The sound of silence

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Silence in America:

  • Over four hundred American soldiers killed in Iraq since the beginning of the war — 283 since the Bush declared that the war was over. Silence.
  • Constitutional rights being suspended via the Patriot Act. Silence.
  • Bush urges us to support the troops, while cutting pay and benefits for the military. Silence.
  • Prisoners detained and held indefinitely without charges in Guantanamo Bay. Silence.

Silence in Italy:

The sight was extraordinary, but less so than the sound, or rather the lack of it. Although thousands upon thousands of people filled one of this city’s most chaotic squares during the evening rush hour on Monday, the decibel level seldom rose above a whisper’s.

Silence was just one way in which those people sought to show their respect for 19 Italians killed in a suicide bombing in Iraq last week. Another was to wait two to three hours, in the drizzle and dark, for a chance to walk past the victims’ coffins, arrayed inside a palace that towers over the square, Piazza Venezia.

The line went on and on, just like Italy’s mourning.

Why can’t we as a nation honor our four hundred and twenty two dead as touchingly and honestly as the Italians do their nineteen? Of course, if behavior like that was sanctioned here — or, heaven forbid, encouraged — the public might just realize the extent of what’s happening in Iraq, to the US and to our allies. We can’t have that, now can we?

(To clarify, this is in no way meant to belittle the bombing of the Italian soldiers. Rather, it’s meant to belittle the lack of facts, knowledge, and questioning in the US media, who instead all too often seem to blindly accept the shameless posturing foisted upon us by our government.)

(via Atrios)

Fight Link Rot!

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link rot n.

The natural decay of web links as the sites they’re connected to change or die.

Calpundit has an excellent summary posted on how to link to New York Times articles without having the links succumb to link rot. This should be required reading for all bloggers, IMNSHO — citing sources is important, and it’s best if the sources don’t later disappear.

Update: Even better than Calpundit’s method (as good as it is) is the New York Times Link Generator! Just feed it the URL of a NYT story, and it will generate the link rot proof version of the URL for use in your weblog. Thanks to Aaron Swartz for providing this, and to Jason Kottke for pointing it out in Calpundit’s comment thread.

Calpundit also breaks down the most archive-friendly (i.e., least susceptible to link rot) sources:

  1. Tier 1: CNN, the Guardian, and the BBC all have permanent archives that never disappear.
  2. Tier 2: The Washington Post places old articles behind an archive wall, but previously existing links to the articles work forever. The New York Times makes permanent links possible, even if they’re a bit of a pain.
  3. Tier 3: The LA Times places all its content behind an archive wall after a few days and breaks any existing links.
  4. Purgatory: The Wall Street Journal is in a class by itself, since their content is never accessible free of charge on the Web.

GeoURL

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Prompted by the Localfeeds Seattle service (which gives me an RSS feed of weblog posts from people close to me in the real world), I’ve just added my GeoURL location identification to my main page — I had it on my old Long Letter blog, but hadn’t thought to put it in here on Eclecticism yet. Silly me.

This post is mostly here to give me an excuse to post the GeoURL button, which allows me to see who’s near me in the real world.

Stuff I've Seen

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Finally — I can talk about this!

Every so often during my time working on the Microsoft campus, I’d see something that really caught my interest. However, I couldn’t ever talk about it — NDAs and the like — so I’ve never mentioned any of them. However, the one that was always at the top of the “I really wish I had this” list was just announced at Comdex (and was apparently briefly mentioned back in April, too).

A prototype application called “Stuff I’ve Seen,” for instance, will store every screen that has popped up on a given computer monitor for a year. (from the April article)

The chairman also showed off a research project known as “Stuff I’ve Seen,” which catalogs any place a computer user has gone. As previously reported, Stuff I’ve Seen is designed to make it easier to find a previously visited Web site or an old e-mail, as well as other files that have become increasingly hard to find among the myriad folders on a typical PC’s hard drive. (from yesterday’s article)

Right now, it’s not uncommon for me to remember (or half-remember) reading something, somewhere, that I’d like to reference back to later on. Unfortunately, it can be a royal pain in the butt to track that down. Where did I see it? Was it in an e-mail someone sent me? An IM session? Something I stumbled across on the web? If it was on the web, how easy will it be for me to find it? As wonderful as Google is, when you’re a little iffy on the details of what you’re looking for, it can be almost impossible to find a specific reference or citation without being buried in false hits because your search terms are too vague.

SIS attempts to solve that problem by creating a database that stores the text of virtually any information displayed on your screen in the past year (I’d assume the default time period could be adjusted), along with references to the source of that information (URLs, files, etc.). Then, when searching for a phrase or subject, rather than limiting your search to whatever is stored on your drive, or expanding your search to everything on the Internet, you can confine the scope of your search to items that you have looked at, and likely increase the chances of finding the correct result by leaps and bounds.

I want this. And I want it on my Mac. ;)

Apple? Mac shareware programmers? You listening?

For more information on SIS, this Google search is turning up a lot of hits, including research papers and PowerPoint presentations directly from Microsoft Research (in fact, this Google search is the only reason I continued this post beyond the pull quotes — if I hadn’t turned up this amount of already freely-available information, I’d have stopped with what C|Net reported just to be on the safe side).

(via Scoble)

World record pillow fight!

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Knocking the stuffing out of each other may also set a record if Oregon State University students are recognized for what they hope was the largest pillow fight in history.

Unofficially, 766 people showed up at Oregon State on Friday to take part in the jumbo pillow fight in hopes of topping the Guinness Book of Records mark set by 645 people who staged a mass pillow brawl in Garnett, Kan., last June.

That sounds like so much fun!

(via Prairie)

Bombs? Assassinations? Attacks? Place your bets!

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Remember the Policy Awareness Market? It was a DARPA-backed plan to establish a “futures” market wagering on the likelihood of terrorist attacks, assassinations, and the like that almost slipped under the radar until being outed and subsequently shut down last July.

The Pentagon will abandon a plan to establish a futures market to help predict terrorist strikes, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee said Tuesday.

[…]

The little-publicized Pentagon plan envisioned a potential futures trading market in which speculators would wager on the Internet on the likelihood of a future terrorist attack or assassination attempt on a particular leader. A website promoting the plan already is available.

When the plan was disclosed by two Democratic senators Monday, the Pentagon defended it as a way to gain intelligence about potential terrorists’ plans.

Earlier, Warner had said that his staff was looking into the program and would report on it later Tuesday. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-New York), said she was appalled to hear of plans to set up “a futures market in death.”

Other Democrats expressed similar alarm.

“The idea of a federal betting parlor on atrocities and terrorism is ridiculous and it’s grotesque,” said Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon), one of two lawmakers who disclosed the plan Monday.

Well, guess what? It’s back! Apparently it’s now being run without government involvement, but the idea is still incredibly sick and wrong.

(via Daily Kos)

Bush denied 'license to kill'

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Incredible. Among the list of concessions that the US wanted from Britain in preparation for Bush’s upcoming visit were Tube closures, minigun battlefield weaponry to use against rioters, and diplomatic immunity for American agents in case protesters are shot.

Home Secretary David Blunkett has refused to grant diplomatic immunity to armed American special agents and snipers travelling to Britain as part of President Bush’s entourage this week.

In the case of the accidental shooting of a protester, the Americans in Bush’s protection squad will face justice in a British court as would any other visitor, the Home Office has confirmed.

The issue of immunity is one of a series of extraordinary US demands turned down by Ministers and Downing Street during preparations for the Bush visit.

These included the closure of the Tube network, the use of US air force planes and helicopters and the shipping in of battlefield weaponry to use against rioters.

While these outrageous requests were turned down, the UK has agreed to create a ‘sterile zone’ extending for blocks around the President’s travel plan to keep people away.

What’s more disturbing? The fact that we have an administration with the unmitigated gall to make such requests in the first place? Or the fact that we have a President who is so mistrusted, disliked, and outright hated by so many people that they feel the need for that level of security?

(via Atrios)

The Democratic parties

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According to The New Republic, it’s looking more and more like we practically have two feuding Democratic parties now: Clinton’s version and Dean’s version.

The division in the party over Dean is less about ideology than about power. Three years after Bill Clinton left office, he and Hillary still control what remains of a Democratic establishment. Terry McAuliffe, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), was installed by Clinton. Most of the powerful new fund-raising groups, known as 527s, and the new think tanks, such as the Center for American Progress, are run by the best and brightest of the Clinton administration. As National Journal noted in a detailed look at what it called “Hillary Inc.,” the senator’s network of fund-raising organizations “has begun to assume a quasi-party status.” And some of the best Clinton talent is heavily invested in non-Dean campaigns, especially Joe Lieberman’s (Mandy Grunwald and Mark Penn), John Edwards’s (Bruce Reed), and Wesley Clark’s (Bruce Lindsey, Eli Segal, and Mickey Kantor).

Dean, by contrast, has come to represent the party’s anti-establishment forces. While the other candidates, especially former self-styled front-runner John Kerry, started the campaign by wooing party leaders, Dean built a grassroots army first–in part by bashing D.C. Democrats and their disastrous 2002 election strategy–and is only now leveraging his fund-raising power to win over establishment types. No Democrats closely associated with the Clintons are working for the Dean campaign. In fact, it’s hard to find a Clintonite who speaks favorably of the former Vermont governor. This evident schism is not just about Dean’s opposition to the war–or even his prospects in the general election. It’s a turf war to decide who will control the future of the party.

It’s an interesting look at where the Democratic party is headed, and there’s some more good analysis at the Daily Kos. It’s my hope that the “old-school” Clinton faction will recognize the strength of what Dean and his campaign are building by getting people — “real” people, not just big-money people — interested, excited and involved. Otherwise, continued rivalry could end up costing us 2004, and four more years of Bush is the last thing this country needs.

Because I suck at remembering names

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Vogue regulars I met tonight that I should remember the names of:

Ron: spoke with him up in the DJ booth for a while, on everything from the Vogue to Seattle weather.

Rhonda: friends with and works with Trish.

Sylvie: had the cute purple knit hat with fur trim to match her coat (because they both had fur trim, not because the colors matched). Has a boyfriend whose name I didn’t catch.

Christina: great 40’s (?) style hat. I complimented her on her hat, then Sylvie introduced us. Sylvie then proceeded to embarrass Christina by remarking that she had “great tits” (I certainly wasn’t about to argue, but rather than agree and make an ass out of myself, I merely kept my mouth shut), encouraging me to talk to Christina, and then declaring that I should be taken home by Christina and Josh, who was also talking to Christina.

Josh: the aforementioned person also talking to Christina, who wearing a top hat. Apparently this was a good night for good hats.

None of this will mean anything to anyone else. It’s mostly here for my own reference, in a (probably futile) effort to drill the names into my head for more than a few hours.