Saturday, November 30

Jon Udell: I was shocked to discover a nest of pirates yesterday, operating brazenly right here in my hometown. They were gathered in a large nondescript building, reading and talking quietly and in some cases listening to music. Some kind of social club, perhaps? Yes, but with a profoundly subversive theme: "sharing" content. This establishment houses large collections of books, magazines, audiotapes, videotapes, CDs, DVDs. And it "shares" these with its patrons. I watched in amazement as people left the building carrying armloads of these content assets, which they "borrow" without paying a nickel to the copyright holders. It's frightening, really. Who knew?

Saturday, November 16

Charles Krauthammer: This is truly bizarre. George Bush, extremist? This is a president who passed an education bill essentially written by Ted Kennedy. His tax reform involves the most modest of rate cuts for the upper brackets and is what any Keynesian would have done in the face of a recession. It is, for example, more moderate than the (John) Kennedy tax cuts. The other alleged parts of his agenda--the environmental rape, the imposition of theocracy, the abolition of civil liberties (Moyers: "secrecy on a scale you cannot imagine")--are nothing but the delusion of liberals made quite mad by defeat.
Rebecca Blood: "I think that at some point, turning off information is going to be a huge luxury. But it's clear that a shift has occurred. The game is no longer about access to information, it's about access to reliable, pertinent information. Filters will become more and more important. And, at some point, people will start trying to identify what level of information is optimal. My hunch is that there is a rate at which even useful information moves into diminishing returns. At a certain point, the man who knows less is better equipped to make a good decision."

Monday, November 11

Cory Doctorow: "Feeding the query string 'http' to Google causes it to barf up all the pages in its database in order of their PageRank value."

Sunday, November 10

Jonathan Alter in Newsweek: “HELLO? ANYONE HOME? I’m not quite sure to whom I should address this, considering that you have no leadership right now. Nancy Pelosi? Tom Daschle? The 42d president turned Harlem globe-trotter? You lost only two seats in the Senate and five in the House, but the situation is much grimmer than those numbers suggest. Democrats actually have some good ideas lying around, but in last week’s election you lacked the vision and guts to offer them to the voters. What we have here, as the warden in ‘Cool Hand Luke’ put it, is a failure to communicate.

“At least after the 1994 wipeout (53 seats lost in the House, 10 in the Senate) you controlled the presidency.”
Common Sense and Wonder: “Another reason the EU is against military action is that any fight would show how woefully unprepared they are for battle. As this piece in The Guardian, of all places, says ‘America does the fighting, Europe does the dishes.’ NATO without the US is a fiction. The EU and Canada have been living off the American taxpayer for decades. Perhaps we should tax them for services provided.”

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Microsoft web guy who used to drive the Calico Mine Train at Knott's Berry Farm in the late '70s.