Bayosphere

If you’re interested in personalized news, you might also check out Findory News. It learns from the news you read, searches thousands of sources, and builds you a personalized front page.

Findory News is available at http://findory.com

Thanks, but I’ll take Yahoo News over either of those any day.

MSN has been testing Newsbot since last Fall and it’s now available in 17 regional and language
flavors.

Complete list at http://tinyurl.com/vmuw

It includes a Spanish language version for the U.S. that went live last week.
http://latino.newsbot.msn.com

Notice that microsoft is moving into this field to control that as well? Maybe MS world domination isnt such an obscure idea after all :-/

You have to wonder a bit over how the selection of sources are done. Their bot (or perhaps the people who worked on the site) _really_ seems to like the “Seattle Post Intelligencer”, whatever paper that is. I mean, at the moment it’s even the source for two out of three stories in the international section.

I just don’t just Microsoft to be anything near impartial…. or global.

Still some bugs to work out.
In their “World” section it headlines:
“Ricky Williams says he failed 3rd drug test”

A retired American football player’s comments about
his drug tests are not “World” news.

great page…im sure i’ll come back…best regards

online casinos

Janne: The Post Intelligencer is a Hearst paper that is trying to sue one of the last independent “city papers” in the US, the Seattle Times, out of the market – since they can’t beat it commercially. Find more about that story here:

http://www.seattletimescompany.com/communication/joalinks.htm

BTW: Both papers suck, but the Times sucks far less than the PI. When I moved here I subscribed the PI first (because it features the “Sherman’s Lagoon” comic, if you must know my standards but pretty soon switched to the Times.

I love this trend towards putting together your own online newspaper.

Very useful for making sure you never miss important industry news.

I was just thinking the other day about how Open Source is being villanized as a threat to jobs, security and innovation, when several things occured to me.

First thing that came to mind was the alleged code theft at google and an article several weeks ago that indicated over 60 precent of programmers take code with them from one job to the next (despite the threat that “work made for hire” hangs over their head). If Okrut had been coded with an Open Source license, google would be in the clear and the other company wouldn’t be spending their money on lawyers, hoping for google to go IPO. I think it’s foolish to tie one’s programming hitch to a single horse and I think if you ask around, you’ll find that the road to ritches very will might not be signing that super-star programmer contract with Microsoft (well, maybe in the short run). Given the churn and burn in the tech industry, having had a string of masters could be the single biggest liability that a programmer/company could know…. unless you program open source.

The second thought had to do with security. Why has OpenBSD had stack-smashing protection for over a year and Microsoft just now trying to get it out the door (without much success I might add)? Why didn’t nessus and snort come from Microsoft first? …and what a tragety that LeBrea had to stop distributing their source to do the DMCA. My only conclusions is that circumvention (hacking, not cracking) and sunlight (open source) are good for security. Closed source and maintaining apperance for shareholder’s sake is not good for security.
Even the DoD knows this. I remember back in 1996, I was working for a defense contractor in a position where I was supporting the DIICOE modified kernels and associated software (a suprising amount of which was open source). I mentioned to my soleless tie-wearing taskmasters at the time that maybe the should look at Linux. In short, I was laughed at for thinking silly thoughts. Several years later, a NSA kernel modification or 10 and several linux DIICOE varents down the river, it is obvious to me that security is not obtained via reliance on Microsoft, Sun, HP or “The Market”.

On innovation… did anyone else find Gates somewhat chovinistic when he poo-poo’ed Indian programmers several years ago? Does anyone else think that this might be the “no more than 640kb” Bill Gates satement of this decade? Ok, does anyone really think that Indian (and programmers everywhere else) AREN’T going to innovate? I wonder how many of those 7000 jobs Microsoft is opening up will be for SSN holders. Finally, the economic of Open Source should inspire the middle layer (middle class, if you like) to propagate it for several reasons:

The bulk of the value is not singularly distributed upwards. As long as consulting fees are reasonable, deployment complexity modest and innovative/maintenace coders compensated, there’s absloutely no reason why Open Source can’t save the customer money and make money for the consutaller (consultant/installer). It’s like the ultimate ponsi scheme– the spreading of Open Source will only stop when we run out of computers/customers (or politics/law interveens).

There’s some gristle for those brought-and-paid-for “think tanks” to chew on.

Well – he’s probably running neck and neck with six-time Formula One champion Michael Schumacher (drives for Ferrari), who’s well onhis way to winning his seventh championship this year. He won his 11th race this morning – the German Grand Prix – (out of 12 so far this season), and seems well-nigh unstoppable. Practically every individual Formula One record worth having is either already his, or within his reach. I was never a fan of his sometimes questionable driving tactics on track, but you just have to respect his ENORMOUS talent, and sheer will to win that must drive him.

Here in Chicago, one of the newscasts reported on his win and then gave just as much time to the useless info that “fellow Texan george bush called to congratulate him”
Who cares about the unelected, draft dodging, deserting, halfwit.
Lance is the story!
Both the begining, middle and end of the story

Dan, I watched the entire tour for the first time, never having been a cycling fan, I’ve always prefered basketball and other American pro sports. I was blown away.

The drama, the passion, and the participation by fans, countries, and towns and cities is astounding. Eat your heart out America, we have nothing like this – the Boston Marathon is a blip on the radar compared to this.

And the history is facinating too. They’ve had doping problems, scandals, death and the rest – but they’ve been able to keep the sport and the challenges great and fan friendly.

Speaking of history – Lance is often refered to as a self-centered prick before his bout with cancer. Well, it’s nice to see that athletes – even a generation’s best as you put it – can grow up and become a gentleman – because in this tour Lance and the entire US Postal team handled themselves with poise and grace. …and that made the Tour even more enjoyable to watch.

What a beautiful race – the country side is breathtaking – the peaks and valleys offer a backdrop for the race that brings a tear to your eye. And if that weren’t enough about every tenth peak has a fairyland castle or fortress – a couple of the stages finished at these historic sites. Many of the stages followed history itself – passing through the same mountain pass as Hannibal – leaving Belgium via Waterloo – wow.

And in very unamerican fashion – the race takes it’s time, winding through France for 19 stages before returning to Paris and finishing with the non-competitive grace of a “gentleman’s” sport.

While I’m sure it’s all good business, it’s quite clear that “the Tour” respects more than just revenue and that’s a big change from our pro sports. I for one will be watching next year to see if Lance can pull off a seventh!

Scott out.

Scott –

Great post, and like many other folks I was out grinding up a hill on a bike today, but I think you’re a bit off-base with the part about it being unamerican for a sport to take its time. The obvious counter-example being baseball, spanning 174-181 games over 7 months. You can find whatever you’re looking for in America.

Amazing how the German, Belgian and French fans booing, spitting, accusations of doping, and crude insults scribbled on the pavement all directed at Lance failed to get a mention.

Nothing to see here, move along.

Peter G

Yes, I get your point and I do like that baseball takes it’s time. I even enjoy that it’s fun to go to the games of a team that is “out of the hunt.”

My passion, however, is basketball and the NBA has become almost 100% about hype. (And the same thing could be said of the NFL) This is the source of my critic of American sports. Combine the commercialism of BBall and Football with the beer drinking Nascar and logo’d out “exhibition sports” like the x-games, surfing, and what not and I just found it refreshing that the tour was a single competition that took 20 days to conclude.

It’s great when college basketball starts because (despite being all about the money behind the scenes) the enthusiasm and passion is there – the kids and the fans love the game. The NBA slogan is “I love this game.” Every time I hear it I’m embarrassed for them because I hear more people say they think it’s too hyped and commercial. If you want to “love this game” it’s college ball all the way.

If you’re a fan of the NBA you’re not going to recognize the teams next year – so many players have already traded teams I can’t keep them straight. And more big names than I remember in recent years. How are you supposed to scream at the TV that so and so sucks and just fouled your guy in that last game of the playoff and then wake up and find out he’s on your team the day after the playoffs end?

Oh well – what’s this all got to do with the Tour de France? Nothing – I just thought it was fun.

Thanks Peter. — Scott

Cog

I agree 100% – they gave it harldy a word and I thought it should have been brought up a lot more.

I can see the TV people not saying too much a about it – it’s like people running on to the field at baseball games – don’t give the yahoos coverage or they multiply.

But more should have been written about it and it’s certainly a disgrace to the fans of those countries.

Scott

Professional sports in America have been mostly ruined by media and monied interests.

There is very little “heart” left in American professional sports.

When it takes the better part of a $100 bill to attend a professional sporting event it’s time to move on to other things.

vibrissae – I commend to your attention high school sports. For all the faults of hyper parents and wildly diverse skill levels, the fun, participant commitment and general values of small-town high school hockey and other sports vastly eclipses the commercialism of the pros and big college sports.

Owen, I heartily agree. In fact, local baseball, basketball, softball, and volleyball matches now more than satisfy my need for rooting at competitive events.

Imagine, one can often walk or
bike to the event, pay only $2 for a darn good hotdog, pay a $5-10 admission fee (often, none at all) not have to endure the buffoonery of overpaid ex-professional players-turned-announcers (most of whom have not a single thought in their head except vapid, boring stories from “the old days”, or rapidly fading mamories of the playbook they used when they were active).

The real bonus comes when one has an opportunity to watch real “passion” in sport at the local level instead of the over-hyped, monotonous repetition of over-hyped professsional athletes and the products they endorse.

I’d say blogging holds important advantages for citizen reporters, among them, real-time control over publication, updates, and followups.

At the same time, the OhMyNews approach seems to impose fewer barriers to earning a spot on the front page everyone’s reading for many reporters.

An approach combining the best of the two might involve a popular site republishing what’s blogged. The next generation of my site will hopefully attempt to do this in a mostly automated fashion. But a human-edited approach may even be more successful.

One word – Indymedia

A interesting side effect of the competition between Google and Yahoo for web email is that as well as increasing the file storage, they’ve also upped the maximum attachment size to 10Mb. That means songs can be emailed.

Something like MusicBrainz can list all the tracks and map each one to one or more GMail accounts. As this is just a list it would be hard for the RIAA to get a discovery notice served on it.

This is just an idea, you understand…

The weather sure is pleasant here in the upper midwest today. Wish it was like this all the time.
Is that “nice” enough

You mentioned Ernie Miller’s writing on the INDUCE Act a few days ago. He’s written a great deal more, and there’s a great overview article:

The LawMeme Reader’s Guide to Ernie Miller’s Guide to the INDUCE Act

http://research.yale.edu/lawmeme/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=1549

Looks like Seymour Hersch is alleging that US soldiers or contractors videotaped the rape of Iraqi boys for the purpose of blackmailing their parents for information on the insurgency.
http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/34356

All I can say is this: it was Bill Clinton who let gays in the military, and now the whole world is going to turn against us.

“It was Bill Clinton who let gays in the military, and now the whole world is going to turn against us.”

Huh? Dan, do we REALLY have to be nice to folks like this?

Ever since Yahoo increased their mail storage to 100MB, it doesn’t work right anymore. They just did’t think this one out and plan for it.
Plus, why won’t they do like MS did with Hotmail last year and let report and block entire domains as spam. I rarely get spam at my Hotmail address anymore, way down from the 40-75 a day I used to get.
Yahoo is a whole ‘nother story.
I get around 100 spams a day a the Yahoo address. Sure they go to the bulk mail folder, but I have to go thru that folder, because the Idiots at Yahoo won’t add a button for “This Is A Newletter I Subscribe To” or something like that. And I already have used up all my available filters for other mail sorting.

Owen, Owen, Owen. Simply show him the same respect that our Vice President showed Sen. Leahy on the Senate floor. That should be good enough.

On another topic, I saw the documentary “Outfoxed”. Very well done. Interviews with former and present Fox News employees and contributors. Internal Fox memos. They use hundreds of clips from Fox News analysis and reporting to show how the news is blatantly distorted. The movie was done in secret and released on DVD first in case Fox tried to stop them.
http://www.outfoxed.org/

About Yahoo – i am very happy with what they did it was extremely useful. It changed my days compleately.

Owen, Dan Gillmor only bans conservatives who post reasonable, but embarrassing, comments about *him*.

Not even chastising Bill Clinton qualifies, it seems.

Of course, Owen, it’s fair to ask, can you cite a *single* positive outcome of Clinton’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, or even explain clearly what it attempted to accomplish?

By the way, you should look up the comments of various conservative Members of Congress following Clinton’s comments in the first 10 days of his Administration, about eliminating the ban on gays in the military.

You’ll find warnings about an explosion of perverse acts in the military — even an explicit mention of the possibility of acts of perversion being committed against foreign nationals in U.S. military custody.

I’m giving up on my paid Yahoo mail account. Many times I get a message “Temporary problem, try again later” or “contact us if the problem reoccurs”. I have contacted them 35 times and get the same dumb canned message that they have checked and all is ok. Now I am not getting some messages sent to my Yahoo address or they arrive several hours after being sent. Bottom line, their email service is poor and they don’t give a damn.

Jonathan, I looked at Osama’s site, and you’d have to be named Osama to buy those alleged facts. It looks like someone’s telling lies out of school. To work, the thing would have to be too large a conspiracy.

Besides, the alleged purpose, “the rape of Iraqi boys for the purpose of blackmailing their parents,” does not make sense. Wouldn’t it be the opposite: to blackmail the perps themselves. That makes sense, for they are the criminals caught on tape. But if someone comes to you with a videotape of him abusing your child and says he is going to show it if you don’t give him information, well, isn’t the answer to tell him to show it and be damned.

I don’t think any such thing ever happened. Let’s discuss reality.

Ooooh, an open thread!

The perfect place to ask if, according to federal sentencing guidelines as a penalty for lying to an officer of the court… Martha Stewart should have been spared five months jail time, and received instead the same slap on the wrist as Bill Clinton did?

Or am I wrong and should Clinton have gotten the five months, too.

Gay marriage: the bible clearly condemns homosexuality, but my reading is that polygamy is endorsed. Where did all this talk of ‘one man one woman’ come from? (my wife would kill me!)

Wow!

We get rid of one troll, and they reprodu
ce (apparently asexually) all over an open thread.

Alright children, please pay attention. I have personal friends who served, in various branches of the United States Military Services, Honorably (according to their discharge papers from DOD) before, during, in, and after VietNam:

1) Infantry.
2) Nuclear Submarines.
3) Air Force.
4) While there are others who come to mind, I believe this is a broad enough representative sample.

If your pejorative comments are taken at face value, one must accept that Bill Clinton controlled the Pentagon in the 1950’s, 1960’s and 1970’s. I suspect that you will agree with me that such a belief is somewhat of a stretch.

Each of these Veterans (several decorated) is homosexual. Each of these Veterans Honorably served in the United States Military Forces to defend your freedom to dislike them.

So, as the mature, respectful and gentle adults that you are, please thank them for their service to our Country and their service to you (BTW, there is no need for that snide remark that just flashed across your brain).

Gays in military: The most well known Abu Ghraib prison abusers, Lindy England and her boyfriend that were in so many of those pictures were quite definitely heterosexual. Surprisingly, sexual abuse has very little to do with sex and much to do with power and domination. Even more strange, in some cultures, the sexually abused are a embarrassment to the family and not considered victims. Iraq is one of such places. Women won’t report rape because they are afraid of the family’s backlash.

As for deviant behavior: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/story/206962p-178564c.html

Anyone using SBC as their ISP or to host their domain would be wise to keep an eye on their email. On July 4th, SBC implemented an ISP based spam filtering. I had been scratching my head wondering the last few days why I suddenly wasn’t getting some regular email newsletters. After a few days of back and forth and testing, I called SBC and discovered that they had implemented this new spam filter “feature” WITHOUT NOTIFYING ANYONE. Similarly, back in June, they suddenly implemented rDNS checking without notification, which led to a lot of people not getting their mail and a number of newspaper stories. Finally, they were forced to remove this new functionality a few weeks later.

With the spam filters, they claim to be still “tweaking” them. What I can’t understand is why they are doing their “tweaking” with live user mail in real time. I tried to send them a copy of a good mail that they should not be rejecting but I couldn’t even get it to tech support. It got rejected at the email server! So how do they “tweak” filters without user feedback on what is or is not spam?

SBC does not present a notification to the user than any mail was blocked as spam. There are no user controls in their software, no way to opt-out, no way to exclude an account, no “spam bucket” to retrieve rejected mail from! All they do is a simple bounce-back to whomever sent the mail with this “illuminating” error:

**************************************
SMTP error from remote mailer after end of data:
host mail-fwd.mx.sbc-webhosting.com [161.58.18.5]:
554 Denied
**************************************

Pretty damm useless, right? Most distributors who get a message like this just delete the user. They aren’t going to run around and try and notify people that mail to them got rejected. So it may be weeks or months before a user realizes that he hasn’t gotten some newsletter he subscribed to. Then he has to try and chase down what is going on. Fortunately for me, I use a mail forwarding service for all my newsletters and subscriptions, so I was able to change the forward-to address from my pop3 address on SBC to a webmail account. However, I can’t easily save those newsletters in the folders I have set up in my pop3 Outlook mailbox.

I requested that SBC turn off their spam filtering UNTIL they have a user interface in place to allow people to “opt-out” of this feature or to control it better. They flat-out told me that is not going to happen. I finally got a supervisor to tell me that they expected to have some sort of user interface in 2-3 weeks (MAYBE). So I called the PUC in California today. They told me they couldn’t do anything but forwarded me to SBC Executive Complaints office, where I was told that they have been getting other complaints on this also. I filed a formal complaint with them. The Executive Office telephone number is: 800.403.3302

Just like the U.S. Post Office, I believe than an ISP has a contractual requirement to deliver all mail addressed to the user, UNLESS the user has explicitly given his permission to the ISP to pre-screen his mail. IMO, it is the users responsibility to protect themselves from spam mail, not the ISP’s. Wonder if some lawyer is interested in starting a class-action suit against SBC on this issue?

Here’s a story I wouldn’t be surprised gets buried in the American media. According to the Australian paper Sunday Morning Herald, Iyad Allawi–Bush’s hand-picked man to run Iraq the interim–personally engaged in a summary execution of up to six suspected insurgents a few days before he took over. The witnesses (there are more than one) don’t appear to be just angry anti-Allawi types downing an American puppet, in fact they were quite pleased by the action.

Jonathon, I wasn’t defending the hypocritical Clinton policy, just astonished at the suggestion that the policy was responsible for gays in the military. There have been gays fighting for their country as long as there have been armies and nations. Being gay has nothing to do with courage or patriotism, any more than (as Ted points out) sexual abuse is a gay predeliction. The same prejudices used to prevent blacks and women from fighting for their country.

To me the reaction of conservatives blaming gays for sodomized prisoners is akin to the same people them being blamed for the decline of marriage…ignorant and bigoted.

The conservative comments contemporaneous with Clinton’s “don’t ask, don’t tell”, spoke of liberalizing the treatment of gays in the military as leading to a complete breakdown of discipline with regard to sexual misconduct of *all* types, including heterosexual.

When they spoke of Clinton policy leading potentially to the sexual mistreatement of foreign nationals in military custody, it was *not* a suggestion that a few flaming gay troops would commit sodomy on prisoners. It was about a breakdown of discipline regarding sexual misconduct.

Their comments were prescient, to say the least.

Hey Jonathan, are you sure the breakdown in discipline wasn’t due to allowing women in the military, or was it allowing non-citizens, or blacks, or southerners, or irish, or italians?

Too easy, I know…

Hey, Peter, maybe Jonathon’s onto something. When I was in the Army, there were lots of undesirables who we could eliminate…no women, it was before women officially drew combat duty, but lots of spics, micks, wops, gooks, kikes, niggers, and liberal-college-long-hair-commie-pinko-fags (it’s always hypenated). Maybe we should have thrown them all out, and no doubt the ones left over would thrown themselves enthusiastically into the fray. Sure would have made a lot of guys happy to get out of Vietnam in one piece. Boy, talk about a small army left.

Oops, that’s right…only the poor ones went…their betters got deferrals or slipped into the Guard lists.

Unfortunately, Jonathon’s concerns about maintaining the high moral condition of our armed forces have some awkward realities. Most of the abuses have been coming at the hands of good ol’ heterosexuals and imposed on women and gays (and prisoners) not the other way ’round.

As to the impact on morale…only the rear-area types were concerned about it when we were fighting in the bush. The gays I know laughed at our adolescent fears that they all had the hots to see us in the shower. In combat, we were concerned about a man’s courage and reliability and skill in the face of fire…not what he did in town on pass. I never heard of a gay man propositioning an unwilling straight man…it probably happened, but it was not common, anymore than the incidents of rape and irresponsible sexual conduct by GI’s were characteristic of the rest of us.

So lighten up. Don’t let your prejudices force you to judge men by one characteristic, but by the totality of their behavior and character.