That’s the interpetation of a law Bush signed last Thursday, of Declan McCullagh at CNet.

There are various discussions going on about just what this law, that is supposed to protect against cyberstalking, covers:

Boing Boing, Concurring Opinons, Atrios, Garance Franke-Ruta at The Prospect, Metafilter, Bayosphere, Jeff Jarvis, Dan Rubin.

Read the text of the law at Thomas.gov

Feel free to send more links and thoughts along.

New Scientist: Take a leap into hyperspace: the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics awards prizes for the best papers presented at its annual conference. Last year’s winner in the nuclear and future flight category went to a paper calling for experimental tests of an astonishing new type of engine. According to the paper, this hyperdrive motor would propel a craft through another dimension at enormous speeds. It could leave Earth at lunchtime and get to the moon in time for dinner. There’s just one catch: the idea relies on an obscure and largely unrecognised kind of physics.

I’ve taken my sweet time putting up this bookmarklet at Philly Future, but now it’s there for you to add to your browser. One click to share with the community.

At DecisionOne, back when it was called Bell Atlantic Business System’s Services, I was part of the team that grew its intranet. We did it without MIS approval, right under their noses, to satisfy the needs of our users and of management. We had to build it, and support for it, grassroots up, due to the lock on resources. Someday soon I hope to write the sequel to “How I Got A Career”, to detail our effort a bit, what it ment for us and our business at the time. I believe the experience, and lessons learned, have stuck with me. At least I hope so.

the cluetrain manifesto – chapter one – Internet Apocalypso:

The autonomous PC challenged the hegemony of mainframe computer systems and enabled the development of quick solutions that could end-run the infamous MIS-bottleneck – the fact that it could take months for computer applications to be created and executed to deliver needed information. Then IT management discovered the LAN, which delivered another layer of utility. However, instead of leveraging this new resource for the benefit of “users” – even that word is an artifact of the mentality – the IT department largely used the LAN to reestablish control over information access and work environments.

Now, many companies are doing the same thing again with the intranet. You get this rule-book mindset – the corporation’s common look and feel, logo placement, legal number of words on each Web page. Whatever. It’s all so cramped and constipated and uninviting. Dead. The people who actually built the intranet – created the content that makes it valuable – bail out, looking for another, more open system. And today that’s easy to find.

Remember the context for all this. Twenty years ago, or even five, only corporations could provide the kind of resources needed to process even modest volumes of information. The cost of such systems was a significant barrier to entry for new businesses that might become competitors. But today individuals have this kind of power in their rec rooms. And they can get all the Internet they can eat for a few bucks a month. If the company doesn’t come through with the kind of information and delivery that turns them on – provides learning, advances careers, and nurtures the unbridled joy of creation – well, hey, they’ll just do it elsewhere. Maybe in the garage.

This sort of thing has already been happening for a while now, of course, but there’s more on the way, and not just from the usually suspected quarters. To understand what’s really happening on the Internet, you have to get down beneath the commercial hype and hoopla, which – though it gets 90 percent of the press – is actually a late arrival. From the beginning, something very different has been brewing online. It has to do with living, with livelihood, with craft, connection, and community. This isn’t some form of smarmy New Age mysticism, either. It’s tough and gritty and it’s just beginning to find its voice, its own direction. But it’s also difficult to describe; as the song says, “It’s like trying to tell a stranger about rock and roll.” And it’s next to impossible to understand unless you’ve experienced it for yourself. You have to live in the Net for a while.

At this level, things are often radically other than they appear. A new kind of logic is emerging, or needs to. I call it gonzo business management – paradox become paradigm. We’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto, and we might as well get used to it. There’s a huge opportunity here for individuals to keep their day jobs but at the same time to indulge their natural human bent for self-expression.

Companies that try to prevent this sort of creativity within their firewalls need to have their collective heads examined. Conversely, companies that foster and encourage it will win big. The best software, design, music, graphics, writing – elegant, artistic, fantastically interesting and valuable content – are coming out of places where people feel their creativity is valued. Places where inspiration is paramount and posturing means nothing.

Watch it. Loaded question. Counts upon your point of view and how you define hirearchy or subversion. Shelley Powers has a list of participants in the discussion.

I’ve mostly taken part in the discussion in the context of David Weinberger’s thread, but I can’t help but repost a little of the following….

Ask yourself: Are you a “wiggly worm”, “lowly insect”, “insignificant microbe”, “large mammal”, or “higher being”?

The TTLB ecosystem – as defined by how your peers link to you lets you know. Think about it. Don’t tell me you don’t want to join to track your ranking either.

What does that say?

JOHO: Why the media can’t get Wikipedia right:

Jimmy has been all over the news telling people that Wikipedia is not yet as reliable as the Britannica, that students shouldn’t cite it, that you should take every article with a grain of salt. (One Wikipedian suggested to me that such a disclaimer ought to be on every page; I agree.) The media are acting as if this is a humbling confession when in fact it’s been what Jimmy and Wikipedians have been saying from the first day of this remarkable, and remarkably successful experiment in building an inclusive encyclopedia together.

The media literally can’t hear that humility, which reflects accurately the fluid and uneven quality of Wikipedia. The media – amplifying our general cultural assumptions – have come to expect knowledge to be coupled with arrogance1 : If you claim to know X, then you’ve also been claiming that you’re right and those who disagree are wrong. A leather-bound, published encyclopedia trades on this aura of utter rightness (as does a freebie e-newsletter, albeit it to a lesser degree).The media have a cognitive problem with a publisher of knowledge that modestly does not claim perfect reliability, does not back up that claim through a chain of credentialed individuals, and that does not believe the best way to assure the quality of knowledge is by disciplining individuals for their failures. Arrogance, individual heroism, accountability and discipline … those have been the hallmarks of the institutions that propagate knowledge.2

With Wikipedia, the balance of knowing shifts from the individual to the social process. The solution to a failure of knowledge (as the Seigenthaler entry clearly was) is to fix the social process, while acknowledging that it will never work perfectly. There are still individuals involved, of course, but Wikipedia reputations are made and advanced by being consistent and persistent contributors to the social process. Yes, persistent violators of the social trust can be banished from Wikipedia, but the threat of banishment is not what keeps good contributors contributing well.

Wikipedia is obviously not the first and only instance of this type of knowing in our history. But the balance of heroic individual knowers and persistent, pseudonymous social processes is sufficiently different that the media generally have gone wrong with this story. After all, reporters are held accountable when they get something wrong, so why shouldn’t Wikipedians?

A: Because Wikipedia isn’t a newspaper and newspaper practices aren’t the only way to knowledge.

Is it all good? Nah. But it is.