Saturday, 8 October 2011

8-track or cassette...

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(Thanx HerrB!)

Smoking # 110

Anna Beatriz Barros

Jobs authorized biography so his kids can know him

With Time Running Short, Jobs Managed His Farewells

The revolution begins at home

What is occurring on Wall Street right now is truly remarkable. For more than two weeks, in the sanctum of the great cathedral of global capitalism, the dispossessed have liberated territory from the financial overlords and their police army.
They have created a unique opportunity to shift the tides of history in the tradition of other great peaceful occupations from the sit-down strikes of the 1930s to the lunch-counter sit-ins of the 1960s to the democratic uprisings across the Arab world and Europe today.
While the Wall Street occupation is growing, it needs an all-out commitment from everyone who cheered the Egyptians in Tahrir Square, said “We are all Wisconsin”, and stood in solidarity with the Greeks and Spaniards. This is a movement for anyone who lacks a job, housing or healthcare, or thinks they have no future.
Our system is broken at every level. More than 25 million Americans are unemployed. More than 50 million live without health insurance. And perhaps 100 million Americans are mired in poverty, using realistic measures. Yet the fat cats continue to get tax breaks and reap billions while politicians compete to turn the austerity screws on all of us.
Real potential
At some point the number of people occupying Wall Street - whether that’s five thousand, ten thousand or fifty thousand - will force the powers that be to offer concessions. No one can say how many people it will take or even how things will change exactly, but there is a real potential for bypassing a corrupt political process and to begin realising a society based on human needs not hedge fund profits.

After all, who would have imagined a year ago that Tunisians and Egyptians would oust their dictators?
At Liberty Park, the nerve centre of the occupation, more than a thousand people gather every day to debate, discuss and organise what to do about our failed system that has allowed the 400 richest Americans at the top to amass more wealth than the 180 million Americans at the bottom.
It’s astonishing that this self-organised festival of democracy has sprouted on the turf of the masters of the universe, the men who play the tune that both political parties and the media dance to. The New York Police Department, which has deployed hundreds of officers at a time to surround and intimidate protesters, is capable of arresting everyone and clearing Liberty Plaza in minutes. But they haven’t, which is also astonishing...
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Arun Gupta @'Al Jazeera'

99% vs. 1% - The Latest on Occupy Wall St. Movement: 853 Cities, Occupy Philly Inspires, Media Coverage Improves

Image

♪♫ Blur - She's So High

The Ghost

The deathly pallor, the skeletal stance, the twangy voice, the love of good whiskey and bad women—it's eerie to look at Hank Williams III without seeing this apparition of his legendary grandfather. Elizabeth Gilbert goes on the road with Nashville's prodigal grandson and witnesses his ascent to stardom and his descent into despair.
HERE

Brion Gysin's walk (1966)

HERE

Recording on a Wire


Abstract
Today magnetic recording is used in audio and video cassette recorders, and computer disk drives. Did you know that you can also use an electromagnet to record and play back from a steel wire? In fact, this is how magnetic recording got started. This project shows you how to build a simple wire recorder. Objective
The goal of this experiment is to learn about magnetic recording heads by building and testing a wire recorder. You'll investigate the relationship between recording current and playback voltage. Other variables to investigate are the number of turns used in the coil for the recording head, and the speed of the moving wire.
Introduction
Magnetic recording has proven to be a quick, safe, and robust method for storing and retrieving information. From the first voice recordings on Poulsen's wire recorder (Figure 1), to the tape recording machines used by radio stations in the 1940's and 1950's that freed the stations from having to produce all of their programs live, to the modern hard disk drive that can store billions of bits of digital information in an area smaller than a quarter, we can see the application of the fundamental principles of magnetism...

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Jason S. Goldberg, Walter Eppler and Tim Rauch @'Science Buddies'

:)

Via

Occupy Wall Street Ignites Political Hackathon

Amelia Marzec, 30, displays her creation called Signal Strength. The hack involves using a device to send peer-to-peer signals between mobile phones, making a traditional network unnecessary and preventing conversations from being surreptitiously monitored

A MUST READ - All that is wrong with the tabloids by someone who was there

Richard Peppiatt: Journalistic Practice

The devil babies have arrived...(Swanston Street Melbourne)

(Photos: TimN)

Which VPN Providers Really Take Anonymity Seriously?

Last month it became apparent that not all VPN providers live up to their marketing after an alleged member of Lulzsec was tracked down after using a supposedly anonymous service from HideMyAss. We wanted to know which VPN providers take privacy extremely seriously so we asked many of the leading providers two very straightforward questions. Their responses will be of interest to anyone concerned with anonymity issues.
As detailed in yesterday’s article, if a VPN provider carries logs of their users’ activities the chances of them not being able to live up to their claim of offering an anonymous service begins to decrease rapidly.
There are dozens of VPN providers, many of which carry marketing on their web pages which suggests that the anonymity of their subscribers is a top priority. But is it really? Do their privacy policies stand up to scrutiny? We decided to find out.
Over the past two weeks TorrentFreak contacted some of the leading, most-advertised, and most talked about VPN providers in the file-sharing and anonymity space. Rather than trying to decipher what their often-confusing marketing lingo really means, we asked them two direct questions instead:
1. Do you keep ANY logs which would allow you or a 3rd party to match an IP address and a time stamp to a user of your service? If so, exactly what information do you hold?
2. Under what jurisdictions does your company operate and under what exact circumstances will you share the information you hold with a 3rd party?
This article does not attempt to consider the actual quality of service offered by any listed provider, nor does it consider whether any service is good value for money. All we are interested in is this: Do they live up to claims that they provide a 100% anonymous service? So here we go, VPN providers in the file-sharing space first...
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Omar Mashjari 
Noticed how Tawakkul Karman devote her award to the WHOLE ArabSpring rather than just Yemen. I wonder if others would have done so?