The television networks -- and, by extension, the American viewing public -- got snookered last night.

Strong-armed, beguiled and wheedled into pre-empting an hour of prime-time national programming last night for President Bush's news conference, the networks were assured they would be getting must-see TV. Instead, they got a clip show.

The White House had promised that Bush would unveil new specifics about how he proposes to resolve Social Security's future funding shortfalls. And he did that -- but only briefly, and using language that was disingenuous at best.

Here, in fact, is the sum total of what Bush had to say that was new regarding Social Security: "I propose a Social Security system in the future where benefits for low-income workers will grow faster than benefits for people who are better off. By providing more generous benefits for low-income retirees, we'll make this commitment: If you work hard and pay into Social Security your entire life, you will not retire into poverty. This reform would solve most of the funding challenges facing Social Security."

Huffington said more than 250 people have accepted her invitation to write blogs or personal journals posted on her new Web site on a variety of topics from politics to religion, sports, architecture and entertainment.

She acknowledged that the participants already have access to newspaper opinion pages and other forums to air their thoughts in essay form. But they were attracted to a format where "a zippy one-off is enough to spark a flurry of impassioned replies.

"People are always drawn to any conversation that is passionate and authentic and unfiltered," Huffington said.

The site will not edit or censor opinions. Participants will include "Seinfeld" creator Larry David, Viacom Inc. co-president Tom Freston, former Colorado Sen. Gary Hart, DreamWorks co-founder David Geffen, director Rob Reiner, cable talk show host Bill Maher and actor John Cusack.

"It will be people's voices, including people's spelling mistakes and idiosyncratic punctuation," Huffington said. "Authenticity always draws people."

Bill Brown has uncovered some interesting Slashdot comments by an Apple employee about Spotlight and future Apple's future plans. (Ed note: it's unclear whether As Seen On TV (ASOT) is indeed an Apple employee, but even if he/she isn't, the thoughts are still interesting.) In this comment, ASOT talks about the future direction for Spotlight, Apple's new finder (not Finder, but it seems clear that as Spotlight matures, it will become the de-facto way people use OS X), specifically about speech-to-text capabilities:

Link

LIMBAUGH: We're spending as much on environmental protection as we are on defense and homeland security. And, yet when there's a crisis of deficits, do you ever hear anybody say, "We need to reduce our expenditures on the environment"? No, they always focus on the military.

[A]ccording to the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), the $403.6 billion dedicated to the departments of Defense and Homeland Security in the fiscal 2004 federal budget is more than 20 times the $19.1 billion allocated to the Department of the Interior and the Environmental Protection Agency. Another indicator, based on the OMB's classification (Excel document) of federal spending by function (rather than by department or agency), placed 2004 spending on "national defense" at $455.9 billion -- more than 14 times the $30.7 billion listed for "natural resources and environment."

Ants build elaborate traps for jungle bugs, suck them in and kill them. Don't miss the video.

The ants (Allomerus decemarticulatus), which live in Amazonian plants called Hirtella physophora, construct a honeycomb-like structure out of their host plant's fibres from which they can stage an ambush.

The worker ants hide in the holes of this death trap with their mouths open wide, waiting for locusts, butterflies or other insects to land. When prey arrives they quickly seize its extremities, pulling on legs, arms and antennae until the hostage is rendered immobile. Once trapped, other ants from the colony arrive to sting and bite the prey until it is paralyzed (see video).

Link (Thanks, Bram!)

The United States Secret Service visited Chicago's Columbia College in mid-April to investigate an artwork that bore an image of George W. Bush with a gun to his head. Titled Patriot Act, the work was part of Axis of Evil: The Secret History of Sin, an exhibition of works by 47 international artists who created mock postage stamps on various themes. The feds ended up snapping some photos, asking some questions, and writing down some students' phone numbers. An alarming glimpse into the Bush administration's stance on free expression, but essentially no big deal, right?

The story would be a dismissible blip were it not for the irony. Agents were dispatched to a little-known gallery to investigate a rather blunt artwork by a little-known artist, while no similar effort was launched to investigate a public threat on public officials by a man with considerably more influence. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, lamenting the "moral poverty" and "legal tragedy" of the federal court decision that finally allowed Terri Schiavo to die, issued an ominous statement—one he wouldn't retract—that "the time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior." His timing was appalling: a month earlier, the mother and husband of Chicago judge Joan Lefkow were brutally murdered by a man incensed at Lefkow for a legal opinion that—like DeLay's—didn't go his way. Given the real threat from conservatives who've declared war on so-called "activist judges," the Secret Service's visit to Columbia College seems laughably excessive.

The Inter-American Telecommunication Commission meets three times a year in various cities across the Americas to discuss such dry but important issues as telecommunications standards and spectrum regulations. But for this week's meeting in Guatemala City, politics has barged onto the agenda. At least four of the two dozen or so U.S. delegates selected for the meeting, sources tell TIME, have been bumped by the White House because they supported John Kerry's 2004 campaign.

[...]

The White House admits as much: "We wanted people who would represent the Administration positively, and--call us nutty--it seemed like those who wanted to kick this Administration out of town last November would have some difficulty doing that," says White House spokesman Trent Duffy. Those barred from the trip include employees of Qualcomm and Nokia, two of the largest telecom firms operating in the U.S., as well as Ibiquity, a digital-radio-technology company in Columbia, Md. One nixed participant, who has been to many of these telecom meetings and who wants to remain anonymous, gave just $250 to the Democratic Party. Says Nokia vice president Bill Plummer: "We do not view sending experts to international meetings on telecom issues to be a partisan matter. We would welcome clarification from the White House."

Nike, fresh from unveiling its Considered line of enviroshoes, has just released a detailed corporate responsibility report (after having been silent on the issue since 2002). Among the topics covered in the report is a full list of its suppliers, a move to greater transparency which should be applauded, even by those who remain concerned about past practices. Nike is aware of the need for greater transparency in order to regain public trust: "We felt the risks of any future lawsuit were far outweighed by benefits of transparency," says Hannah Jones, Nike's vice-president of corporate responsibility. "Because if we've learned anything as a company, it's that closing down and not talking about the challenges and opportunities doesn't get you far."

Scariest Bill You Haven't Heard About

Average time served for rape in this country? 7 Years. Time Republican Congressman James Sensenbrenner wants you to serve for passing a joint? 5 Years.

Read about Sensenbrenner's odious planned assualt on low-level offenders here.

The State Department stopped publishing a terrorism report after the terrorism center concluded there were more attacks in 2004 than in any year since the report began in 1985.

Several U.S. officials defended the decision, saying the methodology the National Counter-Terrorism Center used for the report may have been faulty and may have included incidents that were not terrorism.

But other officials charged that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's office ordered the report eliminated several weeks ago because the 2004 statistics raised disturbing questions about the Bush's administration's frequent claims of progress in the war against terrorism.

“Instead of dealing with the facts and dealing with them in an intelligent fashion, they try to hide their facts from the American public,” said Larry C. Johnson, a former CIA analyst and State Department terrorism expert who first disclosed the decision to eliminate the report in The Counterterrorism Blog, an online journal.

Adobe Systems said Monday it had agreed to buy Macromedia for about $3.4 billion in stock, in order to extend its lead in the market for creating and distributing digital documents.

After whining about the tabloid magazines for saying she was pregnant, music diva Britney Spears has come clean and admitted that she was pregnant on her web site.

Those punks at Nike have ripped off our friends at Golf Refugees with their new range of "one black" golf balls ... and we've got an exclusive report on it.

As members of the urban golfing elite and founding sponsors of the Shoreditch Golf Club, Protein° has naturally dug a little deeper into this story as it smells like 18 holes of shite, so I spoke to the head of Golf Refugees to get their side of story. This is what he said ...

What, exactly, is on the First iPod? In an era of celebrity playlists - Tom Brady, the New England Patriots quarterback, recently posted his on the iTunes online music store - what does the presidential selection of downloaded songs tell us about Mr. Bush?

First, Mr. Bush's iPod is heavy on traditional country singers like George Jones, Alan Jackson and Kenny Chesney. He has selections by Van Morrison, whose "Brown Eyed Girl" is a Bush favorite, and by John Fogerty, most predictably "Centerfield," which was played at Texas Rangers games when Mr. Bush was an owner and is still played at ballparks all over America. ("Oh, put me in coach, I'm ready to play today.")

The president also has an eclectic mix of songs downloaded into his iPod from Mark McKinnon, a biking buddy and his chief media strategist during the 2004 campaign. Among them are "Circle Back" by John Hiatt, "(You're So Square) Baby, I Don't Care" by Joni Mitchell and "My Sharona," the 1979 song by the Knack that Joe Levy, a deputy managing editor at Rolling Stone in charge of music coverage, cheerfully branded "suggestive if not outright filthy" in an interview last week.

[...]

As for an analysis of Mr. Bush's playlist, Mr. Levy of Rolling Stone started out with this: "One thing that's interesting is that the president likes artists who don't like him."

Mr. Levy was referring to Mr. Fogerty, who was part of the anti-Bush "Vote for Change" concert tour across the United States last fall. Mr. McKinnon, who once wrote songs for Kris Kristofferson's music publishing company, responded in an e-mail message that "if any president limited his music selection to pro-establishment musicians, it would be a pretty slim collection."

David Rockefeller, chairman emeritus of the Museum of Modern Art, said yesterday that he had pledged $100 million toward its endowment - the biggest cash gift ever given to the museum.

Mr. Rockefeller said the gift was intended to shore up public programs at the Modern, which just completed an ambitious $858 million expansion that more than doubled its size.

[...]

Mr. Rockefeller noted that the Modern's last fund-raising campaign centered on construction and acquisitions, rather than on helping to expand the endowment to pay for the museum's programs and education.

Mr. Rockefeller has watched the museum grow from its inception. His mother, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, founded the Modern with her friends Lizzie P. Bliss and Mary Sullivan at a time when few people took modern art seriously. The museum was first housed in rented space in the Heckscher Building at Fifth Avenue and 56th Street and later in a town house on West 53rd Street and other buildings, many of them Rockefeller homes.

"My own interest in art was because of my mother," Mr. Rockefeller said. "My father didn't like contemporary art, so he didn't give her large sums to spend. So she began buying prints and drawings. During my school days I remember sitting in on many of the early meetings."

Over the years Mr. Rockefeller has been a major benefactor, giving or pledging works of art as well as cash. For the recent $858 million capital campaign, he donated $77 million in cash. In his lifetime he will have given either cash or pledges totaling $200 million, excluding 17 artworks - some promised, others given - that include paintings by Cézanne, Gauguin, Matisse and Picasso and drawings by Cézanne and Picasso.

Windpro from ShedRain, $38:

This brolly sports a 68" arc, making it the Hummer of umbrellas. The generous canopy also caused quite the Mary-Poppins moment on the ferry. The umbrella was forced open by the fierce wind and nearly blew overboard. Ferry riders gathered to watch me wrest control: "You're going to break your umbrella!" someone cried. When I finally closed it, the now-mini crowd erupted in cheers. If it weren't for its Brobdingnagian size and its stick handle, the umbrella—which received high marks for functionality, strength, and effectiveness—would have scored higher overall. Perhaps a smaller ShedRain would have fared better.

Telecoms "target lucrative, high-density markets to make a profit," explains Jim Baller, a Washington telecommunications lawyer. That has led municipalities to begin creating hotspots themselves, as a way to reach lower-density and lower-income areas that a profit-making company would ignore. More than a dozen communities—from downtown Baton Rouge, La., to San Francisco's Marina neighborhood—now have significant Wi-Fi coverage provided by the government at nominal or no cost. But the real tests of municipal Wi-Fi are in Philadelphia and Portland, Ore., both of which plan to begin blanketing their entire areas with low-cost Wi-Fi next year. Cities like Chicago and San Francisco are keenly watching those efforts—as are telecoms that have spent millions in for-profit efforts to provide wired broadband infrastructure.

"The bottom line is that if you're not ready and don't feel comfortable with your tax return as it stands, don't send it in on April 15," says Martin Nissenbaum, national director of personal income tax planning for Ernst & Young in New York. "You can always get an extension to August 15."

You can get an automatic four-month extension by using IRS e-file, by filing a Form 4868 or by phone at 1-888-796-1074.

But here's where things can get sticky.

The Internal Revenue Service requires that the tax liability shown on Form 4868 be properly estimated and based on the best information available to the taxpayer for the extension to be valid. In addition, unless 90% of the taxpayer's liability is paid before the original due date through withholding and estimated payments, a late penalty of 0.5% per month will be assessed, plus the regular interest on underpayments.

President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld can now also be called bushi, cheneyi and rumsfeldi, or simply slime-mold beetles.

Two former Cornell University entomologists named three species in the genus Agathidium after the U.S. leaders, Cornell announced on Wednesday.

Quentin Wheeler and Kelly Miller christened 65 new species of slime-mold beetles, named for the fungi-like molds on which they feed...

CHRIS FORTIER
Apr 01 Budapest, Hungary @ Pacha
Apr 02 Thessaloniki, Greece @ Venue
Apr 15 Melbourne, Australia @ Platform
Apr 16 Sydney, Australia @ Sweetchilli
Apr 22 Perth, Australia @ Monkey Bar
Apr 23 Launceston, Tazmania @ Saloon
Apr 24 Adalaide, Australia @ Fabric
Apr 28 Skopje, Macedonia @ Coliseum
Apr 29 Plovdiv, Bulgaria @ Plazma
Apr 30 Sofia, Bulgaria @ Chervillo
May 01 Dublin, Ireland @ Collective-Music @ The Vaults

Ben sez, "Over at The Guardian, we continue to subvert media and politics from within. The latest thing - the Election 2005 blog, went live yesterday. And today we're using it to launch...The Blair Watch Project.

"Readers are invited to send in pictures of campaigning politicians, election snaps, and the like to our Flickr gallery. The best will be posted to the blog, but we're going to exhibit all of them. The first use of Flickr by a national newspaper? I think so." Link (Thanks, Ben!)

I don't understand about
Diamonds and why men buy them
What's so impressive about a diamond
Except the mining

Again, this follows the first three rules closely but gets an edge on the competition by putting a hat on the chicken and offering pizza. -Bad Gas

Mark R. Levin's Men in Black: How the Supreme Court Is Destroying America was ranked eighth on the New York Times list this week; it's been on that list for six weeks now, and seems to be leaping off the bookshelves, despite the fact that it concerns constitutional law and the U.S. Supreme Court. Yet it has been reviewed virtually no place and written up by almost no one.

[...]

I use the word "book" with some hesitation: Certainly it possesses chapters and words and other book-like accoutrements. But Men in Black is 208 large-print pages of mostly block quotes (from court decisions or other legal thinkers) padded with a forward by the eminent legal scholar Rush Limbaugh, and a blurry 10-page "Appendix" of internal memos to and from congressional Democrats—stolen during Memogate. The reason it may take you only slightly longer to read Men in Black than it took Levin to write it is that you'll experience an overwhelming urge to shower between chapters.

[...]

Men in Black never gets past the a.m.-radio bile to arrive at cogent analysis. Each of the first three chapters ends with the word "tyranny." Absent any structure or argument, this book could just have been titled Legal Decisions I Really, Really Hate. Levin follows the lead of lazy pundits everywhere who excoriate "activist judges" without precisely defining what constitutes one.

We’ve all heard “Pick two: good, fast, or cheap.” Dealing with client projects is no different. Your client needs to pick two: fixed scope, fixed timeframe, or fixed budget. Having all three is a myth. Pick three and you’ll end up with a lot of unsatisified people and subpar results.

Telling your client to pick two, and having them agree to pick two, isn’t easy. But it all comes down to working with the right clients (back to step one), and explaining why picking two is better than picking three. Here are some reasons why:

[continued in the post]

WASHINGTON (AP) - Oil prices briefly topped $58 US a barrel Monday, rallying on long-standing fears about potential supply disruptions and growing demand even as actual inventories are on the rise.

"I've been doing this for 22 years and I've never seen anything like this," said oil analyst Ken Miller at Purvin & Gertz in Houston. "I view this as a very unstable situation."

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies plans to announce on Monday a record for storage density on a disk drive, attained by a novel approach that packs the tiny magnetic ones and zeros that are the basis for digital storage technology even closer together.

The technology, known as perpendicular recording because the tiny magnets that represent digits are placed upright, not end to end, has been anticipated by the magnetic storage industry for more than two decades.

Comedian Mitch Hedberg was found dead in a New Jersey hotel room Wednesday morning, according to Minnesota's Pioneer Press. He was 37.

The cause of death has not been determined, and details concerning his death have yet to be released. The Pioneer Press reported that Hedberg's family has been told he suffered a heart attack.

Zug's media pranks, with a little help from Fark

Welcome to the Copyfight. So, at Etech this year, I gave a talk entitled Ontology is Overrated. I want to put a transcript up online, and Mary Hodder, who recorded the talk, graciously agreed to give me a copy of the video.

When she came by NYC last week, she dropped off a DVD, which I then wanted to convert to AVI (the format used by my transcription service.) I installed ffmpeg and tried to convert the material, at which point I got an error message which read "To comply with copyright laws, DVD device input is not allowed." Except, of course, there are no copyright laws at issue here, since I'M THE COPYRIGHT HOLDER.

More in the post...

Humans and animals contribute as much to air pollution as automobile exhaust and industrial smoke do, a study has said. Dandruff, fur, pollens, cell fragments, skin particles, spores, bacteria, protein crystals and fungi shed by humans, animals and plants are present widely in aerosols in the atmosphere, said the study by Ruprecht Jaenicke from the Institute for Atmospheric Physics at Mainz University, Germany.

Jaenicke, after studying samples of air over a period of 15 years, found that biological matter constituted almost as much as 40 per cent of all aerosols in some areas and around 25 per cent in others. The findings have been published in Science magazine.

Pat Buchanan

“Stop the bigotry!” the demonstrator shouted as he hurled the liquid Thursday
night during the program at Western Michigan University.