War & Peace

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“Peace is best. You should make every sacrifice to secure peace. When you absolutely must go to war, however, you must try to kill all the enemy you can as quickly as you can, holding nothing back, until they have surrendered or you have been defeated utterly. It is a great fraud to think otherwise and it prolongs the agony. It would be better if people said, if we fight, we are going to boil babies in their own fat and blast the skin off nice old ladies, so they die slowly in great pain, and we are happy to do this, because what we fight for is so important. And if they conclude that it is not as important as that, then they should fight no more.”

— Robert K. Tanenbaum, Act of Revenge

Tom Daschle blogging

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Tom Daschle, the Senate minority leader and South Dakota Democrat, “will post a daily diary on his official Web site as he drives around the state next month during Congress’ annual August recess, he said Wednesday. The diary is modeled on the growing phenomenon of the online journals known as Weblogs, or blogs for short.” More on the Argus Leader website. [via Steve Outing]

John C. Dvorak on blogging

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I’d forgotten how much I like (and agree with) John C. Dvorak. He was one of the headliners at Gnomedex and poked some good natured fun at “the Blogging phenomenon.” (Note to self: Try to have something useful or interesting to say). Dan Gillmor was on the opposite end of the spectrum regarding the importance of blogs and gave some powerful examples.

Gnomedex: Slashdot.

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“News for Nerds. Stuff that matters.” Slashdot creator Rob Malda (CMDRTACO) gave the geekiest presentation I’ve heard to date but it was perfect. “One of the largest, self-moderated discussion groups on the web,” Slashdot generates 2.4 million page views per day. Learned a new expression: “Daddy Pants” The guy responsible for getting up at 2 a.m. to reboot the server is wearing the Daddy Pants.

Gnomedex: Google

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Nelson Minor is a software engineer for Google and he gave a fascinating presentation to kick off this two day conference. Starting with the Google mission statement:

* Work on things that matter
* Affect everyone in the world
* Solve problems with algorithms
* Hire bright people and give them lots of freedom
* Don’t be afraid to try new things (According to Minor, Google News was the idea of one guy who said, “Hey, wouldn’t this be cool?”)

Average search time on Google: 1/5 of a second. He even explained how Google works…in a way that even I could sort of understand.