Sunday, December 09, 2001

>>>> My daugther Elena in the first SNOW of the season (you can see by the tongue, she is thinking about things).  The first SNOW is a big deal in my house.  More on the first SNOW in the Robb house. 9:21:40 PM    Comment_ Trackback []

>>>> As the father of three very good looking girls this is great advice.  "Wilt them in the livingroom and they will stay wilted all night." 8:01:39 PM    Comment_ Trackback []

>>>> Dave's right.  2 years ago, the ability to control a keyword like John Doerr was a funding event.  This is a large amount of power.  Dave, if he were so inclined, could modify his story on Doerr to say whatever he wanted.  7:57:18 PM    Comment_ Trackback []

>>>> Modern Civil Disobedience (thanks for the intellectual justification Lawrence Lessig!).  The most overlooked thing about free music  is that you listen to groups you would never buy.  Of all the strange things, I found myself listening to Jimmy Buffet and Captain and Tennille today.  Must be a severe retro phase (thanks Morpheus). With copyrights extended well past our lifetimes (up from 14 years a century ago), it is a moral imperative that people borrow music.  Why?  It creates a broad culture not defined by the narrow cultural managers in Big Co land.  In my mind, anything over 14 years old is free game.  No guilt.  I am culturally enriched by listening to it (maybe not Captain and Tennille, but you catch my drift). We live in an age when America has allowed corporations to become more powerful than they were in the "bad old days" of railway capitalism.  That's wrong.   Corporate control of the populace is fascism....   Unlimited control of copyrights and easy patents is symptomatic.  A lack of anti-trust controls is symptomatic.  Civil Disobedience in this context isn't directed at the government, it is directed at its corporate proxies. It is amazing how easily we can glide into this situation.  Getting out is problematic.  7:24:16 PM    Comment_ Trackback []

>>>> Cringely.  .Net will be expensive.  $350 per seat.  Want an alternative?  Try building Web apps in my favorite real-time event driven desktop CMS...   7:00:25 PM    Comment_ Trackback []

>>>> Why isn't Cheney explaining this instead of Ashcroft (who is needs to be replaced): >Omar and bin Laden would be leading candidates for trial by military tribunals authorized by President Bush (news - web sites), Cheney said. ''They're exactly the kind of people the military tribunals were established for,'' he said.< 6:47:30 PM    Comment_ Trackback []

>>>> SNOW (in my house this is like bees and ants in Dave's).  This morning my home woke up to 1/2 a foot of snow.  Three days after we had 70 degree temps!  Nice.  Melting quickly.  But what a lot of fun.  All the kids were frantic to put on their gear.  This was my youngest Elena's first time in snow (as a toddler).  What a rush.  Nothing like it in the world.  Her face lit up (if you haven't seen something like this I can't explain it to you).  What novelty.  Gives you new faith in life.  Aaron, Rachel, and Irene spent much of the morning making snow angels and generally enjoying the experience.  6:10:19 PM    Comment_ Trackback []

>>>> Adam.  A very engaging anti-email rant.  Adam, Zaplets is merely HTML e-mail (not an innovation).  Now, HTML e-mail served off of my desktop CMS (content managmenet system) via P2P -- now you are talking about something interesting.  Connect this to my K-Log and we have a killer app.   (Note:  this is where things are going.  No doubt about it.).  6:01:57 PM    Comment_ Trackback []

>>>> The Atlantic.  Ever wonder why the bulk of the fanatics in this war came from Saudi Arabia, Egypt (and at least as far as the Taliban is concerned:  Pakistan)?  All countries that are nominally our friends?   All three countries use the hatred of the US to hide their mismanagement and oppression.  Here is an article that looks at Saudi Arabia and Egypt (although I have it on good authority that Pakistan follows the same practice with India and the US).  >All but three of the terrorists, like Bin Laden himself, were from Saudi Arabia; Mohamed Atta, their ringleader, was from Egypt, as is the number two man in al Qaeda, Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri. Something about these countries helped to produce the terrorists. The terrorists are dead; bin Laden will soon join them. But that something endures. The domestic political arrangements of Egypt and Saudi Arabia should be regarded as among our real enemies in the war on terror. The regimes in these countries, we know, are repressive, but so are governments throughout the Third World. What is special about the repression in Egypt and Saudi Arabia is that both governments escape its consequences by redirecting popular anger toward the United States. < 2:25:03 PM    Comment_ Trackback []