Posts from — December 2003

Come over to the dark side.. of the shire. Welcome to Pushington Downs This amusing fairy tale is brought to us from some of the fine folks from MST3k. Edward the less is an amusing bit of comedy based in a universe almost completely unlike that of JRR Tolkien. It never made it past series 1. Perhaps a bunch of renewed interest would push it along. [MetaFilter]

Black helicopter alert?

Via MetaFilter

Saddam's spiderhole photo was taken in August, or what? The fruit on the date palm behind the soldier is yellow. Date fruit grows from March-August (see 'Iraq' in table 23) and is harvested in early fall. Dates are yellow (ie. just ripened) in August, not December. I'm not invoking conspiracy – I'm just asking: what gives?

[Politics in the Zeros]

Big news…. Via Wired News: WASHINGTON — A federal appeals court on Friday rejected efforts by the recording industry to compel the nation's Internet providers to turn over names of subscribers suspected of illegally swapping music online. The ruling from a three-judge… [Epistemographer]

Over at Kickass…. Tina is advocating teaching grade five kids (that's fifth grade for you americans) about wet dreams. i love my wife! The wee tomato is going to know so much that he'll be the one telling the teachers what's what…. [Eat Your Vegetables]

More than half of all the (college-educated) women in one study could not name any of the parts of their external genitalia when presented with a scientific diagram to label. That is scary…and sad.

Strike ballot for lecturers [Ananova News]

Lessons from studying open-source communities. Mike Martin, Scientific Research Backs Wisdom of Open Source, NewsFactor Sci-Tech, December 15, 2003. (Thanks to Garrett Eastman.) New scientific studies of how open-source communities build and debug software conclude that the process is more complex and more effective than usually thought. Quoting Walt Scacchi, a senior research scientist at UC Irvine's Institute for Software Research: “Open-source is not a poor version of software engineering, but a private-collective approach to large-software systems.” Quoting Suzanne Iacono, NSF program director: “The software-intensive systems in today's world have become so complex that we need every available design tool at our disposal. Open-source development has achieved some remarkable successes, and we need to learn from these successes as our systems become increasingly distributed, complex and heterogeneous.” (PS: The complexity of scientific problems, and the benefits of collaboration, suggest that much of this research will transfer from open source to open access.) [Open Access News]

A Telling Account of WSIS. Maria Farrell, who works as a lobbyist for an undisclosed international membership organization based in Paris (OECD? ICC?) writes a great account of WSIS at Crooked Timber. Below I include a sampler, but it’s worth clicking the link to get the whole thing. Other interesting WSIS links include:An interview with the head of the US delegation in which he is basically bragging that the U.S. achieved its objective of protecting the the status quo on such issues as Net governance and funding or, in the case of software, ensure that the interests of major U.S.-based suppliers — notably Microsoft Corp. — got represented.‘The Daily Summit’Archives of Virtual WSIS CS Plenary Group SpaceA grumpy Larry LessigAndy Oram’s gumpy in a different way Gee, when did we give away the Internet? (blogged previously). [Links snagged from all over, espeically Lextext]… [Discourse.net]

Chair of 9/11 Commission: Attacks Were Preventable. The Chair of the independent 9/11 commission says the attacks were preventable: “This is a very, very important part of… [TalkLeft: The Politics of Crime]

Where is Bush Getting These Numbers?. Andrew Sullivan on Bush's “conservatism”. Conservative blogger Andrew Sullivan on Bush's “alleged fiscal conservatism”: MORE SPENDING: Monday, president Bush touted his alleged fiscal conservatism. If he's fiscally conservative, I don't know what fiscally liberal would look like. Here's what he said: “I want to remind… [Dean Independents] [The Mediaburn Radio Weblog]

WSIS Misguided. From an Editorial in the Baltimore Sun: “…Even more misguided is the international movement to take registration of Web addresses from a U.S. nonprofit – the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) – and put it and other coordination under the United Nations. At the 200-nation U.N. World Information Summit last week in Geneva, delegates opted to keep this bad idea afloat with a two-year study.” [Lextext]