matrix fans give advice to the people in the matrix - "Since the Agents can dodge bullets, why not use something un-dodgeable like a flamethrower on them? Trapping them in a giant net might also work."#

read matrix essays is very interesting - it's like reading about religion or the creation of the universe, there's no real way to know the truth because you're just talking about a fake universe/religion - the idea about everything we "know" about the matrix being a lie is appealing though#

this is intense - Lockheed Martin has advertisements for military weapons in the Washing Post?#

iTunes as an oracle#

i would hit it via eros (arnold!)#

memories of a lost age#

richard tallent and i are excited to see the new Mel Gibson movie when its comes out - "Anti-anti-semetic groups are up in arms about Mel Gibson's movie about the death and resurrection of Jesus. They have some lame notion that the fact that a jewish mob encouraged Rome to release Yeshua bar Abba (Barabbas, a terrorist) instead of Yeshua bar Yosef (Jesus, who had commited no capital crime) is a defamation of their race."#

anil dash writes that Flash Mobs are 99% Bad - "Those who are worried about the weblog fad flaming out, fear not. Mobs are truly the flagpole-sitting of the new millennium. As Joshua astutely observed, Flash Mobs are striking in that they are an affinity event for people who have no affinity group. A Meetup for people who like Meetups. How much more meta can it get? None. None more meta."#

scuttlebutt asks, "Are all bloggers introverts, or only the ones who disallow trackbacks?"#

peter wonders if because children and adults invent "constrained universes of expression" (in this case he refers to games and the "organized play" of adults like the stock market) then do animals? i think you need only look to dogs chasing cars, fishing (my dog does), and catching balls - maybe they think of them as exercise for honing their killing skills but looks like games or CUEs to me.#

age is defined by other people, you're as young as you feel - and i'll forever be a year in the past.#

i'm jealous of not being able to rap like Jin - "You wanna say I'm Chinese, Sonny here's a reminder, Check your Timbs, They probably say made in China"#

hah - "I look like some guy chooses fonts for a living"#

accordion guy isn't interested in the inner child of the last programmer - "What you call personality, I call distraction. Yes, I'm probably bound to find out more about the previous coder's approach to programming by their Perl code. I might even able to ratiocinate their astrological sign or whether they're dominant or submissive. But damned if I can figure out what the hell they were trying to get the code to do. "#

paul graham has a FAQ about his "Filters That Fight Back" idea.#

moxie ruthless and right when it comes to politics - "Get a clue Nader."#

tony pierce is all real - "heres the deal with this blog. it's mine. i call bullshit on bullshit and i tell you why im doing it. if you want to call bullshit on me, tell me why im full of shit. start with telling me why you're not holding our president responsible for anything. tell me why the national economy isnt his fault, and yet the california economy is gray davis's fault." - ah men#

ted leung links a little essay about the Evolution of Communities - focusing on the mailing list, "List Mom" concept. interesting good old days... we used to use modems you know?#

ted leung describes his jury duty - "Most of us don't regularly make decisions that have the impact that a jury decision can. It was a very uncomfortable feeling to go home over the weekend and think about whether one party or the other should be punished. Lawsuits are about justice, and not about mercy. But justice without mercy creates brittle relationships, where the only thing that matters is being "right" and having our rights fully exercised. Unfortunately, justice is the only thing that the legal system can bring to the world. But we need more than that." - cooool#

philip greenspun writes about lisp conferences - "At dim sum on Sunday Arthur was wearing a Lisp Conference T-shirt. Kleanthes asked "What do they do at the Lisp Conference?" I chimed in "it is a bunch of old guys talking about how a 20-year-old version of Lisp is so much better than all the language tools being hyped right now." My position was that this isn't a credible stance. Though it is probably true that you can be more productive in Common Lisp (1982) than in C# (2002), nobody will believe that the industrial software world has stagnated for 20+ years. I said that nobody will take Lisp seriously until it at least adds the truly state-of-the-art language features such as type-inferencing (from ML) and preconditions, postconditions, and invariants (from Eiffel). Bill came up with a novel objection to this idea: "My style of programming is exploratory and anything that gets in the way of that slows me down."" - read the comments for lisp guys thanking him and pointing out that these things are supported.#

perl was/is my vice#

james critiques the "curly brace crowd" - "The problem with his decision is that it gets the priorities exactly backwards. Most developers are not writing applications with hard constraints on numeric performance - if they were, VB wouldn't be so popular. Or PHP, or Python. Most people are writing "business" applications where time to market and correct behavior matter a lot more. What he did here is optimize for the infrequent case, at the cost of (expensive) developer time. It's a common mistake in this industry, and one that the curly brace crowd seems content to make over and over again. There are real costs associated with this choice, and the benefits are few."#

kevin is outraged at the administration - ''The argument outran the facts. I had a big long post here about how angry I am about this whole thing. I couldn't bring myself to post it. You know, I have a couple of subtle but important distinctions in my head. One is the separation of our Government with the current Administration. The Government is all those folks in all the government's many agencies who've made a career out of it. The Government handles the day to day stuff and actually changes very little over the course of any four year administration. The Administration is the group of people who are politically appointed during a President's term.''#

beware, beautiful and will publish all embarrassing email sent to her. - heh. i would get screwed if people published email i sent them because i'm loser++#

via patrick logan is How SHRDLU got its name - (this is a neat story)#

Several years later, someone gave me a copy of the science fiction story by Frederic Brown, written originally in 1942(!), entitled "ETAOIN SHRDLU" in which an artificially intelligent Linotype machine (with natural language ability) learns everything it typesets and tries to take over the world (World of Wonder ed. Fletcher Pratt (New York: Twayne, 1951, $3.95, 445pp, hc)). When I saw it, it seemed vaguely familiar, so I suspect that I had read it during my science-fiction years in high school, and it had stuck somewhere in the dim recesses of my memory and popped back out when appropriate.

the hero outwits ETAOIN SHRDLU by having it typeset every book on Buddhism. The story ends: "See, George, it believes what it sets. So I fed it a religion that convinced it of the utter futility of all effort and action and the desirability of nothingness...It doesn't care what happens to it and it doesn't even know we're here. It's archived Nirvana, and it's sitting there contemplating its cam stud."

from mezzoblue and michael pick are wish lists for CSS3 features. read at 'em#

signal vs. noise links the fortune article, What's Your Hot Donuts Sign? - "They begin lining up in the cold darkness, hours before the store opens. Some come wearing pajamas, some lug couches and TVs, others bring beer. And when dawn finally breaks and the ribbon is cut, the rabid customers bolt through the doors. Many of them, in what must be an anticipatory sugar rush, scream at the top of their lungs: "Krispy Kreme doughnuts, yowweeee!" Last year it happened in Fargo and Philadelphia and Amarillo and dozens of other cities in North America. This year it will happen in Boston, Sydney, and elsewhere. All for a simple doughnut. Consider that for a moment: With so many companies today desperate for customers, here is a business—remember, we're talking doughnuts—that has shrieking fanatics lining up around the block in the middle of the night to buy its product."#

a preview of Final Fantasy Tactics: Advance#

don park suggests - "Recent posts elsewhere about gay marriages and XML namespaces mixed in my head somehow and got me thinking about the naming aspect of the gay marriage controversy: What if we called it _garriage_ instead of _marriage_?"#

she who is in red, reminisces - "OK. I grew up in the section of the Boston area known as the "North Shore." This has little to do with actual shore when it comes to my town - though we're not that far from the water, we don't border it. No - the distinguishing features of the North Shore are hair and accent. [...] Who ever would have thought I wouldn't be at home in the place where we always went on dates when I was 14?" - i used to hang out in my mall all day, now it really weird me out. so scummy...#

i didn't actually read the article, in honor of being on slashdot, but this looks kind of interesting - a search engine that relies on user feedback to select good results - sounds like it would require too much input to be effective and be prone to abusive users, maybe an Advogato-ish trust system is used?#

philip greenspun has a great idea - what if you could by a cheap house, factory made by the chinese? - "How about this for a brilliant business idea: clearcut a Canadian forest (they love to cut down trees in British Columbia) and ship the lumber to China, build modular houses there and ship the completed houses back to the U.S. in container ships. Sell them at Walmart (they'll sell anything Chinese-made at Walmart). The quality won't be quite as good as the best custom homes in the U.S. but it will be good enough and when things start to get creaky in 20 years you can throw the house out and buy a new one at Walmart or Home Depot." - he wrote on a similar line a few weeks (months?) ago about cheap throw-away cars.#

john points out the arms race of spam - "Paul Graham wrote a bit about spammers' attempts to fool Bayesian filters and some possible counter strategies in "Filters that Fight Back". A little thought should make it clear that spam detection is AI complete. I think Greg Egan (in Permutation City?) even described a world in which people used intelligent agents to filter spam, so spam used intelligent agents to try to figure out if it was being read by a real person before allowing its content to be viewed, leading to an arms race that ended up with some people being concerned about the ethics of forcing artificially intelligent software to do nothing but read spam all day. "#

are you thirsty for AriZona ? - "the Memory Health Tonic makes no claims at all to help with your memory or anything else. [...] I noticed no improvement to my memory, exactly as AriZona didn't promise. Which is probably for the best, since you and I well know there are great swathes of my life that I'd just as soon forget and yes I'm talking about the EPCOT years."#

accordion guy addresses blogger and blogging - " Blogging encouraged me to write daily, which improved my writing, gave me more discipline, and acted as a way by which I get a better perspective on myself. I understand that line about the unexamined life not being worth living more clearly now -- since I write about what I do and who I am, I give more thought to what I do and who I am. That has paid off in spades. "#

keeping creativity alive through inspiration#

new version of hydra#

richard tallent points to 10 Capitalist Myths part one. - " Capitalism leads to wealth, wealth leads to investment, investment spawns innovation, and through glorious creative destruction, today's innovations surpass and replace yesterday's, creating more wealth. Through capitalist initiative, civilization has advanced beyond the wildest imaginings of our forbears. Today we cure diseases that were incurable. We cultivate miracle crops to feed the world. There is no problem in that cannot eventually be solved if we just give capitalist entrepreneurs free rein. "#