Samuel Pisar - Out of Auschwitz - NYTimes.com
... those of us who survived have a duty to transmit to humankind the memory of what we endured in body and soul, to tell our children that the fanaticism and violence that nearly destroyed our universe have the power to enflame theirs, too. The fury of the Haitian earthquake, which has taken more than 200,000 lives, teaches us how cruel nature can be to man. The Holocaust, which destroyed a people, teaches us that nature, even in its cruelest moments, is benign in comparison with man when he loses his moral compass and his reason.
After so much death, a groundswell of compassion and solidarity for victims — all victims, whether from natural disasters, racial hatred, religious intolerance or terrorism — occasionally manifests itself, as it has in recent days.
These actions stand in contrast to those moments when we have failed to act; they remind us, on this dark anniversary, of how often we remain divided and confused, how in the face of horror we hesitate, vacillate, like sleepwalkers at the edge of the abyss. Of course, they remind us, too, that we have managed to stave off the irrevocable; that our chances for living in harmony are, thankfully, still intact.
Even if we found aliens, how would we communicate? -Hear that Zorgonian containment module 34141434? You can turn off the signal scrambler system now ...
News, TV & Radio - The Independent
... If we do detect signals of extraterrestrial intelligence, one question posed by scientist attending the conference is how to cope with the public response. Will it result in fear, mass panic and riots?
Professor Albert Harrison of the University of California, Davis, believes this is unlikely, based on what he calls “historical prototypes”. In any case, social policies could be used to ease humanity into the “postcontact” era, he said.
“Many people already believe that extraterrestrial intelligence exists and are confident of their own ability to withstand the discovery but doubt other peoples’ abilities to cope,” Professor Harrison said.
“It is easy to imagine scenarios resulting in widespread psychological disintegration and social chaos, but historical prototypes, reactions to false alarms and survey results suggest that the predominant response to the discovery of microwave transmission from light years away is likely to be equanimity, perhaps even delight,” he said....
... I don't think AT&T is getting a taste of the $629. I've never heard of that happening before, and Apple has way too much leverage against AT&T. I suspect the iPad price plans were part of some larger negotiation. (e.g., I wouldn't be surprised to start hearing rumors that AT&T's exclusive contract is extended.)
Also, don't forget that Apple gets a cut of your monthly iPhone bill. Apple/AT&T negotiations probably focused on that more than anything. My guess is that Apple reduced their cut in order to get a monthly price that they thought consumers would tolerate for a new and unproven device/market...
When a colleague asked why the iPad runs iPhone OS rather than OS X a wee bulb went off. Kind of like those little bittie bulbs that came with a camera flash in 1967.
The iPad with iPhone OS is the second coming of the original Macintosh. It runs an OS that anyone can use, including the 50% of the US that doesn’t really engage with the net or with personal computers. This is the OS for all those people who keep every photograph they’ve taken on a 4GB flash card in their camera.
Yes, I know the first Mac soon became far more complex. Twenty-five years ago the personal computer was growing into a geek market. Satisfying that market meant the platform became more and more powerful. That increasing power pleased geeks like me --- for a while. Even we, however, noticed that it was a lot of work to keep these machines happy.
Around the same time, a poor grad student in 1986 accidentally unleashed an internet worm. We know what came after. Security issues combined with platform complexity to give us a world in which non-geeks shouldn’t touch a connected computer.
The iPad and the App Store though, that can work for most anyone. The dependency on iTunes will fade away over time – look soon for online backup. I assume there will be viruses, but the iPhone world will be a very tough, locked down, target.
Chrome OS will be playing in the same big field – non-geek computing.
The geek environments won’t go away immediately, but the end is in sight. Ten years from now we may say that the iPad killed OS X.
My first iPad impressions were cautiously positive. I think I missed the real target. The iPad isn’t aimed at Microsoft or Google or even the Macbook. It’s aimed at everything.
Fifty years ago, a young astronomer named Frank Drake pointed a radio telescope at nearby stars in the hope of picking up a signal from an alien civilization. Thus began one of the boldest scientific projects in history: the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). But after a half-century of scanning the skies, astronomers have little to report but an eerie silence, eerie because many scientists are convinced that the universe is teeming with life. The problem could be that we've been looking in the wrong place, at the wrong time, and in the wrong way. In this lecture Professor Davies will offer a new and exciting roadmap for the future of SETI, arguing that we need to be far more expansive in our efforts, by questioning existing ideas of what form an alien intelligence might take, how it might try to communicate with us, and how we should respond if we ever do make contact.
Professor Paul Davies is a British-born theoretical physicist, cosmologist, astrobiologist and best-selling author. He is Director of the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science and Co-Director of the Cosmology Initiative, at Arizona State University...
On Windows there's Home Server, which is about as carefree a centralized/networked backup solution as you can get.The Apple equivalent to Home Server is Time Capsule. I would like to see Apple do a more complete backup/media server/file server home server solution.
Google’s getting a lot of flack for a less than spectacular launch of the gPhone (Nexus One). I’m not too worried about that, I think they’ll get it working. I’m also still optimistic about the Chrome OS netbook – though if it costs over $200 I’ve got yet another public mea culpa waiting.
On the other tentacle, I am getting bad feelings about two Google services I have long relied on – Search and Blogger. I think the problems may be related.
Blogger is the proverbial coal mine canary. It is clearly not thriving. There’s still no iPhone or DROID app for posting or editing, there’s an undocumented and unfixed 5000 post limit, there’s no mobile-optimized version of blog pages, the BlogThis bookmarklet was never updated to support categories, the rich text editor has many longstanding bugs, there’s no spam detection on comments, the Blogger in Draft blog was silent from Nov 28 through Jan 20 (yesterday!) and so on.
Why isn’t Google investing in Blogger? My best guess would be some mix of
Several items on my speculative list implicate search index poisoning problems. These “Search engine optimization” scams degrade search results, which leads to a spiral of click fraud and declining ad word revenue.
Which brings me to the bigger Google problem. The quality of the search results is deteriorating. On technical topics that I search on, I’m getting a large number of junk web sites. I have to use my Google custom searches to find good results. When I search on hard-to-find answers that I know I’ve addressed in my own ad-free tech blog, I don’t get any useful hits at all. It’s not just that I don’t find my marvelous stuff – I don’t find any answers anywhere.
In several instances, Bing has done better. In particular, Bing seems to find fewer splogs and fraudulent ad-heavy pages – perhaps because the scummy SEO gang is still optimizing for Google. (Bing’s time will come.)
Google is only as good as their search engine, and that engine is under relentless attack from the same emergent attacks that killed usenet and severely wounded email. At the moment, the parasites are winning – and threatening to kill their current host.
Google needs a winning response. They’ve got bigger problems than lousy phone service.
Update 1/21/10: See comments for a response from one of Bloggers Product Managers, it's an encouraging rebuttal. Per that comment I corrected the name of the Blogger in Draft blog; the official Blogger blog is http://buzz.blogger.com.
Mac OS X Server supports both traditional UNIX file permissions and access control lists, giving administrators an unprecedented level of control over file and folder permissions. With access control lists, any file object can be assigned multiple users and groups, including groups within groups. Each file object can also be assigned to allow and deny permissions, as well as assign a granular set of permissions for administrative control, read, write, and delete operations. Mac OS X Server supports a file permission inheritance model, ensuring that user permissions are inherited when files are moved to the server and rewritten when files are copied to the server.
CARE: Donate Now:
... CARE is deploying additional emergency team members to the devastated city of Port-au-Prince in Haiti, where the worst earthquake in 200 years destroyed houses and left thousands homeless...CARE will use your money well. Recommended.
Official Google Blog: A new approach to ChinaThis may be the end of Google's services in China. We should expect their share price to fall in the morning. Google's "evil score" has now dropped to the lowest possible level for a public corporation.
Like many other well-known organizations, we face cyber attacks of varying degrees on a regular basis. In mid-December, we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google. However, it soon became clear that what at first appeared to be solely a security incident--albeit a significant one--was something quite different.
First, this attack was not just on Google. As part of our investigation we have discovered that at least twenty other large companies from a wide range of businesses--including the Internet, finance, technology, media and chemical sectors--have been similarly targeted. We are currently in the process of notifying those companies, and we are also working with the relevant U.S. authorities.
Second, we have evidence to suggest that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. Based on our investigation to date we believe their attack did not achieve that objective. Only two Gmail accounts appear to have been accessed, and that activity was limited to account information (such as the date the account was created) and subject line, rather than the content of emails themselves...
... We launched Google.cn in January 2006 in the belief that the benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results. At the time we made clear that "we will carefully monitor conditions in China, including new laws and other restrictions on our services. If we determine that we are unable to achieve the objectives outlined we will not hesitate to reconsider our approach to China."
These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered--combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web--have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.
The decision to review our business operations in China has been incredibly hard, and we know that it will have potentially far-reaching consequences. We want to make clear that this move was driven by our executives in the United States, without the knowledge or involvement of our employees in China who have worked incredibly hard to make Google.cn the success it is today. We are committed to working responsibly to resolve the very difficult issues raised.
Borna Virus Discovered in Human Genome - Carl Zimmer - NYTimes.comIn the physican universe dark matter is only about 70% of all matter, but in humans "dark DNA" is 97%+ of all DNA. So our DNA is about 2% protein coding, 8% retrovirus, and 90% other - including non-retroviral virus origin and "structural". (Yes, I know that's "four times" and Zimer says "seven times" - his numbers are more likely correct.)
...Fossil viruses are also illuminating human evolution. Scientists estimate that 8.3 percent of the human genome can be traced back to retrovirus infections. To put that in perspective, that’s seven times more DNA than is found in all the 20,000 protein-coding genes in the human genome.
... a virus protein called syncitin ... is essential for placentas to develop. Cells push the protein to their surface, where it lets them latch onto other cells, fusing together to create a special layer through which nutrients can pass from mother to child. The protein got its start on viruses, which use it to latch onto host cells and fuse to them, allowing their genes to slip in.But recent research has revealed an intriguing new twist to our viral legacy. It turns out that the viral surface protein in question has a second job. It also tamps down the immune system of its host...
Bubbleheads II - Grasping Reality with Opposable Thumbs:--...S&P 500, June 30, 2000 close: 1455
S&P 500, December 31, 2009 close: 1145
Consumer Price Index, November 2009/June 2000: 1.26
Real price decline: -37.5%...
Once it was Maracanda, ruled by Alexandere. Centuries later, before Rome fell, the Persian speaking Sogdians flourished there, at the heart of the a historically trading empire that lasted from before 300 CE until after 700 CE. They were the traders of the Silk Road, and the conduits for Buddhism and much knowledge of China, India, Asia and places West.
Later their city became a place of Arab history - Samarkand.
Today Samarkand is in Uzbekistan ...
It's a hike, but it's a city of about 400,000 and it's open for tourism. In Google earth you can see their photos.
You can learn the story of the Sogdians, and a surprising amount of China's endless story by listening to ...
Most of what we know of this people comes from a small cache of lost Sogdian mail, and the stories the Chinese told of the them. If not for that accident, we'd know almost nothing.BBC - Radio 4 - In Our Time - The Silk Road
In 1900, a Taoist monk came upon a cave near the Chinese town of Dunhuang. Inside, he found thousands of ancient manuscripts. They revealed a vast amount of evidence about the so-called ‘Silk Road’: the great trade routes which had stretched from Central Asia, through desert oases, to China, throughout the first millennium....
I’ve not written much about the underwear bomber, mostly because the inanity of the public discussion is so depressing.
Schneier, as usual, has the most rational coverage. He points out that even our inevitably imperfect security measures do increase the challenges of bomb preparation, and thus the probability that an attack will fail. So even though metal-free recto-vaginal or intra-abdominal bombs can bypass millimeter-wave scanners or backscatter x-ray these devices will still increase the cost of a successful attack. (Though there are probably more cost-effective measures to increase security.)
One lesson from this attack is that we need to make an understanding of positive predictive value a requirement for high school graduation. It’s also clear that the controversial ridiculous fashion for teaching Latin is a major distraction from a desperate need to teach logic.
Lessons aside, I think the response of the Obama administration is interesting to watch. They clearly know that there’s not much that could have been done to stop this attack, and they know that they have to placate our spine-free hysterical nation. More interestingly, it looks like they’re trying to use this to attack the incompetent intelligence network we’ve inherited – even though, in this case, even a very good network would have failed.
It’s the equivalent of jailing a mobster for tax evasion when you can’t get ‘em for murder and mayhem.
PS. I’m so glad our heroic savior is a leftie foreigner who makes “low budget films”. At least we’ve been spared the usual celebratory histrionics.
Update: On further reflection, inspired by a polite comment, I was a bit harsh on the teaching of Latin. I do think there are substantially better uses of educational resources, but "ridiculous" was unmerited.
Update b: Schneier has summarized his recommendations. Perfect, as usual.
Dear Visitor from 2020:
I know you feel things haven't progressed very far, but you really need to take a look at how we did communications in 2010.
Believe it or not, in 2010 Google's Gmail could open 3 windows that looked like this ...
One was for something called email. Another was for something called "Chat" or "Instant Messaging". A third was for something called "SMS" or "Texting".
They all looked rather the same and did rather similar things, but they all worked somewhat differently with different phones and different computers. The SMS was the most restrictive, it was limited to less than 200 ascii characters! Despite being so limited, it cost much more than the others. It worked, however, with the archaic phones that persisted in the US until 2012.
Pretty bad eh? It gets worse. I'd tell you about Twitter, but you wouldn't understand it at all.
Aren't you glad you're not living in the dark ages any more?
john
OpenDoc was a multi-platform software componentry framework standard for compound documents, inspired by the Xerox Star system ...
...The basic idea of OpenDoc was to create small, reusable components, responsible for a specific task, such as text editing, bitmap editing or browsing an FTP server. OpenDoc provided a framework in which these components could run together, and a document format for storing the data created by each component..
... OpenDoc was one of Apple's earliest experiments with open standards and collaborative development methods with other companies...
... OpenDoc components were invariably large and slow. For instance, opening a simple text editor part would often require 2 megabytes of RAM or more, whereas the same editor written as a standalone application could be as small as 32 KB...
... each part saved its data within Bento (the former name of an OpenDoc compound document file format) in its own internal binary format...
What to Read - Inside the Hermit Kingdom Salon.comA cross between Shangri-La and Auschwitz, forever mysterious, untouchable, inaccessi...
.... the bizarre spectacle of the vacant Ryugyong Hotel (aka the "Hotel of Doom") towering over Pyongyang...
... If you went out on a moonless night in the years after the nation's electrical grid effectively collapsed, the only way you could tell anyone else was around was by the coal of their cigarette burning in the dark. There's the writing paper sold in state stores, made of corn husks that "would crumble easily if you scratched too hard," so that people wrote on paper scavenged from the margins of newspapers. And then there's Vinalon, "a stiff, shiny synthetic material unique to North Korea," of which the fatherland was ludicrously proud. Vinalon takes dye so poorly that everyone's clothes (which were mostly uniforms to begin with) were limited to drab grays, blues and browns...
...With the factories and electricity shut down, the air over Chungjin is pristine again, and you can see every star in the night sky. Doctors provide herbal remedies, but only because they have nothing else; furthermore, they are required to spend weeks camping out in the mountainous countryside, harvesting wild plants. Some resort to growing their own cotton in order to have bandages. Most North Koreans have never seen a mobile phone and don't know that the Internet exists....
