The Always-Encrypted Firewire Hard Drive [Slashdot]

nifty

Fool me once, shame on you, etc.

Today's NY Times features an interesting piece by David Sanger about the contortions the Bush administration is going through in trying to decide what evidence about Iraqi arms violations it can declassify for Secretary of State Powell to present to the U.N.. I can understand not wanting to reveal stuff from informants for fear of blowing their cover; but apparently they're reluctant even to reveal satellite photos, because somehow they might reveal details about the satellites' capabilities to our rivals.

to be anything less than a fool, is to not believe in government

Museum of Compilers. Borland offers its antique compilers and development environments — Turbo Pascal and Turbo C in particular — for free at their museum site. I was one of the first customers for Turbo Pascal when it was a $29.00 wonder and hadn't yet been acquired by Borland, so I'm looking forward to the musty rush of nostalgia…. [Joho the Blog]

this type of thing should be encouraged.

I'd like this instead of the woeful search technology on the Irish Times archive — maybe the government might want to have a goo (gle) as well: “It's difficult to imagine getting more from a $23,000 investment in search technology than the city of San Diego has gotten from its deployment of a Google Inc. search appliance.” [[ t e c h n o \ c u l t u r e ]]

this is a solution that amazes me, but is ultimately, i think the only way to go.

Why everything goes wrong. Joel Spolsky offers an insightful sermon that explains why everything goes wrong at once. [Mark Bernstein]

how many times, over the history of man, does it have to be too late….

Fray Cafe 3 at SXSW [bOing bOing]

I won Declan and SXSW's free interactive festival pass (free is good when you are a low paid academic), so I'm going to be in Austin for this and hope I'll see others there.

William Gibson's blog is becoming, day by day, an astonishingly rich trove of insight and ideas. Check out this essay titled “IN THE VISEGRIPS OF DR. SATAN (WITH VANNEVAR BUSH),” then read on to find out what Gibson thought about “The Matrix” when he finally watched it. [Scott Rosenberg's Links & Comment]

whether he wants to be or not, Gibson is part of the cultural zeitgeist of the internet, he enables its mythos as much as J.P. Barlow.

2nd Shuttle gone.

CNN: “The space shuttle Columbia, carrying a crew of seven, broke up Saturday morning 200,000 feet above Texas.” [Scripting News] [Ross Mayfield's Weblog] An image is worth a 200,000 words.

[Marc's Voice] [Adam Curry: Adam Curry's Weblog]

a tragedy…. sometimes complex systems fail…