House prices in the U.S. from 1890 until 2005, plotted as a roller coaster that you ride from a first person perspective. Here is the data source. Hold on to your hats.

Also check out these two posts from Decius about the current state of the housing market.

Real Estate Roller Coaster

He was the ultimate keeper of secrets, lurking in the shadows of American history. He toppled banana republics, planned the Bay of Pigs invasion and led the Watergate break-in. Now he would reveal what he'd always kept hidden: who killed JFK

Regardless of how the inevitable follow-up on this goes, this is a great read. Given that the identify of Deep Through has been revealed as Mark Felt, there are few great secrets from this era of US history that have captivated the general public which have yet to be revealed.

Screw The Good Shepherd, I'd rather see a movie of this.

Update: NOT by Costner.

Rolling Stone : The Last Confessions of E. Howard Hunt

Mike Lynn posted an updated version of his previously posted programming rules. It's a good list. Read it over. Obey.

Abaddon's Programming Rules v2.1

This picture was way too amusing to not blog...

Danger Room - The Dukes of Fallujah

This afternoon I was happily geeking away when I heard a knock at the door. I went to answer and was presented with a local sheriff and two FBI agents holding a lovely search warrant (scans coming when I can get down to Kinko's in the morning).

The original prank was covered earlier.

It appears neither McCain's people nor the FBI have a grasp on what has happened here. In short, it was McCain's web staff that screwed up. The only crime committed here was civil in nature, and was on the part of McCain's web staff. They included images in their MySpace profile that were not hosted on MySpace or McCain's servers, and did not follow the license associated with those images. They did not attribute them, so the owner changed them.

If this escalates, it will be an interesting court case. McCain and the FBI will lose.

For some background reading that relates to this, I strongly suggest reading the account of how Jason Scott did something similar, only much more offensive. I suggest reading the entire account, as it is both extremely humorous and insightful.

Update: The original prank was featured on the Daily Show.

Update^2: It was an April Fools day joke. A pretty believable one too. Heh. I expect this kinda thing to happen these days.

Senator McCain web staff and FBI both lacking clue

Bruce Sterling wants to fund the Industrial Memetics Institute.

"I'm shocked that I understood every damn thing Benkler's saying. Online experiences need to be granular, modular, and integratable. Furthermore, I didn't know about self-selection, humanization, and trust construction. I'd love to see that industrialized. Norm creation, transparency, peer review, discipline, yeah, all of that's lacking today. Internet institutions lack sustainability. They have the lifetime of my skin. They get bought out. The available platforms for self-expression are terrible. I use seven word processors, all of them terrible."

"Why are social applications businesses? Why aren't they political parties?"

"I hang out at a lot of gigs like this. Everybody's sticking it to the man; nobody's the man. What if the state of Vermont gets metal-spined ubiquitous broadband? If it leaks over state borders, are you going to sell connectivity? Will they make sure nobody in New Hampshire can 'steal' Wi-fi? What if New Hampshire becomes the next Baltic-style e-state, the next Estonia?"

What you build, you cannot contain or control. "I'm a cyberpunk. Information wants to be free. It used to be hard to find, but Google was my apotheosis. We now have this unbelievable tidal wave of information. There's no end to it. It's endlessly seductive. Suddenly, your skills at ferreting out obscure information are almost worthless. Now they don't want to pay you. I say, follow your bliss. I spend more time with Google now than with novels and magazines. I'm swimming in it. I'm marinating it."

"Follow your bliss into the abyss. That's my new bumper sticker. This is the abyss. This is where my explorations led me. You guys are the denizens of the abyss. I strap on my diver helmet and go into the internet as far as you can go. You're the guys laying the pipe. It's a cyberpunk Mariana Trench in this room. I have to cheer you. Thank you for having us here."

Freedom to Connect | Summary

Contextual searching has been fixed. Whenever you preform a search using the upper right hand search bar, it should be limited to the section of the site you are using. Limited to topic, user, user and topic, circle, et cetera.

Thanks to Bad Religion, there is a theme song for this. Here are the lyrics:

Somewhere high in the desert near a curtain of a blue
St. Anne's skirts are billowing
But down here in the city of the lime lights
The fans of santa ana are withering
And you can’t deny that living is easy
If you never look behind the scenery
It's showtime for dry climes
And bedlam is dreaming of rain

When the hills of los angeles are burning
Palm trees are candles in the murder wind
So many lives are on the breeze
Even the stars are ill at ease
And los angeles is burning

This is not a test
Of the emergency broadcast system
Where malibu fires and radio towers
Conspire to dance again
And I cannot believe the media Mecca
They're only trying to peddle reality,
Catch it on prime time, story at nine
The whole world is going insane

When the hills of los angeles are burning
Palm trees are candles in the murder wind
So many lives are on the breeze
Even the stars are ill at ease
And los angeles is burning

A placard reads
"the end of days"
Jacaranda boughs are bending in the haze

More a question than a curse
How could hell be any worse?

The flames are stunning
The cameras running
So take warning

When the hills of los angeles are burnin
Palm trees are candles in the murder wind
So many lives are on the breeze
Even the stars are ill at ease
And los angeles is burning

Available on iTunes.

Update: And there is even a video:

Someone on Presidential hopeful John McCain’s staff is going to be in trouble today. They used a well known template to create his Myspace page. The template was designed by Newsvine Founder and CEO Mike Davidson (original template is here). Davidson gave the template code away to anyone who wanted to use it, but asked that he be given credit when it was used, and told users to host their own image files.

McCain’s staff used his template, but didn’t give Davidson credit. Worse, he says, they use images that are on his server, meaning he has to pay for the bandwidth used from page views on McCain’s site.

Davidson decided to play a small prank on the campaign this morning as retribution.

John McCain’s MySpace Page “Enhanced”

The last thing a geek sees before his house fills with feds.