Rattle wrote:
Don't miss that privacy policy link. Think of what Google could do.

Security is Surveillance.
Privacy is Publicity.
War is Peace.
Freedom is Slavery.
Google is Good.

RE: Google Secure Access: Frequently Asked Questions

Sad news, Overcode passed away on Saturday, September 17th.

More information and a guestbook is on his home page http://overcode.yak.net

Valhalla welcomes its latest hacker. John, may you Rest in Peace.

John's War with Melanoma is over

In order to have a greater impact in the world, particularly in failed in failing states, our new Defence Policy Statement will increase the capacity of the Canadian Forces to participate in overseas operations.

The addition of significant new equipment and five thousand Regular Force personnel – the bulk of which will go to the army – will essentially double the capacity of our land forces to undertake challenging international operations anywhere in the world.

This is an important datapoint with regard to the outlook for the War on Terror in the medium term future.

Canada is engaged in a major strategic effort to restructure their armed forces for offensive military operations. Canada's roll in Afghanistan has been converted from policing Kandahar to relieving US forces in the south facing a beefed up Taliban that is getting equipment and training from Iraq. They are also running prominent terror attack response exercises.

A related datapoint concerns rumblings that Japan may follow.

Canada has not committed a large military force to an offensive operation since the Korean War. They usually provide funding and specialists, but not large standing forces. The fact that they are restructuring and beefing up directly reflects a feeling by their leadership that they will be involved in large military conflicts outside of Canada in the future. Insofaras Canada does not engage in conflicts that aren't approved by the UN security council this means we're not talking about Iraq.

Canada beefing up military for future offensive operations

Jared Diamond, Ph. D. is trained in physiology and membrane biophysics, and well known as a groundbreaking ecologist and evolutionary biologist.

Jared Diamond is on NPR in Atlanta tonight.

Public Broadcasting Atlanta

"Without a change on the level of ideas, any reconciliation of Islam and democracy is not going to come about.

Unless you fight out that battle on the plain of ideas and say it is perfectly legitimate to have a more liberal version of religion, then I think ultimately you will have long-term problems having genuine democracy in a Muslim country.

We should not minimise the fact that there is a conflict of ideas at the present, not with Islam as a religion but with particular interpretations of Islam."

There are some interesting quotes from Fukuyama in here, unfortunately spun together by a reporter who is trying to push him into a partisan pigeonhole. I don't think Fukuyama is a neoconservative any more then I think he is a democrat. His thinking is driven by observations and not ideaologies.

On a somewhat unrelated tangent, it strikes me that the fundamental problem with ideaologies is that people have a tendancy to prefer ideas that are philisophically pure to ideas that that actually work well for people in practice. This is because philiophical purity is easier to accept then messy reality with its endless caveats. Once you've got an ideaology you can reach a conclusion on any issue based on how that ideaology informs you to think about the matter rather then based on the actual realities of the matter itself. This fallacy seems the core problem at all ends of the spectrum. It infects communists, fundamentalists, and libertarians alike. Most idealogical (and partisan) commentators frame their points of view as "the other guy's ideology doesn't work in practice, so we should prefer the most pure form of my ideaology." In order to move past this we must get people to observe that ideaologies don't work. In order to do that, there must be a word for the ideaological fallacy. What is that word? Does anyone here know?

Francis Fukuyama: The acceptable face of the neo-cons? | Al-Ahram Weekly | Profile

janelane wrote:
In my "Engineering Design" class, we have to figure out what the world of 2020 will be like.

Brilliant. This is the sort of question we all should be asking. I'd like to see the final results.

communication: No one will have a POTS line. You'll have a digital network connection in your house, maybe ip6, all voice traffic will be carried over that digital network, your cellphone will be like a sidekick, it might have thin parts that fold out to make the realestate bigger when you need it, it will use your home network when at home and other networks when not at home. It will be able to project content onto the wall. Long Distance will be included in the price of whatever you pay for network access. Its possible that the internet will submerge into a MMORPG style virtual reality environment, but it remains to be seen. There might be a standards war over that in 15 years.

The media industry will be quite blurred with blogs and independent music/film. The copyright battles will be near their peak at that time. Movies, music, and news will come as often from proam indies then from "industry," but you'll turn to the same source for both kinds of information and it may be hard to tell them apart. You'll have internet radio in your car. Reputation systems will matter more then editors.

Comptuer security problems will constantly plauge what we'd today call telecom and television infrastucture.

South Korea will do for communciations technology what Japan did for manufacturing in the 80s.

information availability: You'll search wikipedia instead of searching google. You'll pretty much have everything instantly available to a device that fits in your pocket. We're almost there today. A lot of the good information will be produced by proams.

geographic location: What do you want? Your digital devices will know where they are. Your cellphone will easily map your location, show you where you want to go, and give you directions. You'll be able to leave virtual notes for people connected to physical locations, like a bulletin board connected to every bar. Often, the way to get news about major events will be to ask an internet service what pictures were submitted from a particular physical location at a particular time. Everyone will have devices in their cars which report their driving habits to their insurance company, in exchange for a cost break for most. Some orwellian use of this technology will go on, particularly with regard to minors.

government structure: This is a US centric response: I don't see many structural changes occuring in a 15 year timespan, other then the final nails in the coffin of the idea that the commerce clause restricts federal authority. Politics will increasingly be influenced by internet based open information sources like blogs and wikipedia. Voters will be more informed about particular issues. You will see more ballot refer... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

RE: The Year 2020

Getting started, you'll need:
- A hampster
- Tape
- A knife

Well, it looks like I rolled a 20, so you bitches can suck it!

Turn Your Hamster into a Fighting Machine

rattle says:

Heat-tempered aluminum shell has the strength of steel at only one quarter the weight
Sturdy triple-digit combination lock for superior security
Easy to customize, high-density foam padding
Two to four key locks
Extra strength hinges withstand pulling of over 400 pounds
Sturdy drawbolt latches
Innovative neoprene gasket keeps out dust and moisture, providing unrivaled protection
Manufactured in the USA

I'm fast becoming a big fan of Zero Halliburton cases, mostly due to the one I've borrowed from Decius. This one might qualify as dual use. I could envision it working well for other weapons, such as guitars. I think this has made my want list. Why the hell do I always seem to develop such expensive tastes? The exceptions don't add up to the desired. There is just something about a brief case that can stop a carbine round that's, well, sexy..

Zero Halliburton - Double Long Case

The White House has approved NASA's plan to replace the nation's aging fleet of winged spaceships with a new generation of vehicles meant to carry human explorers back to the Moon and onward to Mars and beyond, aerospace experts said yesterday.

White House Backs NASA Plan for Vehicles

The better world is one in which we don't need to seek permission or risk punishment to do cool stuff that makes the world a better place. In the early days of the internet, a lot of people felt that we'd found that better world. Thanks to the internet's open protocols, many of the most useful innovations, from the web to instant messaging to internet telephony, emerged without developers needing anyone's permission to run their cool new code.

But under a permission-only legal regime, the Katrinalist.net volunteers would have had to contact every site with listing data and ask for authorization to use the information first. With dozens of sites popping up in the days following the storm, getting permission would have taken a lot of time -- if the site owners could even be reached and convinced of the merit of the idea in the first place.

On the internet, having to ask permission first can kill the creation of a useful new tool.

The law should treat the internet as open by default -- a public resource rather than a gated community. This doesn't mean that we can't protect our networked computers or data with copyright law, passwords, firewalls or perhaps even terms-of-service agreements. But rather than asking whether a user obtained permission to access computers connected to the internet, the law should ask whether the owner did anything to prevent public access.

Jennifer Granick has an article on Wired talking about risks to the open Internet, using the situation surrounding KatrinaList.net as an example. According to a post on her blog, they have already received a cease and desist letter from one of the sites they are collecting information from.

Jennifer is going to be writing columns for Wired bi-weekly. She is one of the best cyberlaw people in the world, so I expect them to be good. Feel the good karma..

Wired News: Open Internet, We Hardly Knew Ye