# Notice (Oct 19/05): So ends my stay here on Blogger. This morning Google implemented an anti-spam 'feature' that forces me to answer a challenge phrase when I want to post to my own blog. No notice of the change, nothing. Worse is that it doesn't even work! I type the phrase, submit, "An error occured", post deleted. Damn you, Google. Chances are I will revive my blog somewhere else, sometime soon. I'll post the new coordinates here as soon as they become available. (BTW, I'm unable to post anything to my RSS stream, so I'd appreciate it if readers could spread the word and ask people to take a look at this notice)

Update (Oct 19/05, ~noon): After a frustrating few hours (and not just trying out alternatives to Blogger), I've decided that this is a good time to take a break from all this. A day? A week? Who knows. But I need to step away from it before I pass a heavy magnet over the whole mess.

Update 2: According to this post, the reason I'm seeing the CAPTCHA (challenge phrase) is that Blogger has classified my blog as spam. Thanks. User for five years and now I'm spam. I searched the Blogger site, but there is no mention of how to get the spam flag turned off. There is also no way of contacting anyone at Blogger. Wow. Spam they say I am, so spam I must be. Maybe it is time to take a break.

"Opinions in the room were mixed; I came into it skeptical and left more skeptical -- not that it would do well, which it will, doomed, perhaps, to moderate success; but that I could think of a reason to recommend it or a need it would fill better than other options. [...] But you don't need me to tell you their opinions -- go read their blogs. Which is why we aren't the market; we already have identities online. Yahoo 360 is for those who don't."

Nobody knows how to produce an automaton that even approaches the complexity of a real human being, let alone a society. Our approach, then, is not even to attempt this, but instead to use the computational medium to augment the communications channels between real people.

"Nukes let you offer a nasty undertow to invading armies when you are forced into tactical retreat. If you must lose a city, pull back and let the army from across the border have the town. Then launch a Nuclear Missile at it, and send all your Citizens around the corner somewhere while it's in flight so you don't have to rebuild them. Whatever was left of the invading army after taking the city won't be left anymore after the nuke blast. You'll get the town back up and running before your foe can reinforce."

The whistle-blower was an undergraduate at University of Vermont who had been hired as a research assistant. ''I was in a unique position to act," [Walter] DeNino said. ''I did not rely on Dr. Poehlman for funding, a post doc [research position], or a salary."

".plan files were appropriate ten years ago, and sort of retro-cute several years ago, but I'll be sensible and use the web."

My big gripe with Apple, of course, is their cult of hermetic secrecy. We at Sun and our esteemed competitors up in Redmond are engaged in a grand experiment: what happens when you dramatically increase a company's transparency? Initial results are pretty good for both of us. Apple's approach is of course, exactly the opposite. They control the message, nothing that's not part of the message can be said, nobody is allowed to say anything except for Steve, and they'll sue your ass if you step out of bounds.

"The report cites widespread and growing problems such as the collapse of fisheries in some parts of the world because of over-exploitation, the creation of 'dead zones' around the mouths of some rivers because of nitrogen runoff from farms, and environmental degradation in some dry-land ecosystems."

"The circumstances of the Long Emergency will require us to downscale and re-scale virtually everything we do and how we do it, from the kind of communities we physically inhabit to the way we grow our food to the way we work and trade the products of our work. Our lives will become profoundly and intensely local. Daily life will be far less about mobility and much more about staying where you are. Anything organized on the large scale, whether it is government or a corporate business enterprise such as Wal-Mart, will wither as the cheap energy props that support bigness fall away. The turbulence of the Long Emergency will produce a lot of economic losers, and many of these will be members of an angry and aggrieved former middle class."

The major processor manufacturers and architectures, from Intel and AMD to Sparc and PowerPC, have run out of room with most of their traditional approaches to boosting CPU performance. Instead of driving clock speeds and straight-line instruction throughput ever higher, they are instead turning en masse to hyperthreading and multicore architectures.

"The judging was hard for me. As I clicked through the hundreds of submissions, I started to get an uneasy feeling. Why was all of this so bad? I mean, it was really bad."

"You need three things to create a successful startup: to start with good people, to make something customers actually want, and to spend as little money as possible. Most startups that fail do it because they fail at one of these. A startup that does all three will probably succeed."

"This particular wave of crackdown was apparently generated by an edict from high above and was applied to all the bulletin board systems at the higher institutions of education."

"'Unlike blue-collar workers who may declare themselves 'unemployed,' the knowledge workers I know shun that appellation,' he writes. 'They're never 'unemployed.' They're 'contractors' seeking gigs, or 'business owners' seeking clients. If a job comes their way, great, but in the meantime, they're 'working.' In a real sense, they are working, because they're trying to provide a service in exchange for money; but they're 'working poor' trying to survive, just like displaced factory workers.' "

"[The] study, published by the Royal Economic Society, said: 'Despite numerous claims by politicians and software vendors to the contrary, the evidence so far suggests that computer use in schools does not seem to contribute substantially to students' learning of basic skills such as maths or reading.'

Indeed, the more pupils used computers, the worse they performed, said Thomas Fuchs and Ludger Wossmann of Munich University."

The study found this conclusion "highly misleading" because computer availability at home is linked to other family-background characteristics, in the same way computer availability at school is strongly linked to availability of other resources.

Pupils tended to do worse in schools generously equipped with computers, apparently because computerised instruction replaced more effective forms of teaching.

Denise Howell talks with Cory Doctorow, Robert Scoble, and Martin Schwimmer about what AutoLink and tools like it mean for the future of the Web

"Folksonomies aren't interesting from an 'emerging technology' perspective -- they're interesting from a social and cultural perspective."

"Without AFP's authorization, defendant is continuously and willfully reproducing and publicly displaying AFP's photographs, headlines and story leads on its Google News Web pages," AFP charged in its lawsuit.

AFP said it has informed Google that it is not authorized to use AFP's copyrighted material as it does and has asked Google to cease and desist from infringing its copyright work.

AFP alleged that Google has ignored such requests and as of the filing date of the lawsuit "continues in an unabated manner to violate AFP's copyrights."

The executives aim to get the message out that although the industry currently lacks stability, there are jobs, both technical and otherwise.

Reading is a private, uncontrollable act.

Spend any time at all surfing the Net, and you quickly discover that there are a lot of people who spend a lot of time and effort publishing information on subjects that interest them. Whether it's a father putting up pictures of his family, a student building a shrine to her cat, a teenager listing the titles in his video game and music collection, or a young lawyer designing a site dedicated to her favorite Californian wines, they all have some things in common. They all feel passionately about something, and they all want to share their passions with others.

It is important to remember that the Web is only a passive, malleable technology. Some people simply want to spend time reading through what others have created. Some want to seek this information out, others want it pushed at them. Still others thrive on many-way communication, and the Internet makes that possible as well. Newsgoups, chat rooms, or simple e-mail all make it possible for people from all over the world to communicate almost effortlessly.

This is cyberspace: the virtual space where all these communications, exchanges, and conversations take place. And [this] is my contribution to that conversation.

'Skill obsolescence is the number one issue for I.T. workers,' Professor Deb Armstrong of the University of Arkansas told NewsFactor. And it turns out, according to a study by Armstrong and her colleagues, that certain facts of women's lives make staying ahead of the game harder than it is for men.

The big prize still dangling out there is McGill University's management faculty, which for several years has attached a $40-million price tag to its brand. So far, there are no takers but the school remains confident it will happen.

J'ai un indicateur pour savoir si une conférence a été bénéfique pour moi ou pas. C'est le nombre d'idées qui me vient en écoutant les différentes interventions.

Anyhow, this is a policy problem not a technical problem, so here’s a suggestion: perhaps our friends at Creative Commons could have a look and develop a professional legal opinion as to whether their licenses, like the one I use, are infringed by AutoLink (my non-professional opinion is that Google’s damn close to the edge). If not, perhaps they could create a variant license that clearly rules it out of order. Then Google stops, or we sue their ass.

The secret of the neoconservative movement is that it’s not conservative, it’s radical. Guys like me, who are conservatives, are upset about these nenocons calling themselves conservative when they’re so radical.

"When a Special Forces platoon leader just back from Iraq matter-of-factly tells a close friend of mine, as happened last week, that he and his unit are now training their sights (literally) on Iran, we need to take that seriously. It provides us with a glimpse of reality as seen at ground level. For me, it brought to mind an unsolicited email I received from the father of a young soldier training at Fort Benning in the spring of 2002, soon after I wrote an op-ed discussing the timing of George W. Bush's decision to make war on Iraq. The father informed me that, during the spring of 2002, his son kept writing home saying his unit was training to go into Iraq. No, said the father; you mean Afghanistan... that's where the war is, not Iraq. In his next email, the son said, 'No, Dad, they keep saying Iraq. I asked them and that's what they mean.'"

The Net Generation has grown up with information technology. The aptitudes, attitudes, expectations, and learning styles of Net Gen students reflect the environment in which they were raised—one that is decidedly different from that which existed when faculty and administrators were growing up.

This collection explores the Net Gen and the implications for institutions in areas such as teaching, service, learning space design, faculty development, and curriculum.

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"If management was a licensed profession on a par with law or medicine, there might be fewer opportunities for corporate bad guys, argue HBS professors Rakesh Khurana and Nitin Nohria, and research associate Daniel Penrice."

"When I visit your website, and you send me a page in response, I should be able to do whatever I like to manipulate it on my end. Display it in purple, suppress images, block pop-ups, compare prices from other vendors, whatever. In the words of my colleague, Cory Doctorow, "it's my screen, and I should be able to control it; companies like Google and individuals should be able to provide tools and services to let me control it."