October 2001
Wednesday, 31 October 2001
A Downward Spiral: “Increasingly, people on each side say of the other: It’s impossible to have peace with them.”
T-bond demise a complication for investors, issuers: “The uncertainty is a real concern. In the future, when an issuer sells 30-year debt, investors will no longer be able to assess its value by using the Treasury long bond as a benchmark.”
Tuesday, 30 October 2001
Net guru’s fragmented future: “the broadband experience is not a streaming experience as much as a response time experience and most people don’t even know that.”
Monday, 29 October 2001
Discovery triggers new lemur debate: “If the teeth found in Pakistan are real, the entire theory is again thrown into doubt. The teeth also are very similar to the teeth of modern lemurs, suggesting the animal may not have evolved much over millions of years. For that, scientists have no explanation.”
Comet’s death dive captured by satellite: “Scientists theorize that comets that buzz the sun are fragments of a huge comet, perhaps one spotted by ancient Greek astronomers.”
Computational capacity of the universe
Friday, 26 October 2001
Statement of U.S. Senator Russ Feingold on the Anti-Terrorism Bill: “The Founders who wrote our Constitution and Bill of Rights exercised that vigilance even though they had recently fought and won the Revolutionary War. They did not live in comfortable and easy times of hypothetical enemies. They wrote a Constitution of limited powers and an explicit Bill of Rights to protect liberty in times of war, as well as in times of peace.”
Thursday, 25 October 2001
Experts explain terrorist training: “people must understand that terrorists are made and not born. ‘The hardest thing to understand,’ she said, ‘is that the mind itself can be captured and made into a machine.”
Muslims and Modernity By Robert Wright: “It’s impossible to do business with people while slaughtering them, and it’s pretty hard to do business with them while telling them that they’ll burn in hell forever. Modern global capitalism has its faults, but religious intolerance isn’t one of them.”
Kernel changelogs to be censored?: “file permissions and userids may constitute and be used for rights management”
Time to Look at Stock Options’ Real Cost: “How corporations account for the stock options they bestow, mostly on top executives, may not appear crucial to a nation at war against terrorism. But Mr. Oxley seems to think that America is imperiled if its companies can no longer overstate earnings by misrepresenting their employee costs.”
Wednesday, 24 October 2001
The Right and US Trade Law: Invalidating the 20th Century (1): “NAFTA does clearly create some rights for foreign investors that local citizens and companies don’t have. But that’s the whole purpose of it.”
Building blocks for capital projects: “Yet ‘platforming’ principles are being applied successfully even here. The companies involved treat a series of projects - sometimes lasting for five or ten years - as a portfolio, not as a series of individual schemes. The resulting shortened lead times, smaller inventories, and lower engineering, operating, and maintenance expenses are cutting the cost of the projects by as much as 30 percent, representing, in some cases, hundreds of millions of dollars. Furthermore, the uniform interfaces presented to operators promote safety by minimizing the risk of confusion.”
Valuing dot-coms after the fall: “One reason to be skeptical about claims that Internet companies will earn high returns is that intangibles don’t necessarily earn them; the industry structure does. Consider investment banking and movie production, two industries with lots of intangible capital. In both, most of the value goes to the talent – bankers, actors, and directors – not to the shareholders.”
Tuesday, 23 October 2001
Karlin Lillington on Irish Terrorism
The biology of ‘irrational exuberance’: “After watching the results, they could gauge traders’ experience level solely by how their bodies behaved as they worked. Novice traders reacted strongly. Experienced ones displayed a more even keel.”
A report from the plan: “No Internet service provider has refused to cooperate with surveillance requests, yet the FBI has received surveillance capacity without the active interaction of the network services provider . This means that network service providers cannot ensure the security of their own networks”
Kanan Makiya: Fighting Islam’s Ku Klux Klan: “Muslims and Arabs have to be on the front lines of a new kind of war, one that is worth waging for their own salvation and in their own souls. And that, as good out-of-fashion Muslim scholars will tell you, is the true meaning of jihad, a meaning that has been hijacked by terrorists and suicide bombers and all those who applaud or find excuses for them.”
Islam has become its own enemy: “In the US-led coalition against the Taliban, liberal Muslims have found an ideal substitute for self-examination and the critical, internal struggle needed to address home-grown problems.”
Monday, 22 October 2001
Ripping up the Charter: “This humbling of the UN was followed by further humiliation, when it was powerless to protest about a US cruise missile that killed four UN civilians in Afghanistan on the night of 8 October. The UN workers had been guarding the offices of the main Afghan mine clearance agency two miles outside Kabul and were not near any obvious Taliban military target - and the UN had passed the coordinates of the offices to the US military a fortnight earlier.”
America’s NERF-Based Security: Reassurance Through Illusion, Rhetoric, and Fear-Mongering
Mikhail Gorbachev: A Leading Role for the Security Council
Apple looks to future - post-Motorola? - PowerPC world: “We can only see Apple making such a move if it had literally no other choice, such has been its investment - in money and intellectual capital - on PowerPC. That won’t stop it exploring the potential of such platforms, and its important not to mistake experimental systems never intended to go beyond the lab for a strategic change of direction.”
WIPO Arbitrators Stern In Domain ‘Hijacking’ Rulings: “But even rarer was the severity of the spanking received by Nestle at the hands of three arbitrators assigned by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).”
Friday, 19 October 2001
Open War: “At best, this obsession is a distraction, a waste of time. At worst, it’s sapping energy from the Linux movement and keeping the OS from gaining traction in a market where it actually stands a chance”
Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy: –SPOILERS!– Review: Armageddon: “Here’s the short version: ‘Armageddon’ got some astronomy right. For example, there is an asteroid in the movie, and asteroids do indeed exist.”
School daze in America: “I asked them, ‘How do you learn irregular verbs in French if you don’t memorize them?’ They said, ‘Maybe they don’t need to learn them.’”
Thursday, 18 October 2001
Novel Security Measures: “He proceeded through the security checkpoint and sat down to read near his boarding gate. About 10 minutes had passed when a National Guardsman approached Godfrey. ‘He told me to step aside,’ Godfrey says. ‘Then he took my book and asked me why I was reading it.’”
Bell Labs makes molecule-size transistor: “We can do this process in a beaker, so we don’t need a sophisticated clean room, and also to define this very short length scales, we don’t need very sophisticated tools for lithography as used in nowadays’ electronic circuits”
11 Questions with Wil Wheaton: “Meeting chicks? Dude. I was 13. If you’d have put a naked girl and a 720 degrees set to free play in front of me, I would have said, ‘Skate or Die!’ as I pushed her aside.” - Man, I loved 720 degrees.
Wednesday, 17 October 2001
Singapore Hands Its Citizens a Stake in Recovery - “The shares are effectively a five-year bond with a guaranteed, tax-free yield of 3 percent a year, which is higher than current fixed deposit rates offered by banks in Singapore.”
Monday, 15 October 2001
get your war on: may not be appropriate for some viewers
Genetic algorithms ‘naturally select’ better satellite orbits: “The most profound impact of such algorithms is that they sometimes find solutions that researchers would ordinarily have missed.”
RIAA Wants to Hack Your PC: “An RIAA-drafted amendment according to a draft obtained by Wired News would immunize all copyright holders – including the movie and e-book industry – for any data losses caused by their hacking efforts or other computer intrusions ‘that are reasonably intended to impede or prevent’ electronic piracy.”
Police Use Helicopter for Doughnut Run
Sunday, 14 October 2001
The Globalizer Who Came In From the Cold: “At this point, the IMF drags the gasping nation to Step Three: Market-Based Pricing, a fancy term for raising prices on food, water and cooking gas. This leads, predictably, to Step-Three-and-a-Half: what Stiglitz calls, ‘The IMF riot.’”
Who Shot Argentina? The Finger Prints On the Smoking Gun Read “I.M.F.’: “The IMF is never wrong without being cruel as well. And so we read, under the boldface heading, ‘improving the conditions of the poor,’ agreement to drop salaries under the government’s emergency employment program by 20%, from $200 a month to $160.”
The Emperor Has No Growth: “In short, there is no region of the world that the Bank or Fund can point to as having succeeded through adopting the policies that they promote - or in many cases, impose - upon borrowing countries. They are understandably reluctant to claim credit for China, which maintains a non-convertible currency, state control over its banking system, and other major violations of IMF/Bank prescriptions. And in both India and China, their opening to trade took place about a decade after the increase in growth began.”
Friday, 12 October 2001
Two civilisations entwined in history: “Certainly, if a monk from sixth-century Byzantium were to come back today, he would find much more that was familiar in the practices and beliefs of a modern Muslim Sufi than in, say, a contemporary American evangelical. Yet this simple truth has been lost by our tendency to think of Christianity as thoroughly Western, rather than the Oriental faith it actually is. We also forget that Islam inherited the same Greek and Roman foundations as our own culture; indeed the Muslims preserved the classics for us, before passing them back via the universities of Islamic Spain and Sicily.”
Thursday, 11 October 2001
Silencing Joseph Stiglitz: “There never was economic evidence in favor of capital market liberalization, … There still isn’t. It increases risk and doesn’t increase growth. You’d think [defenders of liberalization] would say to me by now, ‘You haven’t read these 10 studies,’ but they haven’t, because there’s not even one. There isn’t the intellectual basis that you would have thought required for a major change in international rules. It was all based on ideology.”
US economists win Nobel prize for markets tool: “One obvious application of this general principle is in the jobs market. If employers cannot tell exactly how good the candidates are, they will tend to offer wages that are not high enough to attract the good ones.”
Peace Protest, Hey, Hey! Ho, Ho! The Left’s Tired Tactics Have Got to Go!: “And the best way to convince Mr. Blow is not to scare the shit out of him and/or force him to write you off as a commie pinko loon, but rather to detail your opinion in a clear, concise manner, to explain what you believe the U.S. is doing wrong, and, perhaps most importantly, to offer alternatives and propose solutions. To MOVH, the Left has to stop acting like assholes in public and get a little media savvy. “
Archived Memepool Post: Oct 11, 2001
As holistic medicine has grown in response to the failure of science to handle disease, so too has holistic computer medicine grown to tackle computer viruses and more. (Posted to Computing)
Archived Memepool Post: Oct 11, 2001
Rotting Slug Technology has languished for too long. (Posted to Technology)
Wednesday, 10 October 2001
Buckyballs Make Fantastic Voyage: “‘The lethal dose in animals is astronomical,’ Sagman said. ‘And it is absorbed well orally and excreted unaltered by the kidneys, so it doesn’t harm target organs. That’s important because compliance is a big problem with AIDS drugs, since patients find them too toxic.’ The second fullerene drug, which the company hopes to put into clinical trials, fights Lou Gehrig’s disease. If successful, it may treat similar illnesses such Parkinson’s disease.”
How the terror trail went unseen: “In two successive briefings, senior FBI officials have stated that the agency has as yet found no evidence that the hijackers who attacked America used electronic encryption methods to communicate on the internet. But this has not prevented politicians and journalists repeating lurid rumours that the coded orders for the attack were secretly hidden inside pornographic web images, or from making claiming that the hijacks could have been prevented if only western governments had been given the power to prevent internet users from using secret codes. The latest evidence from the FBI suggests that the hijackers easily hid under the noses of the American government, not by using advanced technology but by being as American as apple pie.”
Robert Fisk: Lost in the rhetorical fog of war: “Al-Jazeera had been upsetting some of the local Arab dictators - President Mubarak of Egypt for one - and Tom thought this a good idea. So do I. But hold everything. The story is being rewritten. Last week, US Secretary of State Colin Powell rapped the Emir of Qatar over the knuckles because - so he claimed - Al-Jazeera was ‘inciting anti-Americanism’. So, goodbye democracy.”
The Science Behind the Song Stuck in Your Head: “Deutsch isn’t sure, but insists that if the human brain has a tendency to play songs over and over, there must be an evolutionary reason.”
Tuesday, 9 October 2001
Jedi Knights achieve official recognition as a religion
Mike’s Message 10/08/2001: “Now, nearly every network has settled on ‘America Strikes Back.’ I like this because, first of all, it honors George Lucas.”
Friday, 5 October 2001
The Effects of September 11 on the Leading Search Engine: “This interpretation is consistent with recent reports that for most users, the Web isn’t a place for random surfing; most users re-visit a handful of their favorite sites as they use the Web each day. Google may be more efficient than searching one’s own bookmarks for popular sites; it certainly is more efficient if one is away from the PC that houses one’s bookmarks. Under this interpretation, brand name is at least as important as Web site domain name.”
XML.com: Web Services: It’s So Crazy, It Just Might Not Work: “Automated stock price retrieval is the the standard Web Service – it is simple, obvious, and valuable, and almost every description of Web Services uses it as an example. It is not, however, representative of any real-world challenges.”
Florida Community Can’t Shut Down ‘Voyeur Dorm’: “The opinion is also notable because it suggested that the Internet is a place that, in some cases, may be beyond the reach of local government regulators.”
Sun absorbing iPlanet staff, functions: “In August, AOL announced plans to lay off 500 iPlanet personnel. But what wasn’t revealed at the time was that Sun immediately rehired 85 percent of those employees.”
Thursday, 4 October 2001
Experts: Easy Installations Kill: “This approach, although convenient for the user, creates many of the most dangerous security vulnerabilities because users do not actively maintain and patch software components they don’t use.”
Wednesday, 3 October 2001
Archived Memepool Post: Oct 3, 2001
New photoshopographic evidence sheds new light on the Sep 11 attack and other recent events. (Posted to Conspiracy)
Monday, 1 October 2001
Hostile Political TV Leads To Negative Attitudes About Politics
Reviews: The End of Oil: “Running out of energy in the long run is not the problem. The bind comes during the next 10 years: getting over our dependence on crude oil.”
The Peter Drucker Interview – Unabridged: “no financial man will ever understand business because financial people think a company makes money. A company makes shoes, and no financial man understands that. They think money is real. Shoes are real. Money is an end result. What is a business?”
The algebra of infinite justice: “But who is Osama bin Laden really? Let me rephrase that. What is Osama bin Laden? He’s America’s family secret. He is the American president’s dark doppelg?nger. The savage twin of all that purports to be beautiful and civilised.”
Crypto-Gram: September 30, 2001: “Security and privacy are not two sides of a teeter-totter. This association is simplistic and largely fallacious. It’s easy and fast, but less effective, to increase security by taking away liberty. However, the best ways to increase security are not at the expense of privacy and liberty.” - READ THIS. ALL OF IT. FORWARD IT TO YOUR FRIENDS.