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http://www.pbs.org/now/transcript/transcript339_full.html

An amazing transcript of NOW with Bill Moyers on PBS, in which participants discuss secret agreements between the political parties to pre-distribute questions, not ask each other questions or challenge each others’ answers, eliminate the ability of audience members to ask follow up questions, and exclude third party participants.

Ralph Nader, who had made it onto the ballots in 43 states and the District of Columbia, was not only kept out of the debates but was prevented from getting into a debate site even though he showed up with a credential. NADER: We all have the same so-called badge. Everyone got in but me.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/29/obituaries/29Beene.html

One of the most original American designers passes away. RIP.

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Samuel Smith Unibroue (from the Canucks) Stella Artois

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THE UNPOLITICAL ANIMAL

This is a fascinating ‘critic at large’ article in the New Yorker that discusses the way that the majority of American voters make their decisions. This article really blew my mind when I read it.

“Eighty-six per cent of likely voters in that election knew that the Bushes’ dog’s name was Millie; only fifteen per cent knew that Bush and Clinton both favored the death penalty. It’s not that people know nothing. It’s just that politics is not what they know.”

It references a book i’ll have to read, “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics”, written by Philip Converse, in 1964. For those of us who make an actual effort to understand, comprehend, and discuss the ‘issues at large’ within a campaign, it’s often mind boggling to understand why the nation is so polarized when our opinions are so clearly right. It might be the case that, despite our attachments to the ‘issue’ rhetoric, the voters who are most courted within a political campaign are those who have no such considerations.

“In other words, about twice as many people have no political views as have a coherent political belief system.”

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A while back, I did a great deal of research into faceted classification, metadata, ontological schemes, and other informationally challenging topics. The problem? Complex access control systems. As I work more and more towards a practical application of such systems, it’s occuring to me that complex business rule application systems may actually be on the same path.

Both business rule systems and classification systems have been developing in terms of the schema used to describe interrelationships and requirements of various objects and logic in complex systems. When you boil it down, business rule systems collect metadata about the relationships between objects, and enforce well-defined policies on that metadata. Ontological schemes not only capture metadata about objects, but also encode relationship information in ways that can be used similarly.

Big players on the business rule from include IBM, ILOG, Fair Isaac, Corticon, Production Systems Technologies, and even Microsoft.

Whereas, metadata-based systems are used in the open source world aren’t traditionally known as business rule systems. There’s been a lot of discussion about the ways that you can build faceted navigation systems, related links sidebars, and other neato website widgets within the web development world (especially that of information architects). Major players in this sphere include Ontopia, Ontoprise, IBM (again), and more.

Business rule systems are in some ways, the practical application of these metadata-based topics that kind of struck me by surprise. The more I worked on application of metadata towards decision-making process, the more I realized that the work i was doing is remarkably similar to that described by business rule engines.

Although i’m sure i’m simplifying slightly to make a point, it may prove useful for others to be able to see the similarities between business rule engines and metadata-based information architectures, two seemingly different (at least the marketing materials appear different) approaches towards solving two mysteriously similar – perhaps the same – problem spaces.

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http://www.schladerbotze.de/Wirueberuns04.htm http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://rose.zero.ad.jp/~zae52132/muno-taisou.jpg&imgrefurl=http://rose.zero.ad.jp/~zae52132/00Cover-Muno.html&h=435&w=300&sz=20&tbnid=ZMpwZapPuUcJ:&tbnh=121&tbnw=84&start=25&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dmuno%26start%3D20%26hl%3Den%26lr%3D%26ie%3DUTF-8%26c2coff%3D1%26sa%3DN

The result of a very fun game to play at work: google your coworkers’ last names on Google Images.

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Referred from Knauss: http://wellstyled.com/tools/ Useful color selection tools.

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As seen through videos of people breaking kryptonite bike locks here, you can break these expensive U-lock mechanisms with a BIC pen.

Clearly, what the makers of these locking devices should do is attempt to issue a restraining order against BIC to prevent them from distributing these U-lock breaking devices. Ah, it sounds like a case for …THE LEGAL SYSTEM!.

Note: I know that the DMCA doesn’t apply. Just trying to make a point with satire, people.

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http://epierce.freeshell.org/gimp/gimp_ps.php – A pretty awesome reason to use gimp for simple functions when you don’t need full-on photoshop.

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I thought I oughta say something about the 100th getluky post! I’m glad that this is turning into a repository for my notes, and it’s always interesting when people tell me they like the things I link to. Hello Getluky readers!

Anyway, I just installed Firefox PR1.0, and so far it seems like it takes a little use to notice the major changes. Some are extremely smart:

• Changing the background color of the URL bar, and displaying a lock icon in the URL bar when it’s a secure site. Excellent idea, and I know it will be implemented by other browsers soon.
• Context-highlighting when doing Ctrl-F Find. Background color of find toolbar changes to red when your keyword is no longer recognized.

Others, i’m not sure if I like yet: * Find toolbar on the bottom. This was disorienting at first, but I guess the flashing yellow helped identify that this was a new feature. * RSS Subscriptions built-in: how is this supposed to work? I’m adding subscriptions to my bookmarks??? I read up on the pages, then they don’t disappear from my bookmarks? Maybe my confusion is only because of the format change, but i’ll reserve final judgement til later. * Email checking/new mail integration in the Tools menu.

Then others, I dislike: * Plugins need to be adapted to 1.0. There’s no warning of this when installing, you just kind of need to find out when you install, and your plugins are all deactivated. I need to update my code ref plugin, and i’ll post more info about this when I get it working. * When you click on Get Extensions, it doesn’t filter to only extensions that are 1.0-compatible. Clicking on the BugMeNot link just fails to install, although to be fair, it does mention why.

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