Friday, July 30, 2004

Will Farrell makes me laugh. Four funny minutes. Will Farrell's impression of Bush on Saturday Night Live always made me laugh out loud, so this video was a real treat (via Poppy and Taegan). It's a four-minute commercial Farrell did for America Coming Together. It's damn funny; be sure to take a look. [The Carpetbagger Report] 10:26:19 AM    comment []

Dave Post convention nugget. Which of you called him names? Nice blogging at the Convention. Thanks Dave and thanks for the convention aggregator page. This was another watershed moment in the movement. The job of a blogger is to stay steady even when they say you're stupid, unqualified, inexperienced, irrelevant, biased or self-obsessed. Maybe even report on them saying it. Let the reader draw his or her own conclusion as to why they do this. I have a lot of training, because people in the tech blogging world say all these things about me, and have been doing so for years. In the end it doesn't make the slightest bit of difference. My flow keeps going up, I keep getting better at what I do, and there's always more juicy bits to point to. [Scripting News] 10:04:24 AM    comment []

Darpa program on Cognitive Agent Architecture. Controlling agent societies with Ruby: Rich Kilmer and Dana Moore. In his talk Controlling and Testing Distributed Systems with Ruby, Rich Kilmer shared details of a DARPA-funded project he's been working on for about a year and a half. His team has built up a rich set of "control surfaces" -- in Ruby -- for a cluster of 150-odd Linux machines that run large-scale simulations of military exercises. The simulation platform is Cougaar (Cognitive Agent Architecture), an open-source project written in Java. The Ruby-based system that controls and tests the Cougaar-based "agent societies" is called ACME. ... [Jon's Radio] 9:56:57 AM    comment []

I especially like John's close "Frankly, there is already an Islamic Corps in Iraq and it is fighting for the other side." The Saudi plan for a Islamic Corps to police Iraq is stillborn.  Here's why: Few countries will participate.  Pakistan is the pivotal player.  Egypt has already declined.  The countries that may send troops are dictatorships. The requirement that these troops will be outside of US military command and control is an unacceptable condition. The number of troops that can possibly be sent will be inconsequential.  The US has 140,000 troops in theater.  As a result, the demand that this deployment is part of a US withdrawal is impossible. These troops will be targets (as are Iraqi forces).  Additionally, these troops do not have the capabilities of the US military for force protection. Frankly, there is already an Islamic Corps in Iraq and it is fighting for the other side.  It's little wonder that Saudi Arabia is frantic to build a bulwark against global guerrillas in Iraq.  They have been moving into Saudi Arabia over the last several months... [John Robb's Weblog] 9:54:34 AM    comment []