You people are some of the most disgusting examples of a waste of protoplasm I've ever had the displeasure to hear about.

Sean Penn, you're a traitor to the United States of America. You gave aid and comfort to the enemy. How many American lives will your little, "fact finding trip" to Iraq cost? You encouraged Saddam to think that we didn’t have the stomach for war.

You people protect one of the most evil men on the face of this earth and won't lift a finger to save the life of an unborn baby.

Freedom of choice you say?

This internal FBI memo reveals numerous mistakes that agents made when using FISA. For instance, they illegally videotaped suspects, intercepted e-mails without court permission, recorded the wrong phone conversations, and allowed electronic surveillance operations to run beyond their legal deadline, during sensitive terrorism investigations. The existence of the memo was first revealed in documents that EPIC obtained through FOIA litigation...

An FBI anti-terrorism investigation involving Osama bin Laden was hampered by technical flaws in the Bureau's controversial Carnivore Internet surveillance system. The incident, which occurred in March 2000, is described in FBI documents obtained under court order by EPIC. A written report describes the incident as part of a "pattern" indicating "an inability on the part of the FBI to manage" its foreign intelligence surveillance activities.

I'm sorry about our softwood lumber. Just because we have more trees than you doesn't give us the right to sell you lumber that's cheaper and better than your own.

I'm sorry we beat you in Olympic hockey. In our defense I guess our excuse would be that our team was much, much, much, much better than yours.

I'm sorry we burnt down your white house during the war of 1812. I notice you've rebuilt it! It's Very Nice.

officials agreed -718
officials expressed - 521
officials found - 454
officials suspect - 380; officials suspected - 199
officials denied - 371
officials insisted - 348

72 Hafnium

I'm in solid, Zirc
make nuclear control rods-
I can take the heat

So, the Feds are not only inspecting our bags -- and invading our privacy -- to ensure that they are bomb-free; they're now taking it upon themselves to chastise us for our political beliefs? What the hell does keeping bombs off airplanes have to do with winkling out protest signs?

Nothing like a little thoughtcrime policing to undermine the entire mission and credibility of the TSA. Of course, the TSA is maintaining that this wasn't the work of an inspector -- rather, someone at the airport cut the security-seal left behind by the inspector, defaced the "You have been inspected" card, and replaced the seal, all without being caught by the TSA itself (wow, that gives me a lot of confidence in the TSA's ability to secure the nation's airports!).

Nico Melendez, western regional spokesman for the TSA, said the note in Goldberg's luggage will be investigated, but he said there's no proof that a TSA employee wrote it. "It's a leap to say it was a TSA screener," Melendez said.

But Goldberg said, "It seems a little far-fetched to think people are running around the airport writing messages on TSA literature and slipping them into people's bags."

The cryptographic handshake is more than just comparing two policies to make sure they’re identical. And, of course, if the content owner has built in an escape hatch to allow key revocation for security lapses, I’d better have some kind of strong assurance that they won’t decide to hold my music collection for ransom five years down the line.

But it gets worse. If that song is copyrighted – which, after all, is the putative basis for this whole game – that copyright will expire at some point. That means you need to build an expiration date into the rights grant (just in case your handheld is still around in 2098). Once you’ve done that, well, the device needs to be secure against rolling its clock forward to 2099; if it gets a time from a central server, that server had better be secure and trusted both by content owners and consumers.

Ed Felten also observed, in a different context, that much of computer science involves using bulldozers to shove tough problems into someone else's back yard.

Dick's speed-enhanced gift was to capture the illusion sometimes encountered by the deadline-conscious hack, hyped on adrenaline, playing with transcen- dental notions that creator and creations, illusions and reality are one. As with hallucinogens, the condition can cause obsession and psychosis, a distinct sense that the book is writing you. You become merely a medium. Common sense usually brings you back to shared reality. But in the case of Dick or L Ron Hubbard, inventor of Scientology, the experience formed the basis of a rough and ready belief system resembling Buddhism or Manichaeism. Does the mind control reality? Do good and evil emanate from the same source? What do we worship and why?

As he followed these themes, Dick's novels became increasingly incoherent and, for me, scarcely readable. Hacking out book after book, he gave himself no time to discover a more idiosyncratic structure or style, the search for which characterised the so-called SF New Wave and gave us sophisticated American visionaries such as Thomas M Disch, John Sladek and Samuel R Delany.

...cover topics that range from library education and librarianship as a profession to the more political and spiritual aspects of librarianship. The contributions include critiques of library and information science programs, firsthand accounts of work experiences, and original fiction, poetry and art. Ten of the original librarians who wrote essays for Revolting Librarians back in 1972 reflect upon what they wrote thirty years ago and the turns that their lives and careers have taken since.

It's really simple: India are already through, New Zealand have to win.

Meanwhile, have you ever thought WHAT SORT OF LIFE IS THIS AND WHAT THE HELL AM I DOING BOARDING A TRAIN FOR MOORGATE AT 6.30 IN THE MORNING AND THEN STANDING AROUND FOR AGES WAITING FOR A TUBE WHILE STARING AT A SIGN TELLING YOU THAT IF YOU WAIT FOR FOUR MINUTES YOU CAN BOARD A TRAIN TO UXBRIDGE I'D RATHER WAIT FOUR HOURS FOR A JOURNEY WITH THE GRIM REAPER QUITE FRANKLY AND THEN YOU GET TO WORK AND THEN THERE'S THIS AND I KNOW THE CRICKET'S GOOD AND ALL THAT BUT I'VE GOT OUT OF THE WRONG SIDE OF BED THIS MORNING AND IN ANY CASE IT'S NOT AS IF I'LL WRITE A CRACKING MATCH REPORT AND THEN GET REWARDED BY BEING SENT ON A WONDERFUL ASSIGNMENT AROUND THE WORLD BECAUSE I'LL BE VERY SURPRISED IF ANY OF MY BOSSES WILL READ ANY OF THIS LET'S BE HONEST THEY WON'T ALTHOUGH ON THE OTHER HAND THAT'S PROBABLY JUST AS WELL HEY I WOULDN'T BE ABLE TO GET AWAY WITH TYPING THINGS LIKE THIS KIqL!UYS^%$DFLI ZSDSAFC SFE4O92 )(^(*^o"$ bBLKU E875O3 96*&^%o*"$ogb LOOK I'M SORRY THIS ISN'T EXACTLY THE SORT OF QUALITY EDITORIAL COPY YOU EXPECT FROM THE GUARDIAN BUT LOOK AT THE FACTS I'M ADRIFT IN THE MIDDLE OF ONE OF THE WORST CITIES IN THE WORLD SITTING IN FRONT OF THE SAME COMPUTER SCREEN I FACE DAY AFTER INTERMINABLE DAY HELL I COULD BE WAKING UP IN SAY THE MALDIVES OR SYDNEY OR COPENHAGEN OR A CROFTER'S COTTAGE IN SKYE AND GOING FOR A WALK IN THE CRISP MORNING AIR?

In a study to be published in the journal Biology of Reproduction, researchers collected samples from the underarms of men who refrained from using deodorant for four weeks. The extracts were then blended and applied to the upper lips of 18 women, aged 25 to 45.

The women rated their moods on a fixed scale for a period of six hours. The findings suggested something in the perspiration brightened their moods and helped them feel less tense.

Blood analyses also showed a rise in levels of the reproductive luteinizing hormone that typically surge before ovulation.

But he will not be able to call himself plain Harry Potter, as election rules state that Russian citizens who change their name have to retain their patronymic - their genuine father's first name.

The man, who has so far remained anonymous, said he will reveal his true identity on 29 March, when he receives his new passport.

You have to scroll deep into the text to finally learn that subscribers do not in fact have to become members of the SBC Yahoo family (and open themselves up to unforeseen privacy issues, but we'll get back to that).

"If you do not upgrade your account to SBC Yahoo DSL, you will still have your high-speed Internet connection," the company admits, "but you will eventually lose your SBC home page and portal."

There, at last, is the truth: You don't have to make the switch, and, if you choose not to, all you'll have to do is pick a new start page for your browser. Otherwise, nothing changes.

On March 23-24, 2003, the second in a series of international workshops on interstellar message design will be held in Paris. The workshop will focus on two broad themes: first, the interface of art, science, and technology in interstellar message design; and second, how to communicate concepts of altruism in interstellar messages. The workshop will focus on messages that could be transmitted across interstellar space by radio or laser signals. These communication techniques reflect the methods used by current observational programs in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI).

They expect fans to learn about the album from Ms. Merchant's Web site and through publicity and a small advertising campaign. To gauge demand, they may offer fans who order the CD in advance a downloadable file of a song from the sessions that is not included on the album. In an increasingly consolidated retail business, a handful of chain stores, like Borders and Barnes & Noble, have accounted for a large percentage of Ms. Merchant's sales in the past; now her label is approaching them directly.

"I don't know that every artist has the capability to go directly to these chains, but Natalie has a history," Mr. Smith said.

"The new products are a mix of adult-pleasing convenience and child-pleasing shock value ... a hamburger meal with a patty shaped like a house and cookies that look like bricks... a line of jellies for dinner rolls in flavors like watermelon, sour apple and banana... hot pink and electric blue margarine... neon-colored salad dressings with names like Purple Pizzazzz and Outrageous Orange.... blue fries, which can be dipped in the purple, orange, pink and teal ketchups..." Link Discuss (Thanks, Scott!)

The impression that UWB is going to deal Bluetooth the final blow was intensified this week in meetings in Dallas, at which major manufacturers -- among them Intel and Sony -- were considering which technology of those submitted to them by leading wireless communication companies to settle on as the new standard to compete, and possibly knock out, Bluetooth. One technology has caught everyone's eye -- UWB. WPANs create wireless connections in the home over short distances, which allow for synchronization among PDAs, computers, television sets, cable TV box, etc. Allied Business Intelligence estimates that the winning technology behind the standard, to be designated 802.15.3a, will likely generate $1.39 billion in revenue by 2007. The IEEE will not make its decision until June at the earliest, but there is a consensus that UWB has emerged as the clear winner from this week's meetings: The technology was used by 95 percent of the proposals submitted, according to Ben Manny, an Intel director of wireless technology development.

UWB is simpler, cheaper, less power-hungry, and 100 times faster than Bluetooth (currently the leading WPAN technology), adopted by makers of cell phones and PDAs, as well as by companies such as Microsoft and Apple Computer.

No doubt you've experienced these two types of networks in your own life, many times over. The karass is that group of friends from college who have helped one another's careers in a hundred subtle ways over the years; the granfalloon is the marketing department at your firm, where everyone has a meticulously defined place on the org chart but nothing ever gets done. When you find yourself in a karass, it's an intuitive, unplanned experience. Getting into a granfalloon, on the other hand, usually involves showing two forms of ID.

For most of the past 50 years, computers have been on the side of the granfalloons, good at maintaining bureaucratic structures and blind to more nuanced social interactions. But a new kind of software called social-network mapping promises to change all that. Instead of polishing up the org chart, the new social maps are designed to locate karasses wherever they emerge. Mapping social networks turns out to be one of those computational problems -- like factoring pi out to a hundred decimal points or rendering complex light patterns on a 3-D shape -- that computers can do effortlessly if you give them the right data.

What is Raging Platypus?

Raging Platypus is so hip, so innovative, so revolutionary, it can be difficult to describe to the uninitiated. In fact, it is best described by what it is not.

* It is not a weblog publishing tool.
* It is not a Linux distribution.
* It is not a Flash game.
* It is not a Matrix ripoff.
* It is not an MP3 player.
* It is not an insipidly-marketed soft drink.

Raging Platypus is everywhere, it is all around us. Even now, in this very room... It is at the core of what you are, and what you can become. It believes in you, it adores you, it worships you. And it can be yours, all yours. Oh yes, my friend.

Like the car companies, oil producers have already taken steps toward an oil-free future. Over the past 15 years, corporations like Shell and Exxon have ceded their leadership in oil production to a dozen state-owned enterprises in countries such as Venezuela, Brazil, and Norway. Instead they've focused on adding value farther down the supply chain by refining crude into gasoline and distributing and selling it through filling stations. They know they could play the same role in a hydrogen economy, which is why Shell and BP have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in hydrogen storage and production technology. Indeed, BP, formerly British Petroleum, has rebranded itself Beyond Petroleum.

The major oil companies are already extracting hydrogen from gasoline for industrial uses at nine refinery complexes throughout the United States. With a little push, these plants could serve as hubs for a nascent hydrogen-distribution network.

Converting filling stations is bound to cost billions of dollars over several decades. But it should cost relatively little to retrofit clusters of stations in proximity to both a hydrogen-producing refinery and a population center where fuel cell vehicles are sold. Oil companies could meet initial demand by trucking hydrogen from refineries to these stations. As the number of fuel cell vehicles on the road rises, stations that aren't served by refinery hubs could install processors, called reformers, that use electricity to extract hydrogen from gasoline or water. The White House should ask for $5 billion - roughly $30,000 for each of the nation's 176,000 filling stations - to get the ball rolling.

Internet access in Iraq and the other countries he's traveling in is -- as one might imagine -- unavailable or extremely poor. This makes text blogging difficult or impossible. But by using audblog and his somewhat more reliable satellite phone connection to speak his blog posts (I understand that the CNN crews there are using Iridiums and Thurayas), Kevin's able to share these quick, immediate first-hand reflections of what it's like to be a reporter on the ground.

Audblog post: crossing the border into northern Iraq
I'm calling in from the highly-guarded border of Iran and Kurdistan. A truck is waiting for us to transport CNN staff, our personal belongings, and our television gear into Kurd-controlled northern Iraq. We're crossing into this region to cover the northern front of a potential war with Iraq, in an area dense with oil-rich fields along the northern no-fly-zone.

Closely held American Transit Insurance Co., New York, which insures 80% of the taxis and limousines in the Big Apple, said the devices will be installed late this summer. The company plans to offer $300 insurance discounts to induce owners of as many as 1,500 cabs to take part....Wednesday, IBM and Norwich Union, a car-insurance unit of Britain's Aviva PLC, announced plans to put black boxes in 5,000 volunteers' cars. The aim is to see whether people who drive less should get lower insurance rates. That program could raise invasion-of-privacy issues, because it keep tabs on when, where and how much the cars are driven.

LIKE A MAGPIE WITHOUT A NEST

That's how Rudy Rucker, in an email yesterday, described how it feels to be a novelist between books. No place to take the shiny things we constantly find. He's treating his own condition, he said, by writing a horror sorry about having belonged to a country club in Lynchburg, Virginia, in the early Eighties (man, that *is* scary).

No place for the magpie mind to take the trinkets and bits of tinfoil, currently. If I bring them here, for instance, I'm just leaving them on your window-ledge, something no magpie would ever be satisfied with doing.

Sterling: Let's move onto Topic No. 4: Influence on industry. The thing that impressed me with the foamed aluminum wasn’t the thing itself but the amount of sensing. You almost need aluminum moussing. Just the right temperature. What happens when that crashes? What happens when it's no longer under the control of experts? What if I can go down to Kinko's and foam me some aluminum?

It’s the Linux model for physical objects. It's a really intriguing organizational problem that our society has that no else seems to have. What happens to General Motors if people can build cars? What if you could just download the stats to build a Model T? That can't be that hard. Henry Ford wasn't that big a guy. What if you built one out of foamed aluminum and chopped bamboo? How much would it really cost? Maybe a couple of million dollars? A Model T cost $400 bucks new. And there was no one in particular making them.

It's a Red Hat automobile. There's no digital rights management. When it wore out you'd just make another. How would we fit that into the litigation structure? Who do you sue? What are we going to do when kids are making stuff -- stuff -- not drivers, but actual stuff? We have a major military problem over it. The terrorist spread of mass destruction is basically a Linux model for nuclear weapons. That’s why were going to take out Iraq. It used to be that only governments could afford weapons of mass destruction. Now small groups of networked activists can get their hands on the stuff.

The devil's liver trouble probably began here at Crizzle after a month long drunken holiday at a mutants fairground in the 1300s. Crizzle now broadcasts confusing directions to air traffic with a view to creating controlled flights into terrain. Gold ornamentation is to be seen in the rafter work and the entire length of tunnel has 33,345,567,863,426,875,678 stained wooden steps of which five are in need of repair. This entrance is a rich source of low-self-esteem-gas and is occasionally overgrown with gorse.

"Cream Collon" does indeed look like a cross section of a lower intestine filled with cream... [and then there's] the even more scatalogical-sounding Chocolate Collon... from Singapore airport. Tasty as these may not sound, they are a cut above the sickly sweetness of their vanilla cousins.

The Edison, New Jersey based company gives you one Cisco ATA186 and a phone number in an area code of your choosing (I had a little piece of northern New Jersey in my living room). You have a choice of two different levels of service to go along with this box: for $25.99/month you get unlimited local/regional calling (where local/regional is defined by the area code you choose for your phone number) and 500 minutes of free US long distance, and for $39.99/month you get unlimited long distance. And you also get international rates that rivals most common calling cards. The only problem is that the service only delivers one ATA186, and that specific model is required to use the service -- no other SIP compatible devices are supported yet. If you want to use more than one phone with the box, you will either have to rig up a network of telephone splitters and wires; or you can do what some have done and hack your house to plug the Cisco box into your house's in wall telephone network.

"Give Frank Dickson, general counsel of the beleaguered Los Alamos National Laboratory, some credit: He's a survivor.

"Allegations of discrimination and espionage in the 1990s swallowed up a generation of lab-management staff; Dickson remained. Accusations of corruption and mismanagement have forced his bosses to resign and his subordinates to relinquish their responsibilities; Dickson hung on.

"Now, the nuclear weapons lab's new director has proclaimed that he's ready to "drain the swamp" and give it a fresh start. But Dickson, singled out by Los Alamos whistleblowers for repeatedly interfering with FBI investigations into lab shenanigans, clings to power -- for now...

"Copyright-free" means you can use this art for anything, including adding your own information to it and even printing it commercially.

The job of the hippocampus appears to be to "encode" experiences so they can be stored as long-term memories elsewhere in the brain. "If you lose your hippocampus you only lose the ability to store new memories," says Berger. That offers a relatively simple and safe way to test the device: if someone with the prosthesis regains the ability to store new memories, then it's safe to assume it works.

The inventors of the prosthesis had to overcome three major hurdles. They had to devise a mathematical model of how the hippocampus performs under all possible conditions, build that model into a silicon chip, and then interface the chip with the brain.

No one understands how the hippocampus encodes information. So the team simply copied its behaviour. Slices of rat hippocampus were stimulated with electrical signals, millions of times over, until they could be sure which electrical input produces a corresponding output. Putting the information from various slices together gave the team a mathematical model of the entire hippocampus.

First, do not mistake the tool for the task. The democratization of publishing, communication, and organizing that is afforded by PCs, the Internet, and wireless mobile devices is indeed an important tool for grassroots activism. But it is the knowledge, intentions, and actions of people in the real world -- where ballots are cast, political decisions are made, wars and demonstrations take place -- that empowers democracy. Netizens must have more in common than their technical expertise in order for them to conduct discourse rather than flame each other, to act collectively in the physical world rather than sit in front of keyboards and type all the time. Long-term political organizing is hard work.

Second, understand that not every smart mob is a wise mob. The difference between a riot and democratic discourse is a literacy: if a sufficient percentage of the population does not understand the important issues of the day and does not know how to debate those issues and the governance policies affected by them, the democracy will be hollow and easily manipulated, even if the leaders are selected in fair elections. Deliberation is important for leaders and populations of citizens alike.

Third, civility, reason, and evidence are what distinguish the public sphere -- the free and open discourse among citizens that provides the foundation for democracy -- from the emotion-charged, ignorant, slogan-slinging online combat that sometimes drowns out political debate. The Web is a wonderful resource, and search engines are powerful tools. If you are arguing an issue, take two minutes to research it and post a link as part of your argument. You can question evidence, but questioning evidence is the basis of science and jurisprudence. The point is to argue the issues and evidence, not to attack the character of opponents.

So far, $16,281 has been made selling objects taken from passengers at Oakland and Sacramento airports -- the only ones in Northern California to participate in the state program.

Among the oddest items confiscated and sold were at least three circular saws, hatchets, curtain rods and a little girl's baton, said Robb Deignan, spokesman for the surplus property disposal program, a division of the California Department of General Services.

Also sold: 5,364 pocketknives, 350 pounds of scissors, 594 corkscrews and 309 leatherman tools.

* case studies of deceptive PR campaigns
* industry-friendly experts
* industry-funded organizations
* list of lists
* public relations firms
* think tanks
* war propaganda

The band was carving up a dead sheep as part of its stage act when the animal's head flew off lead singer Maniac's knife and struck 25-year-old Per Kristian Hagen.

"My relationship to sheep is a bit ambivalent now. I like them, but not when they come flying through the air," Hagen told The Associated Press Monday from his hospital room. He is expected to recover.

Mayhem member Rune Eriksen, whose stage name is Blasphemer, said the incident was unfortunate. "The whole thing was an accident, but maybe it would be an idea for another show," he said.

"There's a big gap in what people are currently doing and the exciting, dynamic thing that blogging could be..." said Breslin, whose racy Reverse Cowgirl blog receives several thousand hits each day. "The potential for blogging is fantastic, but the reality falls short right now. If you can say whatever you want to say, why in God's name would you say the same things as everyone else?"

"This X-ray was made using a Soredex Cranex panoramic x-ray machine at the office of Dr. Joseph K. Lever in Spartanburg, SC. This machine places an x-ray source on one side of the head and film on the other. The source and film are rotated through 360 degrees while the film is being exposed. You can see more information on this device at SOREDEX. QTVR has been used for years in medical multimedia presentations -- mostly as Object VR's where, for example, you can view skeleton parts from all sides."

"Hi, Xeni -- here is a Chinese performance artist in a bubble, a performance piece in Sydney Harbour yesterday: 'During the opening week of the Museum of Contemporary Art's Liquid Sea exhibition, Chinese performance artist Zhu Ming holds a number of water-based performances on Sydney Harbour - floating across the water inside a giant transparent bubble.'"

Anti-war movements usually attract quite a number of, shall we say, eccentric ideas. But this has to be one of the strangest pleas for peace ever: activists are begging the Pope to go to Baghdad and become "the ultimate human shield." Dr. Helen Caldicott, a former Harvard professor, is urging people from around the globe to e-mail, fax, call, and snail mail the Vatican, and ask the Pope to "travel to Baghdad and to remain there until a peaceful solution to this crisis has been implemented." The idea, Caldicott writes, is that the Bush Administration wouldn't risk a bombing campaign in Iraq if the Pope's life were in danger. There's been no official word from Rome in reaction to Caldicott's entreaty. But new-age guru Deepak Chopra said late last month that he'd join John Paul II and the Dalai Lama in Baghdad, if the two spiritual leaders were willing to place themselves in harm's way.

The spoofs featured looped messages from Linkin Park bandmembers in which they mention the title of the album and single, its release date and discuss the making of it for approximately the same duration as the three-and-a-half-minute single. The band's label, Warner Bros., would not comment on the bogus files.

In a further sign of the spread of wireless Internet technology, McDonald's restaurants in three U.S. cities will offer one hour of free high-speed access to anyone who buys a combination meal.

Or look it at the crowds around the Independent Game Festival finalists. That's a bunch of machines on the showroom floor, with representatives of the finalists demoing their titles. The IGF is basically open to any game that doesn't have a publishing contract, and hundreds of hopefuls submit titles every year (every year of the five it's been running) hoping for a little glory--and a shot at a publishing contract with one of the majors. Never mind that no IGF title has ever gone on to major publication and success. It's one of the few ways a garage operation can hope for a shot at glory...

They're this desperate--this desperate for the hope of a little innovation, a little chance to do something real, a little chance to reach an audience. These 10,000 geeks (that's what CMP Game Media claims was the attendance), most of them professionals, would just love to do what the IGF guys are doing--do a game for chrissakes, work on something you believe in, not churn out the next big-budget piece of crap.

"This is the culmination of more than three years of computing, the largest computation ever done," said UC Berkeley computer scientist David Anderson, director of SETI@home. "It's a milestone for the SETI@home project."

SETI@home users should find out the results of the re-observations - what The Planetary Society, the founding and principal sponsor of SETI@home, is billing as the "stellar countdown" - within two to three months.

Though excited at the opportunity to re-observe as many as 150 candidate signals, Anderson is cautious about raising people's expectations that they will discover a signal from an extraterrestrial civilization.

"Google is one of the few web giants that values personal opinion."

What is desperately needed is enhanced ability to search blog content. Increasingly difficult to find intersting content. Google's expertise in searching is the key to help find the intersting content.

Reading the assumptions would make you think there are now hundreds of people working on 'Bloogle'. Not true. Same people, but the food's much better. A couple new guys. Still constrained by people inside Google. 'Never enough people, all the hardware they could imagine.'

Drawing on his own experiences before and after the 1991 Gulf War, Mr Bush Sr said that the brief flowering of hope for Arab-Israeli relations a decade ago would never have happened if America had ignored the will of the United Nations.

...

He also urged the President to resist his tendency to bear grudges, advising his son to bridge the rift between the United States, France and Germany.

Mr Bush Jr, who is said never to forget even relatively minor slights, has alarmed analysts with the way in which he has allowed senior Administration figures such as Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary, aggressively to criticise France and Germany.

But the demonstration also stresses that the Mystro TV system offers networks and studios considerable advantages over in-home personal video recorders such as TiVo or ReplayTV, which is made by Sonicblue. Not only can networks determine the availability of their shows, but Mystro TV prevents consumers from making, storing or sharing copies (something ReplayTV allows). Mystro also does not automatically skip commercials or even include a fast-forward button that leaps past one 30-second commercial at a time (another feature of ReplayTV.)

While a program is paused or rewinding, networks can insert new commercials during the process or display them around the periphery of the screen. On the CD-ROM demo, for example, a viewer pausing "Charmed" might see a commercial for Special K or Pizza Hut.

Jon Dennis, deputy news editor of the Guardian Unlimited web site said: "We have noticed an upsurge in traffic from America, primarily because we are receiving more emails from US visitors thanking us for reporting on worldwide news in a way that is unavailable in the US media."

The American public is apparently turning away from the mostly US-centric American media in search of unbiased reporting and other points of views. Much of the US media's reaction to France and Germany's intransigence on the Iraqi war issue has verged on the xenophobic, even in the so-called 'respectable' press. Some reporting has verged on the hysterical - one US news web site, NewsMax.com, recently captioned a photograph of young German anti-war protesters as "Hitler's children".

As you may know, I have been arguing for a decade that the Internet was fatally flawed and would go the way of the telegraph, telephone, radio and television as far as its promise of elevating ideas and discourse, advancing democracy, enhancing liberty or facilitating economic and political justice. I have lived long enough to remember the claims that were made at the advent of radio and television, and read enough of the history of the telegraph and telephone to realize that the claims made by the messiahs of those forms of communication were not dissimilar from the claims made by aficionados of the Internet. The reason, from my perspective, is not complicated.

Culture brings us together, usually at a very small scale through mutual belief, trust and common interest. It educes, not compels, behavior. Culture codified is law. It is as inevitable as the day the night that as scale increases, law increases. Law enforced is government. Government does not, in the main, educe behavior, but compels it. Democratic or otherwise, rarely, very rarely, does any concentration of power or wealth desire to see subjects well informed, truly educated, their privacy ensured or their discourse uninhibited. Those are the very things that power and wealth fear most. Old forms of government have every reason to operate in secret, while denying just that privilege to subjects. The people are to be minutely scrutinized while power is to be free of examination.

wn businesses and have the time and wherewithal to indulge their hobby. "I'm a nice Jewish boy who likes motorcycles, shoots guns from time to time, and kills things for a living," said Seth Tokson, 43, of Armonk, owner of Absolute Pest Management Inc.

They are suspicious of the angst explanation. "There are many reasons we ride," Mr. Rayman said, "and the idea that we're rebelling against our parents after a protected childhood is not one of them."

Howard Rozins, 47, co-owner of the Bagel Emporium on Main Street in Armonk, likes the rush. "The speed, the freedom, the openness of it," he said. "You can't believe the beauty of riding up here."

On December 2nd a peaceful march of 200 women survivors from Bhopal delivered toxic waste from the abandoned Carbide factory back to Dow's Indian headquarters in Bombay with the demand that Dow take responsibility for the disaster and clean up the site. Dow obviously has other ideas because they are suing survivors for about US$10,000 for "loss of work". That's US$10,000 compensation demanded for a two hour peaceful protest where only one Dow employee briefly ventured out of the Mumbai corporate business park to meet the women protestors.

One college student I spoke to described leaving one's phone at home or letting the battery die as "the new taboo." Teens and twentysomethings usually do not bother to set a time and place for their meetings. They exchange as many as 5 to 15 messages throughout the day that progressively narrows in on a time and place, two points eventually converging in a coordinated dance through the urban jungle. To not have a keitai [cellphone] is to be walking blind, disconnected from just-in-time information on where and when you are in the social networks of time and place.

Update: Here's the original Online Journalism Review Story

I've barely been making it to any panels besides my own, because I'm really tightly scheduled, and the one panel I did make it to, a presentation by an exec from WayPort, was depressingly awful. His main thesis seemed to be that community networks would vanish due to their "unreliability" (in Manhattan, it's easier to get an open WiFi signal than it is to get a cellphone signal -- but this is a special definition of "reliability" meaning, "expensive" and "crappy"), and be replaced with expensive, managed networks in McDonalds restaurants in franchise ghettos on freeways near airports -- these networks would be run by the phone companies, who would "own the customer." This is the starkest, most distopian vision of a wireless future imaginable.

• David "Small Pieces" Weinberger on Lessig's keynote
• David "Loosely Joined" Weinberger on Journalism: Old and New
• Aaron Swartz on Lessig's keynote
• Heath Row's transcript of "Conceptual Firewalls"
• Heath Row's transcript of Lessig's keynote
• Heath Row's transcript of Understanding Common Sense
• Heath Row's transcript of Journalism: Old and New

Let’s talk about fair use. What is fair use? Fair use is dead. Why? Why is that so? There are copyright laws in this country (the Digital Millenium Copyright Act). They are unfair and unwise and unwieldy and absolutely, it gives me all this power. Cooool.

Handspring Visor Edge I use it for my appointments and phone numbers, but I really use it to read article and books from Project Gutenberg and alt.binaries.e-book. When I'm waiting in line, or stuck in an office lobby, it's great to pull out. I'm reading Treasure Island right now. I'm tempted to buy the Sony Clie 665C, which has twice the resolution and is in color, but don't know if I want to spend almost $300. It has some pretty cool features, like being able to control your TV and VCR with the infrared port. It has an MP3 player, to, which would be nice to use when I didn't feel like hauling my iPod around. Anybody have one of these? I saw some beautiful-looking oranges ones at Fry's today.

Sony Cyber-shot U This miniature digital camera is easy to slip into my pocket. I take pictures nearly every day. I think I've taken more pictures in the last two months since I've had it than the last five years without one. It's only two megapixels, but I've gotten decent prints from Ofoto using it. I love this camera.

A crappy T-61 Sony Ericsson phone Why oh why did I ever get rid of my Ericsson T-28 and get this bulky hunk o' junk? Probably becuse the T-28 was rated as having the highest microwave emissions of any cell phone. Still, I think I'd rather have a cooked brain than the T-61. The display is filled with dust, and I can't clean it out, because it's under the plastic screen. Makes it hard to read in daylight. Still, I haven't found a mobile phone tiny enough to goad me into switching.

Things I don't carry with me at all times: iPod (too heavy, too much hassle with the earphones, but I like it when I run), Blackberry (good for short trips when I don't want to bring my iBook with me, otherwise, I keep it at home.)

What do you carry and why? Discuss

chris: with npr since 1998 -- when he got there he did the website, there were six people there. had to do it every day. cut and encoded eight hours of audio every day. what we do is put content on the internet, and in a way so people can't just listen to things, but the specific things that they want. (example, the impeachment hearings, people could listen to snippets of it) ... npr's mission statement has nothing about making money, lucky enough to work in an area where you can have pie in the sky ideas and it's okay. ... "driveway moment" is when you hear something in your driveway and are so enthralled that you can't leave ... one of the top searches we get is for "this american life", which is not an npr program. since we're not concerned with profits but that people get they want on our site, if they came for that then we give them what they want.

"Though the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has strict rules regarding the airing of obscene material over the public airwaves, it has no provisions for songs that have been edited. That might explain why on a recent weeknight more than three-quarters of the hit tracks played on KISS 107.1's (WKFS-FM) 'Freak Show' ('The only show worth a bleep' is its slogan.) between 7 and 8 p.m. featured at least three or more edits."

Cory Doctorow is an avid Weblogger (he can be found at boingboing.net), and his novel's ad-hocracies of ''twittering Pollyannic castmembers'' who smoke ''decaf'' crack and congratulate one another on ''Bitchun'' ideas offer a knowing, gently satiric view of a once ascendant digital culture. And the impressively imagined world of the novel is tricked out in lively prose.

Dying online: Dana Robinson works for an org that provides network connectivity to chronically ill and dying children in 100 hospitals in the US and Canada. She's observed that online communities have yet to formalize any kind of social norm for coping with the death of community members (indeed, sometimes the community only infers the death from the absence of a login from some ill member over time, and confirms it much later or never) -- some gamers have mass-log-in funerals, some chat systems reserve the deceased's ID and add a RIP and rememberances to her profile, some do nothing. Dana's been studying all the online norms for coping with death she can find, and in this panel, she reports on her research.

Effective Social Networks: It's clear that online communities are capable of bringing large numbers of people with common interests together, but organizing those people into some form of collective action is much harder than just assembling them.

Discuss