A TextArc is a visual represention of a text—the entire text (twice!) on a single page. Some funny combination of an index, concordance, and summary, it uses the viewer's eye to help uncover meaning. A more detailed overview is available

Awesome. You must look at this.

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"'We do not get that large a percentage of our oil from the Middle East... And one of the reasons that we are sort of assuming this role of policeman of the Middle East has more to do with making Japan and some other countries feel that their oil flow
is assured... so that they don't then feel more need to create a great power, armed forces, and security doctrine, and you don't start getting a lot of great powers with conflicting interests sending their militaries all over the world.'"

Originally recommended by Decius this is an interesting article, but there are a few flaws. It's claimed that only 25% of U.S. oil comes from the Gulf, but it is poorly assumed that that is insignificant, which is not true. Also, what is missed is that large parts of the Middle East (Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait) are effectively U.S. supported governments and the ability to influence them and their oil allows the U.S. significant influence with these same countries that have dependence. So, I basically agree, but I think that there is a certain viewpoint that has been ignored.

IP: With a friend like this...

The company is backed by Verizon (18.6%) and Tyco (11.2%), among others.

So, who wants to buy the world's longest cable? Cheap! Cheap! What, no takers?

Flag Telecom Files for Bankruptcy

"Most U.S. citizens are unaware that the effect of U.S. power abroad has nothing to do with the "values" celebrated at home, and indeed often serves to deprive people in other countries of the opportunity to attempt to enjoy them should they care to do so."

Powerful. An excellent and short document that puts into perspective American might. Although point #2 is a bit weak in that it makes assertions that some might be uncomfortable with this document speaks for itself in it's clear thinking and outspoken message. I urge you to read it and think about what you can do to take action.

ZNet | Mideast | U.S. Letter to Europeans

A noble cause and a noble site. Find out more about your rights online and how to combat the "Chilling Effects" of corporations and individual who are using some of the new laws (DMCA, etc.) to clamp down on your rights to free speech!

Chilling Effects Clearinghouse

Jaron Lanier: "I'm 41 now so I've decided I need to develop my grumpy side. So here's a rant about the sorry state of pop music."

I'm not going to include a bunch of excerpts for this one, because I want everyone to read the whole thing start to finish. It will only take a few minutes; like most good rants, it's short, direct, and thought provoking.

'Where did the music go?' by Jaron Lanier

Crypto to the people.

It's about freaking time. The openssl documentation is for crap.

SSLeay Certificate Cookbook

Abstract: Recommender systems learn about user preferences over time, automatically finding things of similar interest. This reduces the burden of creating explicit queries. Recommender systems do, however, suffer from cold-start problems where no initial information is available early on upon which to base recommendations. Semantic knowledge structures, such as ontologies, can provide valuable domain knowledge and user information. However, acquiring such knowledge and keeping it up to date is not a trivial task and user interests are particularly difficult to acquire and maintain. This paper investigates the synergy between a web-based research paper recommender system and an ontology containing information automatically extracted from departmental databases available on the web. The ontology is used to address the recommender systems cold-start problem. The recommender system addresses the ontology's interest-acquisition problem. An empirical evaluation of this approach is conducted and the performance of the integrated systems measured.

Exploiting Synergy Between Ontologies and Recommender Systems [PDF]

"(CNN) -- Computer security expert Chad Harrington regularly surfs Internet Relay Chat (IRC), one of the oldest chat technologies on the Web. The IRC networks have names like Dalnet and EFnet, but he agrees that another name works just as well: eBay for hackers. "

A call to bring the law into IRC. What I find interesting is the idea the jurisdictional problems will require federal law enforcement to get involved with crimes that are "petty." Usually the feds deal with major crime and the local cops deal with unruly kids. On the net, the FBI has to handle everything. That will probably require major changes over there. (So far, they seem to just ignore "petty" internet crime. A serious law enforcement effort concerning SMTP relay abuse is needed, but its too lame for an FBI thats designed to fight bank robbers.)

CNN.com - Experts: Chat rooms a haven for hackers - April 10, 2002

http://www.aclu.org/news/2002/n031802a.html "

ACLU Press Release: 04-10-02 -- ACLU Joins Broad Coalition in Constitutional Challenge to Campaign Finance Law