Thu Sep 9 09:35:46 2004
ObURL: http://www.umatechnology.org/Unlicensed Mobile Access (UMA)
In my floor statement of Oct. 8, 2002, during the debate on the "military use of force" resolution, I said "the administration cannot yet present incontrovertible evidence of a link between al Qaeda and Saddam."
Of course, one of the major controversies yet remaining is whether key individuals in the administration skewed the intelligence made available to them to justify military action against Saddam's Iraq or, whether coerced, intimidated or sympathetic American intelligence analysts and managers gave them the findings they seemed to want in order to justify military action.
The Senate Select Intelligence Committee report finds no evidence of such pressure and I do not believe that individual members of the House Committee have such evidence. Left unresolved for now, is whether intelligence was intentionally misconstrued to justify military action. That would be difficult to determine definitively without "a smoking gun."
OburL: http://publicaddress.net/default,1461.sm#post1461But, after analyzing the results of surveys conducted over time, in which people tended to give different and randomly inconsistent answers to the same questions, Converse concluded that "very substantial portions of the public" hold opinions that are essentially meaningless — off-the-top-of-the-head responses to questions they have never thought about, derived from no underlying set of principles.Also: What if the whole world could vote in the U.S. presidential election?These people might as well base their political choices on the weather.
And, in fact, many of them do…
And: http://www.inwithtim.co.nz/home.htm
CHICAGO, Illinois (Reuters) -- Teenagers who watch a lot of television with sexual content are twice as likely to engage in intercourse than those who watch few such programs, according to a study published Tuesday. The study covered 1,792 adolescents aged 12 to 17 who were quizzed on viewing habits and sexual activity and then surveyed again a year later.ObURL: http://www.cnn.com/2004/HEALTH/09/07/tv.teen.sex.reut/index.html
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We continue to watch the evolution of open source software development and distribution, and continue to differentiate our products from competitive products including those based on open source software. We believe that Microsoft’s share of server units grew modestly in fiscal 2004, while Linux distributions rose slightly faster on an absolute basis. The increase in Linux distributions reflects some significant public announcements of support and adoption of open source software in both the server and desktop markets in the last year. To the extent open source software products gain increasing market acceptance, sales of our products may decline, which could result in a reduction in our revenue and operating margins.
Oburl: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/storydisplay.cfm?storyID=3589888
As a critic of consumer culture, I did a double take when I saw that headline — evidence at last! In his book Britain on the Couch, James purports that our way of wealth lowers our levels of serotonin — which he calls the happiness brain chemical — thereby making us depressed. James is far from alone in equating advanced capitalism with mental illness. Here in the United States, a growing movement of therapist-activists battles "affluenza," defined as a debilitating mental state caused by having too much money. While much of the affluenza literature makes a certain kind of sense, all it takes is a cross-cultural perspective to see the problem with arguing that affluence causes depression — namely, it's not true.
‘sometimes rational decisions aren't sensible!’
More than half the women in the study said they would look at porn on someone else's computer, although men were almost three times more likely to sneak a peak on their own monitor.
Churchill once said the 'the measure of a civilised community is its treatment of prisoners'
"The DTI is hoping to keep Russian nuclear scientists from spreading =
weapons secrets by employing them as software engineers=20
=20
The UK government is hoping an ambitious scheme to outsource UK =
software development to former Russian nuclear scientists will =
encourage the weapons experts to remain in-situ rather than seek work =
with foreign governments or terrorist networks.
As part of the scheme, the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) has =
flown over six of the former scientists to meet with UK game industry =
representatives at the European Games Network show in London's =
Docklands.=20
Nokia has shipped one million of its N-Gage game deck/smartphones since the platform was launched 11 months ago. The device lets users participate in 3D multiplayer games online, using Bluetooth or wireless connections.ObURL: http://wireless.newsfactor.com/story.xhtml?story_title=Nokia--One-Million-N-Gage-Game-Decks-Shipped&story_id=26703
Ishikawa is president, cofounder, and the I of Production I.G., a studio that might be described as the Miramax of anime: passionate, with a reputation for success with challenging films. He has worked with Oshii for years, but even he was startled by the director's response.
"I want to be a dog," Oshii said.
These countries understand that security doesn't come from a scared populace, and that true counter-terrorism occurs behind the scenes and away from public eye. For earthquakes, the long term security solutions include things like building codes. For terrorism, they include intelligence, investigation, and emergency response preparedness.
The DHS's incessant warnings against any and every possible method of terrorist attack has nothing to do with security, and everything to do with politics. In 2002, Republican strategist Karl Rove instructed Republican legislators to make terrorism the mainstay of their campaign. Study after study has shown that Americans worried about terrorism are more likely to vote Republican. Strength in the face of the terrorist threat is the basis of Bush's reelection campaign.
Speaking about terrorist threat warnings, Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge said: "We don't do politics in the Department of Homeland Security." Despite these words, it's increasingly clear that politics is at the heart of Bush's counter-terrorism program.
The researchers used the five-photon entanglement process to carry out open-destination teleportation, which makes it possible to transmit information to any one of several processors within a quantum computer or nodes in a quantum network. Quantum teleportation is akin to faxing a document and in the process destroying the original.ObURL: http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/04/08/rnb_083004.asp?trk=nl
It will be more than a decade before the technology is practical, according to the researchers.
"Innovation often comes in waves when the social and economic environments synchronize around a technologically primed opportunity. This happened in the 1930s with the telephone, in the 1950s with the automobile and in the 1980s with the personal computer. The communication industry is facing a similar disruption. As in the past, vertically integrated giants tied to centralized or mainframe technologies and services are being eclipsed by newcomers with new ideas about individual ownership, incremental adoption and instant turnover. Technology enables the change by making local intelligence affordable; society transforms that power into something useful to them, and the potential for diffuse economic investment fuels new options. The Viral Communications Program at the MIT Media Laboratory addresses this opportunity; companies can succeed by using research to .see around corners. rather than plow a straight line. The key idea is communications devices that work with no central backbone and scale almost without bound. They are based on reinterpreting the basic principles of wireless in the light of economically viable digital radios that can expand spectrum capacity even as they use it. This apparent contradiction is resolved by real-time RF processing that collaboratively distributes signals and reduces the power required at each node. As with the PC, this fundamental shift in architecture, moves communications intelligence from the core of a network to the ends, and builds upon a viral architecture* that enables infinite growth and vastly reduced costs of innovation.ObuRL: http://web.media.mit.edu/~lip/Papers/Viral.pdf
Communications are poised to become personal, embedded features of the world around us. New technologies allow us to make wired and wireless devices that are ad hoc, incrementally installed and populous almost without limit.ObPDF: http://web.media.mit.edu/~lip/Papers/Viral.pdfThey need no backbone or infrastructure in order to work – instead, they use neighbors to bootstrap both bit delivery and geolocation.
This re-distributes ownership of communications from a vertically integrated provider to the end-user or end-device and segregates bit delivery from services. Communications can become something you do rather than something you buy.
This new research program explores the enabling principles for these viral communicators and will demonstrate their fundamental ability to scale and automatically configure themselves through a diverse set of applications including live voice, secure transmission, lowpower/ high-availability signaling, and sensors with a sense of place. We will address this in economic and social cases that include telephony, media distribution, safety and emerging markets.
He has argued that while genes are the predominant replicator in our biological world, they are not the only ones. Ideas too are replicated; some more frequently than others. Since thought is relevant to action, that differential success of meme-lineages has effects on their bearers; mostly, but not only, humans.
Moreover, he has argued that this conception of life's evolution is true not just of our living world. Some aspects of it will characterise any evolutionary process capable of producing complex lifeforms.
First, QoS is impractical. There are indeed bits in IP packets designed to indicate "type of service," but no one uses them. There's not even agreement how to interpret them, much less how to rank them. More important, the Internet routers would have to be set to act on thost bits which would require a massive retooling of the Net's "operating system."ObURL: http://www.greaterdemocracy.org/2002_12_01_gd.html#90055715
Second, QoS is the wrong solution. According to this line of thought, QoS is only required if there's a scarcity of bits available. It'd be far better to solve the QoS issue by opening up the sluices of connectivity: light up the "dark" (unused) fiber, open up the spectrum for public access, install more powerful routers, get with the IPv6 program. With sufficient bits and sufficient throughput, voice packets will arrive in time without having to always arrive first.
Third. QoS violates the principle of the Internet's architecture. The Net has succeeded precisely because it does nothing but move bits from A to B. This is the " End-to-End" theory described by Saltzer, Reed and Clark and the "Stupid Network" as described by Isenberg. Part of the simplicity that keeps the Internet humming is the fact that it treats all bits alike. Further, the fact that the Internet is not optimized for any particular applications means that it is optimized for innovation; "tune" the Internet for the VIP du jour and you will de-tune it for other applications.
Extreme sensitivity to initial conditions suggests that small perturbations to the atmosphere may effectively control the evolution of the atmosphere, if the atmosphere is observed and modeled sufficiently well. The architecture of a system to control the global atmosphere and the components of such a system are described. A feedback control system similar to many used in industrial settings is envisioned. Although the weather controller is extremely complex, the realization of the required technology is plausible in the time range of several decades.
The discovery was made by the Trans-Atlantic Exoplanet Survey (TrES), a network of small, inexpensive telescopes designed to look for planets orbiting bright stars. Scientists David Charbonneau of Caltech, Timothy Brown of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and Edward Dunham of Lowell Observatory led the team that developed TrES. The discovery was verified with observations made with the 10-meter Keck I telescope in Hawaii.ObURL: http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/blog.asp?blogID=1535&trk=nl
Recent research has shown that not all psychopaths are violent killers -- many of them hold normal jobs, with some rising to the highest levels of executive management.ObuRL: http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1508&e=9&u=/afp/science_psychology
But their charisma and ambition are often mistaken for leadership traits rather than psychopathic ones, industrial-organisation psychologist Paul Babiak of the United States told the EuroScience Open Forum in Stockholm.
He believes that, for the foreseeable future, the bulk of innovation in Internet scale systems will occur via additional architectural constraints applied to the Web; for example the Semantic Web, or the Two Way Web. Unfortunately, these beliefs also indicate to him that Web services have some serious architectural flaws that make their suitability as a large scale integration solution questionable. As a result, he spends considerable amounts of time working within standards setting organizations to ensure that these specifications - including SOAP 1.2 - take maximal advantage of the Web.ObURL: http://www.markbaker.ca/2002/09/Blog/2004/08/27#2004-08-ws-uche
The use of Internet as a general purpose communication system is growing very fast in all market sectors (bank, distribution, health, industry, aeronautics and defense, building and home automation, etc.). Today enterprise information systems are spread throughout multiple data and computing centers – including smart embedded/mobile devices – geographically dispersed over Internet. Therefore the distributed enterprise is increasingly concerned by the integration of these semi-autonomous entities within a global enterprise information system. The integration objective involves complementary facets.ObURL: http://www.scalagent.com/pages/en/datasheet/040322-joram-whitepaper-en.pdf
India has embarked on a remarkable voyage, launched by the deregulation of its telecommunications markets, according to a new Shosteck Group white paper entitled, THE INDIAN TELECOMMUNICATIONS EXPERIENCE: ITS
RELEVANCE FOR THE WORLD.
"This voyage will carry India into the ranks of countries with the most advanced telecommunications infrastructure. It will occur at astonishing speed and will stimulate India's economic growth," stated Dr. Herschel Shosteck, President and Chairman of the Shosteck Group.
France's own "war on terror" in Algeria in the 1950s.The police attempt to control things by only allowing people who can show valid ID into the european quarter of Algiers via a few checkpoints. When this proves completely ineffective, the French army, led by a Colonel Mathieu, is called in. The first thing he does is show his troops film footage of the checkpoints and the ID checking, pointing out that this footage is useful because it illustrates how not to do things:
Checking identity papers is a complete waste of time. If anyone can be counted on to have valid papers, it will be the terrorists.
That's actually a rather astute observation: Joe Sixpack will be lucky to remember to bring their passport, let alone check whether it's currently valid and every little detail is correct, but any terrorist will triple-check every bit of it to make sure that they don't get picked out. The best that the ID- checking can hope to do is stop opportunists (as well as any number of innocent Joe Sixpacks).
Peter.
Programs for computer-aided design, or CAD, have been around for decades, but eMachineShop.com appears to be the first service that checks whether a design can be made, tells the customer how much it will cost. If the customer wants the item the design goes to a "real world" machine shop for manufacturing.
The key to this enterprise is free design software provided by eMachineShop that aims to be simple enough for hobbyists and other non-engineers.
Q: What makes you believe Linux will continue to gain momentum?ObURL: http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/aug2004/tc20040818_1593.htm
A: I think, fundamentally, open source does tend to be more stable software. It's the right way to do things. I compare it to science vs. witchcraft. In science, the whole system builds on people looking at other people's results and building on top of them. In witchcraft, somebody had a small secret and guarded it -- but never allowed others to really understand it and build on it.
Traditional software is like witchcraft. In history, witchcraft just died out. The same will happen in software. When problems get serious enough, you can't have one person or one company guarding their secrets. You have to have everybody share in knowledge.
The world's first TV channel dedicated entirely to adverts is to launch on digital satellite television in the UK.ObDrWHO: http://www.waveguide.co.uk/latest/news040721.htm
The Advert Channel promises the best of contemporary adverts, as well as samples from the last four decades.
Its founders say there is a big public appetite for ads, with 4,000 downloaded from the internet every day.
Viewers will be able to take part in game-shows and phone-ins relating to TV adverts. The channel - complete with its own ads - starts on September 6.
The channel has already soft-launched on Channel 694 on Sky Digital.
Co-founder Chelsey Baker said some viewers found ads more interesting than television programmes.
"We watch hours and hours of adverts as a nation and compared to what they used to be, adverts are now something of an art form," she said.
"Adverts are absolutely infectious and until now there's never been a home for anybody to watch them."
- Advanced LED technology displays colors randomly
- Stylish and graceful color for personal taste
- Comfortable shape for right or left handed users
I'm not that concerned about the threat of Microsoft (MSFT ) enforcing patents against Linux. I think their mode of operation isn't through the legal system. I think they hate lawyers more than most companies. They've been on the receiving end. [CEO Steve] Ballmer and [Chairman Bill] Gates have pride in the fact that their competition may have tried to crush them with legal wars, but they overcame. I think they would have a hard time using legal tactics. They would be ashamed.
pear-shaped
\Pear"-shaped`\, a. Of the form of a pear.
[Free Trial - Merriam-Webster Unabridged.]
Source: Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary, © 1996, 1998 MICRA, Inc.
pear-shaped
adj 1: having a round shape tapered at one end 2: (of sounds) full and rich; "orotund tones"; "the rotund and reverberating phrase"; "pear-shaped vowels" [syn: orotund, rotund, round]
"The movement of the progressive societies has hitherto been a movement from Status to contract."ObURL: http://www.members.tripod.com/GellnerPage/conditRev1.html
Milos Forman's "Amadeus" is not about the genius of Mozart but about the envy of his rival Salieri, whose curse was to have the talent of a third-rate composer but the ear of a first-rate music lover, so that he knew how bad he was, and how good Mozart was.ObURL: http://www.suntimes.com/ebert/greatmovies/amadeus.html
The most moving scene in the movie takes place at Mozart's deathbed, where the great composer, only 35, dictates the final pages of his great "Requiem" to Salieri, sitting at the foot of the bed with quill and manuscript, dragging the notes from Mozart's fevered brain. This scene is moving not because Mozart is dying, but because Salieri, his lifelong rival, is striving to extract from the dying man yet another masterpiece that will illuminate how shabby Salieri's work is. Salieri hates Mozart but loves music more, and cannot live without yet one more work that he can resent for its perfection. True, Salieri plans to claim the work as his own--but for a man like him, that will be one more turn of the screw.
Having conquered the world made of bits, you need to reform the world made of atoms. Not the simulated image on the screen, but corporeal, physical reality. Not meshes and splines, but big hefty skull-crackingly solid things that you can pick up and throw. That's the world that needs conquering. Because that world can't manage on its own. It is not sustainable, it has no future, and it needs one.ObVIA: http://www.ffej.org/archives/001116.html
It is going to get one from you.
Now let me briefly tell you how I think this process will play out.
Listen to this: ProE, FormZ, Catia, Rhino, Solidworks. Wifi, bluetooth, WiMax. Radio frequency ID chips. Global and local positioning systems. Digital inventory systems. Cradle-to-cradle production methods. Design for disassembly. Social software, customer relations management. Open source manufacturing.
These jigsaw pieces are snapping together. They create a picture, the picture of a new and different kind of physicality. It's a new relationship between humans and objects.
If you can bear with me a while today, and kind of oil and loosen the joints of your incredulity, I'm gonna suspend some disbelief for you here.
You see, the future is already here, it's just not well distributed yet.
"The 3e-527 is a dual-radio unit, which utilizes 5GHz 802.11a on one radio to create a self-configuring backhaul mesh. [] The other radio uses 2.4GHz 802.11b for the client connection to the network. 3eTI director of marketing Marty Gilroy says they can easily turn on the 802.11g for clients if customers demand it."
http://www.wi-fiplanet.com/news/article.php/3396341
Cool, next the Wi-Max dual-mode AP....
