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PARENTS ARE OBLIGATED TO DECIDE FOR THEMSELVES HOW THEY WANT TO MANAGE THEIR CHILDREN'S ACCESS TO THE INTERNET. Please do NOT ask the government or buinesses to become the ethics police, that's MY job.

While I agree with your argument that it ultimately lies with the parent - Yahoo in particular has gone overboard with lack of moderation

Plus - I don't understand why they would allow their servers to be bogged down so with all the fake profiles, personals, auctions - not to mention the perverse and strange groups and chat rooms.

Look here to see how I elaborated about this; last month in my BLOG

We already have watches that require no power, just the normal arm movement. Some even are solar powered. In fact, I have gotten to within 10 minutes of guessing the correct time just by the position of the sun, no small feat in Alaska, where the daylight changes 5-7 minutes per day in some months.

More importantly, I quit worrying about the time years ago. It was too stressful, and really, arbitrary. I learned this from my Grandfather, a wise old Seminole Indian: He never wore a watch, and said that there are only two times, now, and not now. Then again, he never went diving, and never had to calculate decomp times. When I am diving, I have a good watch. When I have a Court or other important appearance, I have a good timepiece. Otherwise, it doesn't matter. I 'did' have one of those Casio watches that had a calculator (it melted in Panama due to the bug dope), and once had a watch with an altimeter, barometer, and lots of other useless stuff on it, and discovered that mission-specific is the way to go. If I need a compass, I'll carry one, and not on my wrist.

KoA

Research on fossils may offer clues on when tsunami will hit

Although I somewhat agree with his conclusion, Derbyshire relies on a number of fallacies to get there. The following sites all do a fairly good job of pointing out the errors in Derbyshire's information and logic:

Curmudgeons Corner
RLV News
Transterrestrial Musings: Derb's Rant

Seems like the answer is apparent: if it were less difficult to navigate a hospital full of moving humans, then wouldn't the pharmbot have been entered in the Darpa Challenge?

I'm guessing it's apples to oranges.

KoA

Navy to Test Shape Shifting Catamaran in Alaska

Yes, David Brin even mentioned this in his Blog.

davidbrin.blogspot.com

It's a shame there was no reference to his novel in the article - they even used the word clay to describe the technology. It seems a clear case of plagerism to me - but I guess you do not get funding for ideas you lift from novels... errr except for Space Elevators...

David Brin linked to the New Scientist version of the article.

http://www.newscientist.com/channel/mech-tech/mg18 625031.800

Let's have some hypothetical fun and assume that there are some brave souls who live in, say, Beijing, and who decide to write about their views on Taiwan independence, or democracy, or freedom of speech, there are many ways to get around it -- just use different words! For instance, I'm sure someone would have no problem setting up a Chinese blog titled "Taiwanese People should decide their own fate", or "People are the master of their political future", or "Putting people in prison for their words is wrong" etc, I mean I can go on and on. Relax, Chinese people aren't dumb; they'll figure out myriads of ways to get around their stupid government's tyrannical rules.

I'm glad that the bloggers are blowing the whistle on this unholy alliance between Microsoft and the Chinese government. For those of you who are still cynical about the power of blogging, consider this: the struggle for individual freedom is being fought, not by politicians in Washington, but on a new frontline called "blogosphere".

Bloggers are everywhere, we are unstoppable. I've written a light-hearted piece titled "Invasion of Blogging Critters" on my blog at http://sunandfun.blogspot.com/, if anyone's interested.

heatlh care

We don't want the government to give us health care, we either want them to reign in the cost *or* provide universal *insurance* coverage. It isn't even about using tax dollars, it's more about revoking the corporate charters of HMO companies or doing something about rising costs. I for one *demand* mental health parity, but last time someone did that they died in a plane crash. Of course, not supporting mental health parity in the private insurace sectors affects those without mental health problems (Crime rate. drug/alcohol use, homelessness, domestic violence... all lead to more crime thus costing the tax payer a bundle. Let's ignore the fact that those who aren't covered under private insurance are eligible for public services anyways...).

retirement

Well, we don't want old people to starve do we? You might, but I guess your political views demand that sort of thing...

education

As far back as education goes in America, it's been controlled by the states (and their governements). Private schools are one thing, but the government isn't taking those schools over, and never have. And to be brutally honest, public schools serve two purposes in America: to Americanize and Industrialize the young. Of course we don't think about those students who are second generation Americans... (see link at bottom)

freedom means freedom to fail

Yeah, I can see that point. But is that okay with most Americans? Considering 94% are said to be Christians I doubt it. Then again, what passes for Christianity now a days in America is appaling. I'm not a Xian, but let's be consistent. If "under God" stays in the pledge, the 10 commandments stay in courts and "in god we trust" stays on the dollar bill then welfare stays.

You are free to fail, but shouldn't there be a freedom to not fail as well? Is it fair that society should stack the deck against the weakest among us?

Source: http://www.inmotionmagazine.com/pedro31.html

http://gtgtpawa.blogspot.com/

In a vain effort to figure out what GTGTPAWA means...

In Spain there is this company called Fire Fox selling fire extinguishers:
- Original post (in Spanish).
- Original post (Google translated into English).

No, the FairTax does not require sending in receipts. EVERY household receives a rebate every month for the amount they would have paid in taxes if they spent up to the poverty level for a household of their size.

As to being regressive... here
is a comparison of effective tax rates for various household sizes and spending/income levels. If you look at it you will see that every married household does better under the FairTax, and that some single households with low incomes and children do worse (it's very hard to compete with the -24.7% tax rate the Earned Income Tax rate provides).

No, the FairTax does not require sending in receipts. EVERY household receives a rebate every month for the amount they would have paid in taxes if they spent up to the poverty level for a household of their size.

As to being regressive... here
is a comparison of effective tax rates for various household sizes and spending/income levels. If you look at it you will see that every married household does better under the FairTax, and that some single households with low incomes and children do worse (it's very hard to compete with the -24.7% tax rate the Earned Income Tax rate provides).

The way a lawyer explained it to me, I am not actually selling you the bridge, I am merely quit claiming any right, title, or interest I may have in the bridge or other property. Having seen quit-claim deeds in mining, I can understand what he meant.

On another point, why not? There are companies or organizations selling 'rights' to properties on the Moon, Mars, and elsewhere. Will these 'properties' ever rise to validity? Unlikely, unless you, the buyer, can actually establish some open and notorious occupation for some length of time.

KoA

Navy to Test Shape Shifting Catamaran in Alaska

--
I Love Microsoft blog

Global Frequency just got leaked. There are torrents out there. The show never got picked up. You can read about it here.

Do you even realize why this is wrong? DLL hell rings a bell?

Do you even realize why your response is wrong? Does Dependency Hell ring a bell?

Look, the guy I was fighting with was obviously trolling. He wasn't at all interested in an intelligent discussion. I, however, *am* intersted in finding a method for improving Linux on the Desktop. So instead of complaining here, read my articles on this, and comment there.

Back in 1988, I got a screaming deal on a few hundred pounds of Alaskan-grown potatoes. I stored them in a bus I was converting to an RV, and then the temp dropped to -30 below. One fine day, I got some potatoes out to prepare a meal. They were as hard as rocks, literally. They even sounded like rocks when I tapped them together. I thought "no problem, I'll just thaw them out." I put them in a large bowl of very hot water, and after a few minutes, I noticed that the water was frozen. When the potatoes finally thawed out, they were disgusting. Gray, mushy, and wrinkly. (Insert joke here).

They went into the compost pile.

KoA

Navy to Test Shape Shifting Catamaran in Alaska

actually, I agree. I'd add that I hold broadband providers like Comcast partly to blame: they downplay and ignore the security issues of having an unprotected computer on a fixed IP address just to ease the sale of their service. But the broadband provider is hurting itself if it never promotes internet hygeine: letting their domain become a free fire zone for zombies and counter measures only makes their service look worse.
Guardrails? reminds me of a very strange blog I came across.

All of the links on William Hurleys page http://whurleyvision.blogspot.com/2005/06/self-def ending-networks-aggressive.html result in Not Found.

GIGOwiz

I hear those home school teachers are as strict as your parents.

On a much grander scale, we're accelerating towards a global computing grid which will extract unimaginable power from hundreds of thousands of separate computers each with the processing capabilities of our brain. The collective intelligence which emerges will possibly rival our fantasies of artificial intelligence

As we modelled the eye to build cameras, the brain to build computers, the ear to build speakers, we're modeling our autonomic nervous system to build the next evolutionary step in computing. Networks that independently and reflexively self -regulate, configure, repair, optimize, and protect in the same sense as an immune system or an automatic pilot.

This would allow the network to automatically manage server load balancing, process allocation, monitor the power supply, automatic update software and fend off threats without having to consult the administrator.

For example, if an application starts performing badly, it automatically receives increased resources. If software or hardware fails, it doesn't even ripple the end users coffee. An autonomous computing system would roll out new patches, monitor and adjust the resources singular end users need, set up servers... all the mundane stuff.

The complexity of integrating and managing the latest hardware and software into existing systems is destroying the advantages of economies of scale. Autonomic computing is one way of insulating the IT administrator from the mundane complexities and freeing them to do other more interesting things like understanding the needs of the business more, or modelling and automating existing business processes.

On a larger scale, it spells an evolutionary move towards a decentralized global self-configuring, self-healing, self-optimizing, and self-protecting nervous system. Since Autonomic Computing can look for patterns in data and extrapolate to predict future events, deployed on a global scale, the spin-offs would be very interesting...

Excellent idea! I mean the rape and pillage of
Iraq is going really well, eh? Oh, wait...
Daily War News

Unqualified? Interesting. Which part of 16 years earning my employment as a programmer and then a technical lead would disqualify me to comment on technical matters?

Also, the link you gave for my blog is actually my personal website http://www.simonpeter.com/ my blog is hosted at blogspot. http://uab.blogspot.com/

" Aleutians rocked by series of big quakes

The countless quakes started short after midnight. The biggest one, with a preliminary magnitude of 6.9, struck at 9:10 a.m. Tuesday. There were reports of items falling off shelves in Adak, about 175 miles from the epicenter.

The series of quakes occurred where the Pacific and North American plates collide. Most were in the range of 4.5 and 5.7."

Seems to be a relation.

KoA

Eagle crashes into living room of a Ketchikan home

Excellent point, though I bristle at the "American" comment. I've read some very pointed rants about the death of blogging from non-Americans as well (http://thesplinteredmind.blogspot.com/2005/06/blo gging-part-one-has-blogging.html). Bloggers world over started because they found a new vehicle for self expression. Then some of them made money at it and some of them became popular and culturally relevant, some achieved both at the same time. Then the late-comers and carpet baggers came in to get in on the action/fun and now there is pandemonium. It's like the hippies got together, started a movement, got frustrated when their movement was reduced to cheesy fashion statements, then wondered why they ever wore beads in the first place.

Blogging hasn't stopped being relevant, but at the moment the signal to noise ratio is abominable. It's hard to get noticed. The greats get greater and the other savvy, pithy, voices scrabble for mindshare amidst teenage angst blogs, spammer blogs, and MLM blogs. Soon there will be another trend that will take the public and investment world by storm (podcasting and vlogging next year for instance) and the useless blogs will be abandoned. Then the signal to noise ratio will become a bit more tolerable. That's how I see it, at any rate.

LOL Great headline. I just blogged about a blog that wondered if blogging had plateaud. I didn't agree with it. http://thesplinteredmind.blogspot.com/2005/06/blog ging-part-one-has-blogging.html

But there does seem to be a collective sigh out there in the blogosphere from all the noise coming in. Just the other day I had hits galore on my site from people coming off some spammer's blogs. Networkwebsites.com created a large number of blogs on Sunday in the following format: Everything you want to know about LINK. Everything you want to know about LINK... All the way down the page. All their blogs looked like that with names like bobthebuilder123 and find260info. Obvious SEO websites. What a mess. This Google whoring is another problem affecting the blogging community.

Ooh! Ooh! I should write a blog about it.

That is not always the case. I have an interesting blog, IMO, but how many people does it appeal to? I cover neurological disabilities like AD/HD, Depression, and tic disorders and how to cope with them WITHOUT medication - and always with a bit of humor mixed in. Mine is a lone voice out there. I've been blogging for six months and I have 4 readers subscribed to my feed. Four. I've been searching for just as long for blogs like mine and can't find them so one would think that I would corner the market. And I do to the extent that the market allows. People find my site mostly by searching for info on the topics I mentioned. But how many people are looking for that info?

Wil Wheaton says he has a cold and 140 people wish him well. I write an essay on blogging or psychotropic meds and they are met with silence. That may sound like sour grapes, but the raw fact is that I'm not a celebrity. He is. Getting heard above the din of thousands of blogs is tough to do without money, connections, or fame. My site is simply lost in the confusion no matter how well written I think it is. Check out this excellent news story about the problem: http://observer.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,69 03,972764,00.html. Freedom of speech is nothing more than an exercize in vain futility if nobody is there to hear what you have to say.

So here's a shamless plug. Read my blog
http://thesplinteredmind.blogspot.com/ and let me know there whether I'm wasting a bit of your life by speaking or not. Heaven knows I could use the activity in the comments section. ;)

Depends on location. From my post "Rural Alaska nuclear power gets legislative backing":

"Because of Galena's inaccessibility and the necessity to ship diesel fuel by barge, residents pay from 20 cents to $1 per kilowatt hour, while the national average is less than 9 cents. With nuclear power, residents could pay a third of what they now pay to power their homes, Yoder said.

If it's feasible in Galena, nuclear power could be used to lower energy costs throughout rural Alaska, state lawmakers said.

"Nuclear power is something folks might frown on, but it's self- contained," said House Speaker John Harris, R-Valdez. "It has a lot of potential for areas" that have high fuel costs.

KOA

Hmmm... Obviously I'm not a US citizen, but it seems that not everyone feels that way. In fact it looks like the US already has their Real ID bill passed, and not everyone welcomed it with open arms.

All the things you mention are abhorrant, but none of them have anything to do with a national ID card. The police can stop you and ask for your papers today in most states. A national ID card won't change that at all. The rules for how the police act are totally seperate from the rules on what constitutes a valid ID.

Fair points and I'll try and address them.

"but none of them have anything to do with a national ID card". They do however have to do with how the ID card is being sold to the british public. The Id card is being touted as, among other fairy tales, a panacea against terrorism. And yet, as pointed out by an ancestor post, that id is useless unless checked, and to check them widely and efficiently would require measures similar to the ones I describe.

"The police can stop you and ask for your papers today in most states". But if the card is to have any hope of serving its alleged purpose this would need to be endemic. There were checkpoints like this set up in Northern Ireland during the height of the Troubles. I understand that everyone there thought they were a Bad Thing. I sometimes wonder how many of those who say "Harumph! ID cards! Jolly Good Thing Too!" have actually thought through the implications, or whether they would be so keen if they had. Of course, everyone always assumes that they won't be on the receiving end.

"The rules for how the police act are totally seperate from the rules on what constitutes a valid ID". Arguably perhaps, but for the cards to work as advertised... well I've done that bit. The question is whether the government is planning such repressive measures, or whether they're lying about the cards effectveness whilst harbouring ulterior motives, or whether they are just plain incompetant.

Let me give you a little background here. The UK is the most heavily surveilled nation on the planet. Recent legislation saw the right to silence of an accused criminal removed. We have curfews in some parts of the country now - only for certain age groups at the moment, but that can quickly change. We have travel restrictions; usually applied in cases of overseas football matches but again the mechanism is there and is not limited to football hooliganism. Now they want to remove the right to a trial by jury. Oh and resign from the charter for human rights as well.

The last journalist to seriously embarrass the government was sacked, along with the director general of the BBC, while the whistle blower in the case was hounded to his grave.

Does anyone else see a trend developing here?

Almost all of the above is the work of the current government. I hope you'll excuse me if I don't fall over myself in my haste to extend them the benefit of the doubt.

What exactly is the downside to having ID standards that are harder to fake?

ID standards and implementations (in the non-code sense of the word) are not the same thing. Let's not confuse matters unnecessarily. My privacy in only violated by the government when the government forces me to present an ID.

And I've already explained why I find this less than reassuring. All the same, I think we're losing sight of something fundamental here:

The single best reason why we in the UK should not have ID cards is that we do not want them. We live in a dem

I serialized a 16-chapter novel of mine online at: http://losangelesnow.blogspot.com/, if you want to try it. Mind you, it's not science fiction, if that's what you're looking for.

I've been saying that this move will only help Linux. Over and over...

But once again, let me point out why: Because Apple wants to sell pretty, uncrackable, all-in-one, gold standard computers. They've been doing that since the 1970's and they will continue to do so. As we see with OSX and the ability to easily install Linux on a "Macintosh" that the software is just another layer.

Apple isn't concerned with those who want to run Linux, or even Windows on their computers. Doesn't matter because you bought their high priced, well worth it, hardware and likely paid for OSX twice in the process. And think about how open source friendly Apple has become over the past few years. Really, the only reason they went with BSD is because they can keep their version closed (right?). Apple knows that there is competition out there, they don't ignore it like other companies (guess which one I mean for extra points). Apple realizes that there are other options out there and looking at OSX you can see that they have made their product better to compete with those options. For once proprietary software is looking more and more like open source hardware (look at their widget campaigns).

Apple wants you to run whatever software you want, on their PC's.

Don't you think linux development and customer support is going to skyrocket when there is just a few configurations to develop for? Maybe Apple will be the first large computer manufacturer to offer a choice of Fedora, Mandrake, Suse, FreeBSD, OSX, Zeta, Windows, whatever. Maybe you buy Linux from Apple because that price includes Apple's own Linux support. Maybe that isn't feasible, but the point still remains: Apple can grab a giant amount of marketshare by telling buyers that they have a choice. Wouldn't you rush out to buy an Apple knowing there is no politics in what software you use.

So Jobs: Lock OSX to your machines, but leave your machines open to other operating systems. The world will thank you.

I think the problem lies in the definition of the term "garbage". I definitely hear what you're saying, but my guess is that my definition of "good blogging" is slightly different than yours, which is slightly different from that of your neighbor, and so on.

But to me this is an issue that could be dealt with through a variety of means. For one thing, blog indexes are becoming more useful. I find a lot of really useful information with Technorati. For example, I was interested in reading a variety of opinions about the concept of peak oil. So I ran this search and quickly found The Oil Drum, a site full of information on the topic.

I think your fears of spill-over will be eased as search filtering capabilities become more robust and long, undifferentiated blogrolls on the more useful sites become replaced by shorter lists of related blogs. Just as the early days of "web pages" were a morass of links to other lists of links, many bloggers are still giddy about linking to as many other blogs as possible. This will die down in time, as they realize that the quality of the links matters more than their number.

I still think that even if filtering mechanisms don't improve much more and it remains a bit more difficult to find "quality" (as defined by me) blog content, I'd rather have that than a blogosphere controlled solely by the usual suspects. To me, avoiding consolidation of media ownership is worth a little inconvenience. The last thing I want is all of the best blogs to be bought out by Big Media and unpopular views (be they about kitty litter or peak oil) utterly marginalized.

The biggest reason Blogs have become so very popular, and why they are here to stay in growing numbers is because they made publishing online easy for everyone. Blogs don't require you to know HTML before you can publish your ideas online. Just type your thoughts into a form, and the software builds the code automatically.

So, Blogs dramatically reduced the "friction" to publishing online. Millions of non-geeks now have their say.

If you mentally replace the word "Blog" with "Home Page" in any article you read online, it'll seem like you've stepped back in time to the dawn of the Web. That's how people talked about the web a few years ago.

Blogs have accelerated grass roots democracy, leaching the "Mass" from Media, splintering it into untold numbers of demassified niches. The impact is very big and will deepen.

I've just finished a piece on the impact of new digital media upon the mass media and entertainment industry in an article called: "Is Big Brother Dying or Just Being Born?". It makes the case that the digitization of media will force mass media in all forms, to take it's rightful place as another niche.

In a nutshell, Mass media will be good for mass events. But Blogs represent the birth of grass roots media. Aggregated through RSS, they'll soon out-perform mainstream.

The biggest reason Blogs have become so very popular, and why they are here to stay in growing numbers is because they made publishing online easy for everyone. Blogs don't require you to know HTML before you can publish your ideas online. Just type your thoughts into a form, and the software builds the code automatically.

So, Blogs dramatically reduced the "friction" to publishing online. Millions of non-geeks now have their say.

If you mentally replace the word "Blog" with "Home Page" in any article you read online, it'll seem like you've stepped back in time to the dawn of the Web. That's how people talked about the web a few years ago.

Blogs have accelerated grass roots democracy, leaching the "Mass" from Media, splintering it into untold numbers of demassified niches. The impact is very big and will deepen.

I've just finished a piece on the impact of new digital media upon the mass media and entertainment industry in an article called: "Is Big Brother Dying or Just Being Born?". It makes the case that the digitization of media will force mass media in all forms, to take it's rightful place as another niche.

In a nutshell, Mass media will be good for mass events. But Blogs represent the birth of grass roots media. Aggregated through RSS, they'll soon out-perform mainstream.

http://obacht.blogspot.com/ TEST

And my guess is you won't find much "sense" on Hulk's Blog ... but then again, did you really think it was a Big Green Monster writing those things?!?

Here's my all time favorite blog and the last comment he made "that made sense" was on Saturday, April 10, 2004, where he said that he was taking a hiatus.

Read it if you haven't already, it will engulf you. It gives a unique perspective on the Iraq war by an Iraqi in Baghdad (who happens to write good English).

http://dearraed.blogspot.com/

I think that this is a good example of where someone with an interesting story to tell could reach a wide audience without having great resources. Without the blog phenomenon I would have never known this story.

Jörg Schilling will be so happy. He can finally release SchilliX, the Linux lookalike that runs cdrecord the way god intended it to.

Most interesting is that you attempt to separate religion and faith. I do not subscribe to that tactic.

I assure you it's not a "tactic"; I've never been a fan of organized religion, but it has been only recently where my investigation leads me to believe that much of religion today is man-made rituals. That is religion. Choosing to believe in God on a personal level, that is faith.

Why Christianity and not Buddhism, Hindu, etc

You assume I subscribe to Christianity because I talk about Jesus. I'm actually a Jew who has found out that this Jesus guy is actually the messiah my ancestor's religion (Judaism) has pointed to since the beginning.

To answer your question, Christianity is not "the religion" of God. Again, I don't believe God has a "religion", but rather, a group of people who follow him. I really don't think God cares whose set of rituals is best, or who worships on which day; I think God cares more about who follows him. Religion is built around the idea of God, but it is largely a man-made attempt to get closer to God.

When God came to Abraham -- as Muslims, Christians, and Jews believe -- did he say, "Abraham, go to church on Sunday and worship me, I am your God </loud thundering voice>? No, he didn't. Despite the 3 big religions being Abrahamic faiths, Abraham did not start any new religion. Furthermore, some Christians might crap their pants to know that Jesus also didn't start a new religion, in fact, he followed the previous faith in God perfectly, following the law and fulfilling the prophets that spoke of him. It wasn't until several years after Christ's death that his followers were called "Christians", and even then, they were still meeting in synagogues and very largely following Mosaic law. Christianity as we know it today didn't become a new religion until about the 3rd century CE, when a Roman emperor by the name of Constantine decided it would be a good way to unite all the tribes under his rule, thereby starting the Roman Catholic Church.

A better question might be, "How do you know your faith in God is in the right God?"

This is a question I've been asked often. I'll tell you how I came to my conclusion that the God of Abraham is God. I've done much research on world religions. You'd be surprised to find out that a vast majority of religions have their roots in the Babylonian Mystery Religion. I won't go into details for lack of time, but I will point you to my blog post that covers some of the Babylonian Mystery Religion. The false godhood of Nimrod, Ishtar, and Tammuz was spread over much of the known world: Egypt adopted Ishtar as Isis, the Moabites adopted her as Astarte, the Zidonians and some Israelits as Ashtoreth, the Greeks as Aphrodite, the Babylonians as Ishtar, the Anglo-Saxons as Eostre, the Latin speaking peoples as Juno, the Assyrians as Ashtar, to name a few examples. Basically, this religion and its variants are responsible for many of the religions spawned throughout history. Even today, we have remnants of this religion in our festivals: our "Easter" is named after the Anglo-Saxon Eostre, "Lent" was originally a a Tammuz celebration.

So how does this pertain to my belief in God? Throughout the history of mankind, going back about 4000 years, there has been a struggle between the people who worship the God of Abraham and the people (often much of the known world) who followed the Babylonian myths. It is obvious to me that despite the vast majority of the known world believing in the Babylonian Mystery religion, my God always comes out on top: he blessed Abraham's descendants, promising that Abraham's descendants would be a Godly people, different from the rest of the world, and that from him would come many nations. Guess what? It happened! Abraham is the father of all Arab nations, the geneological progenitor of both Arabs and Jews. And d

"Municipal officials will discuss recent proposals by Alaska Senator Ted Stevens for a national video franchise agreement, the importance of protecting public rights of way, the ability of cities to provide broadband connections for their residents and businesses, and the upcoming rewrite of the Telecommunications Act at a meeting of the National League of Cities (NLC), June 16-18, in Anchorage at the Millennium Alaskan Hotel."

KOA

I was there at the stanford stadium. I found his speech serious and very insightful. People just picks the ironic part of his speech. His main advice is to follow the passion. I talked about his speech here .

Sorry that link is http://warchalk.blogspot.com/2005/03/new-islington -warchalk.html

Of course, as the parent poster stated, you could try your chances in the cities. Just have your own army. Then you can travel by armored car with escorts from your gated, walled compound to your office. Yes, Brazil is not Columbia. It's not Paradise, either.

KOA

Anchorage, Alaska Will Host National Policy Meeting on Technology

Maybe after The War Against Terrorism is over, the Israelis can export this technology to Iraq...

You still have a boss, or if you prefer, a chain of command. While some tattoos will never be acceptable, e.g. those that may suggest racist affiliations, you must remember that those who outrank you can make or break your career, and can make your life miserable. Further, you may find a wall to a higher level security clearance, and to opportunities. I had a potentially identifying mark (not a tattoo) burned off, just in case. I can say from experience that almost any tattoo will create prejudice against the wearer, at least in the military.

KOA

Anchorage, Alaska Will Host National Policy Meeting on Technology

But what if a house is designed by GOOD software developers? There are lots of advantages, including the bathroom Class, the fridge that uses hashcoding and compression, and the ability to resize and move your windows. Check it out here.

I wrote a little about this here , but you should also check out Marshall Brain's Robotic Nation essays for more. It might not be all good news for a rapid rise of robotic technologies. Espcially if the socio-economic factors aren't taken into consideration from the beginning.

On the bottom? A sticker that read "Made in China."

KOA

A Case for Traditional Monarchy

Posting anonymously for obvious reasons, but I work for SMART and in my heart of hearts, I kind of agree with you.

First, a few words in defense of the SMART Board interactive whiteboard: if you haven't used one, being able to physically manipulate objects in real time (assembling a map of states, for instance, or real-time group editing of a document; see for example here) can be a serious aid to learning. There's a growing body of third-party research that suggests attention span and long-term retention is better with a SMART Board interactive whiteboard than without: it's seems to be about giving learners the opportunity to directly (i.e. with their hands) manipulate information and not just have it spoonfed to them by the "sage on the stage."

Part of me, though, wonders how much of that is the novelty effect. In twenty years when every classroom has an interactive whiteboard of one kind or another, will kids' attention still be held by a technology they've grown up with?

More importantly, as you said, how many better things could that money have been spent on? The UK government decided, a couple of years ago, that every classroom would be equipped with an interactive whiteboard. SMART has won the lion's share of that business and it's been hugely beneficial for us as a company. That makes me uncomfortable for two reasons: first, because I don't like the idea that so much of our income comes from sucking at the tit of government. More importantly, I've found myself thinking: if I were a British taxpayer, wouldn't I be raising the same issues in the parent post? You bet I would. A Board with a dedicated computer and projector, plus mounting and installation runs to several thousand dollars. Multiply by every classroom and yeah, I'm frankly not sure it's worth it. I'm definitely sure the money could be put to better use. Heresy where I work, but there you are.

As for the parents comment, think of all the debris that we are putting in our little part of space. This has been posted before, but the fact remains that every launch adds to the problem. Soon we will have a very serious mess, and no solution. A little paint chip will ruin your day. A loose nut will ruin much more.

KOA

Anchorage, Alaska Will Host National Policy Meeting on Technology

That is a safe bet, as Igloo simply means house. It doesn't mean 'house built of wind packed snow'.

KOA

Anchorage, Alaska Will Host National Policy Meeting on Technology

The going rate for a US computer is more like 15 to 20 cents. Other countries go for as little as 1 or 2 cents. Cash4Toolbar is installing its stuff through some blogspot.com blogs (IE users beware) and some really cute social engineering, but several others are seeding infected files on BitTorrent.