Secretary On the Offensive: SecDef Donald Rumsfeld no longer even bothers to pay lip service to the idea that Congress has a right to oversight, information, or to question.
The GOP now seems to have embarked in the sort of hubristic fall that seems to come to all one-party governments eventually. The remaining questions are the rate of decent, and the degree of collateral damage to the rest of us on their way down.
Groupware Bad. Everyone in certain circles is going to link to this, so I almost didn't, but then I figured that I seem to have an unusually diverse set of readers — legal, technical, political and others — so why not.
You have to love lines like,
If you want to do something that's going to change the world, build software that people want to use instead of software that managers want to buy.
…which captures one of the problems here at UM: software that sells command and control for the sysops is much more likely be deployed than stuff that lets us actually do stuff.
As for this remark, I'm sure it will be quoted a lot:
So I said, narrow the focus. Your “use case” should be, there's a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid?
That got me a look like I had just sprouted a third head, but bear with me, because I think that it's not only crude but insightful. “How will this software get my users laid” should be on the minds of anyone writing social software (and these days, almost all software is social software).
“Social software” is about making it easy for people to do other things that make them happy: meeting, communicating, and hooking up.
The last graph even strikes me as true.
(spotted via the insightful Many2Many social software blog)
Henry Kissinger is the author of a line that I like to quote a lot, in which he describes a claim as “having the added advantage of being true”. I like the line for many reasons, one being because it reminds us that when it suited him Kissinger was not above pushing ideas that were false.
And, oh boy, it seems like Kissinger is still up to his old bullying tricks trying to deny, obscure, or distract attention from his complicity in the Chilean coup that replaced Salvador Allende with the evil Augusto Pinochet., as well as a strategic CIA murder plus the CIA's and White House's involvement in “Operation Condor”, Pinochet's scheme to murder his opponents living abroad in several Latin American countries and then later — in the Letelier affair — in Washington D.C.
None of which is all that surprising. What's amazing is the number of establishment figures still willing to do the old man's dirty work for him.
Nvu (N-view —> “new view”, geddit?), my favorite souped-up HTML editor is now in 1.0 Beta pre-Release 3 (Version 0.81).
Seems to work well, even though it's not 1.0 yet.
Newsweek runs a good profile of the most powerful man in Iraq, What Sistani Wants.
The ultimate contract of adhesion.
Even the Seventh Circuit might find it unenforceable as against public policy.
Recent Bluessky Posts
Jotwell Blenderlaw