Lucision is dedicated to providing GSA standards based back office systems for casinos that provide a stable back end for financial and marketing operations. We aim to provide casinos with the ability to make lucid decisions. Our casino reporting systems give casino operators clear visualization of the trends in the data they need to see to make decisions that maximize the profitability of their operation.

This company is run by MemeStreams user Jello. I've looked over their recent business plan, and it appears they have a solid market for the applications they are building. I wish them the best of luck in their endeavors.

Lucision - Back office financial and marketing for casinos

In the aftermath of the Dubai ports dispute, the Bush administration is hiring a Hong Kong conglomerate to help detect nuclear materials inside cargo passing through the Bahamas to the United States and elsewhere.

The administration is negotiating a second no-bid contract for a Philippine company to install radiation detectors in its home country, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press. At dozens of other overseas ports, foreign governments are primarily responsible for scanning cargo.

"Li Ka-Shing is pretty close to a lot of senior leaders of the Chinese government and the Chinese Communist Party," said Larry M. Wortzel, head of a U.S. government commission that studies China security and economic issues. But Wortzel said Hutchison operates independently from Beijing, and he described Li as "a very legitimate international businessman."

Any positive reading would set off alarms monitored simultaneously by Bahamian customs inspectors at Freeport and by U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials working at an anti-terrorism center 800 miles away in northern Virginia. Any alarm would prompt a closer inspection of the cargo, and there are multiple layers of security to prevent tampering, officials said.

Very interesting. This comes on the heels of the Dubai port management row and along with an outcry over the State Department buying computers from Lenovo, the Chinese buyer of IBM's personal computer division.

Li Ka-Shing is a major power in Hong Kong, and owns a large percentage of the country's assets as a whole. Companies, buildings, etc.. His son Richard runs PCCW, the province's major telecom company. As a whole, the Li family in a major power in both Hong Kong and China as a whole.

I think an outright rejection of letting some of these parties get involved in the process of running and securing our ports is missing some of the big picture. Without the cooperation of trading partners, our ports will never be secure. In the case of scanning for radiological weapons, its not all that useful unless it can happen before things get here. Either way, that will require cooperation on the part of foreign powers. In these recent cases, the players at hand are all places that have a very hardcore interest in having both our support in the geo-political realm and in having us as a solid trade and business partner.

Dubai is counting on tourism and being a business hub to be the basis of its economy by 2015. If they don't achieve that goal, things will not be going well for them around that time. This is why they are engaging in insane amounts of unprecedented creative building.

Hong Kong is a business and trade hub where anyone can do busines... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

AP | U.S. Hiring Hong Kong Company to Scan for Nukes

Russia's Federal Security Service closes down Pravda.Ru's Russian version over Danish caricatures.

The Volokh Conspiracy - Pravada's Main Web Page Closed Down by Russian Security Service:

Today, the Chairman FCC stated they support a so-called "tiered Internet" where telcos can change the priority of the packets for other peoples data depending on who pays them.

Martin told attendees at the TelecomNext show that telcos should be allowed to charge web sites whatever they want if those sites want adequate bandwidth.

He threw in his lot with AT&T, Verizon, and the other telcos, who are no doubt salivating at the prospect at charging whatever the market can bear.

If this sounds like extortion that because it is (See Meme). So who is this FCC Chairman and why is he favoring the telecoms?

Martin worked several years for Wiley, Rein, and Fielding, "Rated Top Telecommunications Lobbyists" according to an article on their website. The firm represents the Bells as well as Viacom/CBS, Gannett, Belo, Emmis, Gray Television, and Motorola.

Bush nominated the slimeball lobbyist to become the chairman of the FCC? Martin now chairs the organization he spent years lobbying? You can't get a better example of "Fox guarding the hen house." But all can't be lost! This little clip from the "tiered Internet" article was hopefuly:

[Martin] did throw a bone to those who favor so-called "net neutrality" -- the idea that telcos and other ISPs should not be allowed to limit services or bandwidth, or charge sites extra fees. He said that the FCC "has the authority necessary" to enforce network neutrality violations. He added that it had done so already, when it stepped in to stop an ISP from blocking Vonage VoIP service.

Wow, the FCC did seem to foster VOIP, and why would a guy in the telecom's pocket do that?... oh wait, Kevin Martin didn't do any such thing. Kevin Martin wasn't even AT the FCC when that decision was made. It was the previous chairman, Michael Powell.

Update - My mistake, Kevin Martin was at the FCC during the Vontage VOIP issue. He was serving as one of the five FCC Commissioners. I'm looking up now how he voted on that issue.

Kevin Martin can suck it.

MySpace isn't cool, it isn't hip and it isn't trendy. It represents a cyber trojan horse and the media elite's last gasp effort to reclaim control of the Internet and sink it with a stranglehold of regulation, control and censorship.

Since Rupert Murdoch's $580 Million acquisition of MySpace in July 2005, it has come from total obscurity to now being the 8th most visited website in the world, receiving half as many page hits as Google, despite the fact that on first appearance it looks like a 5-year-old's picture scrap and scribble book.

MySpace is the new mobile phone. If you don't have a MySpace account then you belong to some kind of culturally shunned underclass.

What most of the trendy wendy's remain blissfully unaware of is the fact that MySpace is Rupert Murdoch's battle axe for shaping a future Internet environment whereby electronic dissent, whether it be against corporations or government, will not tolerated and freedom of e-speech will cease to exist.

Oh, I love "the conspiracy" perspective on just about anything. This site is chock full of conspiracy theories. I've explained the origin of my love for conspiracy theories many times before, but its always worth repeating. Conspiracy theories get repeated. Its the nature of the game.. It can't be resisted. It all started when I worked at this gourmet tex-mex place in Belmar, New Jersey called Hell's Kitchen. The owner of this truly great establishment could best be described as a "conspiracy theory router". Everything was open game from government police state plots and tales of black helicopters, to UFOs and the second coming of Christ. The back office of the place was stocked with supplies, firearms, and short wave radios. This back office held all the secrets of the universe, including the most closely guarded secret of the ages: what salsa we used. "The end times are here my friend. The shits going down! What do you want on your taco?"

You name it, I heard about it, at length. Too much length usually. It did wonders to fine tune my bullshit detector. It got to the point where I had to do serious and constant research to keep sanity in check. I truly loved every moment of it.

Good conspiracy theories always have a few things in common.. They start off with something completely plausible and (sometimes) reasonable, even if its an incitement of something. By the end, they wind up some place way off the reservation of reality, but go close enough to the edge every so often to keep it all almost somehow plausible. The bullshit detector is forced to align against many angles of incidence. The conspiracy theory must do this while at the same time avoid introducing any new information. The end result of the message must always be "it is inevitable, and we are completely screwed".

At some point in the middle of the... [ Read More (0.4k in body) ]

MySpace Is The Trojan Horse Of Internet Censorship (Plus, thoughts on conspiracy theories)

A lot of folks have asked me "What went wrong with Friendster? Why is MySpace any different?" I guess i never directly answered that question, even though i've addressed the causes in other talks. Still, i guess it would be helpful to piece some of it together and directly attend to this question.

* Social technologies succeed when they fit into the social lives and practices of those who engage with the technology.
* People use the social technologies that all of their friends are using.
* Social technologies need benevolent dictators who love their constituents.
* It's not all about productivity.
* It is not about technological perfection.
* Is it all a fad?

This essay by Danah Boyd is worth a read. Danah is a Berkley PhD student who has been watching this space very closely for quite some time now and has always shown some good insight. Also take a look at the followup post where she talks about the term "super publics" in the context of traditional communications theory.

Friendster lost steam. Is MySpace just a fad?

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to toll free America..

Sprint + Asterisk = unlimited domestic phone calls for $68 a month

The French bill, the implementation of a European Union
directive, calls for digital songs to be playable on all
devices. As part of the law proposal, companies that use
copyright protection measures would have to supply "the
information essential to interoperability" to those interested
at no other charge than the cost of delivering the data.

"IPod sales will likely increase as users freely load
their iPods with 'interoperable' music, which cannot be
adequately protected", Apple said. "Free movies for iPods
should not be far behind in what will rapidly become a state-
sponsored culture of piracy."

Microsoft wouldn't comment on the bill.

"The recording industry fully supports interoperability because it is important to consumers to have the ability to move songs between their various listening devices," John Kennedy, Chairman of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, said in an e-mailed statement late yesterday.

"Interoperability is crucial to attracting consumers to buy music online, but it should not be at the cost of endangering the technology used to enable legitimate offerings of music and services online," Kennedy said.

This should be ironic, but its not..

Bloomberg.com | Apple Says France's Copyright Bill Promotes Piracy

"As we declared, our strong revolutionary might put in place all measures to counter possible U.S. pre-emptive strike," the spokesman said, according to the Korean Central News Agency. "Pre-emptive strike is not the monopoly of the United States."

Last week, the communist country warned that it had the right to launch a pre-emptive strike, saying it would strengthen its war footing before joint South Korea-U.S. military exercises scheduled for this weekend.

If it becomes necessary to engage in a shooting conflict with North Korea, it's not going to be hard to back up why it's necessary. If these bozos didn't have enough artillery aimed at Seoul to take it out three times, they would be toast by now.

The spokesman also said it would be a "wise" step for the United States to cooperate on nuclear issues with North Korea in the same way it does with India.

"If the U.S. is truly interested in finding a realistic way of resolving the Korean Peninsula nuclear issue, it would be wise for it to come out on the path of nuclear cooperation with us," he said.

I seriously want some of that North Korean crack. It's gotta be some over the top stuff to cause these DPRK officials to think that North Korea and India exhibit the same level of good will necessary to enter into a nuclear development agreement. Reality isn't even in the equation. Did these people skip over the news about our approach to Pakistan on the same issue? Pakistan has better odds of getting a nuclear development treaty than North Korea ever will.. North Korea's leadership is completely bonkers. It's just preaching to its own brainwashed populous.

Asia is in a period of unparalleled economic boom... Meanwhile, the DPRK's people are starving to death, abused and tortured, and completely brainwashed into thinking none of it is their leadership's fault. This continues to just be flat out sad and pathetic. It shouldn't be possible. It's human tragedy of an all to surreal level.

Guardian Unlimited | North Korea Suggests It Can Strike U.S. First

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