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I don't buy this whole "Digital Devide" concept. ... people I chat with on IRC are what would be considered very poor in the US sense, and have basically put together computers from with others have thrown out.

That is vaccuous reasoning.

It is true that poor people can get computers (my parents managed when I was a kid) but that does not mean that there isn't a digital divide. A well organised, informed or minimally well connected working class person can get health care for their kids - it may not be great but it will meet their basic needs. Are you going to argue, therefore, that the lower vaccination rates among poor children don't reflect inferior access to health care? After all, the resources are theoretically available to vaccinate all those poor children.

people whining about the "digital divide" are mostly rich people who couldn't imagine what it is like to actually have to work hard to get the things you need.

I'm a whining rich person because I want to see their kids vaccinated, while I get health care from my fellowship?

The fact of the matter is - and the article has these statistics so I'm not going to repeat them - poor people are less likely to have computers. This has a number of impacts on their lives, both economic and cultural, which have also been rehashed endlessly. If ways can be found to get computers for more of them, or to reduce the economic sacrifices they have to make to get them, can we all agree that it is a good thing?

In terms of overall benefit to the culture of the net - which is richer in human content (as opposed to fast, or [.] flashy, or a "rich media experience", but that stuff isn't important anyway) the more people are on it, we're better off spending resources to get the working class connected, than on any buzzing, bleeping toy (like the 40+" flat screen I've been eyeing, ) you could imagine.

It isn't as huge a deal as the failure to get children vaccinated (criminal to my mind - but my background is in biology), but that doesn't mean it is nothing.

Minority children have less computers in their schools. This digital divide is definitely narrowing - and the very poorest schools (in terms of percent children in poverty) have more computers per student than average, because of all the federal money they get; however, most of those are alternative or remedial schools, and I doubt they have more computers than alternative or remedial schools in wealthy districts.

Anyway, as we are well remember from all that fallout with companies supplying computers to schools in exchange for running ads (there was a slashdot story about it but I can't find it), the money for schools to pay for computers is still a major issue, especially in poor schools. That is where organised promotion of open source can really make it's mark - and, hopefully, propogate as an ethic among the next generation.

Correction...
The site is here.

This site states that Paul Baran's work first appeared in a series of RAND studies published between 1960 and 1962.

RAND.org, a public policy group, has a number of interesting papers on the legal, ethical and sociological implications ob Biometrics and specifically Facial Recognition as used at the Super Bowl this year.

-CTH

RAND.org, a public policy group, has a number of interesting papers on the legal, ethical and sociological implications ob Biometrics and specifically Facial Recognition as used at the Super Bowl this year.

-CTH

RAND.org, a public policy group, has a number of interesting papers on the legal, ethical and sociological implications ob Biometrics and specifically Facial Recognition as used at the Super Bowl this year.

-CTH

As much as I support the proposed anti-video surveillance law as it applies to surveilence on public property, I can't find fault with the Borders arrangement. If they feel it will reduce instances of shoplifting, more power to them, although I'd like to see if they can get any shoplifter they catch, to pose for a picture (unless they have been arrested and charged). If borders expects to hold shoplifters they catch, expressly for the purpose of taking their photo for addition to their system, that will prove legally problematic for them.

The public has a right to be angered by public surveilence as was done at the Super Bowl but if you don't like being surveiled on provate property, don't enter that private property. It's as simple as that.

--CTH

If UK schools are actually trying to push establishment IP propaganda onto the rebellious young, that's yet another sign that the traditional concept of copyright is D-E-A-D; they know they will never be able to effectively enforce copyrights, so their last resort is to engineer the memepool. Kind of sad to think about it.

I don't know what's next, but I do know that if an "intellectual property" perversion in an "information economy" is ever taken seriously, it will only be a temporary concession. Once the other, physical side of the economics-of-abundance equation is balanced (in a few decades), people can then stop being such selfish little primates because they won't have to worry about putting food on the table. You can just produce your art, get your ego rubbed, and live a good life. (/end happy-happy-joy-joy)

If you look at the author list, they're all from MITRE or JPL. (read Defense Department sponsored.)

This is likely as important and visionary as (Rand Corporation) Paul Baran's 1964 "On Distributed Communications" series, and I would take it as a look at the near future.

Maybe the U.S. isn't planning to invade with its Army, but even as I type the hellish, demonic IMF sits upon the neck of the Russian citizen.

Don't take my word for it. Just look at the real bottom line, national mortality rates. First read the RAND institute on mortality in Russia after the "free market" set bomb on the Russian population; in particular, examine table 4.1, which shows male life expectancy in Russia declined from 64.9 years in 1987 to 59.0 in 1993. Then to be assured that the fatal trend of capitalism versus the Russian working man has not abated, much less reversed, here's the World Health Organization documenting how male life expectancy has continued to drop still further to 56.1 years in 2000! How would you feel, guy, were eight years delibertely axed off your life solely for the benefit of speculators and profiteers?

The fact is that the accursed U.S.A. and the capitaliism for which it stands have achieved a leap in the mortality rate in Russia of which even Hitler would be proud, and jealous.

And capitalism would cheerfully do exactly the same thing to you and all the members of your family and everyone you love, right here at home (wherever your home is), tomorrow, if this week's scheme seemed the slightest bit likely to increase the overall net wealth of the profit gluttons.

Sorry, reader, if I've insulted your intelligence by explicating the blatantly obvious at such tedious length.

Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net

There's an existence proof for this. R. Stockton Gaines developed a system called "Keyprint" at The RAND Corporation over fifteen years ago, in the days when RAND invented the MH mail system and other cool stuff (they've now assassinated all their high-tech efforts and gone in for policy analysis).

We researchers had our reservations about that one, based on many of the same concerns shown here. Imagine our surprise when the blamed thing actually worked. There were enough degrees of freedom that the aggregate of the correlations it used was immune to "off days" and other such variations. This is described in Rand Report R-2526-NSF.

So what's the moral of the story? Find yourself a medium that you control, don't depend on renting space from other companies. How you do that is up to you.

So what do you do when all mediums are controlled by large corporations?

You see, people always think that government is the sole threat to free speech on the Internet, and it is a threat, but it's not the only one. Industry could, conceivably and very possibly, create a barrier-to-entry so high (the reason the internet is so free and inspiring is that the barrier to entry is so low) that the few who can afford to run a website are the ones who control the majority opinion.

You've already seen that happen with television, radio, and newspapers. They're all controlled by conglomerates who create economic barriers to competition. And since it's usually an oligopoly, and not a monopoly, and since it's not technically holding people back (by force of law) from free press, people claim that this is still a free country.

I say, stop bothering to get up and arms when the government claims it can censor or control the internet. They can't, they don't know how. But industry does, because they've been censoring and controlling mediums for years. It's nothing new to them. It's not oppression, they say, it's economics. But whatever they call it, the end result is the same.

So how do we combat this? We need to do all we can to keep the cost of the Internet down. At times like this, Free Beer can equal Free Speech. Linux, and the cooperative in San Francisco which sells T1 lines at cost is a fantastic example, and I wish I could see more situations like this crop up. It would also be nice to see the computer industry unionise but that's a whole different post.

In the end, if you don't want to see the Internet get gobbled up into the stomachs of the bloated plutocrats, it is up to you to make sure it doesn't happen. Keep the internet cheap and open to anybody, and you'll insure that the internet will be cheap and open for your own needs.

Michael Chisari

First, I suspect the accuracy of anything that appears in the Washington Times. Its owners, the Unification Church, are from the Old School of Red baiters. Then again, the Korean War may have had something to do with this.

But, in reading the paraphrasis of the Chinese article, particularly the reference to "gaining control" of "Internet command", I get the feeling that they don't quite understand the decentralized nature of the Internet.

What can they do? Get root on the root nameservers?

Rand has some interesting studies in this field.


k.

BTW, the analysis that opensource and free software projects are networks that enjoy natural advantages in competition with corporate hierarchives was inspired by this article:

Social Netwar (RAND Corp. Analysis)

It doesn't talk about opensource projects, but it talks about how networks of people can wage a special kind of war against hierarchies wherein the network concentrates a massive pulse attack against the hierarchy--concentrating efforts of people all over the globe on the target all at once, like a giant swarm of bees with a million little stings--and then melts away so that counter-attack is not feasible.

The article is a RAND Corp. analysis of how the Zapitista Rebels in Mexico were essentially a node in a global network that swarmed all over the Mexican hierarchy and forced it to the bargaining table (at least in the beginning) when by all rights they should have been crushed in a matter of days by the more structured, bigger, more powerful Mexican government hierarchy.

I think opensource projects are networks capable of waging "social netwar" against corporate hierarchies, to use the jargon of this excellent article.

This thread seems to say "the NSA are technocrats".

Our tax dollars hire them to spy on everyone outside the united states and find the connections between all sorts of people, their bank accounts, their friends, political and commercial organizations. They may or may not be spying on Americans as well--they have stone-walled the U.S. Senate on the issue of Echelon.

> I've heard some say they are the biggest
> collection of brains in the US. I think that's
> probably true, except for maybe RAND.

The RAND Corporation's Netwar report, prepared for the U.S.
government, recommends that the govt assists repressive governments in
defending themselves in struggles over their reputations, and that
repressive governments can do this with a variety of dirty tricks and
covert operations.

If these recommendations are being carried out, and I have seen some
evidence to suggest that they are, I suspect information from Echelon is
being used to destroy human-rights networks.

I personally believe NSA intelligence filters from
the NSA => the U.S. Army =>
to the Columbian army => rightwing paramilitary

If the NSA's powerful data collection capabilities have been used in this pursuit, American money is [indirectly] responsible for the the blood of, for example, Columbian and Mexican peasants killed by pro-military paramilitaries.

Merlin

You can find more about RAND at their site http://www.rand.org/. They've done a lot of interesting work, if you have the patience to read it. Their reports tend to be extreemly long and you surely don't want to try and print them (except maybe at work ;)).

They do research for the Air Force, Army, and in other non-military fields such as health.

As for my original post. I did typo and miss adding Transmeta as one of those places like the NSA. ;)

As for where the Internet was born, The Pentagon in Arlington, VA is technically the correct location, while the Implementation began in Cambridge, MA.

The papers which started it all were written at RAND in Santa Monica, CA (though the Pentagon paid for them). As for the birth of the ARPANET, which became the Internet--well, even though BBN (in Cambridge, MA) was contracted by (D)ARPA to build the hardware, the actual "first byte" was transmitted at UCLA, which last time I checked was in Los Angeles, CA.

The most popular Internet site is based in Santa Clara, CA. (AOL claims more visits, but a significant fraction of these aren't Internet-based). The major manufacturers of Internet infrastructure equipment are based in Silicon Valley, also in CA.

If being the center of Net VC and Net Companies doesn't make Silicon Valley the "center of the Internet," what would?

-Ed