BBC News | ENGLAND | Party balloon flight breaks record : A 46-year-old man from Herefordshire has flown into the record books by setting a new world record for a flight powered by party balloons. Ian Ashpole, from Ross-on-Wye, reached a height of 11,000ft, while strapped to 600 balloons in a harness. Remember the Darwin award story about the sofa or lawn chair lifted by a balloon that ended up in LAX airspace?

Hack the Planet Prime: : There's been plenty of talk about the possible impact on the open source community if SourceForge shut down, but I haven't seen much creative thinking about what to do about it. In particular, it is not cost-effective for developers to pay for their own hosting today. The only hosting options I see in the market are $20/month web hosting accounts that aren't powerful enough to run SourceForge-style software, or $150/month dedicated servers that would break the budget of most open source projects. Thus a business plan: Set up a SourceForge clone, charge $30/month/project, provide an easy way for users to donate to projects, and take out ads on Slashdot saying "we're not going to go out of business because we actually charge money".

Wes is overstating the costs a bit. Hosting for a Sourceforge like system for a single project is more like $50-60 and by aggregating projects together, the costs per project with some margin would be more like $5-10 per month. But this raises a number of interesting issues. SourceForge is a hugely beneficial resource and it would be an enormous blow to see it disappear. And his comments about easy ways for donating to individual projects admits the crazy economics of most open source development. There are plenty of examples from the past in things like shareware and the systems for managing shareware payments that could be applied. But the real problem is a lack of reasonable business models for small scale open source development. The patronage model is a good one, but needs some sort of intermediary to facilitate the movement of funds, if it's going to really work on a wide scale. One possibility here is to set up a cooperative charity as the collection and distribution mechanism.

Another possibility that is going to really wind people up is for one of the big computer companies (IBM comes to mind) to treat Open Source as a community driven research department. Imagine if IBM donated $10m to an Open Source support fund. And this was then distributed to all the Sourceforge projects perhaps in proportion to the number of programmers involved. Clearly there would have to be some controls to prevent gaming the system. But it would put money into programmer's pockets for writing code that benefits the computing community and by implication the Patron.

What if Sourceforge was incorporated as a Charity and Companies could get Tax credits for donating patronage to it?

BlogNet . Main . WebHome A Wiki to document a project for connecting Blogs with Readers more efficiently So, here's what I want in a nutshell:

Stories should show up on my computer within a couple minutes of being posted

Things that weblogs are linking to should be available, even if the server is unreachable

The total bandwidth used to accomplish the first two items should be less than what it would take if everyone was just polling the sites.

Noam Chomsky: The New War on Terror : We certainly want to reduce the level of terror, certainly not escalate it. There is one easy way to do that and therefore it is never discussed. Namely stop participating in it. That would automatically reduce the level of terror enormously. But that you can't discuss. Well we ought to make it possible to discuss it. So that's one easy way to reduce the level of terror. You may not agree with Chomsky and what he stands for but he is very good at making his case.

Ethical media are doing some really neat stuff

What is Cybiko! Is it really really cool, or is it the pits?

possibly apocryphal Muhammad Ali visited the ruins of the World Trade Center on Thursday. When reporters asked how he felt about the suspects sharing his Islamic faith, Ali responded pleasantly, "How do you feel about Hitler sharing yours?" [bOing bOing]

Salmon Days. At last the BOFH[1] gets his own TV show.
[1]Bastard Operator From Hell. Your favourite corporate IT Support person.

Internet Archive : the Internet Archive's comprehensive library of the Web's digital past comprises 100 terabytes of data and is growing at a rate of 10 terabytes per month, eclipsing the amount of data contained in every library in the world including the Library of Congress, and making it the largest known database in existence. It goes back to 1996 and is aiming to archive the web. All of it. But probably without pictures.

Mail Sterilizer Unbelievable. An industrial strength steam-heat sterilization system for your mail room. Protects against all known biological weapons.

n/a

Webservices.org : OASIS Members Form Technical Committee to Develop Web Services Component Model for Interactive Web Applications. I'm going to have to think a bit to get my head round this one. Exposing an interactive web service in a standard way so that local client applications can build a native UI to it on the fly. Um, what?

Cool! I just got a piece published on Content Wire about the Syndic8 Project.

CNN.com - Northwest pulls sweeteners from flights - October 19, 2001 Jeez! Why don't they just make white powder illegal. Maybe, if we coloured all legal white powder we'd be able to spot the dangerous stuff? There's been rumours of tainted heroin but that's ok because it only hits the underclass. But what if cocaine supplies started getting tainted? Has cocaine use fallen off among the moneyed classes? Would you put some white powder, from an untrusted source, up your nose?

Salon.com Technology | Candy from strangers Webcam teenage girls post a shopping list on the site and have their "admirers" anonymously buy them stuff. Question. Would you let your 15 year old daughter do this? Would you buy me a WiFi card for my laptop, if I showed you some skin? Hmmm? Maybe not.

One of the mailing lists I moderate on Yahoogroups is getting hit by spam to a ridiculous extent. What appears to be happening is that there's a program out there which subscribes to the group and then if successful starts sending spam to the group. I've made subscription moderated and chucked off the members that were spamming, but now I'm getting 10-15 subscription requests a day. This is ridiculous! The group is effectively now a closed group of the current members as I can't distinguish between real new members and yet more spammers. I really don't know how to get out of this cycle. I think it's going to take a change to the Yahoogroups interface to make it similar to Mailman where a potential subscriber has to respond from the same email address. But it's then only a matter of time before some spam program works round that one as well.

What I don't understand is why this one group has been singled out. Other groups I moderate and belong to aren't yet affected. If this spreads, Yahoogroups is going to become unuseable.