Alex is a wicked dork who wants domain names for his dork cave,#

So this cat, Scott, has got a fine little fixer-upper just about five minutes off campus. While I'm quite comfortable in my shiny new on-campus apartment, having even a modest house is an appealing prospect for the final two years of my college experience. Clearly between the two of us it would be one helluva geek pad: mad server racks, serious storage, wired and wireless networking, a firewall/router like you wouldn't believe, wine cellar and humidor hooked up to electronic stock monitoring, etc etc. Such a setup is undeniably deserving of a good domain name for all those networked machines.

So here's what I'm thinking: you suggest amusing, interesting, efficient, or otherwise good domain names for our geek pad that aren't already taken. Points for ones that make for amusing subdomains (of the form machine.funnyname.domain). If you pick the winning domain you get the grand, personal tour of our casa de dork, and probably dinner. Or maybe a shell account on Scott's SparcStation LX. Whatever. It'll be great.

Don Park addresses the issue of Ease of Use with regards to Micropayments,

Ease of Use is a major factor in Micropayment, but no one knows for sure how much of a factor it is.

My guess is that if all that stands between the user and paid-content was a hyperlink titled "Read for 25¢ IOU", most people will click through. Actually billing takes place when the amount owed to a particular site goes over certain amount ($10 sounds reasonable). At 25 cents, that's 40 articles you can read before you are asked to pay. I would guess further that most people who like to read will opt to pay the bill even if they decided to stop reading content at the site. If they refuse to pay, then service is degraded in some way for the user.

As Clay Shirky writes, one of the other big problems is the "mental transaction cost." Advertising seems to be the most reliable and non-intrusive way to make money, but if you're looking for getting paid for YOUR content then their must be a way. I'm just a bear of little brain so I don't know what that is, but Don Park seems like he's on the right track.

Michael Watkins writes about the state of the War on Terrorism,#

It's difficult to remember, now that we are enmeshed in this global war, that 9/11 was the act of a very small group of Islamicist extremists, albeit one a very big vision: to unite the Muslim world under their twisted banner and to destroy our way of life.

Their acts on September 11, and the ones that preceded 9/11 in Yemen and in Africa, justified a relentless campaign to track them down, to destroy their bases of support, and to give them no rest until every one of them is dead.

But is not enough to destroy Al Qaeda, we must discredit their vision too; we must undercut the wellspring of hatred that feeds their cause, provides their recruits, funds their terror. And it is here that we are failing so badly that I fear for our future.

Joi Ito writes that it's not about the files,#

Had an interesting breakfast discussion with David Weinberger and a few others about copyright. I seem to be having more and more heated debates about copyright these days and the more I become familiar with the arguments of old-school copyright guys, the more frustrated I become. As Lessig often says, we're not saying that there shouldn't be copyright or that artists should not be paid. The issue is that the current copyright framework and more importantly, the corporations who are currently entrusted with the task of managing these copyrights are dysfunctional. We need to fundamentally restructure the business of creating and being paid for creating artistic works and it's likely that this business doesn't involve record companies.

Moxie writes about her day at Disneyland two years ago,#

The powers that be had closed Disneyland so they could sweep the grounds for bombs and the costumed characters were lurking around the hotel and trying to make the disappointed kids laugh. Mostly they harassed adults.

The juxtaposition of the day's events and the location were almost too much to bear. I hate costumed Disney characters but the innocence and earnest efforts they made to make people smile brought me to tears several times throughout the day. Were they too crying underneath the furry costumes? Those masked people working during the most difficult day in recent history represented something that OBL hated about America -- the innocence, peace and essence of this country.

Tony Pierce dreams of something more:#

today i think i want to work for a vending machine company.

hopefully one of those japanese ones that have like 5,000 slots.

vending machines are nice. especially when theyre full of good stuff.

this morning i ended up with a minute maid apple juice and a two-pack of hostess cupcakes. except they werent hostess, it was some knockoff brand.

what i wanted was a bagel or a croissant or a muffin, which apparently is impossible here in southern california in the year 2003.

Tony Pierce. How does one person get this funny?#

instead ben affleck and jennifer lopez called me up and asked me if the xbi could help them with their wedding this weekend in santa barbara.

and i said, for the right price we could help you with whatever you want.

they asked, could you kill all the paparazzi?

i said, the xbi doesn't kill anyone.

they said, but

i said, you dont lipsync and we dont kill anyone.

they said, got it.

Ted Leung links to Jeremy Bowers suggesting that librsync would be a good solution to the RSS distribution problem. Mos def. I use rsync for lots of stuff and likes it.#

Godless at Gene Expression writes about a Wall Street Journal article about racial discrimination...#

A quote from the study,

Two young high-school graduates with similar job histories and demeanors apply in person for jobs as waiters, warehousemen or other low-skilled positions advertised in a Milwaukee newspaper. One man is white and admits to having served 18 months in prison for possession of cocaine with intent to sell. The other is black and hasn't any criminal record.

Which man is more likely to get called back?

It is surprisingly close. In a carefully crafted experiment in which college students posing as job applicants visited 350 employers, the white ex-con was called back 17% of the time and the crime-free black applicant 14%. The disadvantage carried by a young black man applying for a job as a dishwasher or a driver is equivalent to forcing a white man to carry an 18-month prison record on his back.

[...]

In a similar experiment that got some attention last year, economists Marianne Bertrand of the University of Chicago and Sendhil Mullainathan of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology responded in writing to help-wanted ads in Chicago and Boston, using names likely to be identified by employers as white or African-American. Applicants named Greg Kelly or Emily Walsh were 50% more likely to get called for interviews than those named Jamal Jackson or Lakisha Washington, names far more common among African-Americans. Putting a white-sounding name on an application, they found, is worth as much as an extra eight years of work experience.

And some of Godless' observations,

1) It is difficult to fire someone who's underperforming if they happen to not be a white male, because of the possibility of a discrimination lawsuit. This will make employers gun-shy about hiring in the first place. The same sort of phenomenon is apparent in Europe, where restrictions on firing have the unintended consequence of making employers far more leery about hiring.

2) Blacks and whites with equal qualifications "on paper" often do not have truly equal qualifications, because of race-normed admissions criteria. For example, U. Michigan had explicit numerically different standards for admission. If black entrants are less qualified than white entrants, it stands to reason that black U Mich graduates would be less qualified than white U Mich graduates.