Andrew Odlyzko: "I find the prospects of smaller networks being able to bypass the Tier Ones fascinating. The development of tools [that do this] is also very interesting."

The COOK Report On Internet

"Anyone who designs a new enhancement for the Internet should analyze the tussles that it will trigger, and the tussles in the surrounding context, and consider how they can be managed to ensure that the enhancement succeeds. As noted above, a powerful force is the tussle of competition. Protocol design, by creating opportunities for competition, can impose a direction on evolution."

Well, duh... The IETF has been "engineering" social directions for decades. Today it is almost entirely under the control of the equipment vendors, and the protocols produced (which get worse every year) are mostly designed to protect vendor interests (this is at the expense of working properly). Its nice to have a paper to reference, though. There are some people in the IETF who still think they are doing academic work which exists in a social vacuum and this is something you can hit them over the head with.

IP protocols should be designed with social and economic conflicts in mind

"George Bush has moved to distance himself from his vice-president after it was revealed that a sabre-rattling speech on Iraq by Dick Cheney was made without clearing key points with the White House. "

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | White House in disarray over Cheney speech

"The Bush administration is not going to sit there and let these groups kill millions of poor people in southern Africa through their ideological campaign," Mr. Natsios said on the sidelines of the World Summit on Sustainable Development."

Greens accused of helping Africans starve -- The Washington Times

"All of the violations cited by ICANN were Whois infractions. Although registrars are not obligated to verify the accuracy of the information in their Whois databases, under their contracts with ICANN they must remedy any incorrect entries brought to their attention. "

The government wants accurate names and addresses associated with all domain registrations and available without a supeona.

ICANN pressures Verisign to clean up whois database

"I do believe that the threat posed by the current Iraqi regime is real, I believe that it is in the UK's national interest that this is addressed, just as dealing with the terrorists after September 11 was in our national interest even though the actual terrorist act took place thousands of miles away on the streets of New York, not in London."

CNN.com - Blair vows to publish Iraq dossier - September 3, 2002

...Nick Bostrom, PhD, is a Lecturer at the Department of Philosophy at Yale University."

There is no spoon.

The Simulation Argument

This is kind of fun. You can do a hell of a lot with multi-media in an educational setting. I found multi-media animations of filter functions in DSP class to be incredibly insightful. Calculus is really a poor way of explaining things that are really very intuitive if you can see them in action. There is a lot of distance we can get out of something that seems so simple.

Dissect a Frog!

The slew of companies caught red-handed in this year of corporate sleaze face potentially colossal legal claims, but they may enjoy pleasant reprieves next year — huge tax breaks from Uncle Sam.
...
The IRS’s conclusion: “The amounts paid by Taxpayer pursuant to the settlement are currently deductible.”
...
“People are going to be upset when they hear companies can deduct these expenses,”

Hrm, I'm not. Corporations are not people. Corporations do not pay taxes on expenses. The reason for this is that eliminating specific deductions would allow the government to incent corporations to operate a certain way, thus leading to effective centralized economic control. This is a fundamental feature of capitalism. If the agencies that are levying fines don't think that the fines are punitive enough on their own, they should RAISE the fines rather then setting a precident that will lead to central control of the economy.

Firms accused of chicanery could get IRS tax break

Boundary Functions is realized as a set of lines projected from overhead onto the floor which divide each person in the gallery from one another. With one person in the gallery there is no response. When two are present, there is a single line drawn halfway between them segmenting the room into two regions. As each person moves, this line dynamically changes, maintaining an even distance between the two. With more than two people, the floor becomes divided into cellular regions, each with the mathematical quality that all space within the region is closer to the person inside than any other.

The title of the piece, Boundary Functions, refers to Theodore Kaczynski's 1967 Phd thesis at the University of Michigan. Better known as the Unabomber, Kaczynski is a pathological example of the conflict between the individual and society - the conflict and compromise of engaging in society versus solitude and individuality uncompromised by the thoughts or presence of others. The thesis itself is an example of the implicit antisocial quality of some scientific discourse, mired in language and symbols impenetrable to the vast majority of society. In this installation, a mathematical abstraction is made instantly knowable by dynamic visual representation.

Boundary Functions