Sunday, October 30, 2011

Amazing Dust Storm--Sydney Australia--23/09/09.

Haboob Hits Lubbock, Texas

Haboob Hits Lubbock, Texas

SpaceX: We Need NASA to Change Crew Contracts Read more: Will SpaceX Dump NASA? - Elon Musk Testimony - Popular Mechanics

By Joe Pappalardo
Today, leaders of private space companies testified before a congressional committee on their relationship with NASA, and they weren’t happy: The space execs say the contract NASA has written to cover their crew-carrying spacecraft is too vague, too intruding, and too slow—and one of the biggest players threatened to drop out altogether.

Read more: Will SpaceX Dump NASA? - Elon Musk Testimony - Popular Mechanics 

How Much Does The Internet Weigh?

Please, Mr. Postman, raise my postage!

 October 16, 2011 10:19 AM
(CBS News)  
Doomsday talk about the Post Office has moved our Ben Stein to speak out post haste:
I see that the U.S. Postal Service is contemplating drastic cutbacks in postal service, closing many post offices and slowing down the delivery of mail ... maybe virtually ending the postal service.
This, of course, is because the Postal Service is losing money as ever more correspondence of every kind is done by free (or almost free) via instantaneous email.
But just for me, email will never replace a printed or handwritten letter on an actual piece of paper. The most cunning email, with moving angels and dolphins and music attached, is not as touching to me as a letter some kindly soul sat down and wrote to me.
I guess it's because I am 66 years old, and I can remember the anticipation of getting letters and cards from relatives - mostly now long gone - and girls I had mad crushes on in high school.
CBS Sunday Morning

Web Powers People-Driven Politics

February 11, 2009 6:54 PM
(AP)  Frustrated by government and empowered by technology, Americans are filling needs and fighting causes through grass-roots organizations they built themselves — some sophisticated, others quaintly ad hoc.

This is the era of people-driven politics.

From a homemaker-turned-kingmaker in Pittsburgh to dog owners in New York to a "gym rat" here in southwest Florida, people are using the Internet to do what politicians can't — or won't — do.

This is their story, but it's also an American story because ordinary folks are doing the extraordinary to find people with similar interests, organize them and create causes and connections.
CBS News

The threat of invasive species

(CBS News)  
Don't look now but ... THEY'RE HERE! A veritable army of real life monsters is invading whole sections of our country, and so far we're not putting up much of a resistance. Our Cover Story is reported by Mark Strassmann:





CBS Sunday Morning

Kyrgyzstan: There Is No Silence Day in Internet

 Elena Skochilo Posted 30 October 2011 7:57 GMT
Yesterday, October 29, was the so-called “Silence Day” in Kyrgyzstan, the last day before the presidential elections. At this day any political agitation is prohibited in the traditional media. But the law has no hold on Internet. The main representative of the Russian newspaper “Rossiyskaya Gazeta” Igor Shestakov said [ru]:
There is no silence day at Facebook today! There is political heat around candidates. Most of my Facebook friends heavily criticize the main candidates. I think that the candidate “No one” will win today!
Global Voices

Ghost In The Shell - A robot's theory on god

Ghost in the Shell (philosophical scenes)

The Individual Eleven Suicide

Serial Experiments Lain: LANDSCAPE (clip fandub)

Videodrome - "Television is reality"

Marshall Mcluhan Full lecture: The medium is the message - 1977 part 1 v 3

Marshall McLuhan - The World is a Global Village (CBC TV)

Marshall McLuhan: The Medium is the Message

Reality Tunnels Robert Anton Wilson

Robert Anton Wilson - Federal Reserve

The Morris Dancers want to Depopulate the Planet !! Its TERRIFYING !!

Saturday, October 29, 2011

The Invention of the Internet : Exclusive [PHOTOS] Then and Now


Internet has indeed revolutionized the world, It's a far cry from the first telegraph message composed by Samuel Morse, "What God hath wrought," to today's modern shorthand of emails and Twitter.

Since the mid-1990s the Internet has had a drastic impact on culture and commerce, including the rise of near instant communication by electronic mail, instant messaging, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) "phone calls", two-way interactive video calls, and the World Wide Web with its discussion forums, blogs, social networking, and online shopping sites.


IBTimes

COINTELPRO

COINTELPRO is an acronym for a series of FBI counterintelligence programs designed to neutralize political dissidents. Although covert operations have been employed throughout FBI history, the formal COINTELPRO's of 1956-1971 were broadly targeted against radical political organizations. In the early 1950s, the Communist Party was illegal in the United States. The Senate and House of Representatives each set up investigating committees to prosecute communists and publicly expose them. (The House Committee on Un-American Activities and the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, led by Senator Joseph McCarthy). When a series of Supreme Court rulings in 1956 and 1957 challenged these committees and questioned the constitutionality of Smith Act prosecutions and Subversive Activities Control Board hearings, the FBI's response was COINTELPRO, a program designed to "neutralize" those who could no longer be prosecuted. Over the years, similar programs were created to neutralize civil rights, anti-war, and many other groups, many of which were said to be "communist front organizations.
 Paul Wolf

SOPA: Hollywood Finally Gets A Chance to Break the Internet

OCTOBER 28, 2011 - 1:33PM | BY CORYNNE MCSHERRY
As promised, here’s the first installment of our closer review of the massive piece of job-killing Internet regulation that is the Stop Online Piracy Act. We’ll start with how it could impact Twitter, Tumblr, and the next innovative social network, cloud computing, or web hosting service that some smart kid is designing in her garage right now.
Let’s make one thing clear from the get-go: despite all the talk about this bill being directed only toward “rogue” foreign sites, there is no question that it targets US companies as well. The bill sets up a system to punish sites allegedly “dedicated to the theft of US property.”  How do you get that label?  Doesn’t take much: Some portion of your site (even a single page) must  
  1. be directed toward the US, and either
  2. allegedly “engage in, enable or facilitate” infringement or
  3. allegedly be taking or have taken steps to “avoid confirming a high probability” of infringement.
Electronic Frontier Foundation

MaineToday Media CEO and president resign | The Portland Press Herald / Maine Sunday Telegram

MaineToday Media CEO and president resign | The Portland Press Herald / Maine Sunday Telegram

Why Johnny Can’t Search – a Response

,23 October 2011 
 

I just got my latest issue of Wired Magazine (Nov 2011). In "Why Johnny Can't Search," Clive Thompson writes:
We're often told that young people tend to be the most tech savvy among us. But just how savvy are they? A group of researchers led by College of Charleston business professor Bing Pan tried to find out. Specifically, Pan wanted to know how skillful young folks are at online search. His team gathered a group of college students and asked them to look up the answers to a handful of questions. Perhaps not surprisingly, the students generally relied on the webpages at the top of Google's results list.
But Pan pulled a trick: he changed the order of the results for some students. More often than not, those kids went for the bait and also used the (falsely) top-ranked pages. Pan grimly concluded that students aren't assessing information sources on their own merit - they're putting too much trust in machine.
Other studies have found the same thing: high school and college students may be “digital natives” but they're wretched at searching. In a recent experiment at Northwestern, when 102 undergraduates were asked to do some research online, none went to the trouble of checking the author's credentials. In 1955, we wondered why Johnny can't read. Today the question is why can't Johnny search?
If you spend any time around students, none of this comes as news.
Copy/ Paste

Keep Wall Street Occupied

Friday, October 28, 2011

Justin Bieber Lashes Out At Senate's New Copyright Bill

By Asawin Suebsaeng
| Fri Oct. 28, 2011 3:12 PM PDT
It seems tweeny-bop sensation Justin Bieber wants to be taken seriously as a policy wonk. During an radio interview on Friday morning, Bieber came out against the Commercial Felony Streaming Act, or S.978, a bill that three senators proposed in May that would make unauthorized online streaming of copyrighted material a felony, punishable by up to five years behind bars.
Mother Jones

Why Workers Are Losing the War Against Machines - The Atlantic

At least since the followers of Ned Ludd smashed mechanized looms in 1811, workers have worried about automation destroying jobs. Economists have reassured them that new jobs would be created even as old ones were eliminated. For over 200 years, the economists were right. Despite massive automation of millions of jobs, more Americans had jobs at the end of each decade up through the end of the 20th century. However, this empirical fact conceals a dirty secret. There is no economic law that says that everyone, or even most people, automatically benefit from technological progress.
Why Workers Are Losing the War Against Machines - The Atlantic

Computer makers caught in wake of Thai floods

By Robin Kwong in Taipei

Computer prices are set to rise following warnings by Acer and Samsung Electronics that severe flooding in Thailand would hit production and that they would pass resulting higher costs on to consumers.
The comments are the most serious indication from technology groups that Thailand’s worst flooding in half a century, which has claimed hundreds of lives, will disrupt the global supply chain just ahead of the busy end-of-year season.
www.ft.com

How not to get caught for copyright infringement

The IT Crowd Piracy Ad

Social Networking Affects Brains Like Falling in Love

By: Adam L. PenenbergJuly 1, 2010

Neuroeconomist Paul Zak has discovered, for the first time, that social networking triggers the release of the generosity-trust chemical in our brains. And that should be a wake-up call for every company.
Fast Company

Google into google? Never type google into google!

The IT Crowd - This, Jen, is the internet

The IT crowd - Truest moment about tech support

The IT Crowd - Series 1 - Episode 3: Lonely hearts

Craigslist Dating

NASA Planetary Science Not Being Killed, Says NASA Official

by Nancy Atkinson on October 27, 2011
Murmurs of disbelief and “say it ain’t so” rippled across social media outlets late Wednesday and early Thursday in reaction to an op-ed by Mars Society President Robert Zubrin, who claimed that “the Obama administration intends to terminate NASA’s planetary exploration program.” The article was published in the Washington Times, and claimed that the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) was also targeting the space astronomy program “for destruction.” This would all be horrible if true, but the director of NASA’s Planetary Science division, Jim Green assured members of the NASA Advisory Council’s Planetary Science subcommittee that it is not. 
universe today

Pay to Play  | American Journalism Review

By Cary Spivak
Newspaper publishers and executives these days can be divided into three groups:
First, there are those who charge readers to view at least some of their content on computers as well as smart phones or tablet devices like the iPad.
Second, there are those who are thinking about doing just that.
The third group? Executives who are watching the first two.Pay to Play | American Journalism Review

Will Apple's music cloud be free? | TG Daily

Will Apple's music cloud be free? | TG Daily

RIAA-led mob threatens innovation, Senator warns

By Iain Thomson in San Francisco

Posted in Law, 18th October 2011 17:24 GMT





Web 2.0 Summit Attempts by the content industry to pass legislation like the Protect IP Act are the greatest threat to technology innovation, a senior US Senator told delegates at the Web 2.0 summit in San Francisco.
Ron Wyden, the senior Democratic senator for Oregon, was scathing in his criticism of organizations such as the RIAA for their role in crafting the legislation, and their spending to support politicians who back it. He said that the act attacked some of the fundamental principles of the internet and he was happy to have placed a public hold on the legislation to stop it becoming law.
“Social media needs to understand what the threat is, the threat to innovation of some of these policies,” he said. “We’re going to have to fight back. This is a question of whether the content sector can use the government as club to go after the innovation sector and everything it represents.”
theregister.co.uk

Jay Bradner: Open-source cancer research

Malcolm Gladwell: The strange tale of the Norden bombsight

Malcolm Gladwell - Spaghetti Sauce (17 minutes)

In Praise of Idleness

By Bertrand Russell

Like most of my generation, I was brought up on the saying: 'Satan finds some mischief for idle hands to do.' Being a highly virtuous child, I believed all that I was told, and acquired a conscience which has kept me working hard down to the present moment. But although my conscience has controlled my actions, my opinions have undergone a revolution. I think that there is far too much work done in the world, that immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous, and that what needs to be preached in modern industrial countries is quite different from what always has been preached. Everyone knows the story of the traveler in Naples who saw twelve beggars lying in the sun (it was before the days of Mussolini), and offered a lira to the laziest of them. Eleven of them jumped up to claim it, so he gave it to the twelfth. this traveler was on the right lines. But in countries which do not enjoy Mediterranean sunshine idleness is more difficult, and a great public propaganda will be required to inaugurate it. I hope that, after reading the following pages, the leaders of the YMCA will start a campaign to induce good young men to do nothing. If so, I shall not have lived in vain.
More...

Looks like Congress has declared war on the internet


Many internet users in the United States have watched with horror as countries like France and Britain have proposed or instituted so-called “three strikes” laws, which cut off internet access to those accused of repeated acts of copyright infringement. Now the U.S. has its own version of this kind of law, and it is arguably much worse: the Stop Online Piracy Act, introduced in the House this week, would give governments and private corporations unprecedented powers to remove websites from the internet on the flimsiest of grounds, and would force internet service providers to play the role of copyright police.
gigaom.com

The Pros and Cons of the Internet, As Taught to Students in 1996

By  |  Friday, October 28, 2011 at 7:00 am
Last weekend, I was at my parents’ house in Connecticut for a family matter. As my sister went through some of the things in her childhood bedroom, she discovered a document from 1996, explaining the advantages and disadvantages of the Internet. This was apparently part of some high school handout packet; also included among the papers were tips on using Altavista and print outs of the Yahoo home page as viewed in Netscape.
technologizer.com

Man Has Smartphone Dock Installed In His Prosthetic Arm

By on October 28, 2011
Trevor Prideaux, a British man born without a left arm, has always struggled with using a smartphone one-handed. So he had the Exeter Mobility Centre build a smartphone dock into his prosthetic arm. As The Telegraph reports, Prideaux is now able to call and text while the phone sits in his left arm.
laughingsquid.com