A small antidote as the excesses of recent years come home to roost.

Laugh-Out-Loud Cats #940 on Flickr - Photo Sharing!

Conservatism was once a frankly elitist movement. Conservatives stood against radical egalitarianism and the destruction of rigorous standards. They stood up for classical education, hard-earned knowledge, experience and prudence. Wisdom was acquired through immersion in the best that has been thought and said.

Sarah Palin has many virtues. If you wanted someone to destroy a corrupt establishment, she’d be your woman. But the constructive act of governance is another matter. She has not been engaged in national issues, does not have a repertoire of historic patterns and, like President Bush, she seems to compensate for her lack of experience with brashness and excessive decisiveness.

Of course, Brooks is preaching to the choir in the New York Times, but it is precisely this sort of uninformed brashness that leads a leader to violate ancient principals - its a lack of knowledge about history. If you don't know why a principal exists and its preventing you from fighting terrorism, well, you are going to embrace the council of people who are telling you that you can ignore it.

Op-Ed Columnist - Why Experience Matters - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com

Google may take its battle for global domination to the high seas with the launch of its own “computer navy”. The company is considering deploying the supercomputers necessary to operate its internet search engines on barges anchored up to seven miles (11km) offshore.

The “water-based data centres” would use wave energy to power and cool their computers, reducing Google’s costs. Their offshore status would also mean the company would no longer have to pay property taxes on its data centres, which are sited across the world, including in Britain.

Combine dreams of floating jurisdiction free anarchist colonies with one of the worlds wealthiest corporations... An interesting idea of a science fiction book but I tend to agree with Hakim Bey that anarchy in the modern world only works in pockets that are small enough in both space and time to avoid the attention of society.

Google planning offshore water-based data centers

The IEEE working group that is putting the finishing touches on the 802.11n 100Mbps wireless LAN standard is about to launch a new project, for a 1Gbps WLAN standard.

That would mean gigabit Wi-Fi.

IEEE readies launch of gigabit Wi-Fi project - Network World

Science Debate 2008 worked with the leading organizations listed to craft the top 14 questions the candidates should answer. These questions are broad enough to allow for wide variations in response, but they are specific enough to help guide the discussion toward many of the largest and most important unresolved challenges currently facing the United States.

There are probably many readers interested in this. Both candidates claim they will support increased funding for basic science research.

Sciencedebate 2008

WHAT IF GOOGLE WERE EVIL? Cory Doctorow imagines the worst

Haven't read this yet but it sounds like fun.

From The Magazine : Radar Online : Cory Doctorow imagines a world in which Google is evil

Kirby Plessas (Open source intelligence expert currently working as an independent contractor for the Central Intelligence Agency) at DNI Open Source Conference, 11 September 2008:

"Web sites like Wikileaks are not what interests us but those like YouTube where information is posted by thousands of people unaware of our intense interest in fragments which can be pieced together with many other sources. All media used by people eager to share, chat, reveal data about themselves and, most importantly, about others not aware of what is being publicized about them, are the richest sources."

I couldn't resist:

I loved my Olympus C-740. It has travelled all around the world. The batteries lasted a long time, the photos were excellent..

I'll bet!

DNI Open Source Conference Eyeball

At a press conference this morning at the National Press club in Washington, the Space Solar Alliance for Future Energy (SSAFE) announced a milestone demonstration of the critical technology enabling SBSP:  long-distance, solar-powered wireless power transmission.

The Technology Liberation Front » A Major Milestone for Space-Based Solar Power (SBSP)

We pump absurd quantities of cash into subsidizing corn (we also have a huge tariff on Brazilian sugar cane, incidentally). Over the past 10 years alone, Congress has appropriated more than $50 billion to encourage farmers to grow the stuff. But people don't want to eat $50 billion in subsidized corn. And if the cobs just sat around developing mold, Congress would cut off the spigot. Enter high fructose corn syrup, which sucks up the subsidies and created a world in which calories from a sweet, highly caloric additive have become the cheapest of all energy sources. That's the primary way the syrup contributes to obesity: Not by being more fattening, but by being so heavily subsidized that it makes it far cheaper to sustain yourself on sweetened carbohydrates than on nutritious food. That might be fine if the sweetener were naturally cheap, but instead, taxpayers are funding a concerted effort to flood grocery stores with unnaturally cheap, utterly unhealthy, foods.

Corruption kills.

The truth about corn syrup

Our war is over. Time to come home.

Informed Comment: On the Seventh Anniversary of September 11: Time to Declare the original al-Qaeda Defeated