De-escalation Bill Lind. Just as having soldiers who want to fight is important in Second and Third Generation war, so not wanting to fight is key to success in the Fourth Generation. Any fight, whether won or lost, ultimately works against an outside power that is trying to damp down a Fourth Generation conflict. Fighting… Continue reading De-escalation

Impeach your president (and ours too). Lew Rockwell is looking past the death throes of the lame duck, but do you really have to wait three years? So there we have it: three more years of a lame duck president who is stuck in two losing, bloody, terrorist-recruiting wars, and has presided over one of… Continue reading Impeach your
president (and ours too)

Full Disclosure. Project Aardvark presents Fog Creek Copilot (coming soon from Fog Creek Software) Fog Creek Copilot is a service that lets you help your friends, relatives, and customers fix their computer problems over the Internet. Built on a VNC core, Fog Creek Copilot sets itself apart from other remote assistance software and services in… Continue reading Full Disclosure

Americans have more devices than broadband. MIT's Technology Review notes that while more than half of Americans now own advanced digital media devices, only about one quarter have broadband access. Is the digital divide more pronounced in terms of network access than hardware ownership? [M]ore than half of U.S. households now have a DVD player,… Continue reading Americans have more devices than broadband

O'Connor, First Woman on High Court, Resigns After 24 Years. Her departure is likely to ignite a passionate ideological battle throughout the summer. By RICHARD W. STEVENSON and LINDA GREENHOUSE. [NYT > Home Page]

Dell misses chance to make influential happy. Jeff Jarvis learns that Dell is not watching blogs and gives them hell for it. I agree. If you aren't listening to the new word-of-mouth network you'll miss opportunities like this to make influentials happy.  [Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger]

The FCC Loses its Memory. One non-Supernova event signficant enough to note here. Bob Pepper, Chief of Policy Development at the FCC and my former boss and mentor, is leaving the Commission. (He just told me the internal email went around announcing his farewell party, so that makes it official!) Pepper is irreplaceable. He's the… Continue reading The FCC Loses its Memory

TextDrive seeks to sweeten control with Rails application. TextPanel is the name of TextDrive’s effort to modernize Webmin and the whole of branch of control panel software. They’re hard at work on it. And it’s going to be a Rails application, of course. Like all the other management software they’re building over there. The first… Continue reading TextDrive seeks to sweeten control with Rails application

Taking Ajax higher with next Rails release. Thomas Fuchs has been doing awesome work building on top of Prototype (the Javascript engine driving Ajax in Rails) to bring us script.aculo.us: Better effects and drag’n’drop capabilities. Together with the upload progress enhancements from Sean Treadway, we’re going to have a big upgrade to the Ajax capabilities… Continue reading Taking Ajax higher with next Rails release

Asterisk. By nat Asterisk is amazing. I remember PBX systems being the mainframes of the business telephony world: huge expensive systems that trapped you with a vendor. Now you can bring up a Linux box to manage your company's voice systems in a matter of days, with more features than you could afford in hardware.… Continue reading Asterisk