RKNet Blog... Thing

Today on MIT’s Technology Review: someone has taken up the mighty task of mapping the internet. The idea here is not to promote any one thing as the be-all-end-all of the internet world in an arbitrary website popularity contest, but to examine the current structure of the internet for the sake of SCIENCE!
They have a few amazing diagrams (such as the one below) showing the overall structure of the internet in terms of the most critical and populated nodes moving outward to more isolated nodes.
The overall basis of the study was to determine whether or not peer-to-peer networking - often labeled as a black sea of piracy and other vile activities - could actually assist in speeding up the internet for everyone. Keep an eye on The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America for a full article from the researchers about their progress so far.
In the meantime, for more information or to participate in the ongoing study of the internet and its structure, visit the DIMES project to read the full details of the on going project or to volunteer. The current map was built with the help of around 5,000 volunteers, and already the research team was able to identify 20% more of the connections that make up the internet than any previous study has, so you can just imagine what kind of progress can be made with more volunteers!

“We need more laws with stiffer penalties to rid our community of drugs,”

Says an innocent pawn of Eris. To be sure, these laws make smuggling and selling and buying drugs more risky. That, in turn, drives up their prices - thus making them more profitable. So more money and work goes into expanding the market for the contraband - in keeping with the Law of Eristic Escalation.

Or, as the Taoist sage Chuang Tzu simply said:

“The more laws there are, the more crime there is.”

(Identification and elucidation of anerisms is a favorite pastime of politically conscious Discordians - who note that the whole text of my “Epistle to the Paranoids” on page 00069 is a psychological anerism. Goddess punished me for it, about five years later, by turning me into a paranoid myself. A conspiracy helped Her.
As of this writing, I am still paranoid - according to my friends.) (Or are they my enemies?)

Proliferation of crime in the wake of multiplication of laws is more than a matter of expanded definition. Governments are impositions of order designed to discourage theft and killing. But they wind up taking more in taxes than all the freelance crooks around could steal. Their wars involve more killing than all the meanest toughs and hoodlums can hope to rival.

– Source: Principa Discordia

Formulate your own opinions.

kuro5hin.org posted a story yesterday that at first made me laugh, then made a minor amount of sense, then made me cluck my tongue in irritation with this country's rampant paranoia.

TRON, as in battle bikes, everybody's glow in the dark, Master Control Program TRON - that TRON, has been cited as a “sensitive” by the illustrious US Department of Homeland Security.

To paraphrase, TRON contains scenes of a former government testing facility. The scenes they're talking about are the “real world” ones with all the intense lab equipment strewn about. Showing this lab equipment, which is apparently the actual lab equipment that was used at that facility, is a potential security breach.

In a move that I can only describe as “shutting the barn door after the horse has run out”, the DHS is going on a crusade to sieze all copies of the movie. In addition to writing Disney a huge nasty-gram, they have also been sending nasty-grams out to film retailers large and small.

Thankfully, there was some dissent among the working class, even if Disney officials were scared to say anything.

Government conspiracy to undermine our morale in subtle ways? Disney plot to move a copies of TRON?
YOU DECIDE!

You want to know why I don't take the time to write out my dreams? Because if I did that, all I would do is sleep and write. It would take that long.

Here are some highlights, though!
A journey between an painted, huge, old school building type place, and a mountain.
Exploring hallways with monsters and going the basement to find the spiral stairs unstable and the man at the bottom becoming a less-than-friendly/stable willy wonka. (Gene Wilder style, adulterated tragically.)
Brainwashing of various persons (the reason for the journey away from the painted place monsters aside).
Verbal child abuse.
Observing various persons' and groups' flights from the painted place.
One girl was dressed in so many layers of stuff she looked like a flapper crossed with a gypsy spraypainted with the neon palette from the 80's, and had this blond, Brittany Murphy air about her.
She fled late in the game, panicing, and got pinned in some corner by a bunch of black dogs and one big wolf thing.
She should have had a goat, it was another dog, being flayed alive and turning insane and viscious.
I remember standing with someone in some kind of post or ticket office remarking how unsettling it was that Todd from work seemed to be programed to look snooty, but that it didn't take entirely, because sometimes he'd smile and be a whole different person.

The golden dagger!!!!
This was one of my favorite parts. The golden dagger was pilfered from a camp of male witches. They all had dark clothes (like a deep grey wool) with light trim, and muskateer sort of hats with pentacles on them. (Just the star, actually, no circle to be had.) We (the party and the individual whose head I rode in - it wasn't me) were scrambling by there, still fleeing the painted place as fast as we could. The mountain was known to be dangerous, full of monsters and crazies and the like. The witch-men didn't really seem to notice our presence all that much. Stumbling about in the grass, SWIM noticed something shiny and snatched it up with a furtive backward glance. Cut to the old man. He's behind a counter, and on it he places a small golden box. He pries the lid open with the golden dagger - which SWIM had found - and inside are a bunch of gold coins. I think there was another demonstration of really bendy gold, but I can't remember. Anyway, I notice the tip of the daggar isn't really pointed at all. The little old man pushes a button and from the plateaued top of the daggar comes a tiny silvery key which is pushed up by two smaller telescopic levels of the deep yellow gold. Another trigger and a small, silvery keyhole appears in the side of the thing. Dreams assume a lot sometimes, and from this inferrence, a panel opened in the broad side of the dagger. It was a camera! There was an appeture on one side and a view square on the other. (They lined up perfectly, but no matter… or does it?) Ah, but above the view square was a line of tiny pictures, like slide pictures, backlit, of the painted town, the painted old building, some other things relating to this vast, spooky conspiracy. There was a camera pan moment, because at one moment they were too small to really see much of, and then next not only were the 4-5 times that small size, but moving! Each picture in the line (6 or 7 of those) starting moving, displaying life in short, repeating segments.

It all flowed together from there and moved on to other things. Lots and lots of other, weird things.

See what I mean? Sleep and write, that'd be it. I'd never maked it through a week!