I have to admit that despite the fact that I read Glenn Greenwald’s blog and have followed his numerous posts on FISA, until recently I haven’t fully understand the law or how it recently changed. I think the complexity of the issue is one of the reasons there isn’t more outrage about or opposition to the revised FISA law.

So I took the time to do some careful reading, diagramming as I went. I thought these might be useful to others.

What you’ll see below are two diagrams comparing Old and New FISA.

Understanding Recent Changes to FISA — A Visual Guide

Douglas Rushkoff:

Computers and networks finally offer us the ability to write. And we do write with them. Everyone is a blogger, now. Citizen bloggers and YouTubers who believe we have now embraced a new "personal" democracy. Personal, because we can sit safely at home with our laptops and type our way to freedom.

But writing is not the capability being offered us by these tools at all. The capability is programming—which almost none of us really know how to do. We simply use the programs that have been made for us, and enter our blog text in the appropriate box on the screen. Nothing against the strides made by citizen bloggers and journalists, but big deal. Let them eat blog.

The Next Renaissance

Everyone knows the G.I. generation of World War II and the baby boomers who followed. And everyone knows the late-20th-century demographic labeled with the non-label generation X.

But the next generation is harder to define. They are unsure what most encapsulates their experience.

...

She smiled. Finally, she figured it out. She belongs to generation Nintendo.

What Comes Next After Generation X?

One day, you may be lucky enough to have a scarcity problem. A product or a service or even a job that's in such high demand that people are clamoring for more than you can make.

We can learn a lot from the abysmal performance of Apple this weekend. They took a hot product and totally botched the launch because of a misunderstanding of the benefits and uses of scarcity.

Seth's Blog: Scarcity

First published in 1945 and about to be reissued in the NYRB Classics series, it is an epic account of how just about everything in America—creeks and valleys, rivers and mountains, streets and schools, towns and cities, counties and states, the country and continent itself—came to be named. Like other broad-minded and big-hearted works of American culture from the first half of the 20th century—H.L. Mencken's American Language, John Dos Passos' U.S.A. trilogy of novels, the Federal Writers' Project American Guide series, Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music—Names on the Land reflects a glorious union of two primal forces in the American mind. On one hand, Americanism: the inclination toward the large-scale and industrial, toward manifest destiny and the farthest shore, toward what a French critic a century ago called the American "worship of size, mass, quantity and numbers." On the other, Americana: the craving for the local and the lo-fi, for the inward heart of things, for the handcrafted and the homemade.

Rediscovering George Rippey Stewart's Names on the Land

Andy Grove:

Energy independence is the wrong goal. Here is a plan Americans can stick to.

Our Electric Future

William Deresiewicz:

There’s been much talk of late about the loss of privacy, but equally calamitous is its corollary, the loss of solitude. It used to be that you couldn’t always get together with your friends even when you wanted to. Now that students are in constant electronic contact, they never have trouble finding each other. But it’s not as if their compulsive sociability is enabling them to develop deep friendships. “To whom can I expose the urgency of my own passion?”: my student was in her friend’s room writing a paper, not having a heart-to-heart. She probably didn’t have the time; indeed, other students told me they found their peers too busy for intimacy.

What happens when busyness and sociability leave no room for solitude? The ability to engage in introspection, I put it to my students that day, is the essential precondition for living an intellectual life, and the essential precondition for introspection is solitude. They took this in for a second, and then one of them said, with a dawning sense of self-awareness, “So are you saying that we’re all just, like, really excellent sheep?” Well, I don’t know. But I do know that the life of the mind is lived one mind at a time: one solitary, skeptical, resistant mind at a time. The best place to cultivate it is not within an educational system whose real purpose is to reproduce the class system.

The Disadvantages of an Elite Education

In contrast with most internet topology measurement research, our concern here is not to obtain a map as complete and precise as possible of the whole internet. Instead, we claim that each machine's view of this topology, which we call ego-centered view, is an object worth of study in itself. We design and implement an ego-centered measurement tool, and perform radar-like measurements consisting of repeated measurements of such views of the internet topology. We conduct long-term (several weeks) and high-speed (one round every few minutes) measurements of this kind from more than one hundred monitors, and we provide the obtained data. We also show that these data may be used to detect events in the dynamics of internet topology.

A Radar for the Internet

The global order is changing. The 21st century will be marked by many competing sources of global power. Across politics, economics, culture, military strength, and more, a new group of countries has growing influence over the future of the world.

Rising Powers: The New Global Reality is a Stanley Foundation project designed to raise awareness, motivate new thinking, and ultimately improve US foreign policy regarding this global transformation. Our aim is to discuss several of the countries challenging the global order, major issues which cut across national boundaries, and how all of this will impact American lives.

As this new world unfolds, America will increasingly need other nations, and they will need us in order to build a better future. Leadership and cooperation in this situation require understanding the world as it really exists.

Rising Powers: The New Global Reality

Neal Stephenson delivered a talk entitled The Fork: Science Fiction versus Mundane Culture at Gresham College.

The Fork: Science Fiction versus Mundane Culture