Hey, looks like its time to resurrect MLP posts! This MLP post is brought to you by the recent stock market turmoil.

PayPal finally may have some competition from new comer noca.

Do you think you're a Software Engineer? According to one man hacker Ravi Mohan, your probably really a ratcatcher. I have to agree with Steve over here though. If you're a programmer, you probably don't know how compilers work.

If you like Apple's new MacBook Air but dont have the budget for it perhaps you would be interested in the cheeper Asus Eee PC solution and upgrade it yourself.

I finally bought Rock Band, even though I only got the PS2 (PS3 compatible though!) version. It certainly brings back memories of my drummer days. Check out this cool program that will allow the drum pads to work with your PC.

The immigration debate continues to be heated. Many people hit the streets all across the nation protesting the ill will towards immigrants. People have been talking about building a wall. Others have even talked about throwing out the more than 11 million immigrants. Very few seem to be talking about the punishing the companies that hire illegal immigrants and encourage immigrants to come here. Some people are arguing better than others.

I have only a few things to say about this debate. First who cares what language The National Anthem is in, at least they want to hear and understand it. America can never again become an isolated country, it is not healthy. America thrives on new blood. Also the possibility of splitting up families needs to be exempted from any possible immigration reform. The idea that families would be split up is unacceptable. Whatever reform comes of all of this it should be remembered that those illegal immigrants tend to be the most driven and are the kinds of people we want in this country, it is the companies who are the most at fault here.

Another cure for skin cancer.

Is there a possible massive oil field found off the coast of US near New Orleans?

Why are Americans less healthy than this European counterparts? More information about health in America here and here.

No TWI today. Last couple weeks of classes, spending most my time trying to keep up with work and study for finals.

Plinks and links: Chatology Special Report

I think this short but sweet message says everything for this last week.

It's a massive totally random one this week.

An argument raged last week about the media's coverage of the US occupation of Iraq characterizing it as one sided, showing only the bad things. Some people actually tried to say journalists in Iraq were reporting from their balconies rather than going out on to the ground to report on the good things going on in Iraq. I think this argument is distasteful and call shame on those who are making this argument themselves from the safety of America. These reporters in Iraq who are constantly under threat of death, as is evident from the many reporters who have died in Iraq, are reporting what needs to be reported about Iraq. A school or hospital opening is well and good but when its the backdrop of constant violence which is the most important things to the people in Iraq and people back here in America.

If you have not seen this video you should: mime torn. Also you should see this one too: French Horn Guy. Oh and Ask A Ninja is funny as hell.

It can be hard to grok the open source movement and in particular Richard Stallman but here is a transcript from groklaw of a recent keynote Richard gave about the future of free software.

I smell some bullshit coming from the direction of the FCC. Speaking of stupid things from the FCC, FCC Chief Kevin Martin has come out and sanctioned tiered internet.

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No it's a spy drone!

Am I the only one who thought they knew what caused Asthma? Well I guess they do now. Also apparently hot peppers can kill cancer.

The hugely successful PSOne with 100 million shipped worldwide is produced no more.

While many continue to not recognize global warming the rest of us know it is a real threat. Even NASA acknowledges its effects. While perhaps it does no one any good to talk in such overtones like DOOM, it does no one any good to ignore it and wait for 100% 'evidence' when such will likely be damaging and way too late. Better be safe than sorry and start now to clean ourselves up. We don't have to be smug about it though. Smug can be just as bad as smog.

And yes the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything is 42!

Tom Delay doesn't think the Judicial branch is a check and balance over the Legislative branch, George W. Bush thinks he is above congress and its laws. What's going on in this country? Are we slowly loosing the checks and balances that keep this country great and stable?

As always I rail against the notion of DRM and the media industries use of copyright to limit the rights of consumers. I thought this piece on the BBC had an interesting overview of how DRM won't work and the realities that the media industries need to wake up to unless they want to die.

Gaming is good for you! For every article out there about game violence and ADD there's an article about military applications for gaming and hand eye coordination.

The US space exploits continues to depress.

Round 5
everyone else 5, Microsoft 0
Microsoft delays Windows Vista again.

On another tech note you can read this interview of Tim Berners-Lee.

Notable: Chatology

MPAA gets ripped a new one during an sxsw session. Listen to the audio. Organ harvesting Chinese Concentration Camps. Did the Blackstar exist? Should we have open internet tests?

Notable: Chatology

Getting this out late, was busy all weekend.

I listen to a couple podcasts and one of my favorite is the Gillmor Gang. I was listening to his latest one when yet again Steve Gillmor mentioned that we should show respect for Earthlink, which he advertises at the beginning of each podcast. The problem isn't that we should have respect for Earthlink, it is his constant reminder at the beginning of every podcast. He needs to let the advertisement stand on its own now, possibly he should diversify to other advertisers. I'm all for advertisements on podcasts and blogs, I have google ads on my site, but I think the advertisements have matured enough that we don't need a constant reminder about them. What needs to happen now is the continuation of the advertisement movement for the correct context. This leads things to intention vs attention and google ads.

Speaking of which Doc Searls put words to a concept I've been trying to describe for a while now. The idea of attention vs attention vs intention. Where advertisers for a long time now have been spending billions to get our attention. Whether its a billboard or TV or spam alot can go into trying to get peoples attention and sell their product. However most of this money seems to me to be wasted, and in fact not only wastes money but wastes time. My time to view an advertisement for a product I will never buy and companies time in creating flashy advertisements to grab such a low percent of buyers who would otherwise not have bought their product where otherwise a very simple promotional advertisement or blurb that they exist would get a majority of their buyers to indeed buy their stuff.

In recent years we have seen two kinds of movements around attention. One side has been the context movement which is things like google advertisements where the advertisement is geared towards the content of the page itself thus perhaps leading to higher click rate. The other side, promoted by people such as Steve Gillmor and others over at attentiontrust.org, is a sort of vault where click streams or previous buys are recorded in a central place and the potential buyers can at their own will allow other companies to find out that information to be able to show advertisements or promotions that are very specific to that potential buyer.

The last piece to this evolution, as I see, is the idea of intention. When I know I want to buy something I can let vendors know my intention of buying something and they can then compete for my business. It can be as little as I am interested in buying an RPG game or a Java programming book or a plasma screen. It can be sorta vague or very specific and depending on that intention I might be a few advertisements and promotions or many. To me this should be where businesses are heading in the future of trying to get buyers.

On a different note reporters may need to watch out for Bush as he may be attacking reporters on the very idea that they report things.

Notable: Chatology

I've been doing TWI... for a couple weeks now. TWI... is sort of a play on TWIT though I never could cover as much as they do and as good as the people over there could. However, the point of my friday TWI... is to post the various things of interest that I find on the internets every week as well as any comments I've made on other peoples posts.

The guy over at Erratic Wisdom wonders how anyone could not understand the importance of studying history. (My comment: here).

I take this post to heart. Part of the reason for my site is communication with the outside audience. Not necessarily for personal gratification of other people viewing my content, but being genuinely interested in peoples comments about various topics I am interested it. Whether that's some bit of philosophy, science, code, or application I put out there I wanna hear what other people have to say about it.

Doc Searls continues to talk about and advocate the new journalism.

Notable: Chatology

Original wonkette Ana Marie Cox continues to make funny and witty posts in her weekly Chatology. Seems the US intelligence agencies can't make up their minds whether to classify or declassify documents. This is a little late, I saw it last week, but I found this page on The Rise & Fall of Object Orientation interesting. Someone posted an interesting response to the events surrounding the cartoon of their Prophet Muhammed at Kuro5hin. Can hydrogren producing mutant algae solve our energy problems? Fox does it again by asking if an Iraq civil war could be a good thing.

Finally, this is an interesting analysis about watermarks and I agree with the authors conclusion that watermarks aren't well suited for DRM. I think watermarks should be used only to find out who shared the file later.

A little late but here are a few of the things I found interesting on the net this week: Are viruses the ancestors of all life on earth?, Mormon's and DNA, Google releases more widgets, A decentralized internet?

Also I meant to post this last week but here is a quick rundown with links on the big discussion across the blogsphere about the supposed gatekeepers of the blogsphere. Whether it is about the long tail, or the short head, or A-list, B-list, or C-list. It all stems from the same idea, that there are a few blogs which have tremendous traffic and wield considerable power in possibly aiming that traffic at other blogs. What typically happens, as happens with most things social, is these high profile blogs tend to point their links to other high profile blogs. This social schema is better known by the power law. They perpetuate the traffic in the circle of A-list blogs, while the other blogs see significantly less traffic. These blogs with low traffic are in what is considered the long tail, the vast number of blogs which individually have few links into them and thus have low traffic but interestingly comprise more total traffic than the short head. More activity happens under the surface even if the surface seems more turbulent.

Here's this weeks blogs I found interesting: That's right Christopher Walken seems to be running for president, Paul Montgomery complains about the Gillmor Gang podcast (my comments: 1), Human vs. Animal Charity (my comments: 1, 2), The Death of the Movie Blockbuster (my comments: 1), Wonkette: Chatology, Tech you didn't know you needed?, Daily Kos comments on FISA

In case you hadn't noticed already I'm voting for Kerry this election, but regardless of who I may want to win, if you aren't voting at all this year you suck. Who's up for some old school MLP? I knew you were.

It seems AMD has been doing very well this year, seemingly beating Intel to the punch with their latest Athlon 64 4000+. One wonders what AMD will use to base their model numbers with as Intel starts focusing more on general preformance rather than GHZ. Apple also has been doing good lately. They released new iBooks and re-added their single G5 desktop today. One of these days, maybe when their next generation comes out, I need to get me an iPod. My favorate maven of the late night comedy fake news The Daily Show, John Stewart has been having an interesting month showing up at CNN's Crossfire calling one of the hosts a dick, talking to Bill O'Reilly on his show, and releasing a book which has now been banned at Walmart. If anyone doesn't know anything about Google these days they need to go Google it. Anyway they released a new Desktop Search program that can combine web searching with searching files on your hard drive. However some people have voiced concerns about it. I myself am not sure I want anything on my system that can search through some of my encrypted files as if they werent. One of my newest favorate authors Neal Stephenson was interviewed at Slashdot.

Wasn't that fun? I'm going to sleep.

The Destroyer of Worlds commanded me to reorganize my menu. What the Destroyer wants he gets. I finally saw Fahrenheit 9/11 last night and while I still have reservations about his motives and facts I think it was a very interesting documentary. As I've been reading more and more about Michael Moore and his films I think he is right about some things and wrong about others. George Bush is a calamity of bad decisions, horrible execution, and downright stupid policies. He may turn out to be the worst US President ever. I won't make claims about his dealings with companies and his connections to foreign families, that is for congress and others to investigate, it is his actions as president that I am so much against.

Eh, I don't mean to be the bearer of so much negativity. I do celebrate my country, even if it is fucked up. I wish these United States a happy fourth of July. Even if it was yesterday... There is always hope, we just need to remind ourselves that every now and then.

So I read on Slashdot that Affinity Engines Says Google Stole Orkut Code. This is kind of interesting because Orkut is not even close to being on par with what Google has done in the past so it might just be true. You'd think a company like Google would just write their own stuff.

It seems there's some good news about Guantanamo with the ruling from the United States Supreme Court. Kuro5hin also has a good article outlining more about the ruling and other things going on about the Hamdi v. Rumsfeld case. I've also been keeping my eye on the Cassini mission which got close to Saturn this week. Fahrenheit 9/11 made a big wave last weekend, I guess I'll have to go see the movie. I've kinda flip flopped between skepticism and agreeing with Michael Moore.

In site related news, I'll be adding a mathematics section here shortly. It will mostly be focused on Calculus with limits as a kind of background for my philosophy section topic in objective observations.

David Cross is a funny guy. I'm currently reading a book called Cryptonomicon written by Neal Stephenson. This guy is borderline fucking genius or I'm borderline fucking retarded, either way. Anyway he takes these pauses in the book to explain some complex theory like how sex affects clarity of mind such that C_m (clarity of mind) can be designated as a range from 0 ≤ C_m < 1 where C_m = 0 indicates a totally clouded mind and C_m = 1 is an unattainable divine state of infinite intellect. Horniness designated as σ begins at zero at time t = t₀ and increases linearly immediately following sex as a function of time such as &sigma a (t - tô) and can only drop back down to zero by having sex or a Manual Override. This function of horniness effect clarity of mind such that the at a critical point in horniness there is a threshold σ_c when σ > σ_c it becomes impossible to concentrate. This can be completely described by the limit function:

Cm  a	lim n®∞	1
		______
		(σ - σc)n

It's bloody brilliant! The main thrust of the book is about the importance of cryptography through WWII and currently as you can probably tell from the title.

Normally I'm not much into quirky community sites but orkut seems relatively decent. It's affiliated with google so it might be an interesting site. The server is a little slow but they got a ton of communities, even one for Fort Collins.

So I'm surfing the web, as I'm prone to do from time to time, and I run across the Christian Exodus web site. These very few people are trying to organize thousands of people to emigrate into South Carolina to take over legislative districts. Their goal is to return the United States to the good old days of their christian fundamentalist bullshit views one state at a time and if they can't do that secede from the Union. Take a look at their bullet points of what is wrong with this country. Now take a look at the Free State Project web site where a bunch of libertarians have the same kinda of idea. Sad fucking people.

I been also reading the news from the Guardian UK web site. It's pretty sad when I have to go to a news site in another country to get real news about my own. They have some up to date news on Guantanamo Bay. For those of you who don't know anything about The Patriot Act you need to smack your head against the wall for 3 hours then read this. Also go here, here, and here.

Finally, on a brighter note the Daily Show is funny.

Read some interesting pages about Microsoft over the last week or two. The most telling was How Microsoft Lost the API War which has a theory about the change internally from backwards compatibility. There is some more evidence that this change has become quite pervasive here and here. As someone who believes heartily that backwards compatibility is key to having a large enough software base for good adoption this trend is most telling that Microsoft is going in the wrong direction. Lawrence Lessig posted on his blog an interesting speech Cory Doctorow gave to some people at Microsoft about DRM. Finally, if its to be believed, Transgaming has announced WineX 4.0, named Cedega, which will be able to run Windows games on Linux with very good compatibility and performance.

Linkmarks has been completely replaced by sparce. Some various links that were in Linkmarks but not in Sparce have been put into the sections which I thought were applicable.

Here's a shit load of links for you to click on.