It's a shame the New York Times prints baseless tripe like this. Taking quotes from a couple burnouts and pairing them with a few general statistics in big type is sloppy journalism at best, and a personal grudge at worst.

How did the Web arrive at this juncture? Some people say that the rush to make money, in which profits mattered more than passion, was a significant driver. Mr. Davis, for instance, said he did not design Cool Site of the Day with profit in mind. The site, which was housed on servers at Infinet, the Internet service provider for whom Mr. Davis worked, was taken over by the company when he left in November 1995. In 1998, Infinet sold the site to Mike Corso, a businessman in Chappaqua, N.Y., who charges $97 to those who submit a site for "priority express" consideration, plus $19 a month if the submission is selected and added to the archives.

Still, there is something symbolically appalling about killing buffalo. Perhaps it is the manner in which the animals dumbly accept a bullet to the brain. Or, more likely, the dithering thump of a 2,000-pound beast hitting the ground faintly echoes the 19th century slaughter of 60 million of the beasts, an essential element of the drive to deracinate the Indians and repopulate the Plains with cattle-raising Protestants. Bison bison, hump-shouldered survivor of those campaigns, is the iconic trapezium of the American West. His brown eyes are beady, suspicious and unvanquished. The horns and dark wooly mane are so familiar they could almost be costumes.

We need to steer policy makers in a different direction, toward watermarking technologies that do not block copies from being made but allows them to be traced after the fact. Yes, effective watermarking is technically difficult, and several have already been broken. But at least it's *possible* to build an effective watermarking scheme without utterly destroying both the personal computer and the Internet.

It is "easy to imagine an infinite number of situations . . . where government officials might quite legitimately have reasons to give false information out," the Justice Department's senior trial lawyer said to the justices, who are weighing Jennifer Harbury's claim that she had the right to the truth about the torture and murder of her Guatemalan revolutionary husband by CIA-financed Guatemalan forces in 1993.

Some researchers believe that about one in every 25,000 people has synesthesia, Palmeri said. Some studies suggest it may be much more common, closer to about one in every 200 people, Hubbard said.

As Afghan schools reopen today, the United States is back in the business of providing schoolbooks. But now it is wrestling with the unintended consequences of its successful strategy of stirring Islamic fervor to fight communism. What seemed like a good idea in the context of the Cold War is being criticized by humanitarian workers as a crude tool that steeped a generation in violence.

Few indeed have never regretted some action nor yearned to have avoided some circumstance. But it is the childlike wonder with which we gaze upon "what might have been," into realms of possible, alternative worlds, which truly underlies the excitement of counterfactual research. What if Kennedy had survived his assassin's bullets into a second term in the White House? What if the Nazis had triumphed over the western democracies in the Second World War? What if your parents had never met? There is something at once obsessively compelling and oddly unsettling about confronting such unrealities that might well have been. In intermixing fantasy and freeform creativity with the tangible truths of our lives, such subjunctive suppositions have the potential to inform, enrich, emote, and even entertain. As Douglas Hofstadter wrote, "Think how immeasurably poorer our mental lives would be if we didn't have this creative capacity for slipping out of the midst of reality into soft 'what ifs'!"

Despite the decentralized, unorganized, and heterogeneous nature of the web, where millions of individuals with different backgrounds, cultures, and goals operate independently, the study shows that the structure of the web self-organizes into communities of related information.

The study shows that a remarkable degree of order emerges from the independent linking actions of individuals

MC:

Yes, just wait for a really long and wordy ruling where we show that the presence of competitors holds back competition! What do you think of that, Contestant #1?

Contestant #1:

(blubbering)
Aw, this is great, I should have kept around some of those competent employees. Gee, folks, I love America, you--

In the war on terrorism, IM has become a tactical weapon for the U.S. Navy and its allies. Supply clerks are chatting directly with other clerks, doctors with other doctors and lawyers with other lawyers. And commanders are sharing battle plans with one another in real-time meetings.

P3P is essentially a set of questions about what information sites collect and how they use it. The sites' answers get translated into machine-readable code. Software then matches sites' practices with users' privacy preferences. It can warn users when a site collects or shares more data than they want.

Bush decried a routine congressional practice of taking up the defense money bill in the waning days of the fiscal year, saying, "That's bad budgeting practices in times of peace. It's really bad budgeting practices in times of war."

"I expect the United States Congress to not only pass the budget as I submitted, I expect them to make it the first order of business, so we can plan for this war," Bush said. "Now is not the time to play politics with the defense budget. Now is the time to get it out first and get it on my desk."

What many people don’t realize, however, is that this visionary network is increasingly up and running today. And it doesn’t even require any new technology, business models or significant investment. Indeed, if there is a single difference between the Broadband2Wireless mission and the reality of this new ubiquitous network, it’s that the real wireless Internet doesn’t cost $50 a month—it’s free. All that’s required, really, is openness.

Assata Shakur’s prison notes, Nina Zivancevic’s memories of Yugoslavia during the war with Croatia, Kathy Acker’s study of romantic sexual desire between individuals separated by colonialism and borders, Jane DeLynn’s tale of surrender to the mysterious, Michelle Tea’s goth remembrance, Jack Smith’s queen-bitch complaints — all seem to share a common ground. The writers are desperately trying to break through their fear, their vacancy, their numbness, not by embracing the simplicity of a rulebook God but by locating authenticity in an experimental relationship with the unknown.

I'm afraid, however, that Lomborg is not merely a victim of Scientific American's churlishness, but a harbinger of things to come. As bad as this episode is, things will likely only get worse unless the growing tendency to use copyright to stifle free speech is brought under control. But the people who are often held up as the remedy to corporate overreaching seem either willing to abandon their principles, as with Scientific American, or to have been bought off in large numbers.

Exhibit one for the prosecution on the latter is Senate Commerce Committee chairman Ernest "Fritz" Hollings (D-SC), who last week led hearings on digital copy protection in which, as The Register's Thomas Greene noted, he seemed to lose sight of the distinction between representing the citizenry and doing the bidding of the industries seeking to control what goes on inside your computer. Hollings' confusion is perhaps understandable -- he was the recipient of nearly $300,000 in contributions from the entertainment industry in the last election cycle.

From a branding perspective, it would certainly be tiresome if we found ourselves simultaneously admiring and abusing our washing powder. But when it comes to our relationship with governments, particularly the government of the most powerful and richest nation in the world, surely some complexity is in order. Having conflicting views about the US - admiring its creativity, for instance, but resenting its double standards - doesn't mean you are "mixed up"; it means you have been paying attention.

Her code gives Netochka her power and makes her more than just a flamer or self-involved performance artist/Net prankster who could simply be enjoyed, deleted or ignored. She controls the software that the artists whom she amuses and hectors, taunts and plagues, use to do their work.

Google pioneered the use of links to deduce pages' relevance. Its PageRank technology counts a link from site A to site B as a vote for B from A. But it does not take account of all the other sites to which A has links, as NEC's new technique does.

If you are not happy with this list, drop me a line, because the list changes in response to suggestions from my readers. If you had scales and put Stalin's massacres on the left side, what could you put on the right-hand side to balance it? Extreme kindness and attempts to alleviate suffering? Curing cancer? Ending world hunger? Charity? Elevating the thinking of humankind with respect to human rights? Perhaps the very best people don't seek publicity for their good deeds; these are the unknown heroes who work tirelessly with the poor and the sick. When considering religions leaders, do we need to consider possible negative results that evolved, such as fundamentalist groups that suppress women, or the concept of Jihad, or holy war? If the Inquisition arose out of Christianity, need we consider this in assessments we make?

The book contains more than 1,800 illustrations. The first show God's hand emerging from a fluffy sleeve and gesturing over the cosmos, depicted as concentric rings. The ones that follow include biblical and classical scenes, genealogies and maps of the world as seen through late-15th-century eyes.

Caral is dominated by a central zone containing six large platform mounds arranged around a huge public plaza area. The largest of these mounds, "Piramide Mayor," is truly remarkable: 60-feet high and 450-by-500 feet at the base. Research indicates that all six central mounds were built in only one or two phases, indicating the presence of complex planning, centralized decision-making, and mobilization of large labor forces.

Viewed more than 30 years later, when we've recently emerged from an age of exceedingly self-conscious irony, it's clear that while "2001" is full of classically Kubrickian black comedy, it never apologizes for dreaming big. The movie balances a youthfully idealistic sense of inquiry with a wisely restrained manner.

The status of the Internet is shifting from being the dazzling new thing to being a purposeful tool that Americans use to help them with some of life's important tasks. As Internet users gain experience online, they increasingly turn to the Internet to perform work-related tasks, to make purchases and do other financial transactions, to write emails with weighty and urgent content, and to seek information that is important to their everyday lives.

The single most effective strategy for pre-empting another attack is to hit the attackers first—to disrupt and root out the terrorists who are planning the next strike. That's hard but not impossible. The Sept. 11 hijackers kept low profiles, for example, but didn't plan the attacks in cloistered secrecy. Mohamed Atta and his crew received money from al-Qaeda paymasters through traceable banking channels. Nine of them were singled out for special airport-security screenings on the morning of the attacks, the Washington Post reported, yet managed to slip through. The two hijackers who were on the government terrorist watch list before Sept. 11 possessed valid driver's licenses under their own names and paid for their tickets with credit cards that the FBI could have easily tracked. In some cases, the FBI failed to share information it possessed on suspect individuals with other law-enforcement authorities; in others, the feds simply didn't pay close enough attention.

Okay, so the Net has proved toxic to business and nobody's making any money there. That stopped the profiteering, except for the spammers of course ... hucksters who are methodically bringing net.commerce into such putrid disrepute that it may well never recover. Lack of money, though, is not stopping the innovation. It never did. The Internet now reaches half the population of the USA. It is starting big seismic rumblings in China, Iran, and India, societies that lack their own AOL Time Warner and therefore have some dead-serious uses for cheap global network communication. Worldwide, people use the Net for e-mail. E-mail never had a real business model, but it was one feature everybody always wanted. The Net is becoming the planet's water cooler. It's all about the schmoozing and the gossip.

The good folks of SXSW Interactive have a whole lotta blogging in the schedule. You may have never heard of "weblogging," because it never yet made anyone rich, but blogging is a way cool deal, man. Metafilter, Memepool, Boingboing.net, I'm on those blogs all the time. Blogdex, Daypop, those sites rock. SXSW Interactive is totally awash in the cream of blogger royalty. They've got Meg of Megnut, and Derek of Powazek, and Jason of Kottke, and Jeffrey of Alistapart, and a very Mongol host of other bloggers. If this recital means nothing to you, you are probably old and near death now.