james replies to scoble on the issue of tablets versus pads of paper. i like the storytelling aspect of these "back and forth"s - "As to emailing, let me introduce Scoble to scanner technology. Cheap, easy to use, creates a nice document I can push anywhere I want. It allows me to use the *best tool for the job* (paper), and then send it along if I needd to. As to searching, maybe that's something he needs for these type of things - in my experience, such diagrams are mostly one-off exercises, rarely something I need to save. Certainly not enough to justify a Tablet."#

atrios links an essay from Bad Attitudes about Bush/Lies/etc - (who then links Belva Ann Prycel #

The editors and the producers were waiting for the body bags, simple as that. Only when the public began to ask its own questions about the war did the papers and the talking heads dare to pile on. Only then were the lies of Bush and his men seen as worthy of a full-court press.

Much the same thing happened in Vietnam, a fact little noted nor long remembered. By now the general perception is that the professional skeptics of the Saigon press corps kept throwing the ugly truth in our faces until finally we understood the folly of our leaders.

But most coverage of our engagement in Vietnam was supportive throughout most of the war. While many correspondents pointed out early on that we were waging the war stupidly, few argued that we shouldn't be waging it at all.

tracy address effectiveness - easy, good, fast - choose two.#

andrew grumet links an article about 3D printers - "In 10 years, you might be able to fax a toy car to a favorite niece or nephew. It could even be sooner than that." - and he makes me laugh with the comment, "Oh God, I can see it coming. Toy car EULAs. Toy car Napster. Toy car infringement lawsuits."#

new alertbox from Jakob, called Information Pollution - "Saying less often communicates more. Our lives are littered with extraneous details that smother salient information [...] Each little piece of useless chatter is relatively innocent, and only robs us of a few seconds. The cumulative effect, however, is much worse: we assume that most communication is equally useless and tune it out, thus missing important information that's sometimes embedded in the mess. [...] Most instruction manuals are littered with "important" warnings that caution against obvious stupidities, burying actual dangers amid a mass of irrelevancy. An out-of-control legal system has made a joke of the entire warnings concept; products are now less safe because nobody bothers to read warnings anymore." - *and the best part* - "The Web is a procrastination apparatus: It can absorb as much time as is required to ensure that you won't get any real work done. Sites overflow with either low-value stream-of-consciousness postings or bland corporatese. "#

tony - "britney murphy came over last night when i least expected it. and i know what you're going to say, "isnt she crazy?" but show me one person who isnt crazy and i'll show you someone who's so dull that its not even worth the time. [...] shes not crazy. shes hot. lots of people confuse the two."#

from michael feldman is an article from the telegraph about Arnold. - it goes through possibly criticisms and addresses them, #

*2. Arnold is unqualified.*
Arnold made his first business investment at 19, using savings from his bodybuilding contests to buy a failed Munich gym. He turned it around. The first really big money he made in America in the early 1970s came when he and a fellow bodybuilder started a bricklaying business. He's one of a very few actors who was a millionaire before he ever acted. And, if you think it's no big deal being the world's highest-paid movie star, you try it - with a guttural German accent so thick you can barely do dialogue and a body frame so large you're too goofy for playing love scenes. From his gym to his mail-order company to his masonry business to his shopping malls, Schwarzenegger has shown a consistent knack for exploiting the fullest financial value from even his most modest successes. Who would you say best embodies the spirit of California? The guy who has made all his own money? Or the fellows who've squandered everybody else's?

*3. Arnold's had too many women.*
Arnold has been married to Maria Shriver for 17 human years, which in celebrity years is the equivalent of a Diamond Jubilee.

peter lindberg explains the relationship between dramaturgy and software development to my little brain. he's a very interesting guy and smarts in this area.#

it's neat when companies apologize for doing silly things to the people they are supposed to server.#

nova spivack links an article that talks about CIA spy planes and their relationship to UFO lore - some of the things these planes could do was pretty intense - "What better way to hide extraordinary aircraft than to wrap them in the compelling fiction of aliens?"#

from just a gwai lo are some interesting links - nick denton writes How to beat Bush, the democrats should stop beating around the bush and "should appropriate the traditional Republican values of limited government, individual liberty, and fiscal responsibility." #

people will like this - good job jake#

hah - "Our heroic and sexy Attorney General, John Ashcroft, has come up with yet another way to keep all us white, Christian Americans safe. The Victory Act is designed to give authorities even more power when it comes to cracking down on Al Qaeda and narcoterrorists and non-Caucasian taxi drivers. Our nation's top cop has a knack for implementing new tough, no-nonsense, privacy-raping rules in the name of freedom and justice. His Patriot Act has detained thousands of brown and yellow and darkish brownish yellowy people since it passed through congress last year. I've never felt safer! But our nation's top cop won't stop there, as he has some other acts he's planning on proposing to congress in the coming months."#

a post on ll1-discuss about how many programmers don't write interpreters anymore - read!#

on that thread is a link to something paul graham wrote about Viaweb and using lisp for web applications - i've read this before but this time i liked this bit the most - "In fact it turned out that Web consultants didn't like Viaweb. Consultants, as a general rule, like to use products that are too hard for their clients to use, because it guarantees them ongoing employment. Consultants would come to our Web site, which said all over it that our software was so easy to use that it would let anyone make an online store in five minutes, and they'd say, there's no way we're using that."#

i wonder when she'll be back?#

really fast network simulations#

at the spoon experience is discussion of segregated blog rolls - separating the "every day" from the "occasionally" - "Personally, I'm flattered when someone adds me to their blogroll, no matter what label they put on me. I also know that everyone has their own favorites, and few people have the time to read everything they might like to. I don't expect everyone to read me everyday: though some people do. I'm just grateful if people make time to drop by this site once and a while." - i read every blog on my blog roll every day that I read blogs (basically every day) because i have no life :)#

shelley, yourish, teresa, and tom are all a bit offended at the charge of 500 dollars for Dave Winer's conference. #

this is neat. it's nice when reason prevails.#

charles miller defends wheel re-invention in the style of joel: - "You want to avoid an external dependency. Every dependency you add makes your project just that little bit more complex, and that little bit harder for an end-user to get up and running. There is also an unavoidable mismatch between what you want external code to do and what it actually does that will have to be bridged over (and the bridge maintained across revisions of both codebases). Sometimes, you will decide that the effort to write something yourself is actually less than the effort of tracking and packaging someone else's code."#

neat story from robert scoble - "On the way down to Oakland, I sat next to Howard Poe. He shot down, with just a Springfield 1903 rifle, the first plane in U.S. World War II action. He was based at Kane'ohe Naval Air Station and had a lucky shot. The Japanese hit the air base first, before moving onto Pearl Harbor."#

from the bikini diaries - article - excerpt, "The research found 80% of British men didn't even know what foreplay was, mistaking it for a sport, a computer game or an item of clothing."#

also from bd - ninja lessons - you MUST read this.#

awesome idea via digital web magazine - "Matt Robinson launches Web design postcards. No, it's not what you think. These are postcards you email to the designers and owners of sites that haven't quite picked up on the best practices of the web, very clever."#

via ted leung it seems that Paul Graham has a new article about spam. it's called Filters that Fight Back and is about making spam filters that proactively increase load on spammer's servers and try to give good reason for them to knock it off. - ted leung writes, "Basically the idea is to turn spam messages into a Denial of Service attack against spammers by making spam filters pound any URL's embedded in messages determined to be spam. I love it." - (james warns that ISPs may not be so fond of this idea.) - an excerpt from Paul...#

"Would that kill spam? Not quite. If auto-retrieving spam filters become widespread, spammers will make sure to include working unsubscribe links in their mails. It will be the only way to get these filters off their backs. So spam would still get sent, but only to people too clueless or too lazy to to use auto-retrieving (and thus auto-unsubscribing) filters. Since this is exactly the audience most spammers want to reach, the end result, ironically, would be to transform spam into one of the more precisely targeted forms of advertising."

james a robertson has ideas for improving aggregators, specifically his, one idea - "Add a discuss this! option that takes you off to an IRC channel or newsgroup. The question here is, which one?" - there's already a 'commentsUrl' in RSS (something) right? I ponder if the !(Atom/Pie/Echo) thingy will have a 'chatroom' - irc://irc.freenode.net/#je_apostrophe anyone?#

madpony - "taking an apartment "as is" means also accepting a dryer that will never work, footprints on the walls, and burritos left in the microwave by the previous tenants. and i won't even mention the tube of ky jelly. oops." - are bachelorettes of the weak#

carly - in high school she wrote soap operas with the new vocabulary words she had to learn - i used to write really terrible poetry and send it to my pen pal - and in regards to her question, i hope not!#

don park is a great imaginist, this time it's about a "Living IRC Server" - "Living IRC Server is an IRC server enhanced with AI and designed to strive for survival. For a server to survive, it must be useful. To be useful, IRC server must encourage participation, enhance user experience, and market itself using allowed mediums like web pages, feeds, e-mail, IM, etc." - currently #joiito has some need stuff, like the "jibot heraldry", but i think service bots like that could be made much more useful - how you ask? - don't ask me i just blindly support the smart guys, ask don.#

russell is very bad ass - " I just ordered my absentee ballot for the special election. If somehow you've gotten all starry eyed, please remember that all Republicans are lying sacks of elitist shit including Arnold Schwarzenegger. " - "Nice to know that the Republicans are still the "dirty tricks" and lies party. Amazing. Since Nixon to Clinton's impeachment to the vote in Florida to finding some 100 year old law to recall a democratically elected leader to redo an election that didn't go their way. These people are vicious. Worse than worms and more rabid than dogs. They're fucking scum all of them." - yess!#

moxie's aunt is the diva of drama - "I waiver frequently on my diagnosis of Aunt Helen's condition. One day is spent wondering if she's a drama queen, the next day if I'm being insensitive and she's veritably ill in a physical sense. Using that tired old idea that anyone living is indeed dying at any given moment -- I've concluded it is the former. [-] I'd say it's Hypochondria but this impending sense of doom spills over onto other family members. " - hypochondria is a bitch#

philip greenspun on driving and hybrids - i find this interesting for two reasons: i want a hybrid, and i hate stop and go traffic so i try to crawl a consistently along so i always feel like i'm moving. - "Traversing a few miles of I-80 here (the Bay Bridge) took 2 hours, longer than flying over the entire stretch of I-80 that traverses Utah (from Wyoming to Nevada). No accidents; just a normal flow Sunday around noon."#

tom coates on journalism and weblogs - the difference between professionals, unprofessionals, and sharing the world between them - "The other difference between weblogs and established mainstream journalism is in terms of the brand - and more importantly the mechanisms that are supposed to lie behind that brand. The trusted brand is supposed to reflect an organisation that makes sure its journalism conforms to good standards of fact-checking, that it is guaranteed to be professional, that it asks the questions that its readers want answered and that if it is not there is a space and a process whereby redress that can be made."#