NASA is contemplating accelerating an ambitious plan to build a Mars Network. Comprised of a group of small orbiting satelites, the network will provide the communications infrastructure so that future mars missions will not fail simply because an antenna is not pointed in just the right direction. Joining the list of "I'm not sure I want to live there" countries could be Thailand. There's a long tradition of affairs by the men of the country. Women are fighting back by slashing at the root of the problem. Of course, things can be just as hazardous here; just more unpredictable Some people debate when the new century begins. Is it January 1, 2000 or January 1, 2001? The local NPR affiliate runs a talk show that today featured T. R. Reid, former Wall Street Journal columnist in Asia. He noted that, for many there, the new century begins on December 20, 1999. That’s the date that the last Anglo-European colonial presence ends. Which begs the question… some people consider the 20th Century, the American Century. Will the 21st Century be the Asian Century, the Japanese Century, the Chinese Century? Last night, the career of pro basketball great Charles Barkley ended months earlier than he planned when he did major damage to his knee. After the press conference he is supposed to have said: "just what America needs, another unemployed black man." Share with: TwitterRedditEmailLinkedInFacebook

We've added a form to allow you easily join one of our listservs. Just click resources. On that page, click lists and fill out the form. It may be the simplest form you've ever filled out on the internet: type in your email address, choose the list you want to join (or leave!) and send the form on it's way. If you haven’t checked out my personal webpage, nows a good time. I’ve just posted a series of photos using some unusual angles to convey the sheer scale and some of the details of the Gateway Arch in St. Louis. Forbes hasn’t posted it on their website, but according to this Yahoo News item, Stevie’s favoriate business publication has named Legos the toy of the century. Time to pull them back out again and wonder how bizarre people will get on categories for best of the decade. We’re not fogetting best of the year, who's going to bother to hand them out? Or, they will and no one listens. What's sound does applause make when no one is listening? Share with: TwitterRedditEmailLinkedInFacebook

Most people know quite a bit about the WTO now. Last week’s protests have left many people stumped, though. It seemed so 60's. 35,000 to 50,000 people shutdown the city for a week. While the property damage by some people grabbed the attention, that damage was very limited considering the size and length of the protests. The protests were primarily peaceful. And the police were remarkably restrained with limited arrests and limited use of tear gas and such. A number of commentators have noted that the effort was very organized. The protests were organized primarily over the internet via websites like seattle99.org. Businesses may have taken to the internet like fish to water, but they don’t own the internet. It’s still a powerful tool for everyone else, too. More broadly, the government representatives and the public have both seen that public needs to be taken into account in government again. That's a huge reaffirmation of democracy. Going forward, governments need to find creative ways to include public concerns much more integrally to the decision making process. I suspect we’ll also see more protests like this going forward. Hopefully, they’ll be even more peaceful than this protest was. Damage doesn’t make the point. Masses of people do. Beyond that, I suspect police departments will now include internet research as a core part of their intelligence gathering. You can be sure the Seattle police wish they'd kept a closer eye on the information available on websites like seattle99.org and coordinated with the … Continue reading 1999-12-07 →

Echelon is not our favorite topic, but the story just keeps going and going like some evil energizer bunny roaming prime-time TV. Beyond the bad metaphors, it turns out that the US NSA is prohibited from spying domestically. But, the NSA is the agency that’s probably handling the US portion of Echelon. Whoops. So, in early June, EPIC filed a freedom of information request with the NSA. The NSA missed the legal deadline to respond. Now, they’ve been sued. Of course, it could be worse. Echelon may be the largest spy project ever conceived, but it’s restricted to material that’s been sent out of your computer into the wilds of the internet. The Australian government has the legal power to go beyond that and both monitor and change the contents of private computers. I’ve been mistaking Australia for a modern 'western' democracy that signed international Human Rights accords. Silly me. Any Australians for emigrating to someplace with more rights respect? Say, the People’s Republic of China. Coverage: Wired It's monday. And what’s monday without our infamous hopelessly complete waste of time. This week, we bring your a solute to the evil dancing baby of Christmases yor. Thanks to the twisted, demented individual known as Aaron Dragushan we present Billy, Halloween and Beer. Share with: TwitterRedditEmailLinkedInFacebook

If you loved Star Wars Episode One, you might be interested in a authorized life size mannequin of Anakin Skywalker. A good charity in Omaha, Nebraska is taking bids on it to raise money. Everyone’s trying to think of a name for the next decade: the Double-Os, the Y2Ks, the Oh-Ohs, and the Millies among others. My favorite is The Naughties. Follow-ups: CNN is reporting that so much information is being captured by the NSA –much presumably from Echelon— that the agency can’t keep up. Share with: TwitterRedditEmailLinkedInFacebook

Because yesterday was the 12th World Aids Day, we took our site black for the day, like many other sites. Those specific efforts are called a Day With(out) art (here or here) and a Day without Weblog. We managed to locate almost 200 sites that observed one or the other. Why not support a few of the other sites that we’re black yesterday: Megnut skinny, bradlands, noisebetweenstation, metafilter, redriverreview, sikkema, avalon, xplane, turlyming and bekkoame. Think we should put a man on Mars? The Mars Society and Think Mars do. They set a goal to collect a million signatures to goad Washington into acting. The petition is here Share with: TwitterRedditEmailLinkedInFacebook

For December 1, we took our site black for the day and didn’t post any news. If you’d like to see what our site looked like that day and why, click in. Share with: TwitterRedditEmailLinkedInFacebook

Tonight, 60 minutes (CBS 7pm Eastern, 6pm Central) will include a segment on the new poetry movement. It includes footage shot at the 1999 National Poetry Slam (Chicago this past August). Slam founder Marc Smith will be interviewed by Morley Saffer. And U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky is also interviewed. And another note on the world of poetry. Dan Byrne of Australia isn’t the best web designer around but does an excellant job of collecting calls for submissions, poetry events and other goodies at Word Factory. Share with: TwitterRedditEmailLinkedInFacebook

Weblogs have been around almost as long the world wide web. They’re sites, like this one, where usually on person posts notes about things they’re interested in. The most popular are those that update regularly –often daily– and connect with a large audience. Key examples include Slashdot, Scripting News and Memepool. Recently, someone finally came up with the term weblog and that’s all it took for them to become the next hot thing. And the hype will continue for sometime and then die down. Unlike other such phenoms, I suspect this one will become an ongoing part of the fabric of the web. In a world of too much information, tools to help us filter, sort and run down the information we want are critical. Search engines are one such tool. But, they often provide little sense of what’s important and only serve to answer the specific question that was asked. Weblogs are usually not a place to search for answers, but to discover new stuff. And the good ones provide some idea of what you’re getting before you go. The best circle repeatedly through a topic, adding more key links and more information. They’re not news sites –with the journalistic standards implied– but with the advent of the internet, they’re just as important. On a little less serious note, we stumbled across a wonderful comic on thanksgiving. Don’t like comics? Go anyway. It’ll be worth it. Share with: TwitterRedditEmailLinkedInFacebook

Today's Wall Street Journal (requires paid subscription) includes a profile of Susan Estes, a rising star in the male-dominated world of bond-trading. She has an interesting approach to dealing with sexist behavior in the workplace. She writes down the comments –say crude remarks about a blond weather forecaster– and reads them back later. Sounds useful in dealing with stupid remarks in general. Many people complain that you can't trust what's on the internet because anyone can post. As this article points out, the internet can potentially be the most reliable news source. And links are a key tool. Other coverage of an event can be linked and source material can be directly referenced. After all, a link is just a footnote (that academic uber-proof) that takes you directly to the source instead of making you look it up. The FBI recently 'encouraged' an ISP to pull the domain CrowdedTheater.com that showed a fairly realistic work by video artist Mike Z that portrayed a military briefing on a secret army plan to incite riots in Times Square at the roll-over into the next millenium. If's a frightening thought that the FBI didn’t bother to even get a court order. But, the video is mirrored at moxy.wtower.com. Coverage: Village Voice If you think hacking means breaking into computers and defacing websites, check out this article. Hackers, hacking and hack definately mean something different. Unfortunately, much of the mainstream media doesn’t understand technlogy and has even less understanding of how to cover it. … Continue reading 1999-11-26 →