Uproar over Google’s Internet Censorship

It’s been done before by Microsoft, but then we expect them to play dirty don’t we.

There has been a massive outcry against Google’s unethical partnership with the Chinese government. People around the world, online and off, are shocked that a company claiming to be for the free flow of information and operating while not doing evil would hypocritically push Chinese propaganda and censor the truth.

Google says, in a very defensive statement that it could be worse, although filtering searches is wrong, failing to offer the Google search at all is worse. This twisted logic is nothing more than choosing one of two bad choices – Refusing to censor searches is the right thing to do. For the average Chinese user, basic searches for recipes and “safe” government approved topics will be allowed, but anything that might threaten the totalitarian state and bring about political reform is wrong and can be severely punished. You can email Andrew McLaughlin (Mr. defensive at Google) and tell him what you think about it all.

Read more here…

Cubicles and Open-Plan Offices Have To Go

I work in an open plan office; I have for 5 years now and let me tell you it doesn’t get any better with time. I postulate that cubicle dwelling and the open plan “tech” office leads in fact to lower productivity levels due to absolute lack of privacy, incessant interruptions and a feeling of exposure. Don’t get me wrong I really like my colleagues; I just can’t stand their music, annoying cell phones, loud telephone conversations, finger tapping and whistling along to their latest song. I do a rather technical job which involves concentration and problem solving and these incessant interruptions make me want to tear my hair out or leap from my chair and throttle the latest offender.

The lack of privacy is a major problem on an ongoing basis, your cell phone goes and it’s your wife – now you would like a little privacy but the generally busy work space has now suddenly gone quiet, you can hear a pin drop or a colleague’s borborigmy at the other end of the office. So you politely ask if she’d hold while you find somewhere in the building where you can have a private conversation and then meander the halls for some unoccupied corner to chat in.

This week alone, I have had to endure no less than 5 heated conversations from three of my co-workers, one was fighting with his girlfriend, the other yelling at a car dealer over something that wasn’t fixed and the last was overcharged on his cell phone activation and was rather upset. One of the ladies we work with has a wolf-whistle as an SMS alert and a southpark quote as the ring. When her phone goes you have to sit, wait and listen until she answers; this breaks all concentration and is perhaps one of the rudest violations of office etiquette I can imagine.

Being individuals, we all have completely different tastes and work methods. Some do in fact prefer the dynamism of the open office; they feel that it somehow activates unknown Feng-shui centers in the brain leading to all sorts of creativity and happiness. For me personally it leaves me cold.

I wish companies would stop swallowing the latest in pulp marketing and business strategy and use a little common sense. Properly segregate the office, give those who need quite and privacy the opportunity to have it. Those who want to congregate like jabbering half-starved seals – by all means.

Just don’t mix them up or you could end up with less rather then more.

See newsvine comments relating to this article

Suffer the Children, he Destitute and the Homeless.

There is a conservative estimate regarding the number of street children that scrounge out an existence in India, eighteen million is the number, victims of poverty these children will have very little choice but to perpetuate the cycle of poverty. With numbers like this it is very easy for nations, including one’s own, to dehumanise the situation, toting the numbers in a journal of human misery.Speak to a street child though and under all the layers of grime and disillusionment they are little kids who have the same aspirations for love and success, a need to be sheltered and count for something. In South Africa we have a similar situation, thousands of children orphaned every month by poverty, neglect and AIDS. They become very easy targets for the sociopaths, the gangsters and the paedophiles.

Organisations like cotlands try to help but the inflow increases monthly and with very little government assistance they have to eke out a living on the few donations they receive. The brave people of these organisations suffer financial hardship and an emotional battering every day to bring a little something special to these children.

If you don’t already donate to organisations like this I implore you to give up one DVD rental a month and send a little help, you’d be surprised how far it will go.

And if bird flu hits Africa?

This is a real concern for everyone living in Africa. The WHO says that that African countries need to strengthen their laboratory facilities….WTF – we are talking about countries without bare minium food or shelter requirements, people at the base of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, in fact there is no pyramid just an empty dusty hole in the ground. Is WHO really that out of touch with reality and if so will they prove effective should the coming pandemic hit?

As avian influenza continues to spread from poultry to humans in Asia and Europe, the World Health Organization (WHO) has warned that Africa is at great risk of a pandemic, and urgently needs to strengthen its laboratory facilities to identify avian influenza in humans and animals.

International experts, including the UN’s avian flu coordinator David Nabarro, have expressed concern in recent days that migratory birds or travellers may carry the virus to Africa from Turkey or other affected areas.

Given these risks, UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s (FAO) deputy director-general David Harcharik said this week that African nations deserve special attention when it comes to improving preparedness for a pandemic. “In Turkey, the virus has already reached the crossroads of Asia, Europe and Africa, and there is a real risk of further spread,” he said at a meeting in Beijing.

The Scientist : And if bird flu hits Africa.

Genocide in Darfur while the world does nothing, yet again.

[The attackers] took a knife and cut my mother’s throat and threw her into the well. Then they took my oldest sister and began to rape her, one by one. My father was kneeling, crying and begging them for mercy. After that they killed my brother and finally my father. They threw all the bodies in the well.

This is an account from one of the “lucky” survivors of the current Darfur massacre – a Sudanese government initiated program against the black non-Arab members of the country. The world responds much as they have in the past, when massacre and genocide are being committed on an appalling scale, with complacency and a strong sense of outrage. It is the same old tune revisited every time, it happened in Rwanda, in Cambodia and Armenia and now in Sudan. Violent atrocities and sexual terrorism are the order with men only good for the slaughter and women only good for rape and disfigurement.

Under the first tree, I found a man who had been shot in the neck and the jaw; his brother, shot only in the foot, had carried him for forty-nine days to get to this oasis. Under the next tree was a widow whose parents had been killed and stuffed in the village well to poison the local water supply; then the Janjaweed had tracked down the rest of her family and killed her husband. Under the third tree was a four-year-old orphan girl carrying her one-year-old baby sister on her back; their parents had been killed. Under the fourth tree was a woman whose husband and children had been killed in front of her, and then she was gang-raped and left naked and mutilated in the desert.

Those were the people I met under just four adjacent trees. And in every direction, as far as I could see, were more trees and more victims—all with similar stories.

Read this article…

News Bytes

A group at UCLA is offering students rewards of $100 for ratting out lecturers who are “abusive, off sided or off topic” in advocating political ideologies (a.k.a. not in line with current government thinking.). It is bad enough that there are recruitment officers trawling the universities but this takes matters to a state of lunacy. How many students are going to try and cash in on this by sparking debates guaranteed to give mixed response. Awful, is the next step ratting out your parents for not having the same ideologies as they guys with the black boots and shiny helmets – sounds familiar doesn’t it? (more..)

Brian Handwerk for National Geographic contributes to the recent vine discussions on methane related global warming – nice map showing hotspots (more..) It is a strange concept that decaying foliage contributes to these methane emissions, we have been reared in a society that has mostly blamed man made sources of planetary damage, from cfc’s to industrial emissions. I wonder if this is not part of some planetary regulatory cycle. I am not a scientist but the greenhouse effect has happened before, so then what was the cause and the outcome – perhaps all out tinkering has just accelerated a cycle. I’d love someone more in the know to fill me in on the technicalities of past global warming and cooling.

It was only a matter of time, but the Bush administrations has asked a federal judge to order Google inc. to turn over material from its database. The idea behind limiting internet pornographic content to minors is not a bad one but once you set the precedent where does it end? (more..) Unfortunately the administration has not proved itself very trustworthy lately so the real reasons behind this request is most likely cloistered behind an emotional topic such as kiddies access to porn on the net.

Good news, the iTunes installer now lets you know they are transmitting data – they do fail to mention the fact that this information is also submitted to a 3rd party marketing company or the fact that the transmission url was hidden behind what looked like a local network address. (See the comments area)

For a little chuckle, visit “Defective Yeti” for a spoof on how the Iraqi war happened, you take the position of Bush in a text based MUD adventure, highly entertaining:
Here is a little sample:

    > GO RIGHT
    Radical Right
    You are on the extreme right of the political spectrum.
    Dick Cheney is here.
    Pat Robertson is here.

    > INVADE IRAQ
    You are not able to do that, yet.

    > TAKE VACATION
    Taken.

    > INVADE IRAQ
    You are not able to do that, yet.

    > SCORE
    Your favorability rating is 58% out of a possible 100%.

    > GO PHOTOOP
    Photo Op
    You are at a the Emma T. Booker Elementary School, along with a gaggle of obsequious members of the mainstream media.
    There is a book here.
    There are some children here.

    > READ BOOK
    You read “My Pet Goat.”

    In the distance, terrorists attack the United States.

    > READ BOOK
    You continue to read “My Pet Goat.”

    > READ BOOK
    You continue to read “My Pet Goat.”

Daily Dribs ‘n Drabs

I can’t stand stupidity and buying William Shatner’s kidney stone for $25,000.00 takes the cake! Hello it’s a kidney stone people, it’s gross, you can probably grow your own and it hurts a lot – although the money does go to charity and it can share a glass case with the “Virgin Mary” cheese sandwich.

The Iraqi kidnappers of Jill Carroll have threatened to kill her unless all female Iraqi prisoners are released within 72 hours; this kind of mad savagery is really not helping their case. Link..
India is making a dash for the moon and then Mars, I guess real-estate is taking off on the red planet and everyone wants a villa with a view of Olympos Mons. I have to wonder though, for a country with a population of 1.6 billion, a 64% literacy rate and a 39% employment rate (stats..) – you’d think they’d have more pressing things to do with their money.

Another of our corrupt politicians, Deputy President “greedy ass” Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka is in the dock for a $66,000.00 little holiday (tax payer sponsored aeroplane included). Apparently when you are a big-wig, you shouldn’t be held responsible for lavish spending with your mates. The trip to the shopping hubs of the Arab world was in fact – according to Ms. Ngucka – “Fact finding missions to study cranes” ….WTF?

Apparently if you’re a disgraced stem cell researcher, employment opportunities abound. Hwang Woo-suk has been offered a job by the dodgy company Clonaid, a genetic engineering arm of a religious cult claiming to have cloned many children. Mr. Suk should feel right at home working for a company with such a strong sense of creative writing.

There is hope for America, the government is getting sued for the latest in terrorist protection – NSA spying. The American Civil Liberties Union filed lawsuits on Tuesday against the Bush Administration.
iPod paraphernalia is just getting weird, this latest offering, the iPod kitty looks exactly like a sex toy…..mmmhhh……no comment

It appears that the frenetic pace of life in populated countries like Japan is not high on the agenda anymore. The country notorious for its work ethic, traffic jams and stress related suicide statistics is slowly moving back to a slower pace of life with more emphasis on living. Go slow life ..

In closing, for those of you with an off the wall sense of humour and a lack of ideas for a birthday present, try this knife block shaped like a human head – a guaranteed conversation piece.

I’m A Programmer, Not A Computer Guy

I came across a wonderful article this morning bemoaning the fact that programmers are often lumped in with the hardware-fixit types. I find this hilarious especially since it happens to me all the time.

Writing computer software for a living can be completely misrepresented especially by friends and loved ones. It seems that if you know anything about computers, God forbid work on them for a living, you automatically belong to the special charitable red cross of hardware repair.

Countless bleary eyed family members have come to me, clutching dusty antiquated shells, panic writ faces  and the briefest glimmer of hope. This nauseating state of affairs either leaves me mildly bilious or looking for an empty phone booth to change in.

Either way should you be looking for a non-hardware related career in IT or already be in IT then tell nobody what you do. Then the expectant masses will be forced to bestow their freebie sojourns on some other poor sucker.

A gentle warning to young or up-and-coming IT professionals: keep your professional identity a secret! Guard your privacy like a superhero, because before you can say “what do you mean reboot?”, you’ll be the neighborhood troubleshooter, constantly on call to save the day.

Blogcritics.org: I’m A Programmer, Not A Computer Guy.

Studying, insomnia and the newsvine

Studying, insomnia and the newsvine

Thank God I’m an insomniac – this studying while holding down a full time job is a little exhausting! A LARGE cup of coffee and a toasted Mozzarella Croissant saved me this morning. Have been reviewing and posting to newsvine – I really like the concept behind the site. The idea is to combine two of the things that make up an important part of my “online” day – the ability to post to a blog and to read relevant news headlines. It is an awesome cross between blogger and digg and am sure that when it comes out of beta and is publicly available will be an enormous hit.

Not sure who will be able to see my postings but the link is http://thoughtmenagerie.newsvine.com/

Robots go to war

Popular science published an article called “Robots Go to War” on the use of autonomous robotic soldiers in the future.

Where do we stop to examine the boundaries between the things we do and the coping mechanisms we employ to disassociate those actions and keep us comfortable. The latest Iraq debacle saw a host of unmanned strike craft, the most famous media example being the raptor. Now work is progressing along the creation of smaller unmanned reconnaissance craft that will be able to infiltrate narrow streets and areas where the bigger unmanned vehicles cannot go. Machine guns are now mounted on what amounts to remote controlled cars and sent in to kill people. All of this by people whose experience of the situation is no different to the Quake or Unreal Tournament they play in their own time. When you cannot smell the blood or hear the screams it becomes all too comfortable to dictate a course of action with horrible consequences. We live in a society that dehumanizes many aspects of humanity, the media and sensory glut ensures that people are toted and numbers and statistics.

I think that sort of mentality is something we should avoid at all costs, for the sake of what remains that encompasses brotherhood and peace.

India to lose 10 million women

This article follows in the wake of a story on Boing Boing entitled “They Burn Themselves” where Layla Ali, ZEEN program director describes Kurdish woman setting themselves on fire to highlight the awful violence inflicted on Kurdish women by men.

Here new scientist looks at how, over 20 years, 10 million females have been lost to India because of ultrasound techniques. It saddens me when life saving technology gets misused and twisted into some perverted scion of its former potential. Can anyone say “Manhattan Project”?

This bias and brutality leveled towards woman has to stop – at some point sanity must prevail.

An ever expanding virtual footprint

The strangest phenomenon has occurred in the last year or so, my virtual footprint has grown in inverse proportion to an ever decreasing physical footprint. As my glut of physical mail grinds to a halt, the access to information and an identity on the web has soared. I now have information funneling into my news aggregator every morning, post regularly to my blog and use del.icio.us to track my web links. I have 3 web mail account in addition to my work email account and 3 internet chat clients. Every day it gets harder and harder to keep track of all the news feeds, emails and conversations yet I know I would suffer serious separation anxiety if I were unplugged from the information nexus for any length of time.

In Hamilton’s fantastic space opera Commonwealth series we get a glimpse of the future of the human race. The Internet has evolved into planetary dataspheres and fabulous auditory and ocular implants allow one access to relevant information at any point. The information in these books is filtered through a personal assistant, a semi-intelligent “eButler” that consolidates the incoming information to be both meaningful and relevant.

Exciting times lie ahead no doubt, the accelerated access to meaningful information is what will drive us forward in the coming years, all I really need right now is my eButler – any ideas?

A New Year of Presidential Homophobia

Aaaah nothing like a little presidential homophobia to start off the new year. Well done Mr. Bush they are guaranteed their place in Hell – what a plonker!.

President George W. Bush (1/5/06):

We need intelligence officers who, when somebody says something in Arabic or Farsi or Urdu knows what they’re talking about. That’s what we need.

Unless those intelligence officers are gay, of course. In which case, we don’t need it:

Nine Army linguists, including six trained to speak Arabic, have been dismissed from the military because they are gay.

The soldiers’ dismissals come at a time when the military is facing a critical shortage of translators and interpreters for the war on terrorism.

Seven of the soldiers were discharged after telling superiors they are gay, and the two others got in trouble when they were caught together after curfew…[…] Six were specializing in Arabic, two were studying Korean and one was studying Mandarin Chinese. All were at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, the military’s primary language training center.

Arabic. Korean. Mandarin Chinese. This probably isn’t harming national security though.

Blog Creep

Weblogs are slowly infiltrating our office environment, since my last email about my blog, two new colleague related blogs are fizzing and popping into being. I am trying to put my finger on what makes blogs so attractive and wonder if they are an easy forum for personal creativity or merely a narcissistic portrait of your own purported importance. Invariably we move in circles of similar interest and it is this aspect of blogs that make them so exciting for me. I love being able to browse the thoughts of people who interest me and have similar interests to me. This dissemination of information is what makes blogs and news aggregation such exciting concepts for 2006. I am sure that psychology textbooks of the future will have all sorts of withdrawal related symptoms from being unplugged from your information nexus but for now I’m loving it.

Bruce Willis and Genocide

Watched the deeply disturbing “Tears of the Sun” over the weekend. Although the movie had some of the usual bad Hollywood cliches the movie did serve to bring some of the atrocities of the African (Rwanda/Congo….) genocide madness into the public forum. Without giving too much away – Bruce Willis is sent into Nigeria (undergoing a coup at the time of the movie) to evacuate a doctor and some missionaries from a rural mission village. The doctor goes on condition that the able-bodied locals go too – the missionaries and the sick stay and get slaughtered. The rebels start chasing this rag-tag group of sorry souls as the last surviving son of the now dead president is among the group. The movie is hectic in parts, and although I have read about some of the atrocities committed during these genocides, seeing it is another thing.There are so many great books and movies that show us that some of the most amazing lights of humanity can be found in the darkest and most terrible places – here are a few and I’ll add to this list as time goes on:

Books:
The Bone Woman – Clea Koff (Rwanda & Bosnia)
Fools Rush In – Bill Carter (Bosnia)
Journey into Darkness: Genocide in Rwanda – Thomas Odom (Rwanda)

Movies:
Hotel Rwanda – review

Below

some recent headlines:

Rwandan guilty of tourist murders

A former Rwandan soldier has been convicted of the murder of eight western “gorilla tourists” and a game warden in a Ugandan park in 1999.

Jean Paul Bizimana, 31, was among Rwandan rebels who abducted 14 tourists and their guide as they tracked rare mountain gorillas, the judge said.

Nine of them were brutally killed with clubs and machetes. The tourists were from the US, the UK and New Zealand.

BBC NEWS | Africa | Rwandan guilty of tourist murders.

Lego Rocks!

One of the most awesome things about being a parent is having a socially acceptable excuse to play with the cool toys again. My son, thankfully, has a virtually endless appetite for “build-it” type toys and his room is near to bursting with lego and mechanno. Naturally, being only 5, dad has to step in to help build the latest fire engine or space ship and many a wonderful afternoon has been spent on a carpet pouring over the build instructions. LEGO have now done something that I thought they should have since the birth of the Internet – give you the tools to virtually create the toy of your choice and then order the parts to actually build it. For me and C, this heralds a new and exciting era of playtime, go LEGO The Lego Factory

IRS to tax your World of Warcraft booty?

Interesting piece found on Boing Boing. Wonder if you’ll get taxed on your $26,500 virtual island, will World of Warcraft fill with Matrix style agents intent on imprisoning your virtual characters for tax evasion? Are we taking this all a little to far? Hopefully sanity prevails.

Mark Frauenfelder:
Posted on Gareth Branwyn’s Street Tech:

Julian Dibbell has an interesting piece in the Jan/Feb issue of Legal Affairs where he explores the idea of whether the trading of virtual “goods” in virtual worlds could constitute an income-generating, and therefore, taxable exchange under the IRS rules of barter. This may sound ridiculous on the face of it, but because virtual world goods now have real-world market values, there is a legal argument here (albeit an unsettling one for anybody who plays online multiplayer games or hangs out in SecondLife). The good news is that, when he pursued the question with IRS officials, they cocked their heads to the side like dogs hearing a high-pitched noise, i.e. don’t expect to see 1099 forms shipping with multiplayer games anytime soon.

[Via Boing Boing]

The burning Bush, classic!

Bwa-hahahahahaha

 

An Imagination Stagnation

Sitting on my son’s bookshelf at home is a book about the future that I had when I was a kid, now somewhat dated and without the insane technical leaps and bounds predicted for beyond 2000, but still containing relevant concepts that are being put into practice as we speak. One of the stories that caught my imagination back in grade 4 was the ability to harness energy from the sea, one of the concepts we are all familiar with now is the ability to harness energy from the motion of waves. The other concept was using thermal gradients in the ocean – the differential between the relatively warmer surface water and the colder deep ocean water – to power vapour turbines. Almost 20 years on and my trusty news aggregator brings me an article of a company Sea Solar Power inc. that is developing this concept to be comparable in price to other commercially viable sources of energy. Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion it turns out is not a new technology, it was invented in 1881 by a French scientist Jacques Arsene D’Arsonva, 124 years ago.
 

Being an avid science fiction reader, I cannot help but draw some insights as to how a huge number of modern conveniences we take for granted, from computer components to geosynchronous orbital satellites have spawned in the mind of creative thinkers a long time ago. Modern science fiction, with the exception of the likes of Simmons and Hamilton, is in a sorry cycle of regurgitative stagnation. Rather like the plethora of orc-bashing fantasy that has trailed in the wake of Tolkien it seems that creative insight, the things that come into being and take seed in the collective unconscious of the human race, that grabs the tiller on scientific and technological progress and steers our course, is rather stale and sadly lacking at the moment.

Popular mechanics this month published an article on Buzz Aldrin’s view on how to get to Mars, in the wake of the war on terror, the American government has grabbed a hold of a feel good, patriotic topic that has trekkies sliding off their seats – a manned mission to Mars. Caught in the web of procedural bureaucracy and funding cuts it is rather laughable until you read just how plausible it could be. Here we have a man who has stood on another planetoid looking at our own, someone who has walked the walk and is laying a foundation for an economically and scientifically viable option for human expansion in our solar system, perhaps someone whose vision rises to more lofty levels than the lower levels of Maslow’s pyramid.

I guess in the days of information and visual overload, our kids are too busy watching power-puff girls too dream of walking on other worlds – I rather hope not.

Virtual Real-Estate

In another post today I had a brief look at the evolving role of virtual reality as a means of social interaction, virtual real-estate for real money is a new one however -

Get your virtual island today for a mere $26,500.00

Check this out on 3quarksdaily: Real Sweat Shops, Virtual Gold