"Free speech is the loser,'' said Ann Brick, an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer. "All kinds of messages that someone objects to are going to be taken off the Internet, not because they're defamatory but because (ISPs) are afraid of guessing wrong.''

Rather than sorting through voluminous libel claims or risking lawsuits, some ISP's will probably "shut down certain forums of communication,'' said Patrick Carome, a Washington lawyer who has represented AOL in similar cases.

Any attempt at a global ontology is doomed to fail, because meta-data describes a worldview. The designers of the Soviet library's cataloging system were making an assertion about the world when they made the first category of books "Works of the classical authors of Marxism-Leninism." Charles Dewey was making an assertion about the world when he lumped all books about non-Christian religions into a single category, listed last among books about religion. It is not possible to neatly map these two systems onto one another, or onto other classification schemes -- they describe different kinds of worlds.

Because meta-data describes a worldview, incompatibility is an inevitable by-product of vigorous argument. It would be relatively easy, for example, to encode a description of genes in XML, but it would be impossible to get a universal standard for such a description, because biologists are still arguing about what a gene actually is. There are several competing standards for describing genetic information, and the semantic divergence is an artifact of a real conversation among biologists. You can't get a standard til you have an agreement, and you can't force an agreement to exist where none actually does.

Mitchell muses on how AR will change our sense of our selves. Me is "a play on C , the popular programming language. Among programmers, means incremented or extended, so Me suggests the computationally extended self." He suggests we should no longer think of ourselves as "fixed, discrete individuals", but as nodes in a network. "I am part of the networks and the networks are part of me. I am visible to Google. I link, therefore I am."

AR is also changing our cities, which have always been products of boundaries and networks, he points out. But in the past, the boundaries were more important - the image of a city in medieval times is often one of city walls. Now, networks are more prominent: the London Tube map is one of the great icons of the city.

Joi has decided that instead of using a blog to make his life function better, he would change his life to make it work better with his blog. As an enormously successful entrepreneur, political rabble-rouser, and investor, Joi's not a typical "Hey, look at me!" blogger. He created one of Japan's first personal Web sites, was the chairman of Infoseek Japan, and runs a $40 million venture fund. He's also eager to see how this experiment changes his life.

When Joi is online (six or eight hours a day), a camera broadcasts him as he types. If you want him to invest in your company, he'll point you to a discussion of his investment process and his standard terms, both of which are posted online. He'll encourage you to talk to the CEOs of companies that he invests in (all just a click away). If you send him a proposal, he's likely to turn it down, but he'll encourage you to post it on the blog, participate in an online discussion, and see what the thousands of people who read it have to say. It will help sharpen your message.

There are actually people out there -- usually written off as the barking mad fringes of the neoconservative movement -- who hold these values: that the majority of people are worth little or nothing and exist to be led by the enlightened philosophers, while those of greater ability but less insight are to be trained up as "gentlemen", patriots and warriors who will fight at the drop of a hat to defend the virtues of intolerance and rigid hierarchical control upon which their society is based. An egalitarian, post-Enlightenment society in which people are of equal worth (even if their abilities and wealth vary widely) is by definition decadent because it provides opportunities for all and a warm bath of culture in which the urge to strive for glory dissolves: citizens of such societies as the liberal democracies are no better than animals and a true Straussian society must defend itself vigilantly against this kind of rot from within.

But as debate swirls about the capabilities of the beleaguered U.S. military, the Pentagon is calling for volunteers to "Serve Your Community and the Nation." It says the Selective Service System "wants to hear from men and women in the community who might be willing to serve as members of a local draft board."

If conscription becomes necessary, it says, 2,000 local and appeal boards would need volunteers. The boards would decide who would go to war and who could defer their service in the event of a national call-up to boost the currently all-volunteer military.

Any shortsighted policy that discourages consumers from watching broadcast TV or raises the price of equipment for receiving broadcast TV is a step in the right direction from my point of view. Broadcast TV is an entrenched politically sanctioned zone of zero effective competition, with all the usual consequences. In addition I think it helps to make people stupid. Ideally it should be taxed into oblivion, but crippling it with DMCA measures is better than nothing I guess.