EcoDesignz aspires to join the growing movement toward reducing the dependence on dwindling timber resources by producing and making available to the public high quality residential and commercial furnishings and accessories produced entirely from bamboo.
Due to recent technological advancements, it is now possible to convert raw bamboo culms into more conventional lumber and plywood such that it can be used to build virtually anything that traditionally has been made from wood. Our experience has shown that bamboo products are highly appreciated because not only does their unique grain and color add warmth and beauty not found in most hardwood products, but more importantly bamboos' incredibly fast growth cycle makes it an environmentally sound and sustainable alternative choice for almost anything made from wood, plastic or metal. And bamboos' inherent strength and hardness actually makes it a better option for many products such as tables, doors and flooring.

Bamboo Furniture For A Sustainable Future

Until now, physicists who wanted to understand how electrons behaved at the nanoscale needed to choose between instruments which had good spatial resolution (down to tens of nanometers or below) or fast time resolution (down to picoseconds), but not both. But researchers at the Ecole Polytechnique F餩rale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland have developed a new machine able of tracking electrons at trillionths of a second. This system can work with any semiconductor and may lead to new discoveries in physics of nanoscale phenomena.
This system took four years of development to a team led by BenoDeveaud-Pl餲an of EPFL's Laboratory of Quantum Optoelectronics (LOEQ). Here is what the researchers did.

Inside a quantum dot ....

Extortionists now have a new type of victim to pick on: podcasters. U.S. podcaster Eric Marcus has fallen prey to a hijacker who has diverted his really simple syndication (RSS) feed and is allegedly demanding money to release it. Marcus, who runs the Vegan.com site and produces the Erik's Diner podcasts, is looking for legal redress.

A podcast is audio content that is distributed to listeners over the Internet through an RSS feed. According to press reports, Marcus discovered that downloads of his podcast had suddenly diminished after he had gradually won an audience of 1,500 regular listeners.
Marcus found that Yahoo has an RSS listing for his podcast on its podcasts.yahoo.com directory, but that the listing directs potential visitors to podkeyword.com rather than to vegan.com. He also discovered that Apple's iTunes online music store associates the podkeyword.com Web address with the Erik's Diner podcast.

Podcaster Falls Prey to RSS Hijacking

Beware the privateers! They whisper sweetly of fantastic new services they will provide – a faster Internet, better quality, even medical alerts for consumers….and blah-de-blah. Their unspoken agenda, however, is to convert the open Internet commons into a pay-for-performance marketplace. The companies who control the “pipes” of the Internet – i.e., the telephone and cable TV companies – are starting to make their move.
It’s imperative that we pay close attention to these plans – and register our objections to Congress and the companies themselves.

At a briefing for reporters and industry analysts yesterday, the chief technology officer of BellSouth Corp. testified that Internet service providers should be able to sell higher-quality or priority services to certain websites. We knew this battle would soon arrive, but now we can see the puffs of smoke coming from their cannons. (See Jonathan Krim’s story in the Washington Post.)

William L. Smith told a House subcommittee that BellSouth should be able to charge companies for loading their websites faster than others, or for assuring that a voice-over-Internet service has higher quality sound. If network traffic got heavy, BellSouth should be able to sell guaranteed quality of service for favored types of “data packets” – say, streaming TV – while everyone else could suffer delays or degradation in transmission.

Smith tried to make all of this sound eminently reasonable. As he put it, "If I go to the airport, I can buy a coach standby ticket or a first-class ticket. In the shipping business, I can get two-day air or six-day ground.”

But if we follow the logic of market-segmentation and price discrimination, it ends up converting this most precious open commons, the Internet, into an inequitable marketplace, with everything that that implies. It degrades the most fundamental virtue of the Internet – open access on an equal basis – and installs a top-down, seller-dominated system.

Sound familiar? Of course: It’s cable TV. It’s Prodigy and CompuServe. It’s the pop music biz. We’ve been there before, and everyone knows that it sucks.

If BellSouth were to be able to charge Google for priority speed in transmitting its search engine results, for example, then - poof! – only the Big Guys would be able to compete at the highest levels. Any newcomer with a great idea suddenly would suddenly face a huge, insuperable disadvantage. So much for the entrepreneurial revolution made possible by the Internet commons.

Read more...

BellSouth’s Secret Dream: Turn the Internet into Cable TV

"Animator Saiman Chow created this wild claymated Hello Kitty vs Video Game Robot film for the 30th anniversary Hello Kitty Exhibtion held in Hong Kong. Needless to say, the Kitty kicks ass."

Claymation Hello Kitty kicks videogame monster's ass

At first glance, Cisco’s AON (Application Oriented Networking) looks like a brilliant idea. Essentially, it proposes to suck all manner of security, administrative, and even business policy functions into its routers and switches. That looks as if it should benefit everyone – especially existing and prospective Cisco customers – and might even grease the wheels for quicker and easier adoption of SOA.

But it’s by no means clear that the rest of us should uncritically welcome “putting intelligence into the network”. One of the main reasons for the Internet’s success has been its profound indifference to the content of the packets it transports. Compromising on the hallowed principle of “dumb pipes” could crack open Pandora’s box – indeed, several boxes.

In Cisco’s words, AON “makes it possible to embed intelligence capabilities into the network”. Obviously this is a gross exaggeration: all it really does is to teach Cisco’s network devices a bunch of new rote tricks. Any intelligence involved must come from the developers, security specialists and sysadmins who write the rules (no doubt with plenty of help from Cisco’s Advanced Services, which will go to boost AON’s gross margins).

At the marketing level, AON really is a work of genius. It presses every hot button, leaves no fashionable acronym unmentioned, and on top of all that it promises to align IT with business, and cut costs, quickly and with little effort. Specifically, it is said to support Web services, SOA, BPM, and EDA, while supercharging BI, BAM, and RFID. It also helps companies to ensure compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, Gramm-Leach-Bliley, and BASEL II. It’s fast, secure, selective, visible, cheap (well, relatively) – and it slices, dices and rices. What’s not to like?

Of course, the primary beneficiary of AON is meant to be Cisco itself. Despite its boast that “The Cisco name has become synonymous with the Internet”, the San Jose giant’s 85 per cent share of the router market in the late 1990s has dropped to somewhere between half and two thirds, depending on which segments you look at. Rivals like Juniper and Alcatel are winning sales and slicing into Cisco’s dominant position.

Read more...

Cisco’s AON: Jeeves in a router or a box of evils?

The U.S. secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, will fly into a storm of criticism Monday as she begins a four-country swing through Europe amid mounting outrage over allegations that the United States has conducted covert counterterrorism missions on the Continent.

Accusations that the United States has snatched terrorism suspects from European streets, operated secret detention facilities, and used airports as stopover points for CIA planes transferring captives have caused a furor.

The charges have provoked parliamentary inquiries, caused close U.S. allies to issue indignant demands for information, and triggered a spate of criminal investigations.

Most of the allegations are speculative, but they have made for shrill headlines from Portugal to Poland in recent days and stoked anti-U.S. anger on the Continent to levels not seen since the invasion of Iraq.

The European Union's top justice official warned last week that any member state found to have permitted secret U.S. jails on its territory could be stripped of its voting rights in the organization.

European storm awaits Rice on CIA allegations...

Swaziland, with the world's highest rate of HIV, cut Aids day events, and South Africa's health minister publicly refused to back anti-retroviral drugs.
US President George W Bush pledged new funds and called for decisive action. The EU stressed the need for effective measures to prevent the disease.
More than 40m people are infected with HIV/Aids, according to the UN.
"The lessons of nearly 25 years into the Aids epidemic are clear. Investments made in HIV prevention break the cycle of new infections," said Peter Piot, executive director of UNAids.
"By making these investments, each and every country can reverse the spread of Aids."

Controversy clouds World Aids Day

believe that there is no God. I'm beyond atheism. Atheism is not believing in God. Not believing in God is easy -- you can't prove a negative, so there's no work to do. You can't prove that there isn't an elephant inside the trunk of my car. You sure? How about now? Maybe he was just hiding before. Check again. Did I mention that my personal heartfelt definition of the word "elephant" includes mystery, order, goodness, love and a spare tire?

So, anyone with a love for truth outside of herself has to start with no belief in God and then look for evidence of God. She needs to search for some objective evidence of a supernatural power. All the people I write e-mails to often are still stuck at this searching stage. The atheism part is easy.

But, this "This I Believe" thing seems to demand something more personal, some leap of faith that helps one see life's big picture, some rules to live by. So, I'm saying, "This I believe: I believe there is no God."

Having taken that step, it informs every moment of my life. I'm not greedy. I have love, blue skies, rainbows and Hallmark cards, and that has to be enough. It has to be enough, but it's everything in the world and everything in the world is plenty for me. It seems just rude to beg the invisible for more. Just the love of my family that raised me and the family I'm raising now is enough that I don't need heaven. I won the huge genetic lottery and I get joy every day.

Believing there's no God means I can't really be forgiven except by kindness and faulty memories. That's good; it makes me want to be more thoughtful. I have to try to treat people right the first time around.

Believing there's no God stops me from being solipsistic. I can read ideas from all different people from all different cultures. Without God, we can agree on reality, and I can keep learning where I'm wrong. We can all keep adjusting, so we can really communicate. I don't travel in circles where people say, "I have faith, I believe this in my heart and nothing you can say or do can shake my faith." That's just a long-winded religious way to say, "shut up," or another two words that the FCC likes less. But all obscenity is less insulting than, "How I was brought up and my imaginary friend means more to me than anything you can ever say or do." So, believing there is no God lets me be proven wrong and that's always fun. It means I'm learning something.

Believing there is no God means the suffering I've seen in my family, and indeed all the suffering in the world, isn't caused by an omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent force that isn't bothered to help or is just testing us, but rather something we all may be able to help others with in the future. No God means the possibility of less suffering in the future.

Believing there is no God gives me more room for belief in family, people, love, truth, beauty, sex, Jell-O and all the other things I can prove and that make this life the best life I will ever have.

There Is No God By Penn Jillette

The American poet Wallace Stevens died 50 years ago this year. Commentator Jay Keyser says Stevens wrote the best short poem in the English language, "The Snow Man." Stevens marries what the poem is about with the way that it is built.

Wallace Stevens: 'The Snow Man'