PUBLIC MARKS with search bill

Americans seem ready to forfeit their most basic civil liberty -- actually, all their civil liberties -- without a whimper. By a vote of 93-7 the Senate this month approved a military appropriations bill empowering the government to designate any U.S. citizen within the country as a terrorist and to have the military hold him indefinitely without trial and without the right to habeas corpus, the right to be brought before a court for a judgment on the legality of one's imprisonment.

Yet Obama hasn't played the game that he promised. Instead, the game he has played has been exactly the game that Hillary Clinton promised and that Bill Clinton executed: striking a bargain with the most powerful lobbyists as a way to get a bill through--and as it turns out, the people don't have the most powerful lobbyists.

The statements, written by people from a variety of backgrounds and political persuasions, incorporate many of the same broad themes: SOPA will threaten perfectly legal websites, stifle innovation, kill jobs, and substantially disrupt the infrastructure of the Internet. Here is a small sample of what they had to say

But, of course, many of these services are not free at all. Users pay for them with their personal data, whether they know it or not. And at some point in time, the bill will come due. But, like Jeff’s truffles debacle, what remains unknown is the price.

If you gave them free hardware, like a cameraphone, they'd take it of course.  But when it came time to pay for camera-related services, they took one look at the first month's bill and then stopped sending photos to each other.  That's why multimedia messaging was a business failure.

For the most part, the movement that started with OpenID and OAuth is largely over. All the cool kids got grownup jobs and have been mostly missing. Think of the people you used to hear from on a weekly basis, and then try to remember when was the last time they had something new or provocative to say.

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I also realized just how destructive choosing standards as a career path can be. The standards world is very demanding and will suck every free minute you have. Most people contribute very little, and at the end, a handful of people end up carrying all the load. The problem is, no one wants to foot the bill for those suckers. Only a handful of very large corporations (mostly telecommunication and hardware) support employees doing standards full time, and mostly to serve their self-interest.

I was astounded by Bill Rankin's map of Chicago's racial

and ethnic divides and wanted to see what other cities

looked like mapped the same way. To

match his map, Red is White, Blue is

Black, Green is Asian, Orange is

Hispanic, Gray is Other, and each dot is

25 people. Data from Census 2000.

Download if you like and don’t look back!

while others say it’s due to the fact it can’t be used in many of Japan’s more than 5.2 million vending machines (roughly one for every 23 people, according to the Japan Vending Machine Manufacturers Association. Machine owners were unwilling to spend to adapt their machines to accept the new note

How else can we interpret the G20’s final communiqué, which includes not even a measly tax on banks or financial transactions, yet instructs governments to slash their deficits in half by 2013.

The bill boarding effect is just selectively removing line work that would confuse the eye. In this case, the black road outlines are stripped away so they don’t directly touch the black lettering. Meanwhile, elements that the eye can easily distinguish because of color differences (like the roads themselves and the blue lake) are left untouched.