rc3.org

Copyright infringement is not the killer feature of YouTube. It’s a killer app because it makes the videos that define our times easily accessible. Much of the stuff you can find on YouTube simply isn’t available anywhere else. The problem, of course, is that a lot of it is protected by copyright, but that [...]

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Today’s Washington Post article on Vice President Cheney’s enthusiastic endorsement of waterboarding in an interview finally does what I wish more torture-related articles do, which is give a full background of the technique in question. Here’s how the article ends:

In waterboarding — one of a number of drowning-simulation techniques that date to the [...]

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You are probably familiar with the Michael J Fox campaign ads being shown in support of Democratic candidates who are running against Republicans who voted against federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. If so, you’ve also read that Rush Limbaugh accused Michael J Fox of faking, going off his medication, or at least playing [...]

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Is it just me, or are all of the Sourceforge mirrors gone? For every package I try to download, I find that only the University of Kent (UK) server is available. Needless to say, it’s not responding. The Sourceforge status page has nothing about this seeming outage.

Update: The mirrors all seem to be back [...]

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I’ve always fancied the idea of having a law named after myself. I don’t aspire to the fame Mike Godwin achieved with Godwin’s law, but a little fame would be nice.

Here’s the first draft of Rafe’s law:

An Internet service cannot be considered truly successful until it has attracted spammers.

Based on my observations, this [...]

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Firefox 2.0 uses tabs more aggressively than Firefox 1.5 did. In Firefox 1.5, if you clicked on a link that attempted to spawn a new window (not a popup, just another regular browser window), Firefox did as it was asked. Now it opens those links in a new tab in the current window. As before, [...]

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How does someone go from writing an article as smart as Spotting the Losers: Seven Signs of Non-Competitive States to drawing silly maps of the optimal Middle East? I can’t think of any pundit who has fallen father in my estimation than Ralph Peters.

Update: don’t miss Andrew Brown’s comment, which illustrates Peters’ psychosis nicely.

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Today O’Reilly Radar has a post about homophily, the tendency to congregate with people with the same interests as your own. The article explains how application developers can enable their users to move beyond homophily and make serendipitous discoveries.

I find that weblogs are a vaccine against homophily. Most people have plenty of widely varied interests, [...]

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I’m not an economist but I’m a big believer in incentives. In this Err the Blog post on his Ruby on Rails toolbox, he has this to say about the excellent exception_notification plugin for Ruby on Rails:

E-mails us whenever an exception is raised on the site. Some days I just gather up the [...]

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Did a legitimate venture capital firm just fund a gossip blog to the tune of $5 million? What’s Pink is the New Blog worth, $50 million?

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