So now I'm disillusioned.

I haven't read Kerry's speech, but this comment resonated while my opinion of the essays on his website. Its pandering without a point. Like he is throwing a thousand lures into the water hoping that one resonates with you on an emotional level. The intellectual is left feeling empty. The only reason I'm voting for this guy is that I don't like some of Bush's policies. But what about the swing voter. The one whose not pissed off at Bush. I mean, is THIS GUY really going to be president of the United States? Does it REALLY make sense? Or is it going to come apart at the seams.

You'll be left at the voting booth in a very dejected state. You can vote for the conservative christian who damaged our relationship with Europe and invaded a country based on an incorrect set of assumptions, or you can vote for Mr. Wishy Washy, or you can vote for the third party candidate.

What you cannot vote for is what you want. A strong leader who can clearly articulate a plan for the war on Terror and the economy who also happens to have real respect for people who are different then he is.

All Things to All People

Like the heads in a VCR, the ones in card readers can wear out. After all, they are reading cards at an extraordinary rate. The busiest turnstile in the subway system, turnstile No. 10 in the middle array by the escalators in the main entrance to the subway below Grand Central Terminal, reads a whopping 236,000 cards a month.

I thought that was a neat factoid. I can imagine New Yorkers saying to themselves, "I know that turnstile!"

The article is rich in trivia about heavy-duty magnetic card readers and the millions of people who (ab)use them.

Mastering the Art of the Swipe

"Chicken hawk" is interesting as an insult because it is such a pure example of reactionary thinking or, rather, the substitution of reaction for thinking. It is the sort of thing you say when you need to stop the argument in its tracks because you simply can't bear to address its realities.

Return of the 'Chicken Hawks'

The purpose of computers is human freedom.

Like "maturity" and "reality" and "progress", the word "technology" has an agenda for your behavior: usually what is being referred to as "technology" is something that somebody wants you to submit to.  "Technology" often implicitly refers to something you are expected to turn over to "the guys who understand it."

What we really need is software designs that go into realms that cannot be visualized on paper, to break ideas and presentations out of their four-walled prison.

Cyber means "I do not know what I am talking about" or "I am trying to fool and confuse you."

And please, Mr. Programmer, leave the choices to ME, not labyrinths of software outside my control, because I DO NOT TRUST YOU.

The Web is a foam of ever-popping bubbles, ever-changing shop windows.
The Web is the minimal concession to hypertext that a sequence-and-hierarchy chauvinist could possibly make.

If you haven't read Ted Nelson you're not really a hacker.

The resolution, such as it is, involves the complexities of time travel — wormholes, tangent universes and so forth — in a way that asks larger questions about free will.

The Resurrection of 'Donnie Darko'

To anyone watching, it seems like magic. To a user, it becomes indispensable.

Basically the idea here is that you design a GUI in which UNIX style "do one thing, do it well" utilities could be plugged in to offer particular capabilities instead of having all of these separate monolithic applications like spreadsheets or word processors where the world has to be reinvented every time. The way spell checking works in the Mac is that its offered at the OS level, and every application gets it everywhere as a virtue of running on the OS, instead of having to have each application implement its own spell checking system. Now imagine taking that concept to a deeper level. Instead of that being on the periphery, for little things like spell check, make it the heart, for big things like browsers or editors or viewers... What COM would be if it didn't suck.

Crafting a Revolution with the Brother of the Macintosh

This article details one particularly instructive case from the Vietnam era.

The Man in the Snow White Cell

Anyone heard this yet?

Slabs of dub, slices of surrealism, and disembodied "found" voices make their appearance on the latest offering by ambient dub commandos The Orb.

Bicycles & Tricycles returns to the original Orb concept which isn't about songs, but lysergic landscapes. Industrial grinds propel you through one moment, only to be untethered into infinite space the next, before being snagged into synchronicity by a dub groove.

Bicycles and Tricycles | The Orb

The strength of a nation is not characterized by what it holds dear in times of peace, but what it holds dear in times of war. Unfortunately, this administration has been all too willing to bend the rules and reinterpret the law.

Wrongly Held: It Can Happen Here

"Nooooo!" the audience roared.

Bush in West Virginia