I just read it for the articles... ;~). JCD:  "Some of the incriminating facts and rumors about Prez Bush laid out by an American journalist exiled to Britian and most likely discredited because the only place it's being published in the US is Hustler magazine." [jenett.radio]

Obviously I don't know whether all of the allegations made in this article are true, but I firmly believe its assertion that corporate cowardice has compromised the news business in America. The September 11 terrorist attacks were a huge eye-opener for me. I ran across a list of online news outlets from central asia and the middle east, and began reading these sources for world news.

Much of the news they ran simply came from Reuters, and other independent sources -- but the stories were left intact, and weren't pulled just because the newspaper might get sued or somebody in the US Government might get pissed. Their coverage was so much broader, so much deeper, so much more detailed. Sometimes local copy was a bit biased, but it was easy to see past that, because the agenda itself hadn't been sanitized, as it is here. It was then that I stopped trusting the news I get from big media outlets here in the States.

This interview couldn't run anywhere but Hustler since Hustler is one of the few remaining uncompromised news organizations in this country. That's sad.

2:47:14 AM   

Excuse the lack of posts in the past few days.

I've been distracted messing around with my uncle's laptop. It's new and he asked me to "set it up" for him, which is, of course, my pleasure. It's been fun using a new laptop. The display is huge (15" 1400x1050), the processor is fast (P4 1.6GHz), and XP's ClearType looks absolutely gorgeous. Actually, some fonts are a bit fuzzy in places, but overall, it's stunningly beautiful. Even Slashdot's crappy italic font looks good!

1:58:07 AM   

Is 99.915% effectiveness possible?. InfoWorld: Will new filters save us from spam?  [via Hack the Planet] [jenett.radio]

A while back, I read the Bayesian spam filtering paper pointed to in this story. It's absolutely fascinating. No only is it an obvious solution to the spam problem, it could be used for other neat applications as well. I think it would be cool to put together a "press release detector."

You'd have a corpus of press releases, and a corpus of real news stories. Then you'd use Bayesian filtering to determine whether a particular news story was a warmed-over press release or not. The GUI would be a toolbar on your Web browser that's simply an icon visually representing the trustworthiness of the story -- is it PR or not?

1:46:31 AM