September 2004
Sunday, 26 September 2004
Touchscreen Hack Effort Called ‘Monkey Business’: “In the minute-long video produced by Black Box Voting, Baxter the chimp is shown deleting the audit log that is supposed to keep track of changes in the Diebold central tabulator, the computer and program that keeps track of county vote totals.”
Wednesday, 22 September 2004
Windows is the ‘biggest beta test in history’: “Gartner security veep, told delegates at the IT Security Summit in London that the most secure organisations spend less than the average and that the lowest spending organisations are the most secure.”
How healthy living ‘extends life’: “Physical activity was the biggest single protector against death, with a 37% lowering of risk, while not smoking cur the risk by 35%, eating a Mediterranean diet 23% and moderate alcohol consumption by 22%.”
Sunday, 19 September 2004
By the book: “Unlike Robinson, the majority of Barter Books’ trade is conventional traffic through the door. Only about a fifth of the shop’s turnover comes from internet sales. Even so, web sales require the attention of two full-time staff to service orders and maintain the various online catalogues.”
Friday, 17 September 2004
The self-service economy: “Many people complain about companies outsourcing work to low-wage economies: but how many notice that firms are increasingly outsourcing work to their own customers?”
An oasis, not a mirage: “The Japanese establishment, as one economist put it rather neatly, has run out of stupid things to do to wreck its economy, and the ‘problems’ that Japan has – huge and growing exports – are problems of which the likes of America can only dream.”
OPEC meeting: “Cartels exist to place artificial constraints on supply. But the constraints on today’s oil supply are all too real.”
Wednesday, 15 September 2004
Dementia and the Voter: “Our voting system does not require intelligent voting or informed voting. The Supreme Court has said the idea of informed voting is too susceptible to abuse.”
California’s SUV Ban - The Golden State has outlawed big SUVs on many of its roads but doesn’t seem to know it.: “She’s right—it wasn’t the intent. But that’s because these weight limits generally predate the 1990s SUV craze that lured suburbanites out of their lighter sedans and minivans. It’s the vehicles that have changed, not the law.”
Tuesday, 14 September 2004
The U.S. Election and the International System: “The international system is therefore caught at present in a fundamental contradiction. The system is trying to take its bearings from an election in a country that few foreign governments really understand. That, in turn, leads to some fairly strange and sometimes almost inexplicable policy shifts.”
Monday, 13 September 2004
Cannabis truly helps multiple sclerosis sufferers: “The results were further complicated because about two thirds of the patients who received cannabis compounds, such as D9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), guessed they had not received a placebo, due to the drugs effect on their mind.”
MS damage repaired by stem cells: “Brew is hopeful his stem cell technique could be also used to tackle illnesses other than MS. “White matter in the brain is extremely important for function, so there are a whole host of deficits that could potentially be helped,” such as meningitis and encephalitis, he says.”
Sunday, 12 September 2004
Spam Influx Reaches New Heights: “The e-mail storm reached a peak on August 30, when 90 percent of all the messages processed by FrontBridge were spam.”
Friday, 10 September 2004
World Bank study on the global business environment: “Overall, businesses in poor countries shoulder three times the administrative costs and have to struggle through twice as many bureaucratic procedures as their counterparts in rich countries. A popular myth holds that this does not matter, because the rules in poor countries are rarely enforced. Not so. Because it is so hard to obey all the rules, businesses in poor countries tend to remain informal. That is, they remain outside the law and pay no taxes. They stay small to avoid detection by the police, and because they cannot raise credit from the formal banking system.”
An Elder Challenges Outsourcing’s Orthodoxy: “‘If you don’t believe that changes the average wages in America, then you believe in the tooth fairy,’ Mr. Samuelson said.”
Tuesday, 7 September 2004
Memory superhighway: “Pip Coburn, a technology strategist at UBS, expects tech-sector multiples to contract in coming months to 15-25 times earnings. This, after all, is where they were from 1992 to 1996, before they shot to the stars in the late 1990s, and the capitalisation of technology companies rose from about 7% of the total stockmarket to almost 35%. It is now less than 15% and, to this columnist’s jaundiced eye, Mr Coburn’s analysis would seem, if anything, a touch rosy.”
Workers of the World, Relax: “Marx may have been erratically idealizing the pre-industrial past and unduly castigating the bourgeoisie, but he ably captured the inescapable degree of conflict between employer and employee. Every commercial organization will try to gather raw materials, labor and machinery at the lowest possible price to combine them into a product that can be sold at the highest possible price. And yet, troublingly, there is one difference between ‘labor’ and other elements that conventional economics does not have a means to represent, or give weight to, but which is nevertheless unavoidably present: labor feels pain and pleasure.”
Sunday, 5 September 2004
Blatant plug: VOTEorNOT is giving away $100,000 in a sweepstakes for people who are registered to vote.
The Return of the Venture Capitalists: “Recently, he said, the firm added a psychological test to the last step of the decision-making process ‘to sort out the wheat from the chaff.’”
Ericsson Halts Bluetooth Development: “an indicator of the technology’s mature state”
Why honesty is the best policy: “Take eBay, one of the few really successful businesses to have grown out of the Internet. It has a reputation for giving conservative financial forecasts to Wall Street analysts, so they have taken to second-guessing the company and marking up its forecasts. That puts eBay under pressure to hit targets it had not considered itself capable of achieving. Yet if it fails to reach them, Wall Street may well forget that they did not come from the company in the first place.”
Man accused of stalking with GPS
Mobile 3G telecoms: “The €109 billion was, in effect, a tax on the right to continue to do business. Few firms were brave enough to refuse to pay up.”
Saturday, 4 September 2004
In the Dark: “The consequences for students losing sleep because they’re getting up for early start times are clear: They lose ability to learn.”
Dallaire ‘disgusted’ by Sudan policy
Friday, 3 September 2004
The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam: “If dissident veterans couldn’t be dismissed as unauthentic or “not real men,” their credibility could be impugned in another way, by raising doubts about their mental stability. Ultimately, this is the course that events would follow, a course that led to establishment of a new psychiatric diagnostic category, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), and the marginalization of Vietnam veterans.”
The Shrill Blog: “An Unofficial Blog of the Ancient and Hermetic Order of the Shrill”
Feel the Hate: “But the vitriol also reflects the fact that many of the people at that convention, for all their flag-waving, hate America. They want a controlled, monolithic society; they fear and loathe our nation’s freedom, diversity and complexity.”
Thursday, 2 September 2004
Imperial President: “The 2004 election is becoming a referendum on your right to hold the president accountable. That’s the upshot of tonight’s speeches by Vice President Dick Cheney and Zell Miller, the Republican National Convention’s keynote speaker.”
Wednesday, 1 September 2004
Six great myths of IT: “The Standish Group surveyed 13,522 projects last year and showed that unqualified project successes are well below 50 percent, 34 percent to be exact. Out-and-out failures, defined as projects abandoned midstream, are at 15 percent. Falling in between the two are completed but “challenged” projects. The report says challenged projects represent 51 percent of all IT projects and are defined as projects with cost overruns, time overruns, and projects not delivered with the right functionality to support the business.”