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CHUD.com (courtesy Fred Badlisi) : Q: My impression – and a lot of people share this – is that the CIA is a dangerous and possibly evil organization. At least that’s the emotional reaction. Baer: That’s because you watch too many movies. Q: Yeah, I was going to say, is there anything you can say to dissuade me from that? Baer: It’s a bureaucracy. But the movie is looking at the evil side, which is that they’ve taken bad information…

It’s none other than one of my favorite journalism buddies, Mr. Paul Boutin. (Hey Paul, nice mug. Really. 🙂 ) BusinessWeek: Today marks the official end of the PC era and the start of the X era. Not X as in Xbox, but X as in X factor, the unknown. Even if you’ve never played a videogame and never will, a look under the hood of an Xbox 360 is a peek into your future.

Rolling Stone: John Walter Rendon Jr. rises at 3 a.m. each morning after six hours of sleep, turns on his Apple computer and begins ingesting information — overnight news reports, e-mail messages, foreign and domestic newspapers, and an assortment of government documents, many of them available only to those with the highest security clearance. According to Pentagon documents obtained by Rolling Stone, the Rendon Group is authorized “to research and analyze information classified up to Top Secret/SCI/SI/TK/G/HCS” — an extraordinarily…

Clive Thompson (of Slate and Wired News fame) : The October issue of Vanity Fair included a profile of Paris Hilton, and at one point in the article the reporter spoke to Paris’ younger sister Nicky. Nicky asked the following question: “I just want to say to these writers, ‘I’m 21 years old, I run two multi-million-dollar companies, I work my ass off. Like, what were you doing that was so fucking important at that age?’ I feel very accomplished…

AFP: November 15, 2005 JOHANNESBURG — A giant underwater cable network connecting Africa to Europe and Asia provides Internet access to the planet’s poorest continent but only a handful of countries seem to be enjoying its benefits. The 28,000-kilometer (17,500-mile) optical fiber cable, named SAT-3/WASC/SAFE, brings the Internet to Africa but seems to be giving an unfair advantage to coastal countries. Its first segment, in the Atlantic Ocean, leaves Portugal and goes down to the Cape in South Africa. In…

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I just discovered this site via NYT (TimesSelect), in an article about the Mission. “The Mission is the burrito vortex,” said Charles Hodgkins, who has visited every one of the city’s more than 150 taquerias – nearly a third of them are in the Mission – rating each burrito for his Web site, burritoeater.com. (Taqueria San Francisco, an unassuming neighborhood hole-in-the-wall on 24th Street, boasts the highest-rated burrito in the city.)

For those of you who know me, you know that I’m obsessed with geographic oddities around the world. One of my favorites is Nauru, a tiny island in the South Pacific (Population: 13,000) that entered into a Faustian tale of strip mining itself into oblivion during the bulk of the 20th century. It was “rescued” through a huge influx of cash by the Australian government when they built a detention center on the island, one of the largest icons of…

Macworld: Got a lot of repetitive tasks in your work life? Automate them! We’ll show you how. All month long, Macworld has been taking a look at Automator, the built-in Automation tool found in Mac OS X 10.4. As part of that look into how to use Automator workflows to handle the repetitive jobs on your Mac, we’ve lined up an interview with Sal Soghoian, product manager of Automator at Apple. I talk to Sal about how Automator is different…

Slate: Since high school, I’ve been a student in three very different environments—Afghanistan, where I’ve been spending my summers; Diablo Valley College, a community college in Pleasant Hill, Calif., about 20 minutes from my home in Concord, Calif. (where I spent most of my life); and Yale, where I transferred this semester as a junior majoring in economics. So, when the professor asked who you shouldn’t mess with, I immediately thought of something I saw in the summer of 2002.…