People who know me might imagine that I would be pleased at the criticism of Rumsfeld, since much of it has been criticism that I have had about the war, a war that I thought was too risky in the first place. In fact I think Rumsfeld is probably right about many things that he will ultimately carry the can.
Of all the hawks, Rumsfeld is the only one I have any time for - he has the personality that the spin doctors try to give Bush - he is a straight talker who does not like bureaucratic bullshit or state run inefficiency. His approach to the military is like a CEO from the private sector coming in to run an anachronistic public utility.
The war is clearly not going according to plan, and because Rumsfeld went against the advice of some of the military the responsibility rests with him and the alternatives will now come from the generals.
So what are the generals saying exactly? They are saying that they need more troops and more artillery and they need to shore up the supply lines. This is all absolutely correct, but what if the supply line hadn't been a line in the first place. Light infantry can be supported from the air. We are seeing an enemy that has become decentralized in such a way that conventional military tactics won't work, and yet the military response is to shore up a conventional approach.
But what do I know - nothing, except that the military is by its very nature conservative. What we are faced with in Iraq is an enemy that has a different way of fighting and it will take people who challenge the orthodoxy to adapt a response.
In the First World War thousands of British troops died because general Haig said the machine gun was 'a vastly overrated weapon', refused to use it and instead increased the amount of conventional charges against the Germans who were using their versions of this weapon to devastating advantage.
Rumsfeld favored a 'lightweight' approach to battle and this was successful in Afghanistan, I have a nagging feeling that the real problem with Iraq is that the plan is actually not Rumsfeldian enough.
Now I may be wrong, but MSNBC seems on the defensive about the Internet now. An Internet pundit has been dragged up to say that the problem with the news on the Internet is that it is untrustworthy. Pretty Ironic considering that the MS in NBC stands for Microsoft.
Well, does that include MSNBC's own site or any of the other 2500 newspapers online? No this is a jibe at other news sources.
I wonder if the cable networks will start to get irritated by the limelight that will increasingly fall on decentralized news coverage on the web, stranger things have happened.
On MSNBC (Moronic Simplistic News Befitting Cretins?) at the moment they are on a witchhunt, referring to 'embedded liberal' Geraldo Rivera, no mention of Arnett of course. Shocked faces as quotes from Edward Said are read out and outrage expressed by Michael 'Savage'.
Michael is founder of the Paul Revere society. Here is their 9 point charter (comments in parens):
1. Make tax cuts permanent. (This would require permanent GOP government - so scrap democracy?).
2. Close the borders now.
3. Deport all illegal immigrants now.
4. Eliminate bilingual education in all states.
5. Require health tests for all recent foreign born immigrants.
(get rid of 'foreigners' they are unpure?)
6. Eliminate as many entitlement programs as possible.
(cleanse the country of poor people?)
Up to here, standard neo-fascist stuff, but this is where it gets weird (and why I will never really understand ultra-right libertarians)
7. Reduce the number of Federal Employees.
(what, like the army?)
8. Oil Drilling on U.S. Soil.
(so no need to go to war with Iraq then?)
9. Tort Reform "STOP LAWYERS".
(and nobody to prosecute criminals?)
"Our best estimate of the likely duration of the war (given the evolution of the war thus far, and assuming that the United States is able to maintain its maneuver-based strategy) is approximately 3½ months. If the U.S. is forced to turn to a pure attrition-based strategy in which it is forced to defeat most or all Iraqi units through direct combat, our estimate of the war's possible duration stretches to over a year."
Predicting the Duration of the 2003 Gulf War via the Agonist
There is a nasty air of schadenfreude around the doomsayers just as there has been too much gung-ho jingoism by the optimists. Neither are healthy and the fact is that it is too early to judge the success of failure of the Iraq war. What is clear, however, is that everything hinges on an uprising.
The frighteningly erudite Joshua Marshall:
"Yesterday, The Washington Monthly released my new article on the Bush administration's grand plan for reforming the entire Middle East. One assertion many found difficult to believe was my claim that the administration would soon seek to provoke wars with Syria and Iran. Today, Don Rumsfeld threatened both countries with just that."
Practice to Deceive via Nick Denton
"Surely this is a bipartisan issue. While many on the antiwar side complain about the media's alleged "pro-war bias," those who support the war, and the Bush administration itself, have also been ill served by overly-positive coverage that now has millions of Americans reeling from diminished expectations. "
"Here, then, is a list of stories that have been widely misreported or poorly reported so far:
1. Saddam may well have been killed in the first night's surprise attack (March 20).
2. Even if he wasn't killed, Iraqi command and control was no doubt "decapitated" (March 22).
3. Umm Qasr has been taken (March 22).
4. Most Iraqis soldiers will not fight for Saddam and instead are surrendering in droves (March 22).
5. Iraqi citizens are greeting Americans as liberators (March 22).
6. An entire division of 8,000 Iraqi soldiers surrendered en masse near Basra (March 23).
7. Several Scud missiles, banned weapons, have been launched against U.S. forces in Kuwait (March 23).
8. Saddam's Fedayeen militia are few in number and do not pose a serious threat (March 23).
9. Basra has been taken (March 23).
10. Umm Qasr has been taken (March 23).
11. A captured chemical plant likely produced chemical weapons (March 23).
12. Nassiriya has been taken (March 23).
13. Umm Qasr has been taken (March 24).
14. The Iraqi government faces a "major rebellion" of anti-Saddam citizens in Basra (March 24).
15. A convoy of 1,000 Iraqi vehicles and Republican Guards are speeding south from Baghdad to engage U.S. (March 25)."
15 Stories They've Already Bungled
Slovenians hit the streets on Wednesday to protest their inclusion in the coalition of the willing.
"Small problem: The lovely Alpine nation isn't a member. 'When we asked for an explanation, the State Department told us we were named in the document by mistake,' Prime Minister Anton Rop said at what Reuters called 'a hastily arranged news conference.'"
They Got the 'Slov' Part Right (washingtonpost.com)
"Judicial Watch said it had filed complaints 'for the unlawful proliferation of nuclear technology, the unlawful trafficking of arms and military technology, and the violation of UN trade sanctions imposed after the 1991 Gulf War, as well as additional UN sanctions relating to the so-called 'oil-for-food' program'."
Herald Sun: Interpol urged to probe Chirac [29mar03]
"From official announcements to coverage in state-controlled media to cooperation with other countries' health experts, government responses to the flu-like disease that struck southern China have been sluggish and at times nonexistent."
While there are reports of how communication via the Internet and increased preparedness for bio-terrorism have been of crucial importance in dealing with SARS, China has hidden figures and information that could have catastrophic consequences.
The case of SARS illustrates perfectly the need for greater information flow, and this applies elsewhere.
In a war, as they say, the first casualty is the truth. There are legitimate reasons to censor future events, but for reporting events that have already happened then censorship for reasons of keeping up morale, preventing panic or avoiding upsetting people is not worth the risk.
The availability of pro and anti-war debate on weblogs of Al-Jazeera and FOX is part of the democratization of news - throw it all out there and the truth will prevail. Truth and reason are economical while lies and propaganda need to be endlessly propped up.
Make this a war where the truth is not a casualty.
CBS News | China Keeps Lid On Bad News | March 27, 2003 18:39:35
"One of the most interesting things to me about this whole SARS episode is that with our current heightened awareness globally of potential bioterrorism, we have in place a surveillance system that is much more sensitive," he said. "My sense is that five to 10 years ago, these cases would have never hit our radar screen."
In '94 we did a 3d interface to Lycos where the search results were returned as a 3d model spinning around (groan) a globe. Results were shown as Cubes, Cones, Spheres and Cylinders, indicating whether the sites linked to were commercial, educational, service providers or others respectively. The size of the object represented the relevance and the color represented location, green for sites registered within the US and red for outside. The objects were slowly spinning and the speed of spin of the object represented size of document. Large documents spun slower.
The problem was that this was a toy, no matter how seductive the idea of 3 dimensional or graph based representations of search results, a list of text results is more useful for all but a handfull of specialist applications.
That is the problem I have with this and other attempts to create visual maps of search results.
The web produced some very sophisticated interfaces early on (remember Onlive Traveller) but simple interfaces are the winning formula, just ask Google.
Oh happy day!
Jason has found decent CSS styles for rounded corners. Now I can finally get around to doing a proper XHTML version of this site and ditch tables.
Albin.Net CSS: Bullet-Proof Rounded Corners
Matt Welsh points out that news about the Iraq war provides a veil which keeps normally newsworthy items from the headlines:
"Daniel Drezner Keeps Eyes Off Ball: And finds five dictators cracking down while the world's gaze lies elsewhere. Someone oughtta do a non-war-news news blog"
Until the First World War, soldiers had generally dressed to impress. The British Redcoats, as the name suggests, wore bright red. The aim was to be as visible and intimidating as possible. Today this would be like walking around wearing a target.
Accurate firearms introduced the need for the opposite strategy - to become invisible. Today, the simplest form of camouflage, the colors green or beige, are synonymous with the army, but this has only been the case for less than a century.
In some situations, 21st century western technology renders traditional camouflage obsolete, being out in the open at all for an under equipped enemy is a risk - wearing a military uniform is like walking around wearing a target.
This is why Iraqi soldiers will cynically dress as civilians, by stepping out of their camouflaged clothing they become camouflaged - invisible.
Nick Denton writes:
"And that was before the missiles went astray this morning, apparently killing as many as 15 people. Hell, 15 dead: that's a quiet day in the Arab world. Even imagining the United States was targeting civilians, its efforts are laughable compared with Saddam -- 5,000 dead in the chemical attack on Halabja in one day -- or Assad -- 30,000 shelled to death in Hama -- or pretty much any other Arab ruler"
1. Not a good idea to lump all Arab governments together with Saddam's.
2. This analogy is equivalent to using the fact that there are more people killed by guns in the US every year than in the attack on the World Trade Center to justify an anti-gun stance comparing the NRA to terrorists. No matter what your stance on gun control this would be morally offensive.
As the US government says, it is really important to go the extra mile to distinguish the Iraqi people from their government and Arabs from the activities of terrorists, but what this includes is not creating statements which are likely to be perceived by some Arabs as a failure to do this. This is called tact - or in government circles, diplomacy.
Fisk:
"Most of these cruise missiles that we hear exploding at night are bursting into government buildings, ministries, offices and barracks that have long ago been abandoned. There's nobody inside them; they are empty. I've watched ministries take all their computers out, trays- even the pictures from the walls. That is the degree to which these buildings are empty; they are shells."
From this report, other than the fabled bunker-busting bombs, air attacks on Baghdad are presumably largely useless, other than as a frightener. Be sure that the Special Republican Guard is spread throughout the city and most likely under the shelter of schools and hospitals. I'm no expert, but it seems that no matter what the risks of casualties to the coalition forces, storming Baghdad is and always has been, unfortunately, necessary. The other option, siege, would surely be a disaster. One can only hope that the reported uprising in Basra is significant and reflected elsewhere.
The NYT says that the terrain of Baghdad does not pose the same dangers as Grozny of Mogadishu.
"The old city in Baghdad does have narrow roads, but most of the city, especially the parts around many of Mr. Hussein's compounds, is crisscrossed with wide boulevards that would be harder to block."
Saddam, like many dictators has really bad taste, - from giant monuments with bronze castings of hands holding massive ceremonial swords (made in Basingstoke in England) to huge sterile avenues created by tearing down historic prototypical arab courtyard houses along a labyrinth of narrow streets. The shelter that these alleys would have provided could have saved him.
If we can't get representatives to get together anymore at the UN, perhaps events like IDEX the massive International Defence Exhibition & Conference which took place last week in the United Arab Emirates would be a suitable venue.
Where else would you get the Libyan Charge d'Affaires, Algerian Chief of Staff or Somalian Deputy Minister of Defence rubbing shoulders with the French Commissioner General for Armament, German Deputy Minister of Defence, Russian Head of Defence, rubbing shoulders in turn with the British Minister for Defense Affairs and US Deputy Commander in Chief.
There are even 14 Israeli firms to pitch to the 17 Arab countries in attendance.
www.worldsecurity-index.com - IDEX 2003 - VIPs and Official Delegations - KNM Media LLP
Steve Bowbrick for the Guardian:
"The American way of life is not for everyone - especially in times of war. But it's hard to avoid falling for its optimism, openness and possibilities for self-creation."
Guardian Unlimited | Online | States of attraction
BBC NEWS | Business | Senate reverses Bush tax cuts
"Moderate Republican Senator George Voinovich said that 'we are at the edge of a fiscal precipice if we keep going the way we are, particularly with this war hanging over us'"
With the full tax cut plan having benn approved by the House of Representatives the differences between the two branches of Congress will have to be resolved when the bill goes to the conference stage.
an article on US initiatives for network-centric warfare
Network warfare making progress
"The tenets of network-centric warfare are as follows:
* A robustly networked force improves information sharing.
* Information sharing enhances quality of information and shared situational awareness.
* Shared situational awareness enables collaboration and self-synchronization, and enhances sustainability and speed of command.
* These, in turn, dramatically increase mission effectiveness.
"
We live in an increasingly networked world where advances in technology are having profound effects in many diverse areas. Just as the the coverage of war is becoming decentralized, so too is warfare itself and this is very disturbing.
Global profile reports on a guerilla leader:
"we confront this occupation by a war of small cells. This type of war spreads and scatters. Every cell can work by itself as a base, a leader and a decision-maker, deciding the right time and place to attack. This type of organisation is a complex system which is very difficult to destroy. It can reproduce itself and grow on a daily basis"
Ananova - Bush wants £47 billion to pay for month long war
"It presumes the military effort to oust Iraqi President Saddam Hussein will take 30 days."
"A Japanese toymaker claims to have developed a gadget that translates dog barks into human language."
The version that transalates human speech into something that dogs can understand will take 30 years.
The Gulf War made CNN, it was the cable news covered war. Since that war, the web has emerged: this is the web covered war, from moblogged war protests to webloggers in Iraq, the channels of choice are weblogs.
The independant reports: "The internet has democratised everything - including being a war correspondent."
Independant: News agencies lose battle on the internet
I said that I would say when I disagreed with the normally hyper-rational Dawkins.
Dawkins writes:
"Saddam Hussein has been a catastrophe for Iraq, but he never posed a threat outside his immediate neighbourhood. George Bush is a catastrophe for the world. And a dream for Bin Laden."
Oh cummon - Hussein has been trying to get his hands on nuclear weapons for 30 years since he wooed a very naive Chirac into giving him Uranium. Saddam walked around with a copy of Mein Kampf in his pocket and modelled his regime on Stalin's with the express notion of extending the Ba'athist rule to a pan-Arab nation.
The Bush administration may not have gone about diplomacy very well, to say the least, but it is false to say that Hussein's ambitions don't extend beyond Iraq's boundaries.
via Jeff Jarvis
"So confident is he that God is all in the mind, or the brain at least, that Dr Persinger claims he can induce mystical feelings in a majority of those willing to don his Transcranial Magnetic Stimulator.
So the BBC Science series Horizon took up the challenge by putting his hat to the ultimate test: could he get arch-sceptic and militant atheist Prof Richard Dawkins to start believing in God by electrically massaging his temporal lobes?"
Telegraph | Connected | Holy visions elude scientists
Wired reports on a new device to allow the miltary to speak in tongues, 'send three and fourpence we're going to a dance':
"Interact lets someone talk into the device in one language -- then it spits out an audio translation with just a two-second delay and no need for the speaker to pause."
Wired News: Device: Arabic In, English Out
Technorati just gets better and better.
Relating news events to comments being written about them by Bloggers was one of the aims of Newsblogger the joint project between Moreover and Blogger.
The interesting thing about this is that aggregated comments are useful to categorize news and add valuable metadata. The end goal is that comments about a story enrich that story and that the process is recursive i.e. comments can be about comments, eventually providing an ecology of news.
Technorati: Current Events, with context
Linksys is the Cisco of wireless - and now quite literally. Cisco has acquired Linksys for $500M, a great move.
Archives: Linksys the Cisco of wireless
Apply Occam's Razor to the Saddam has been killed rumor.
Which is simpler? That this is a deliberate rumor to destabilize and seed doubt in the minds of the Iraqi's (a clever tactic) or that after 12 years of trying to get Saddam, this objective is successful within 90 minutes of hostilities.
On the other hand, Saddam's lookalikes are notoriously good, they fooled the odious Haider on his visit to Iraq, when he posed for photos with an imposter.
People are easily fooled. Charlie Chaplin famously lost a lookalike competition against an impersonator and as Christopher Hitchens discovered, some of Churchill's most famous wartime speeches were delivered by a children's radio presenter with a gift for mimicry.
It would be very good news, however, if this rumor were true.
As the war begins, Nick Denton points out that the Reuters online coverage is much better than the Soft-Warnography being pumped out by the cable channels.
I am already bored with CNN's war jargon, sweeping platitudes, vapid pundits and pictures of silhouetted minarettes, but the problem I have with all the online sites is that there is no real sense of breaking news, without constantly hitting refresh like a laboratory animal in a Skinner box.
Here's what I would like: the top 100 online newspapers with dynamic loading of new headlines in near realtime. Amazingly this simple thing does not seem to exist in any of the news aggregator client interfaces.
Increasingly I hear about people who are reading British newspapers because: 1. people can read news online and 2. British newspapers are in English. The Internet has ratcheted English up another notch as a lingua franca.
In France, the preposterous Academie Francaise (think of the DMV run by philosophy professors) is fighting a losing battle against the rise of English. It creates mandated alternative words for things like 'le Walkman' ('le Baladeur'), which nobody really uses and enforces laws which dictate that websites in France must not be only in English.
Preservation of cultural diversity is a noble cause, but global heterogeneity does not stem from enforced regional homogeneity. i.e. instead of artificially propping up a language, how about promoting French culture and ideas?
At this time more than ever it is important that France communicates its views to a wider audience - and on the web that means English versions of French newspapers. France will suffer badly in the long run if it does not provide English versions of its online media.
Liberation - in French only.
Le Monde - in French only.
Le Figaro - in French only.
Martin Amis had a character in a novel who was always smoking. In order to avoid having to write when the character lit a cigarette or drew a puff, he stated that the character was always smoking unless he stated otherwise.
In order to avoid me writing or anyone having to read a huge tirade explaining my fickle view on the war, assume that I am in pefect agreement with whatever Richard Dawkins says. I'll inform if otherwise.
The consumate diplomat, Bill Clinton vicariously supports the war by defending Blair.
On the one hand too bad someone with his political skills isn't in the White House. On the other, remember that operation Desert Fox, which had the undeclared aim of taking out Saddam, failed, leaving Clinton to stall over Iraq as the Lewinsky affair distracted both himself and the US.
Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Bill Clinton: Trust Tony's judgment
Tomorrow's parliamentary vote in the UK will be a test of how much trouble Blair is in. The Independent has a handy guide to how to interpret the number of Blair's own party voting against the government, my guess is around 125 will:
"FEWER THAN 100 a relief for Mr Blair, who could claim the tide had turned his way since last month's vote.
MORE THAN 121 the biggest Commons rebellion by members of a governing party.
132 OR MORE a body blow to Mr Blair, as it would mean he could not command the support of more than half of Labour backbenchers.
173 OR MORE danger signals flashing for Mr Blair as, depending on the number of abstentions, he would have to rely on the votes of Tory MPs to win a Commons majority. Mr Blair could be in jeopardy if the war went badly.
206 OR MORE meltdown for the Prime Minister. More than half of Labour's MPs, including ministers, would have voted against him. He might even be forced to quit after the war. "
Blogrolling has opened up its own ping server, instead of reading Weblogs.com to alert updates.
I think this is unfortunate, if ping servers become a Balkanized mess this will cause confusion. One solution may be to federate the Weblogs.com server much like DNS, i.e. have updates propagate through a network but have Weblogs.com become the top of the tree.
I can't see any objection to this since weblogs.com is open and allows xml access.
The Weblogs.com ping server is potentially a crucially important piece of the web's infrastructure.
Update - Dave writes that Weblogs.com can indeed be federated.
Regarding Gulf War II:
"The only debate in the U.S. media is on the Web, according to Jon Dennis, Guardian Unlimited deputy news editor. 'Weblogs are doing all the work that the U.S. media did in the past,' he said."
Poynter Online - E-Media Tidbits
Interesting article on content based advertising.
Gil Elbaz of applied Semantics claims that "the very fact that search engine algorithms remain largely keyword-based means that they aren't particularly sophisticated in learning what a page is "about." I think this is optimistic.
Google have the expertise to develop a concept based approach, possibly using intellectual property gained through their acquisition of Outride, but they certainly need to get their act together here or text ads advertising Hummers from suvssuck.com aren't going to be that impressive.
This is particularly important when you consider the following: "While clickthrough rates might indeed be lower, Google claims that their tests show that post-click behavior (conversions to sales) resulting from content-targeted ads is similar to that seen with search engine advertising."
"You are holding your mother's left hand. At the same time, she clutches her own mother, your grandmother, with her right. Your grandmother then holds her mother's hand, and so on into the past.
With each individual allocated a yard of private space, your ancestral queue snakes off into the Industrial Revolution, through the Middle Ages and on into prehistory, until, 300 miles down the line, it eventually reaches the missing link, the common ancestor that humans shared with chimpanzees six million years ago."
The Observer | Review | Dawkins versus the priests and New Age shamans? No contest
Here's a prediction: someone will say something overtly political at tonight's next week's Oscars causing a huge outburst of feigned surprise. Here's another prediction, if nobody says anything political tonight, calls of conspiracy and much thespian flapping will follow. It's a bit like the celebrity Catch-22 below:
"Daniel Day-Lewis, Best Actor nominee for 'Gangs of New York,' described the Catch-22 that celebrities find themselves in -- as they are constantly quizzed by reporters about their political views.
'The media are sick and tired of people in my profession giving their opinion, and yet you're asking me my opinion,' said Day-Lewis. 'And when I give it you'll say, 'Why doesn't he shut up?''"
United Press International: Analysis: Is a Hollywood blacklist coming?
Here is the first stage of something I have been collaborating on with Ian Davis:
BIO: A vocabulary for biographical information
BBC GMR, Phil Wood Show:
Wood: What 'K' could be described as the Islamic Bible?
Contestant: Er...
Wood: Its got two syllables... Kor...
Contestant: Blimey?
Wood: Ha ha ha ha no. The past participle of run...
Contestant: (Silence)
Wood: OK, try it another way. Today I run, yesterday I...
Contestant: Walked?
The web works with hyperlinks - and hyperlinks that have some explanation work best. For news, the age-old headline provides perfect text for a link and headlines are specifically created to whet the appetite for more information.
One of the central problems that developers will need to work around for blogging multimedia files is how to create meaningful links.
For example the Audblog system that lets you dial a number, record a message and post it to your weblog leaves links that don't say anything about the content, and for good reason, this is very difficult.
There are 3 solutions:
Automatic text summarization of a sound file (Autonomy can do this - but the results are unreliable).
Prompted voice recognition of a spoken title (and these systems 'just love my accent').
Keying in a title (difficult on a cellphone).
Despite the difficulties, a clean headline is the basis for all syndicatable content (e.g. RSS is basically a headline a link and some other stuff at its most simple) and Moblogging will need to solve this problem.
Aha - so MMS uses SMIL.
"This is a multi-part message in MIME format.
------<200303132002.UAA09403@mmscfe1.mms.mnc033.mcc234.gprs>
Content-type: multipart/related;
boundary="Boundary_(ID_p5GD6C2ojYJObmQ605bMrg)"; type="application/smil";
start="<941366072>"
"
The Washington post looks to online newspapers from various UN members to gauge opinion:
"As the United Kingdom seeks a second modified U.N. Security Council resolution to disarm Iraq, the online media in most of the member countries are strongly opposed to launching war any time soon."
In Security Council Countries, the Diplomatic Crunch Hits Home (washingtonpost.com)
Hmm, despite the magic of WiFi at conferences these days, very few of the Bloggerati present at SXSW seem to have updated their weblogs.
Perhaps speaking to people in person is back in fashion.
One good thing to come out of consolidation in the search space is the general realization that Google is, first and foremost, an advertising company with an excellent brand.
It is another advertising company, Overture, that has bought some of the main search engines, not the other way around.
Search technology is a commodity and subtleties like PageRank are icing on a cake that others have the recipe for. The main issue with search from a technical perspective is scalability and, as FAST has shown, Google is not the only one to have figured this out.
We are seeing a rise of anti-Americanism, largely because America is so powerful and there is a tendency to resent power - but America is a better place to be than much of the rest of the globe.
Resentment of dominance is not limited to global politics, but a natural phenomenon in any environment. Because of Google's dominance, we are seeing the first signs of anti-Googleism, but Google is still a better search engine than most.
If we look at the alternatives, well Altavista and Alltheweb are now owned by Overture, hardly a small startup - the time to champion them as little guys has passed, and very few bothered to then.
A boy's own stem cells are used to trigger re-growth of part of his heart.
Now if these cells were from someone else, some 'pro-lifers' would have a problem with it.
Is pro-choice non pro-liferation?
Reuters | Latest Financial News / Full News Coverage
If you subtract the amount of money that people pay Blockbuster in late fees from their revenues then Blockbuster is unprofitable.
Then take Netflix, which is premised on not having the revenues that make Blockbuster profitable but leveraging instead the greater effiencies of web based distribution, and subtract the amount of revenue from people who watch less than a few movies a month then you have a non-viable business model.
Despite the logistical and technical efficiencies of online businesses, I wonder if many are paradoxically based upon the inherent inefficiency and laziness of people.
(People like me, who have had the same 3 movies out on Netflix for 2 months now.)
"Genealogy sites generated $26 million in paid content revenue during third quarter 2002, according to comScore networks. That's an 86 percent increase versus the year before."
Over on RSS-DEV:
"There are millions upon millions of people who use services like My Yahoo for customized news, stock quotes, etc. Why not start sending them to an RSS aggregator instead?"
Funny how some things have their time, I think the battles are over for RSS, version 2.0 gives the majority of people what they want, extensibility through modules, but stays simple, and for those that really need RDF, they can go back to version 1.0.
More surprising is how the idea that RSS could rival My Yahoo is seen as something new - this is where it started, several years ago there was an RSS aggregator: My Netscape.
I may be a dove on the war issue - but largely on grounds of practicality and execution. A war in Iraq should not be fought now if it hinders a war on terrorism by:
1. Alienating the Arab world.
2. Creating insurmountable diplomatic problems with former allies at a time when the US needs support.
3. Defocusing, draining resources and creating long term instability without a clear post war plan and budget.
However, the capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was a resounding victory and if the capture of Al Qaeda operatives solicits anti-American sentiment then so what, there is no option. Surgical removal of Al Qaeda terrorists is a good thing.
BBC NEWS | World | South Asia | 'Al-Qaeda brain' praised as hero
Rip Buy, Mix, Burn
Apple preparing digital music service | CNET News.com
Hungarian is the language of the future - and always will be.
Top five technologies of the future - and they always will be:
Speech recognition
(weren't we all supposed to have ditched our keyboards by now?)
Virtual reality
(whatever happened to VRML?)
Smart cash
(can you believe there are online services that write checks?)
The Semantic Web
(the pedantic web)
Monorails
(outside of Disneyworld, where are they?)
The image above shows what the US search landscape looks like after recent consolidation. It is based upon a PDF document at Bruceclay.com
There are 10 principal players out of the original 19, however in terms of supplying services and technology (the outbound arrows) there are only 5 companies: Google; Overture and Yahoo with AskJeeves and Looksmart trailing.
1. Google
2. Overture (+ FAST/Alltheweb, Altavista)
3. Yahoo (+Inktomi)
4. AskJeeves (+Teoma)
5. Looksmart
6. MSN
7. AOL (+Netscape, DMOZ)
8. Lycos (+Hotbot)
9. Iwon (+Excite)
10. Go
Currently in the Daypop Top 40: www.yournotme.com, shouldn't this be www.yourenotme.com?
'The paperless office is as useful as the paperless office', so goes the saying. Since computers have become ubiquitous, paper consumption has actually increased.
It always amazes me that banks and credit card companies have to store vast amounts of paper copies of transactions, that there is still no low cost EDI network and people still send paper invoices and purchase orders and that paper exists at all for anything other than luxury items such as books. Paper documents are often an inefficient, costly, dangerous anachronism and yet the pace of their replacement is business is seemingly glacial.
Take architecture. The vast majority of litigation in architecture (and there is a vast amount of litigation - buildings are complicated and often leak etc.) stems from inconsistencies between contract documents. In the UK there are three principal documents, the plans themselves, the specifications and the bills of quantities. CAD software was supposed to change all of that, since one electronic document could contain all the contract information. Like many things in computing this goal is from fruition, as this latest initiative by Autodesk highlights.
AutoCAD revamp aims to cut out paper | CNET News.com
At 12:34 on the 5th June 1978, I was in a Maths class at St. Johns School in Northwood, Middx. (12345678 - the day precedes the month, military style, in European date nomenclature). It was a hot day and the windows were open and the smell of newly mown grass wafted in from the playing fields. The maths teacher stopped the lesson and told us to remember the date and where we were - I did.
Today is 03, 03, 03, I was alseep at three minutes past three this morning.