“The stranger has been a fundamental touchstone of cultures at least since Abraham and Sarah invited
weary road travelers into their tent only to find out that they were angels in disguise. The Odyssey, too, is a meditation on strangers and hospitality: Odysseus experiences different ways of being a stranger on his way home while the suitors abuse every rule of hospitality in his own house. It’s easy to see why strangers are so important: a culture’s attitude towards them expresses its understanding of its position in the world of social groups. In our culture, we’re suspicious of strangers. They’re a threat. They lurk in shadows. On the Web, however, strangers are the source of everything worthwhile. Strangers and their utterances are the stuff of the Web. They are what give the Web its matter, its shape, its value. Rather than hiding in our tents and declaring our world to exist of the other tents near us – preferably with a nice tall wall around us – the Web explicitly is a world only because of the presence of so many strangers.”
i like that quote so much that i’m going to put it in the .rhetoric box.
blogger is a little peppier now. i wonder if that means that people are so pissed that they’re abandoning it in droves.
anyway – since it’s not so pokey, i might as well take this time to post a link on the rational unified process and “user experience”:
“As market demands get greater, traditional software engineering is marching full force into the web world. Out go the scripting hackers and in move the systems architects armed with J2EE specification and CORBA components and distributed transaction monitors and with all of that their software lifecycle methods such as Rational Unified Process. RUP is held up by many to be the silver bullet for object oriented success. Rational are pushing their business into the “.com” enterprise. However, several
authors have expressed concern about the effect that RUP might have on the User Experience. Here is some of the latest analysis… ”
i live in illinois, a state that has put a moratorium on carrying out the death penalty. in part this was brought about by obscene prosecutorial conduct. it looks like this type of thing is more common than anyone should be comfortable with:
“Prosecutors know that death-qualifying a jury is a great way to help ensure a conviction. That, say experts, is one reason why many of them — particularly in jurisdictions with high death-penalty rates like Texas, Florida, Illinois, Virginia, California and Pennsylvania — deliberately overcharge in murder cases even where they know the death penalty is not appropriate or likely.
In other words, the process can lead to higher conviction rates — and most likely to more wrongful convictions — not just in capital cases, but in other murder cases, too.”
“What we’re trying to say is that we’re low on funds, which has kept us from making the hardware investments needed to keep the Blogger service snappy and fun. So, we’re turning to you, our loyal users, for help. With a small donation to the Blogger Server Fund, you can show your support for Blogger helping people publish on the web for a year and a half (absolutely free and without ads!). And, most importantly, you will help bring Blogger back up to speed, so it’ll be more enjoyable for everyone. (And if we get enough, we’ll even be able to add some groovy new features that are waiting in the wings, which also take extra processing power.) ”