Not caring.

Showing that you care is something you're not supposed to do. The penalty is death, in a symbolic sense. Better to stay aloof, uninvolved, like a TV character. "I don't really care," I say, when nothing could be further from the truth. This is the American way. (Or at least the California way.)

But, at some point you have to take a stand. Maybe it's in the last days or hours of life, struggling against cancer, heart disease or diabetes, or whatever's gonna getcha. Maybe at that point it's okay to care, to take a stand, to fight. But I suspect not. Even then people say "What's he getting so riled up for?" The answer of course is fairly obvious.

It's called living, and it's worth getting agitated over.

[Scripting News]

posted by cedar August 29 6:22 PM | 22 comments. Nine lives? It seems cats do better when dropped...uh, I mean, fall, more than seven stories. Anything less and they fail to reach terminal velocity and don't land properly. Once the cats reach terminal velocity they spread their legs (think parachute) and slow their fall. A cat has a far better chance of survival falling from 32 stories than four. Dwarfs, however, do not benefit from longer flights. [MetaFilter]

Why you get nine minutes of snooze and not ten [FARK]

Dewie the Internet Safety Turtle: Give a hoot, don't look at Internet porn!. The FTC has launched "Dewie," the cartoon Internet Safety Turtle, companion to Smokey the Bear and Woodsy the Owl. Ah, nothing connotes the lightspeed changes on the Internet like a turtle in a sportscar.

Officials said the Dewie campaign is part of the federal government’s broad effort to promote a “culture of security” and the view that every person who uses computers and networks, such as the Internet, has a role in keeping cyberspace safe.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Stefan) [Boing Boing Blog]

Chinese Proverb. "To know the road ahead, ask those coming back." [Adam Curry: Adam Curry's Weblog]

Semantic Studios: Ambient Findability. I want to be able to find anything, anywhere, anytime. What's surprising is how close we are to making this impossibly strange dream a reality. Ambient interfaces, sensors and small tech are about to intertwingle the physical and virtual worlds in shocking ways that will make history of the Diamond Age. [Tomalak's Realm]

Stephanie Félicité Ducrest de St-Albin, Comtesse de Genlis.
Photograph ©MMII Austin Burbridge. All rights reserved

For which reason, you may observe that the man whose probity consists in merely obeying the laws, cannot be truly virtuous or estimable; for he will find many opportunities of doing contemptible and even dishonest acts, which the laws cannot punish

Stephanie Félicité Ducrest de St-Albin, Comtesse de Genlis 1746-1830. "Laws," Tales of the Castle. circa 1793

[Sprezzatura]

Delta flying away with Hotwire. The long-time Priceline stalwart has started selling tickets on rival Hotwire, an airline-backed discount travel site. [CNET News.com]

posted by Dr_Octavius August 28 10:04 AM | 7 comments. Who owns our water? An interesting question considering the droughts going on and this lady has some good insight into where things might lead. Should a few large corporations be allowed to control our most important resource? [MetaFilter]

Pat Robertson in Blakely's hands I part .... Pat Robertson in Blakely's hands

I particularly enjoyed this week's missive from Hank Blakely. He turns from his weekly W bashing to the news from Pat Robertston:

Pat (actually his real name is "Marion," but that's just a bit gender ambiguous, so he substituted "Pat") and his American Center for Law and Justice (they do both!), have come up with this simply nifty idea they call the Houses of Worship Political Speech Protection Act*. Wow! Huh? We mean, wow! How many loaded words can you get into one title? Do these guys know their business, or do these guys know their business?

More here. [JOHO the Blog]

posted by dchase August 28 9:07 AM | 13 comments. MIT's R&D for the US Army of the future appears to be based on a comic book. [MetaFilter]

10-Word Word Square Word Ways, the odde .... 10-Word Word Square

Word Ways, the oddest journal on the planet, and available only in print, has at last put up a website at www.WordWays.com. WordWays is a small-circulation journal for people who treat words as objects. They set themselves challenges and then create enormous word lists of, for example, all the words that can be broken into pallindromic sets. And that's one of the simplest examples.

The site is scandalously out of date, though! It runs Jeff Grant's 10-word word-square that relies on people's proper names but does not yet run the 10-word word-square in the current issue, the first such square with all authenticated sources. It's from Rex Gooch in Letchworth, England. Here it is, with the source of each word to the right:

A B A P T I S T U M     Pulliam

B A H R A M T A P A     in Azerbaijan

A H L E R B R U C H     in Germany

P R E P A R A T O R     Oxford Eng. Dict.

T A R A D A N O V A     in Russia

I M B R A N G L E S     OED

S T R A N G F O R D     in England

T A U T O L O G I A     qv in OED

U P C O V E R I N G     OED

M A H R A S D A G I     in Turkey

Congratulations to Mr. Gooch and all the little Letchworth Gooches! [JOHO the Blog]

Birth of Nerdc0re -- My novella on Salon. My short story, 0wnz0red, is in the new Salon, which just went live. This is, AFAIK, the first original fiction Salon's published, and it's a piece I'm very happy with. It amounts to a science-fictional take on Trusted Computing, with generous dollops of Atkins Diet, hacker ethos and bloggy memes thrown in for good measure. It's a really fun, super-nerdy story (I've been jokingly calling it the first example of a new genre called "Nerdc0re") -- or so I'm told -- and I'm proud as I can be to have it on the Web where anyone can read it and link to it. I hope you dig it as much as I do.

Ten years in the Valley, and all Murray Swain had to show for it was a spare tire, a bald patch, and a life that was friendless and empty and maggoty-rotten. His only ever California friend, Liam, had dwindled from a tubbaguts programmer-shaped potato to a living skeleton on his death-bed the year before, herpes blooms run riot over his skin and bones in the absence of any immunoresponse. The memorial service featured a framed photo of Liam at his graduation; his body was donated for medical science.

Liam's death really screwed things up for Murray. He'd gone into one of those clinical depression spirals that eventually afflicted all the aging bright young coders he'd known during his life in tech. He'd get misty in the morning over his second cup of coffee and by the midafternoon blood-sugar crash, he'd be weeping silently in his cubicle, clattering nonsensically at the keys to disguise the disgusting snuffling noises he made. His wastebasket overflowed with spent tissues and a rumor circulated among the evening cleaning-staff that he was a compulsive masturbator. The impossibility of the rumor was immediately apparent to all the other coders on his floor who, pr0n-hounds that they were, had explored the limits and extent of the censoring proxy that sat at the headwaters of the office network. Nevertheless, it was gleefully repeated in the collegial fratmosphere of his workplace and wags kept dumping their collections of conference-snarfed hotel-sized bottles of hand-lotion on his desk.

The number of bugs per line in Murray's code was 500 percent that of the overall company average. The QA people sometimes just sent his code back to him (From: qamanager@globalsemi.com To: mswain@globalsemi.com Subject: Your code... Body: ...sucks) rather than trying to get it to build and run. Three weeks after Liam died, Murray's team leader pulled his commit privileges on the CVS repository, which meant that he had to grovel with one of the other coders when he wanted to add his work to the project.

Two months after Liam died, Murray was put on probation.

Three months after Liam died, Murray was given two weeks' leave and an e-mail from HR with contact info for an in-plan shrink who could counsel him. The shrink recommended Cognitive Therapy, which he explained in detail, though all Murray remembered ten minutes after the session was that he'd have to do it every week for years, and the name reminded him of Cognitive Dissonance, which was the name of Liam's favorite stupid Orange County garage band.

Murray returned to Global Semiconductor's Mountain View headquarters after three more sessions with the shrink. He badged in at the front door, at the elevator, and on his floor, sat at his desk and badged in again on his PC. From: tvanya@globalsemi.com To: mswain@globalsemi.com Subject: Welcome back! Come see me... Body: ...when you get in.

Tomas Vanya was Murray's team lead, and rated a glass office with a door. The blinds were closed, which meant: dead Murray walking. Murray closed the door behind him and sighed a huge heave of nauseated relief. He'd washed out of Silicon Valley and he could go home to Vancouver and live in his parents' basement and go salmon fishing on weekends with his high-school drinking buds. He didn't exactly love Global Semi, but shit, they were number three in a hot, competitive sector where Moore's Law drove the cost of microprocessors relentlessly downwards as their speed rocketed relentlessly skyward. They had four billion in the bank, a healthy share price, and his options were above water, unlike the poor fucks at Motorola, number four and falling. He'd washed out of the nearly-best, what the fuck, beat spending his prime years in Hongcouver writing government-standard code for the Ministry of Unbelievable Dullness.

Link Discuss [Boing Boing Blog]

Good Communication, An Epigram.

Posted by The Happy Tutor

Good communication is whatever is best understood by your audience. With a dog say whatever you want and wave a piece of meat. With politicians say what you will and wave money. With women, well, forget it...there are limits to what can be said even on this site.

[Wealth Bondage]

Information business as a relationship. Bruce Sterling at his best. His analogy of information business and relationships is great.  [Krzysztof Kowalczyk's Weblog]

Five minute legislation - David Weinberger recently cautioned that, when it comes to the Web, "we should be careful of making bad, hasty decisions."  I accepted that idea right away.  Congress should just leave the Web alone and not pass any laws until we all have a better idea of how it will work.   But then I started thinking.  Does Congress do a better job when it takes a lot of time to analyze a social problem?  Or does that just lead to more complicated solutions?  Things move quickly on the Web, so maybe the legislation should be passed hastily --with very little thought.  Is there any precedent for this sort of wild, out-of-the-box approach?  Absolutely.

Father Guido Sarducci, a brashly innovative thinker, conceived of something called The Five Minute University.  He postulated that, since most of what one learns during college is eventually forgotten, courses should be reduced to key points that can be taught quickly.  For example, a business course is basically about "buying stuff and selling it for more."  Economics is just "supply and demand."  Using this approach, the entire four-year curriculum could be trimmed down to five minutes.  Actually, Sarducci acknowledged that, "about a minute-and-a-half-a would-a be taken up inna registration."  You've got to allow time for bureaucracy.

I think this principle could work in Congress.  The current system produces many convoluted laws that clearly don't work and cause enormous confusion, so how much worse could it be if the congressional term only lasted five minutes?   If nothing else, the official record of the proceedings would be short, and easy to read.  Here's a sample of a session dedicated to the Internet -

Digital Rights Management -  Prominent companies want this.  Let's give it to them.  Truth is, after a while users will revolt and the companies will find that it isn't worth the hassle.  Until then, we need a law so people feel like we did something.  The law will say a bunch of complicated things that no one can figure out.  It will be challenged, and will work its way through the over-burdened court system until the the marketplace revolts.

Hyperlinking - declare it a scarce public resource and auction off linking rights to the highest bidder.  The strategy here is to tax corporate stupidity.  Obviously, people are going to link as they please, and they aren't going to pay anyone for the right to do it.  But some people would believe the government could do this, and would therefore bid for the rights.  By making business people bid against one another for a useless right you increase the financial burden on a companies that are stupid, and therefore likely to go bankrupt anyway -- and you put money in the public coffers.  This is sound economic policy.

Library filtering & kids' access to porn -  Very controversial stuff.  Controversial issues are always challenged on constitutional grounds anyway so let's not worry too much about a sensible solution.  Try to make as many people happy as you can.  Pass a law that says if anyone uses a computer to look at nudity of any kind they pay large fines, which --once collected-- are distributed to the RIAA or the Motion Picture Association.  That will make the religious fundamentalists happy and help subsidize our foundering entertainment industry.  Eventually the Supreme Court will rule the law is laughably unconstitutional, but by then the kids will be grown up.  And hopefully they will have learned how to keep their kids from seeing porn using a low-tech method: i.e., being a watchful parent.

P2P hacking - Let the companies do it, what the hell.  Microsoft's programmers are smart. What could go wrong?  Well, okay something might go wrong.  So create an agency that can add some regulations along the way.  Why?  Let's say the hacking code gets out of control, creates network congestion, and results in huge delays in Internet traffic.  People will complain about the stupid law.   But you've got government officials with a vested interest in defending it, even if it obviously impedes commerce and causes chaos.  Just like the Transportation Security Agency.

Obviously, there other important issues --copyright term extensions, broadcast flags, and so on-- but you can't tackle everything at once.  Plus, you have to leave at least a minute and half for the lobbyists.

[Ernie the Attorney]

posted by arco August 22 4:59 PM | 5 comments. You may have seen the Newseum's collection of newspaper front page images from Sept. 12, 2001. Now you can view the front pages of over 119 newspapers from 23 countries, updated daily. [MetaFilter]

How corporate crooks are "punished". A bank robber talk about the kind of jail-time small-time crooks face and compares it to the time served by billion dollar corporate swindlers.

Keating, Boesky and Milken collectively swindled Wall Street out of more than $500 million. Yet together they served less than 10 years. I know a man serving 20 years for an $800 heist.

Americans say they want to see greedy, dishonest CEOs punished. But in truth, most Americans are more afraid of boys from the housing projects holding them up in an alley for 20 bucks than they are of having their pensions and portfolios gutted by Wall Street scoundrels.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Derek!) [Boing Boing Blog]

posted by ewagoner August 22 11:26 AM | 0 comments. November 25th, 1997, marked the 134th anniversary of the battles for Chattanooga. On that day, Dave Buckhout and T.C. Moore retraced the route along which these battles flowed. They had cameras, a road map, and an '86 Buick. The resulting website is an example of what's wonderful about the internet. [MetaFilter]

The new Republican ideology: Suburban socialism [FARK]

Jesus takes your calls - actually he doesn't have time for that, so he just put out and FAQ, which you might want to look at.

[Ernie the Attorney]

posted by LinusMines August 21 8:35 AM | 46 comments. Washington, DC bar officially enters Guinness Book of World Records with 'the largest selection of commercially available beers' (1,072). Look over the list (from December 2001). Any hidden gems or missing favorites? [MetaFilter]

The title was 'A Political Disease' and here is what Kurt wrote. I recently read Vonnegut's article on Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. The title was 'A Political Disease' and here is what Kurt wrote: "From this moment on, let all those who feel that Americans can be as easily led to beauty as to ugliness, to truth as to public relations, to joy as to bitterness, be said to be suffering from Hunter Thompson's disease.". [soapbox]

Chinese Words From a mailing list comes .... Chinese Words

From a mailing list comes a quote from an interview in the spring issue of "Boulevard" (not available online). The interview is with Ha Jin, "a writing professor at Boston University and the winner of an enviable list of awards — including the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, the Hemingway/PEN Award, and the National Book Award..." (What, no Heissman Trophy?)

Chinese is very rich in describing feelings. For sadness there are some words English doesn't have. So too for taste. ... [But] there are some abstract words that Chinese doesn't have, such as 'truth,' 'identity,' and 'solitude.' Obviously, English is a more speculative language, whereas Chinese is more earthly, closer to things.

This would sound like an urban myth if it didn't come from such a durn good source. Amazing how different we can be while still being the same. [JOHO the Blog]

Regulation vs. BIG/GAS.

Bob Lewis nails it again.  On the current round of accounting scandals and the regulation backlash to come...

• As we sit in the rubble of Enron, ImClone, WorldCom, Tyco, AOL, and other, as-yet-undiscovered or unpublicized corporate implosions, it's worthwhile to wonder which is the egg: the lack of accountability resulting from more than two decades of business deregulation, or the corrupt perspective of the corporate elite who acquired the resulting additional power.
• Lord Acton notwithstanding, I think the corruption came first.
• Without regulation, those businesses that resort to any tactic to win have the advantage over those that restrict their behavior to conventional codes of ethics.
• Consequently, ethical CEOs should welcome government regulation, not fight it.
• The goal of an ethical CEO would be efficient regulation, not deregulation.
• For more than two decades we've been subjected to unrelenting propaganda from the BIG/GAS (Business Is Great/Government and Academics are Stupid) contingent decrying any and all regulation as a fundamentally bad idea.
• Regulation, we've been assured, prevents American businesses from being competitive in world markets, harms productivity, and hampers profitability.
• The business community no longer has the credibility to be part of the process.
• Their goal will be minimizing any chance of new abuses, unfettered by considerations of how hard or easy it will be to comply.
• Every new regulation will result in reporting requirements, every reporting requirement will require new information technology, and nobody is going to care how hard it is to build.

 

[Curiouser and curiouser!]

Understanding risk. One of my pet hates is the extreme irrationality of people when faced with certain risks. Yes, I know the fears are understandable, it's just that it bugs me that in a world where we have so much information available to us, we can't seem to make decisions based on anything more than gut instincts...

Part of breaking down irrationality would seem to require some basic information concerning why people worry about particular things. Today's New York Times (free registration required) has a nice piece that outlines some of the main reasons for worry and gives examples of how people react.

After you've read the piece, think about how many government policy decisions seem to be based on irrational fears. But we can't just blame a government - we are all far too ready to look for a scapegoat for any problem or risk. Instead, we must consider how our opinions about risk are driving government policy decisions. As a simple example, there is incontrovertible evidence that many lives would be saved if everybody wore seatbelts in cars yet governments in some jurisdictions won't enforce it by law because of public pressure against it.

[David Harris' Science News]

The Lifestyle of Bottom the Weaver.

Posted as a Public Service by The Happy Tutor

As composition is to writing so shopping is to Brands.

As writing falls into genres, such as slogan, riddle, invective, lyric, comedy, tragedy, epic, so Brand compositions cluster in Lifestyles: Of the rich and famous, of the Cowboy, of the Athlete, of the Rebel.

Bottom the Weaver lives the lifestyle of the Bumpkin.

Decorum: A Bumpkin should dress, act and talk in the style of a Country Clown; Kings should dress, act, and speak in the style befitting their station. (Horace)

In the world of Lifestyles, Bottom the Weaver wears the signs of the Polo Playing elite.

Aspiration has replaced Decorum: The Clown dresses as King. The illiterate buys bookcases from Levingers. The Half-wit wears a Harvard T-shirt. The Virgin dresses as a Whore. And, the Whore dresses as a Nun.

Who sold Bottom the Weaver his paste-board Crown? Light-fingered Ned, who has sold so many Crowns that he is now King of the Mint.

The Freedom of the Market is horizontal only; higher and lower has been abolished - no station in life is higher than another, no manners are good, no taste is good, no culture is high.

Good, Better, and Best is a Sears Branding Strategy.

To Bottom the Weaver, and Light-fingered Ned O' the Mint, more and less is the only measure of success.

When the King is Ned O' the Mint, the The Book of the Courtier will not dwell on good manners.

[Wealth Bondage]

Garrison Keillor starts largest book club [Salon.com]

posted by aLienated August 20 8:27 AM | 0 comments. Ever wonder where stars are born? an unprecedented, detailed view of the entire inner region of 30 Doradus, measuring 200 light-years wide by 150 light-years high. You can go straight to the photo here. [MetaFilter]

posted by gottabefunky August 19 9:36 AM | 7 comments. Archaeoastronomy examines how ancient cultures studied and worshipped the heavens. From the arrangement of the Stonehenge stelae to the Mayan reverence for the planet Venus, this science has resulted in some fascinating and often beautiful discoveries, including star charts found in tombs in Ireland and Japan, the Lascaux caves in France, and rock paintings of a supernova in 1054 that resulted in the Crab Nebula. My personal favorite is the “Sun Dagger” in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico (scroll down for photos). [MetaFilter]

A British Guide to Pub Etiquette.

Not only does Passport to the Pub: A British Guide to Pub Etiquette teach you how to make your way around an English public house, it's an excellent blueprint for any social environment guide. Here's a snippet about buying the barkeep a drink in lieu of a tip:

"This may initially seem like an unnecessarily convoluted and tortuous way of giving someone a tip. Most visitors, however, find the 'and one for yourself' ritual a refreshingly friendly alternative to the impersonal handing over of coins.

"Feel free to offer a drink even when the bar is busy and the publican or member of staff will not have time to consume it immediately, or even to join you at all. It is quite appropriate for them to accept your offer, add the price of their drink to your order, and enjoy it later when the bar is less crowded. On pouring the drink, even several hours later, the recipient will try to catch your eye, and raise the glass to you in acknowledgement with a nod and a smile, perhaps saying 'cheers' or 'thanks' if you are within earshot."

[kottke.org]

  Source: Doc Searls Weblog; 8/19/2002; 8:11:37 AM.

Feel good, automatically 

Digging RealJoe's Affirmation Bullshit Generator for Sensitive New Age Guys

Trashy Slogans. If your voting could really change things,
it would be illegal.
[Wealth Bondage]

NY Times: In-N-Out Burger. In-N-Out, founded on the West Coast in 1948, is that rarest of chain restaurants: one with a cult following. Exalted both by hamburger fans and those who normally shun fast food, it has built its reputation on the rock of two beliefs: fast food should be made from scratch, and the whims of the customer should be entertained.

Even Eric Schlosser, author of the muckraking book "Fast Food Nation," is a fan. "I think they're great," said Mr. Schlosser.[Scott Loftesness] [ericfreeman.com]

'Catch a note' off this 'tight' Slang Dictionary. [FARK]

He is Ironing My Head.

From Illustrated Armenian Sayings

Armenian: "¶ÉáõËë Ï°³ñ¹áõÏ» Ïáñ"
Transliteration: "K'lukh's g'artuge gor"
Translation: "He's ironing my head"
Meaning: "He is bothering me"

 

[Wealth Bondage]

posted by crasspastor August 17 12:15 PM | 0 comments. The Bush regime is completely called out. (NYTimes) "If the White House wanted anyone to listen, it would not have staged eight separate panels simultaneously on a Tuesday morning in the dog days of August, assuring that complete coverage would be available only on C-Span." [MetaFilter]

posted by hama7 August 17 1:44 AM | 10 comments. The Struggle Continues!. Young Hae-Chang's flash classics include Samsung, the frenzied Royal Crown Super Salon, the languid Jongno, and two amusing masterpieces: Samsung Means To Come, and Hallf Breed Apache. More at her site. [MetaFilter]

posted by psychotic_venom August 16 1:12 PM | 10 comments. Wow your friends [google] and learn a little history behind the best card trick. [pdf] [MetaFilter]

The Ministry of Homeland Security.

Micah Wright has put up this wonderful site with posters done in the style of US WWII propganda posters. Here are reduced versions of two of my favorites that he did. Go to his site to see the full size versions. Recommended (although he says that the site, hosted on Apple's iMac service, is frequently taken down towards the afternoon as it exceeds bandwidth limitations).

[Geodog's Radio Weblog]

HowStuffWorks explains TiVo. HowStuffWorks.com examines the Digital Video Recorder (i.e., ReplayTV, TiVo). Trying to figure out how to explain why you can't live without your TiVo to your grandfather or cluless cousin? Print out this primer and watch them marvel at the groovy exploded diagrams. Link Discuss
[Boing Boing Blog]

Get out of hell free!. Get Out of Hell Free cards -- just $1 for ten cards, plus P&H. Link Discuss (via Bifurcated Rivets)
[Boing Boing Blog]

The Naked Face by Malcolm Gladwell
posted August 15, 2002 at 10:06 am PT

Malcolm Gladwell on The Naked Face we all wear:

"But there's nothing secondary about the face, and surely this realization is what set John Yarbrough apart on the night that the boy in the sports car came at him with a gun. It's not just that he saw a microexpression that the rest of us would have missed. It's that he took what he saw so seriously that he was able to overcome every self-protective instinct in his body, and hold his fire."

A must-read article about what people see when we look at each other and how some have taken that skill to a seemingly super-human level.

Reader Comments (add yours)

Can TiVo Go Prime Time? - Rick asks this question, points to some info and discloses that he's a rabid fan.  So am I.  And I was bummed when a power surge blew out my TIVO modem.  But I googled the web and found this place, where I sent it off to be repaired.  Oh, and to have an additional 90 GB harddrive added.  Interesting place if you are a TIVO owner (repairs or not).  I'll leave it at that. [Ernie the Attorney]

Radio Wishlist - Prevent Directory Browsing in Radio..

Rick Klau's wants more privacy:

I think this should be an option built in to Radio, but it's relatively easy for you to do on your own. Here's the issue: Radio is a web content management system - when you add content to Radio, it automatically uploads that content to your website. For many users, their web site is hosted at http://radio.weblogs.com/. (Others, like me, host it at their own domain.) Radio maintains its content in a hierarchical folder structure. But relatively savvy individuals can type in your URL and add folders they want to "snoop" on - and Radio doesn't prevent this.

There's an easy way to do this: drop a text file into any folder you want to restrict access to. The text file is just a couple lines, and it includes a meta refresh command that forces the browser to load a new page. Here's my file - save it as index.txt, and drop it into any folder other than your "www" folder.

To try this out, try going to someone's Radio weblog and adding /categories after the URL. You'll now see all the categories they've set up. This isn't necessarily snooping, but there may be some private categories they've posted. (There are other examples, but hopefully you get the idea.) If you're the individual maintaining the blog in Radio, adding this text file to the folder will automatically redirect the browser to your site's home page.

Memo to Userland: I'd like this to be an option in the application itself. If I disable directory browsing, Radio should automatically drop this text file into any folder it creates.

[aka Blue Sky Radio]

[a klog apart]

posted by skallas August 14 6:24 AM | 31 comments. Gallery of anti-war propaganda posters remixed from old wartime posters. Some are perhaps over the top, but its very thought provoking work. Some of these posters really drive the point home that we are not that far removed from from the grisly battles of that past regardless of the government spin and all the high-tech military toys. This one is especially moving. [MetaFilter]

Will the US keep the torch burning? - Neal Stephenson's words are relevant:

The twentieth century was one in which limits on state power were removed in order to let the intellectuals run with the ball, and they screwed everything up and turned the century into an abattoir. . . . We Americans are the only ones who didn't get creamed at some point during all of this. We are free and prosperous because we have inherited political and value systems fabricated by a particular set of eighteenth-century intellectuals who happened to get it right. But we have lost touch with those intellectuals. via Instapundit

I don't want to sound like a doom-sayer, but I often wonder if our American culture  --with it's strong federal government, and inclination to address important issues from a central authority-- doesn't contain seeds that will weaken its place in a world that is increasingly vesting power in individuals.  I realize that's a bold assumption, i.e. that we are vesting more power in individuals.  But, if you believe it, as I do, then you have to recognize that the power shift is so subtle that it isn't yet registering on any measuring scale.  Nevertheless, I can't help concluding that technical advances such as the Internet are making central control less meaningful.  Maybe that's why government, along with Hollywood,  is enchanted with the notion of controlling the flow of information on the internet.  Maybe not consciously, even.  Are beauracracies capable of unconscious wishes? Freud and others would say absolutely not.  Anyway, I was just wondering.  You may now return to the regularly scheduled broadcast.

[Er