My webhost went down for a couple of hours today. Sorry.

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Now this is some grim-ass humor. [Thanks to Jeff Mcmanus for the link.]

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OutsideTheBeltway is running a caption contest with a photo from the most recent Democratic debate.

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The Marriott I’m in sells broadband access for $13/night. In order to justify the expense, they also throw in free long distance within the US.

I’m guessing that the Marriott has discovered Voice Over IP…

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I liked Pulp Fiction a lot more the day after I saw than the when I left the theatre. The same thing’s already happening with Kill Bill.

Tarantino’s love of movies is infectious. But what he loves about them isn’t their literary capabilities, the way they can show us people and events changing each other, and the rest of that important yada. No, QT loves their syntax, their rhetoric. And that’s what Kill Bill is great at: a samurai sword being re-holstered, a nod that launches an attack. It’s like a “That’s Entertainment” that shows not the greatest tap dance sequences in the history of movies but the greatest gestures.

It’s also disgustingly violent. I don’t have (much of) a moral issue about the gruesome deaths fully shown. It’s simply that it made it hard for me to watch, which is too bad because otherwise Tarantino is a genius at watchability.

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Clay is at it again. This time his sterling essay is on how the RIAA is inadvertently shaping our network. A sample:

Though the press is calling such systems “darknets” and intimating that they are the work of some sort of internet underground, those two requirements — controlled membership and encrypted file transfer — actually describe business needs better than consumer needs.

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Dan Hughes of TheyBlinked points us to a story about his brother and his fiance. Here’s the intro to the article:

The love story of Trevor Hughes and his fiancee began in an elementary school in the Himalayan foothills.

They were “global nomads.” He was a diplomat’s son. She the daughter of missionaries. They lived in Asia, attended school together, fell in love and want to get married in June.

But when Hughes’ fiancee, a German national, tried to visit him on a six-month tourist visa Monday, she was detained in Atlanta, handcuffed, jailed—even stripped of her diamond engagement ring.

Then, after 20 hours without food, she was put on a plane and shipped back to Stuttgart.

“This isn’t the America I fought for,” said Hughes, who served in the Navy and U.S. diplomatic corps. “You don’t expect that from a great country like ours.”

It’d be easy to say this is an isolated instance if it were an abuse of the system rather than being the system.

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Yesterday, Stig Hackvän noticed my USB wifi card dongling from my Thinkpad. When I explained that I’d manage to bend the pins in the laptop’s pc card slot, he offered to fix it.

Last night, he showed up with his tool belt and head-mounted flashlight and spent an hour and a half disassembling my computer into piles off silicon molecules on the right, plastic molecules on the right, and bent pins in front. And then he reassembled the molecules into a fully working computer

What a combination of skills! Fine motor control is just the start. He worked with a patience and focus you don’t get to see that often. A laptop is a series of puzzles, each of which he solved. And best of all, there was no screw left over at the end.

I am equally impressed and grateful. Thank you, Stig.

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Dori Smith and Tom Negrino have set up this session.

Doc says that the Dean campaign is the implemention of the Cluetrain Manifesto in politics. Here’s a relatively random run through the thread…

Do we see the top listening to the grassroots on policy? Not so much. At the Dean campaign it’s more about enabling the grassroots to connect and self-organize. Should it be more like the Open Source community in how it evolves positions?

Is the Dean campaign a real phenomenon or are we still first adopters who are miles from crossing the chasm? It may depend on how you look at it.

Are 460,000 signed up at the Dean web site a lot or a drop in the bucket? Politically it’s apparently big.

Are blogs changing minds? Compared to TV? Virginia Postrel cited research recently that putting broadcast marketing together with network marketing is highly efficient at shaping opinions.

What will happen when comments on the Dean blog go from 2,000/day to 20,000? How will it scale? Ben Trott says that it will scale technologically (the site uses MovableType) but the social scaling is much harder to figure. Will it fragment into multiple, smaller groups? Everyone gets her own blog? But the commenters often don’t want anything more complex than a comment box … and they consider that their blog. Will the campaign move to a reputation system to sort the messages? You don’t want your supporters to be insulted because their enthusiastic, heart-felt posts got rated as a waste o’ time. Maybe you could segment it into separate boards for odd and even numbered IP addresses. Or segment by aera or interest niche. Those separate threads could bubble up. Team leaders could “recruit” posters into their threads.

Good conversation. Hard to represent in a blog entry, as you probably figured out by now.

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Bram Cohen who created Bittorrent, an efficient way to distribute large files, is explaining why he thinks that bittorrent won’t fall to lawsuits even though it’s widely used to distribute copyrighted movies and CDs. He says that it’s used too widely by large companies for legitimate reasons. And, he thinks, if they were to sue, they are likely to get a precedent they don’t want. (Here’s a FAQ.)

Someone asks if Bram designed it with legal considerations in mind. He says he was aware of the considerations but he really only considered the technical issues. He says that bittorrent happens to be bad if you want anonymity because, well, there is none.

He hasn’t done strict analysis, but he thinks about one in ten people leave their client running after the download completes, enabling them to continue serving bits to others.

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