the hardware behind Echelon?

] Snocap, the new company started by Napster founder Shawn
] Fanning, said Thursday that it struck a deal with SonyBMG
] Music Entertainment to help distribute the record label's
] music through file-swapping networks.

Record deal for Fanning's swap service | CNET News.com

] In common parlance, left is clearly code for "feckless,
] pseudo-intellectual wiener," while right is code for
] "winner" and "the people who are actually running
] things while you assholes are reading James Joyce."
] Left also emphatically stands for "wrong side of
] history," while right is explicitly understood to mean
] the only remaining legitimate vision for future social
] organization.

In other words, the US has gone so far to the right it has no idea where the center is.

Right Wing, Left Wing, Chicken Wing

Cryptome eyeballs the nuclear power plant yours truly grew up within a mere two miles of. I like to think of it as "my nuclear power plant". Over the years, I've truly enjoyed following its various accidents and dribbling safety record. My childhood is dotted by its infrequent drills and more frequent fish-kills. I revel in every dead link to its emergency plans as if they were the failed papers of my children hanging on the kitchen refrigerator.

Noted for being the first commercial nuclear power plant in the United States, it has claimed a number of firsts over its lifetime. I believe it even held first place on Greenpeace's "accidents waiting to happen" list, bumped only because its actually had accidents happen. While no radiation leak has ever (publicly) occurred which has extended beyond the site's inner boundary, local residents keep our iodine tables handy and in a cool preserving environment.

Oyster Creek, first run by the same company that brought us such hits as Three Mile Island, is now run by the company that brought us the spring blockbuster known as The Great East Coast Blackout, and remains a major local attraction. The energy museum on the north end of the site burnt down several years ago when a forrest fire blazed right up to the edge of the plant site, but any given day you will find a dozen or so local residents fishing off the Route 9 (locally known as Thunder Road, due to the Springstein song) bridge on the southern side of the plant. The plant's exit stream is known as one of the best local fishing spots due to the slightly (sometimes radically) warmer waters present. In the evening you can watch the sun set over the plant, and in the morning experience the eerie fog present on the south side of the plant.

Also visible in this image is the past path of the defunct rail line running along Route 9 that government plans cite as the route for transporting its growing nuclear waste stockpile. You may notice how it suddenly ends at the roads on either side of the plant. A few years ago the local waste site was augmented to hold even more waste, as the plant continues to have its license extended again and again, pushing far beyond the plant's designed lifetime. Oyster Creek, rusted drywell and all, continues to pound away, never at full capacity, and likely will for years to come until this lovely chunk of Ocean County is evacuated and turned into a wildlife preserve.

Eyeballing the Oyster Creek Nuclear Power Station

] Huge celebrations have erupted in Beirut after the
] Lebanese government announced its resignation following
] two weeks of popular protests.

BBC | Lebanese ministers forced to quit

] Aviation obsessives with cameras and Internet connections
] have become a threat to cover stories established by the
] CIA to mask its undercover operations and personnel
] overseas. U.S. intel sources complain that "plane
] spotters” hobbyists who photograph airplanes landing or
] departing local airports and post the pix on the
] Internet” made it possible for CIA critics recently to
] assemble details of a clandestine transport system the
] agency set up to secretly move cargo and
] people ”including terrorist suspects” around the world.

This reminds me of a scene from the movie Broken Arrow where the presence of plane spotters nixes a plan to not disclose the loss of a B2 bomber.

MSNBC - No Secrets: Eyes on the CIA

] The Sampling licenses let artists and authors invite other
] people to use a part of their work and make it new.

] * Sampling
] People can take and transform pieces of your work for any
] purpose other than advertising, which is prohibited.
] Copying and distribution of the entire work is also
] prohibited.
]
] * Sampling Plus
] People can take and transform pieces of your work for any
] purpose other than advertising, which is prohibited.
] Noncommercial copying and distribution (like
] file-sharing) of the entire work are also allowed. Hence,
] "plus".
]
] * Noncommercial Sampling Plus
] People can take and transform pieces of your work for
] noncommercial purposes only. Noncommercial copying and
] distribution (like file-sharing) of the entire work are
] also allowed.

Creative Commons - Sampling Licenses

GQ on Google's internal power structure and corporate influences.

GQ: Journey to the (Revoltionary, Evil-Hating, Cash-Crazy, and Possibly Self-Destructive) Center of Google