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I confess I do like the nytimes. I've been reading it regularly since high school. Perhaps I'm attracted to the shear verbosity of it-- I'd rather read a 30 column inch story than an AP supplied 6 column inch blurb. With so much wordiness, it just has to be insightful... And, of course, the Grey Lady has a certain eliteness factor associated with it, adopting color presses long after the McPaper did it. They don't have an astrology column. They have a Science section. And so on.

But occasionally, the institutional interests of the New York Times Company pop up to remind its readers that the newspaper is a conservative beast, at odds with the interests of its readers. When David steals Goliath's Music is one of those occasions.

Both the court and Congress should be sensitive to evolving technologies. But they should not let technology evolve in a way that deprives people who create of the ability to be paid for their work.

Ooh. Now that's a solution. Leave the R&D up to Congress.

I just checked Jack Dongarra's site (on a tip from Boing Boing).

BlueGene(L) takes the lead, with an Rmax of 70720 GFlops. It's followed by Project Columbia, at 51870 GFlops. Earth Simulator is third, with 35860 GFlops. Several clusters are benched at ~20GFlops. It looks like a site needs at least 10 GFlops to enter the top 10-- and it's even possible that Virgina Tech's System X will be knocked out of contention, if a couple of surprise entries publish benchmarks before the Nov 09 top500 list.

The following spam arrived in my inbox from some internet drug dealer.

enjoy your girlfriend's medical problem like never before

I really don't want to know. It sounds quite unethical.

Patrick Smith, a columnist for Salon, has recently been writing about the supposed "terrorist dry run".

About a month ago, Annie Jacobson shared a flight with a group of Syrian musicians travelling to a gig in the states. Observing their peculiar habits (traveling together, speaking arabic, praying), she came to the conclusion that this group was in fact, an Al Qaida cell, preparing for a 11 September attack. The Air Marshall on board came to a rather different conclusion.

One of the groups that has attacked Smith for his skeptism is the Federal Air Marshals Association, which may of may not be associated with actual air marshals.

Anyway. their website opens with a flash introduction. It's pretty cheesy-- interpolating pictures of the World Trade Center disaster (complete with falling bodies) with quotations from American Revolutionaries-- "The tree of liberty must periodically be refreshed with the blood of tyrants"-- that sort of thing. It's all set to one of those vaguely mournful funeral pieces that classical symphonies dredged up for "9-11" memorial concerts and the like.

I'm not sure I really want the Air Marshall on my plane to be motivated by thoughts of bloody revenge and patriotism. I would prefer a purely professional motivation-- so that if skyjackers attempt to take the plane, the marshall will react with competence and professionalism, and not be inspired by thoughts of martyrdom.

Warning: Spoilers follow.

I just got back from seeing the Bourne Supremacy I have to say that I was a little disappointed. Bourne Identity, its predecessor was refreshing at the time because it marked a return to Europe, it was decently plotted, and the characters were at least somewhat believable.

Over the past half century, cinematographers had learned how to properly film a gunfight amid a East German winter. They had learned to highlight the crimson blood against fresh fallen snow, to contrast the crack of sniper rifle against the tranquility of nature. And when the bodies had fallen into the powder, the spy could retreat to the seemingly exotic cities of Berlin, or Paris.

After the wall fell, and the Soviet Empire began to crumble, such European films were eclipsed by the "Columbian Drug Lord" movie, or the "Islamic Terrorist" film. Perhaps these settings were less anachronistic, but somehow the sands of Arabia or the jungles of South America were less aesthetically pleasing.

The Bourne Identity, blessed with the exotic cities of "Zurich", "Marseilles", and "Paris" (which were all, I'm led to understand, redressed sections of Prague), piled on believable characters, a suitably complicated plot, and blessed lack of comedy. Sure, the ubermensch assassin archetype is itself a little absurd, but somehow Damon, with the help of his costar Potente ,pulled it off. The plot departs from Ludlum's original novels, but that's forgivable, as Carlos the Jackel is a non entity in these modern times. And lack of comedy made lines like "I want Bourne in a body bag by sundown" seem more serious and authentic.

And of course, Identity had one of the greatest car chases in the history of cinema.

The Bourne Supremacy, which was not directed by Doug Liman, Identity's director, is still largely set in Europe-- after a brief stop in Goa India, the action moved briefly to Naples, then to Berlin (a profoundly ugly city--at least in Greenglass's lens), and then onto "Moscow".

I hope I'm not giving much away by revealing that Potente, after a listless performance, exits the stage in Goa. Damon spends the rest of the film without her company, and chasing after his adversaries, whom he believes to be agents of the CIA's Treadstone project.

Meanwhile, we learn that "Pamela Landy", played by Joan Allen, is investigating the ruins of her failed operation, which she believed was bloodily disrupted by Jason Bourne. Early in this investigation, Allen announces that she believes that Bourne/Treadstone is running some two bit scam to defraud the CIA financially. We, the audience are initially amused by this notion, because we know that Treadstone is about black-ops work and not about money.

Or is it? In the end, we learn that Allen's inititial suspicions are not so far off the mark-- and Bourne, the $30 million dollar piece of "US Government Property" will find his answers not in a plot to kill government leaders, or steal bombs, or launch coups d'etat, but in a humdrum "Russian Petroleum" fraud.*

It seems a waste-- and though Damon is given ample opportunity to show off his automobile racing skills-- Greenglass's frenetic photography is more blurry than truly engaging.

[*]Yes, I'm well aware that a certain famous CIA mole sold his country essentially for a lifetime supply of "Red Lobster" dinners. But that doesn't mean that his story makes for engaging cinema,