Tuesday, 4 October 2011

Neal Stephenson: Innovation Starvation

My lifespan encompasses the era when the United States of America was capable of launching human beings into space. Some of my earliest memories are of sitting on a braided rug before a hulking black-and-white television, watching the early Gemini missions. This summer, at the age of 51—not even old—I watched on a flatscreen as the last Space Shuttle lifted off the pad. I have followed the dwindling of the space program with sadness, even bitterness. Where’s my donut-shaped space station? Where’s my ticket to Mars? Until recently, though, I have kept my feelings to myself. Space exploration has always had its detractors. To complain about its demise is to expose oneself to attack from those who have no sympathy that an affluent, middle-aged white American has not lived to see his boyhood fantasies fulfilled.
Still, I worry that our inability to match the achievements of the 1960s space program might be symptomatic of a general failure of our society to get big things done. My parents and grandparents witnessed the creation of the airplane, the automobile, nuclear energy, and the computer to name only a few. Scientists and engineers who came of age during the first half of the 20th century could look forward to building things that would solve age-old problems, transform the landscape, build the economy, and provide jobs for the burgeoning middle class that was the basis for our stable democracy.
The Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010 crystallized my feeling that we have lost our ability to get important things done. The OPEC oil shock was in 1973—almost 40 years ago. It was obvious then that it was crazy for the United States to let itself be held economic hostage to the kinds of countries where oil was being produced. It led to Jimmy Carter’s proposal for the development of an enormous synthetic fuels industry on American soil. Whatever one might think of the merits of the Carter presidency or of this particular proposal, it was, at least, a serious effort to come to grips with the problem.
Little has been heard in that vein since. We’ve been talking about wind farms, tidal power, and solar power for decades. Some progress has been made in those areas, but energy is still all about oil. In my city, Seattle, a 35-year-old plan to run a light rail line across Lake Washington is now being blocked by a citizen initiative. Thwarted or endlessly delayed in its efforts to build things, the city plods ahead with a project to paint bicycle lanes on the pavement of thoroughfares.
In early 2011, I participated in a conference called Future Tense, where I lamented the decline of the manned space program, then pivoted to energy, indicating that the real issue isn’t about rockets. It’s our far broader inability as a society to execute on the big stuff. I had, through some kind of blind luck, struck a nerve. The audience at Future Tense was more confident than I that science fiction [SF] had relevance—even utility—in addressing the problem. I heard two theories as to why...

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@'World Policy Institute'

Facebook’s Tracking Scandal Is Mushrooming

The month is off to a bad start for Facebook. The social network is fighting a new class action suit over its non-logout logout. And now it's been busted for bringing back a cookie that tracks people who don't even use Facebook.
Facebook has resumed distribution of the "datr" cookie, which is set by those ubiquitous Facebook "like" widgets all over the web and thus can follow you from site to site. The Wall Street Journal reported on the cookie in May, noting that it follows all web browsers, whether logged in to Facebook or not. Facebook removed the cookie shortly after publication of the article, and after a formal bug was filed with its programmers. Some time between then and now the cookie returned, as entrepreneur and de facto privacy researcher Nik Cubrilovic reveals. The cookie was set by every widget-carrying website Cubrilovic tested.
What does the cookie do? For starters, it is used to associate your account with other people who use your computer, Cubrilovic believes, which is why your Facebook dossier includes a list of "associated users." It also indicates that Facebook was incorrect — knowingly or unknowingly — when it claimed last week that the cookie was set only "when a web browser accesses facebook.com (except social plugin iframes)," since it is in fact set from social plugin iframes. Its re-emergence also means Facebook quietly re-enabled — purposely or accidentally — a privacy bug they supposedly closed last May. And finally it means that Facebook collects raw data it could use to track big chunks of your surfing history, even though Facebook said last may that its intent was not to use the cookies for such a purpose.
News of "datr's" return comes after the chairmen of a Congressional privacy committee, plus 10 public interest groups, pushed the FTC to investigate all of Facebook's clingy cookies, which remain even after a user "logs out." It should only add to the pressure on Facebook, and to the evidence in a suit an Illinois law firm filed against Facebook in San Jose federal court Friday night. The suit, which is seeking class action status, accuses Facebook of misleading users about the meaning of "log off." Facebook promised to fight the suit "vigorously," which means the company thinks it can find someone somewhere who actually had a correct understanding of what actually happens when you "sign off" of Facebook. Sounds like a very expensive manhunt.
@'Gawker'

Facebook Re-Enables Controversial Tracking Cookie

Facebook is fine with hate speech, as long as it's directed at women

Apple rejects Samsung offer of quick settlement of tablet row in Australia

Nearly 400 public health experts warn Lords to reject NHS reforms

Dear Honourable Members of the House of Lords,

As public health doctors and specialists from within the NHS, academia and elsewhere, we write to express our concerns about the Health and Social Care Bill.

The Bill will do irreparable harm to the NHS, to individual patients and to society as a whole.

It ushers in a significantly heightened degree of commercialisation and marketisation that will fragment patient care; aggravate risks to individual patient safety; erode medical ethics and trust within the health system; widen health inequalities; waste much money on attempts to regulate and manage competition; and undermine the ability of the health system to respond effectively and efficiently to communicable disease outbreaks and other public health emergencies.

While we welcome the emphasis placed on establishing a closer working relationship between public health and local government, the proposed reforms as a whole will disrupt, fragment and weaken the country’s public health capabilities.

The government claims that the reforms have the backing of the health professions. They do not. Neither do they have the general support of the public.

It is our professional judgement that the Health and Social Care Bill will erode the NHS’s ethical and cooperative foundations and that it will not deliver efficiency, quality, fairness or choice.

We therefore request that you reject passage of the Health and Social Care Bill
Via

Libyan Jew blocked from Tripoli synagogue

Libyan Jewish exile David Gerbi breaks the wall at the sealed entrance to Dar Bishi synagogue. When he returned a day later, he found the front door locked. Photograph: Suhaib Salem/Reuters

A Libyan Jewish man who returned from exile in Italy to join the revolution against Muammar Gaddafi has been blocked from trying to restore Tripoli's main synagogue.
David Gerbi said he went to clean rubbish from the synagogue on Monday, a day after he broke through the entrance with a sledgehammer to great fanfare. A messenger at the scene warned him, however, that armed men were coming from all over Libya and would target him if he did not leave the area.
Gerbi said he was told a mass anti-Jewish demonstration was planned for Friday in the capital's central Martrys' Square, which used to be named Green Square under Gaddafi's regime.
Breaking down in tears, he criticised Libyan authorities for withdrawing their support, calling his efforts a test of the post-Gaddafi regime's commitment to democracy and tolerance.
"If they want to prove that it's different from Gaddafi … they need to do the opposite," he told reporters after leaving the synagogue in the old Jewish quarter of Tripoli's walled Old City.
The head of the National Transitional Council that is governing the country was dismissive of the issue when asked about it at a news conference, saying it was too early to worry about rebuilding a synagogue when revolutionary forces were still fighting supporters of fugitive leader Gaddafi.
"This matter is premature and we have not decided anything in this regard," Mustafa Abdul-Jalil said. "Everyone who holds Libyan nationality has the right to enjoy all rights, provided that he has no other nationality but Libyan."
Libya's new leaders have promised to lead the oil-rich North African nation to become a democracy after ousting Gaddafi in a civil war that began in mid-February. Abdul-Jalil and the de facto prime minister, Mahmoud Jibril, promised on Monday to step down after the country is fully secured in a bid to reassure the public they will not suffer under another dictatorship.
But Jews are widely despised in the Arab world because of the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians. The NTC has taken Libya's seat at the Arab League, which doesn't sanction normalisation with Israel without a comprehensive settlement with the Palestinians.
Libyan-born Gina Bublil-Waldman, president of the San Francisco-based JIMENA, or Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa, agreed it was too soon to try to return.
"I really do not believe that the Libyan people are ready to reconcile with the past and their history and the wrongs that they have done to the Jewish community," she said, although she called Gerbi's efforts sincere and honourable.
Gerbi, who fled with his family to Italy in 1967, said he was surprised because he had permission from the local sheik and verbal permission from NTC representatives. Gerbi's colleague Richard Peters said several men armed with assault rifles later appeared to guard the building, although none were visible later that day.
It was not clear who was ultimately behind the warnings of violence against Gerbi, although he said the man who gave him the message said there was a Facebook and YouTube campaign against him.
It was a bitter disappointment for Gerbi, coming a day after he had taken a sledgehammer to a concrete wall and entered the crumbling Dar al-Bishi synagogue, which has been filled with decades of rubbish since Gaddafi expelled Libya's small Jewish community early in his rule.
He and a team of helpers carted in brooms, rakes and plastic buckets to begin clearing the debris. But on Monday, the wooden door was again closed with a chain and padlock. Gerbi said people who had supported him were now distancing themselves.
The 56-year-old psychoanalyst appealed to the new leadership to set an example of tolerance, saying that while Gaddafi "wanted to eliminate the diversity, they need to include the diversity".
Gerbi's family fled to Rome in 1967, when Arab anger was rising over the war in which Israel captured large swaths of territory from Jordan, Syria and Egypt. Two years later, Gaddafi expelled the rest of Libya's Jewish community, which at its peak numbered about 37,000.
Gerbi returned to his homeland this summer to join the rebellion that ousted Gaddafi, helping with strategy and psychological treatment.
He said his fellow rebels called him the "revolutionary Jew" and that he was thrilled when he rode into the capital with fighters from the western mountains as Tripoli fell in late August.
Gerbi refused to give up, saying he would stay in Libya and press his case with the government.
"I don't want to be a hero, I don't want to play martyr, I just want to be here to support the new Libya and the democracy and to build this," he said.
@'The Guardian'

OOPS!

(Click to enlarge)
Via

Q & A w/ Slavoj Zizek, Kate Adie, Jon Ronson, Greg Sheridan & Mona Eltahawy

A very dangerous Q&A

...and Sheridan you were of course wrong!

♪♫ The Victorian English Gentlemens Club - A Conversation

Punk-rock dads in suburbia: reflections on 'The Other F Word'

Bin Laden raid: ISI officials brief Abbottabad commission on US raid

Gen. Allen Disavows 2014: US Going to Stay in Afghanistan ‘For a Long Time’

Fresh off of CBS releasing a new poll showing overwhelming American opposition to continuing the war in Afghanistan US General John Allen, the new commander of the occupation, rejected the prospect of the war ending any time soon.

Indeed, in an interview with CBS’ 60 Minutes, Gen. Allen disavowed the 2014 Lisbon Conference date for ending the war, saying “we’re actually going to be here for a long time” and that the troop levels beyond 2014 were yet to be decided.
Allen, who replaced Gen. Petraeus as commander of the Afghan War and became the fourth commander since President Obama took office in 2009, did not offer the usual collection of “foolproof” strategy changes designed to turn the tides in the endless conflict.
“The plan is to win,” was all Allen would offer. This either speaks to a lack of confidence in the latest strategy shift, or perhaps more likely a lack of any strategy whatsoever as the war has a momentum of its own and, with the war planned to extend through 2024, the general likely realizes there will be a dozen or more commanders that will come after him and that what he does won’t matter all that much.
Jason Ditz @'Anti War.com'

Stevie Wonder Live at Rock in Rio 2011

01 – How sweet is to be loved by you
02 – My eyes don’t cry
03 – Master blaster
04 – The way you make me feel
05 – Higher ground
06 – Living for the city
07 – Don’t you worry about a thing
08 – When I fall in love
09 – Ribbon in the sky
10 – Overjoyed
11 – Signed, sealed, delivered
12 – Sir Duke
13 – I wish
14 – Do I do
15 – For once in my life
16 – My cherie amour
17 – I just called to say I love you
18 – Check on your love
19 – Superstition / Isn’t she lovely / Fever
20 – As
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