OK, just two links on the subject, then.

Probably a few of these today

Dammit. Must not buy… Must…not…buy…

Well, maybe after christmas. Maybe.

Nothing exactly shocking, but y'know, it is what it is. Be interesting to see how closely the next couple of months campaigning hews to the line he lays out here.

In summary: The Bush administration has done things that may fuck the US intertubes. The McCain administration will also fuck those tubes. Not exactly revalatory or unexpected stuff, but if you're curious about the major political issues affecting the (US) internet, and have 15 minutes to spare, then this is a good primer on them anyway.

del.icio.us's blog auto-poster seems to be having problems, so I'm trying this plugin as a possible fix for this. Link crossposting may be a bit wonky for a few days as I get the new system bedded in.

This looks like it could be seriously fascinating, in 18 months or so. The principles, certainly, represent a massive shift in the way we might use the web, and while Ubiquity is a little clunky, I'm sure better interfaces for doing exactly this sort of thing will get developed over the next few years.

Via Matt Jones, Jason Kottke on Fake Following, a brilliant new idea at FriendFeed that I fully expect every social network site to implement by the end of next year.

I would give my eyeteeth to make this conference. Sadly, there's no way work will pay for it, and even if they would, I am going to be buried in work at the point it's on. Dammit.

Don't agree with them all, but I'd have to admit, it's only a minority I really have to take issue with, and most of those are by people who have been dead a long time. My really big problem is that it's a bit anti-Christianity-centric, and while I know it's kind of implicit that atheism defines itself in response to theism, I think you can make a stronger argument for it without resorting to just swiping at the alternatives.

Wow, Eudora supports fuck all. I gave up on Eudora years ago, but serious: what's their excuse?

Must grab this for my home machine, and spend some time playing with it.

He got Bill Drummond's recommendation in his new book 17 (about which more another time), and Drummond's recommendation is usually enough for me to at least be interested. I've grabbed a recording of his "Berliner Messe" off Emusic, and well, yeah. I'm not much for classical music, because it really demands more concentration than I usually give music, but this is very nice.

This is something I would like to learn to do better.

Can you guess what's on my mind today, boys and girls?

Hmmm. If this works like it says it does, I may set it up on my home account – my ISP's Spam filtering is good, but not close to perfect, mostly because I can't be arsed to set up proper whitelisting, so instead I have to run at at a low enough level that it doesn't kill even close to all my spam.

Look, I know that from time to time, I post these stories, and it could just be viewed as US-bashing. And I'm also aware that on a civil liberties front, the UK is actually rather behind the US in many ways. But this one is really something special, and should spread far and wide. I don't even have the energy to be angry about it, because I'm busy being stunned and horrifed that this can happen.

This an account of how a the US system accidentally tortured an innocent man to death through bureaucracy, jobsworth-ism and plain lack of decent human feeling. There is no "security" that can possibly be worth this price.

Made me laugh, anyway.

Charlie Stross on a really good, simple baseline rule on deciding if a work fails a basic gender-equality test. There might be the odd work that gets exempted from it, but the number of works of popular entertainment that fail it is disturbing.