Maureen Dowd: “Is the internet over? …The most telling sign that the Internet is no longer the cool American frontier? Blogs, which sprang up to sass the establishment, have been overrun by the establishment.” NY Times op-ed

“With a publicly available search engine, a few well-chosen e-mail addresses, and off-the-shelf viral code, anyone can commit an act of cyberterrorism–or so says Roelof Temmingh, technical director of SensePost, a South African computer security company.

Speaking at the recent Black Hat Briefings and Defcon 11 conferences, Temmingh explained that the current methods of assailing computer networks–denial-of-service attacks (DoS) or remote break-ins–inconvenience too few people to really impact a nation’s information infrastructure. The sort of exploit that could really hurt a country, Temmingh suggests, would more likely be based on e-mail viruses, a concept he outlined in a recent paper.” ZDNet

Answer: not really:

“Bjorn3D has put together an article that answers the age old question: Will customizing your Windows PC slow down your computer?

To find out, he loaded up Object Desktop components such as WindowBlinds, ObjectBar, IconPackager, and WinStyles and then put on CursorXP to top it off.

He then ran it thorugha host of benchmarks comparing it to his clean setup. Benchmarks included 3DMark, PCMark, UT2K3, and others.

The result? No discernable performance hit.” WinCustomize

Gamma-ray weapons could trigger next arms race: “An exotic explosive that blurs the distinction between conventional and nuclear weapons could shift the global balance of power.” New Scientist

The critic is appalled by a survey of Monet’s middle years that cheapens his reputation: “Monet was a virtuoso, like the composer Rossini. Both were prolific with their enormous talents. Ravishing though it is, their work needs to be taken in small doses so that you don’t notice how formulaic and repetitive it can be.” Telegraph/UK

“The chromatic scale — the musical scale that follows the notes of the piano and of which the Western seven-tone do-re-mi scale is a subset — may not be based on number ratios, as many physicists and mathematicians have proposed, but rather on human speech, according to a study published Wednesday in the Journal of Neuroscience.” LA Times

“Blender magazine has named the ’50 Worst Artists in Music History’ – and the list is bound to infuriate pop fans, because along with expected names like Celine Dion and Vanilla Ice are legends like The Doors and Mick Jagger.

Even current top-selling acts, such as the Goo Goo Dolls, Creed and the Gipsy Kings, get savaged.” New York Post

“I used the CTX 5500 to keep bombs off your plane. I also go elbows deep in your underwear.” Wired

“The Arctic ice cap will melt completely within the next century if carbon dioxide emissions continue to heat the Earth’s atmosphere at current rates, according to an international study.” ABC News

“A study funded by the US government has concluded that conservatism can be explained psychologically as a set of neuroses rooted in ‘fear and aggression, dogmatism and the intolerance of ambiguity’.

As if that was not enough to get Republican blood boiling, the report’s four authors linked Hitler, Mussolini, Ronald Reagan and the rightwing talkshow host, Rush Limbaugh, arguing they all suffered from the same affliction.

All of them ‘preached a return to an idealized past and condoned inequality’.

Republicans are demanding to know why the psychologists behind the report, Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition [link is to a .pdf of the paper], received $1.2m in public funds for their research from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.

The authors also peer into the psyche of President George Bush, who turns out to be a textbook case. The telltale signs are his preference for moral certainty and frequently expressed dislike of nuance.” Guardian/UK [via CommonDreams]

Thousands of doctors back proposal in JAMA: “Thousands of US physicians have endorsed a broad proposal that would abolish for-profit hospitals and insurers and transfer all Americans into an expanded and improved Medicare program for all ages, reigniting the debate over universal health care a decade after President Clinton’s failed plan.

While the four physicians who wrote the plan — three of whom are affiliated with Harvard Medical School — are members of a nonprofit organization that has long pushed for universal health coverage, the new proposal is important for two reasons: It was published today in one of the country’s most prestigious and its most widely circulated medical journal, the Journal of the American Medical Association, and because of the large number of doctors — nearly 8,000, including two former surgeons general — who endorsed it.” Boston Globe

“Climate Change Threatens the Future of Humanity, but we Refuse to Respond Rationally” — George Monbiot, CommonDreams

“For over a decade, the military has been shifting its supply and support personnel into combat jobs and hiring defense contractors to do the rest. And the process has accelerated under Defense Secretary Rumsfeld.

And despite the alleged wonders of private enterprise, those companies have left soldiers in filth, heat, and garbage.” CommonDreams

Not considering for the moment the fact that they were sent into the lions’s den on false pretenses and are paying for it daily with their life and limb; see their lives flashing in front of their eyes in the form of an open-ended occupation; have bounties placed on their heads by the people they have ‘liberated’; are succumbing to a mysterious multi-organ failure disease that may be a result of toxic exposure; etc. etc.,

The Progressive Case for Howard Dean: “Yes, I’ve read the unfavorable commentaries on Howard Dean by writers whose opinions I greatly respect, like Norman Solomon and Alexander Cockburn. And yes, I know that I disagree with some critical components of Dean’s platform. Progressives should be well aware that they’re going to disagree on a range of issues with every individual who has a chance at being in the White House two years from now. Our choice is not between Howard Dean and the-even-better-candidate who-has-a-shot-at-winning the-Democratic-nomination and-defeating-George-Bush; that other candidate doesn’t exist. Neither Kucinich nor Al Sharpton nor Carol Moseley Braun nor any Green will be President. Progressives should incorporate these realities into their electoral strategy, however disappointing they may be.” AlterNet

Until I realized it was Hitchcock‘s (August 13, 1899, Leytonstone, England — April 28, 1980) birthday today, I puzzled over this change in the Google logo:

Here is a Hitchcock filmography; find your favorite(s). [Do you prefer the British or the American period?] Here’s a list of all his cameos in his films.

From Destiny-land:

“Al Franken committed a brilliant publicity stunt.

He renamed his new book ‘Fair and Balanced‘ — prompting Fox News to sue him.

Of course, they’re angry because the book is partly about Fox News. But this means they’re suing him to get the book’s title changed back to ‘Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right.’

Update: In an apparent show of solidarity, the liberal blog Atrios has changed its tagline to ‘Fair and Balanced.’ If you look at the top of this page, you’ll see Destiny-land is following suit…”

Will this become a new webloggers’ meme?