random($foo)

I’m not sure Lessig would want to be Attorney General (although following up Ashcroft, it would be hard impossible to do worse), but FCC chairman, now that would be interesting.

Imagine a FCC that doesn’t spend its time regulating what you can and can’t say on the airwaves. A FCC that actually cares about having open, unfettered spectrum for the people, since they actually own it, instead of auctioning off every last megahertz to the highest bidder. Imagine a FCC where TiVo doesn’t have to ask first before they create a new feature.

The, Sinclair, the.

• More at Media Matters for America
• Boycott Sinclair Broadcast Group – time to put Sinclair to bed (see Advertiser DB)
• Google News: sinclair kerry

The rebound is based on their deciding to only “show clips” from the attack documentary. My question: are they going to run Going Upriver (ahem, EasyNews members, attention) clips as well? Also, are they going to dedicate an hour or two to discuss Bush’s Vietnam experience (I think not).

• Eisenhower’s son endorses Kerry (via)
  

  “The fact is that today’s ‘Republican’ Party is one with which I am totally unfamiliar. To me, the word ‘Republican’ has always been synonymous with the word ‘responsibility,’ which has meant limiting our governmental obligations to those we can afford in human and financial terms.

• Music Lab – ostensibly a test music tastes. Mostly craprock, but some decent punkish stuff. I wonder what it’s really testing? (willingness to click through mod_jk errors?)
• Cat Experiment – makes me want to buy a kitten and try it out (apparently that would be inhumane or something. nm)
• Voices of Iraq – 150 DV cams distributed to Iraqi citizens. Great idea. Hmm, this is showing on campus next Tuesday. Who’s getting me in there?
• Slurm on OS X – a realtime ncurses network monitor, like nload, but for OS X. (for local monitoring, I use MenuMeters). see: Slurm, Wormulon
• GEORGE W. BUSH – THE GREATEST PRESIDENT SINCE GENERAL PATTON!! – heheh
• Transparency and sponsorship in the blogosphere – Marc on pro-blogging

I watched Going Upriver ($13.29 @ DeepDiscountDVD) tonight. I feel a lot better about Kerry. Watching him as a young war veteran, handling himself in the way he did in the situation he was in is rather astounding.

• Review of “The Last Starfighter: The Musical” – wow, if I were in NYC now I’d go see it
• Republican Switchers – more talk on why conservatives and traditional Republicans should be rallying against Bush’s radical agenda
• Lie Down for America – if you’re making under $200K/yr, you don’t like pre-emptive wars, and want to keep the gov’t out of your private life, and oh yeah, support Objective Reality, then no, it doesn’t make sense
• Daniel Dreznerdeliberates and shows that yes, there can be a reasoned approach to being undecided and leaning towards Kerry – if you’re a Republican
• Jon Stewart, Again in the Crossfire – oh, back to absurd (or is that wickid retarded?), watch how Crossfire spin’s Stewarts appearance AND TOTALLY FUCKIN MISSES THE POINT
• Home of the Social Networking Services Meta List – slightly less absurd 😉
• Journalistic crash – oh yes, how about those journalist yahoos. That’s pretty absurd
• Digital Agenda: Homeland Security – did I mention absurdity?
• Applications for your future TV – Mark Cuban throws out some ideas (and points out the absurdity of our patent system

Sorry for the unresponsiveness this morning. Some assholes have been leeching some large files very aggressively, which ended up maxing out the number of active connections now that I’m limiting bandwidth.

• Firefox Advocacy Ad Campaign Overview & FAQ – contribute over $30 and get your name in the NYTimes ad – ingenious – over 2,500 names already!
• The Inflation Calculator – try comparing 1990 to 2003 and watch your jaw drop
• Emulating Prototyping of DOM Objects in Internet Explorer – In Mozilla all DOM objects are native Javascript objects, which means we can easily use prototypes to add methods and properties to all instances of a DOM class at once. This is very useful as it allows us to easily extend the functionality of DOM objects. Unfortuantly there isn’t such an easy way to do this in IE, but we can emulate it by using behaviors and extending the document.createElement method. (Paul’s back. A smart company would simply give fistfuls of cash to him now, before he graduates.)
• Matt’s featured in a Business Week article about registration – hey stupid publishers, why don’t you take a hint from community sites like Metafilter and actually offer something of value for signing up? See Holovaty’s comments. Lawrence, Kansas gets it. You’d think Los Angeles, Washington DC, or New York might
• GmailStatus – another useless piece of blinkery for your menubar
• Six Apart Professional Network – this is not a paid placement, but rather as a public service for your edification. Where Anil posts good stuff (say, unlike the barren desert wasteland that is the 6A front page)
• Metadata for the Masses – peterme writes about freetagging. Here’s something I posted at the beginning of this year, and a still stand by it:
  

  Kurt, I agree that analytics will be an importance
  force-multiplier for assisting tagging. Automated clustering, emergent
  taxonomies, and network scaling w/ collaborative filtering, webs of
  trust will all factor in. As will good interfaces (personally, I find
  navigating long, nested contextual menus a PITA).

  We’re seeing a lot of areas converging right now. It’s all quite exciting.

  some other intersting MSR stuff:
  http://research.microsoft.com/~jplatt/
  http://research.microsoft.com/research/downloads/

  A few disparate (but related) links that may be of interest:
  http://users.bestweb.net/~sowa/peirce/ontometa.htm
  http://facetmap.com/
  http://www.iuiconf.org/pastiui.html
  http://www.idlewords.com/pages/emerging_tech_talk.htm
  http://collaboratory.planetwork.net/linktank_whitepaper
  http://www.dynamicobjects.com/d2r/archives/002564.html
  http://www.neci.nec.com/~lawrence/papers.html
  http://www.nuclearelephant.com/projects/dspam/dobly.html
  http://web.umr.edu/~tauritzd/art/
  http://bonsai.ims.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~mdehoon/software/cluster/software.htm

• DrupalEd and DrupalBlog Downloads and Demos – two preconfigured setups for the classroom and blogging, respectively
• Styling even more form controls – comprehensive followup on styling form elements. Illustrated.
• Drupal.org gets a make-over – very nice. And 4.5 is released
• So You’re… – (175,898 book results) I wonder what the origin of this phrase comes from?
• Oct 2004 State of the Blogosphere: Corporate Bloggers
• HitMaps – Locative implement for visitor visualization – ooh, cool.
• p2p-Politics – yet another Larry Lessig idea comes to life. Great design by J Christopher Garcia and Aaron Swartz

OK, considering my bandwidth usage this month, I probably shouldn’t do this, but hey, check it out (slowly, bandwidth capped):

• Jon Stewart Presents America – Journalism – the part of the book where he goes off on journalists
• Daily_Show-Crossfire_Fallout.mov – boogah’s iFilm’s hosting the daily show followup

Sunday mornings can be dangerous. You know, when you’re just clicking around and decide to visit some label website which leads to another label and the next thing you know, in addition to the one album with the one song you’re looking for you end up also with another band’s entire catalog in your basket. (check out the mp3s, they’re great)

On the other hand, this haphazard clicky thing can also lead you to discover some amazing stuff you never would have. Like this band, The Heavenly States and the music video for My Friends, from their s/t, now re-released on Baria Records (available w/ bonus CD @ Amazon).

(In summary, while the best things in life may be free, gainful employment is a good thing.)