June 30, 2003
Is Google God
THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN, NEW YORK TIMES OP-ED COLUMNIST, writes:
Says Alan Cohen, a V.P. of Airespace, a new Wi-Fi provider: "If I can operate Google, I can find anything. And with wireless, it means I will be able to find anything, anywhere, anytime. Which is why I say that Google, combined with Wi-Fi, is a little bit like God. God is wireless, God is everywhere and God sees and knows everything. Throughout history, people connected to God without wires. Now, for many questions in the world, you ask Google, and increasingly, you can do it without wires, too."
Since 9/11 the world has felt increasingly fragmented. Reading the papers, one senses that many Americans are emotionally withdrawing from the world and that the world is drifting away from America. The powerful sense of integration that the go-go-globalizing 1990's created, the sense that the world was shrinking from a size medium to a size small, feels over now.
The reality, though, is quite different. While you were sleeping after 9/11, not only has the process of technological integration continued, it has actually intensified — and this will have profound implications. I recently went out to Silicon Valley to visit the offices of Google, the world's most popular search engine. It is a mind-bending experience. You can actually sit in front of a monitor and watch a sample of everything that everyone in the world is searching for. (Hint: sex, God, jobs and, oh my word, professional wrestling usually top the lists.)
In the past three years, Google has gone from processing 100 million searches per day to over 200 million searches per day. And get this: only one-third come from inside the U.S. The rest are in 88 other languages. "The rate of the adoption of the Internet in all its forms is increasing, not decreasing," says Eric Schmidt, Google's C.E.O. "The fact that many [Internet companies] are in a terrible state does not correlate with users not using their products."
VeriSign, which operates much of the Internet's infrastructure, was processing 600 million domain requests per day in early 2000. It's now processing nine billion per day. A domain request is anytime anyone types in .com or .net. And you ain't seen nothin' yet. Within the next few years you will be able to be both mobile and totally connected, thanks to the pending explosion of Wi-Fi, or wireless fidelity. Using radio technology, Wi-Fi will provide high-speed connection from your laptop computer or P.D.A. to the Internet from anywhere — McDonald's, the beach or your library.
Says Alan Cohen, a V.P. of Airespace, a new Wi-Fi provider: "If I can operate Google, I can find anything. And with wireless, it means I will be able to find anything, anywhere, anytime. Which is why I say that Google, combined with Wi-Fi, is a little bit like God. God is wireless, God is everywhere and God sees and knows everything. Throughout history, people connected to God without wires. Now, for many questions in the world, you ask Google, and increasingly, you can do it without wires, too."
In other words, once Wi-Fi is in place, with one little Internet connection I can download anything from anywhere and I can spread anything from anywhere. That is good news for both scientists and terrorists, pro-Americans and anti-Americans.
And that brings me to the point of this column: While we may be emotionally distancing ourselves from the world, the world is getting more integrated. That means that what people think of us, as Americans, will matter more, not less. Because people outside America will be able to build alliances more efficiently in the world we are entering and they will be able to reach out and touch us — whether with computer viruses or anthrax recipes downloaded from the Internet — more than ever.
"The key point is not just whether people hate us," says Robert Wright, the author of "Nonzero," a highly original book on the integrated world. "The key point is that it matters more now whether people hate us, and will keep mattering more, for technological reasons. I don't mean just homemade W.M.D.'s. I am talking about the way information technology — everyone using e-mail, Wi-Fi and Google — will make it much easier for small groups to rally like-minded people, crystallize diffuse hatreds and mobilize lethal force. And wait until the whole world goes broadband. Broadband — a much richer Internet service that brings video on demand to your PC — will revolutionize recruiting, because video is such an emotionally powerful medium. Ever seen one of Osama bin Laden's recruiting videos They're very effective, and they'll reach their targeted audience much more efficiently via broadband."
None of this means we, America, just have to do what the world wants, but we do have to take it seriously, and we do have to be good listeners. We, America, "have to work even harder to build bridges," argues Mr. Wright, because info-tech, left to its own devices, will make it so much easier for small groups to build their own little island kingdoms. And their island kingdoms, which may not seem important or potent now, will be able to touch us more, not less.
NASA To Study Man Who Lives On Liquids And Light
Sydney Morning Herald reports:
An Indian man, who claims to have survived only on liquids and sunlight for eight years, has been invited by NASA to show them how he does it.
Hira Ratan Manek - also known as Hirachand - a 64-year-old mechanical engineer who lives in the southern state of Kerala, apparently started disliking food in 1992, the Hindustan Times newspaper reported.
In 1995, he went on a pilgrimage to the Himalayas and stopped eating completely on his return.
His wife, Vimla, said: "Every evening he looks at the sun for one hour without batting an eyelid. It is his main food. Occasionally he takes coffee, tea or some other liquid."
Last June, scientists from the US space agency verified that Manek spent 130 days surviving only on water, the report said.
They even named this subsistence on water and solar energy after him: The HRM (Hira Ratan Manek) Phenomenon.
Mr Manek is now in the US to show NASA's scientists how he survives without food.
The US space agency hopes to use the technique to solve food storage and preservation problems on its expeditions, the report said.
Mr Manek said he "eats through his eyes" in the evening, when the sun's ultraviolet rays are least harmful. He and his wife claim the technique is totally scientific. However, doctors warn that staring at the sun can make you blind.
His wife said: "He has a special taste for sun energy. He believes only 5 per cent of human brain cells are used by most people. The other 95 per cent can be activated through solar energy."
DPA
Spraypaint Printer
Hektor is an inkjet printer made out of a can of spraypaint and a series of clever, machine-controlled pulleys. The site features a making-of guide in PDF and a really sexy movie of Hektor in action.
(via BoingBoing)
Chicago Porch Collapse Kills 12
CHICAGO, June 30 — For Simon Rasin and other partygoers crammed onto a third-floor porch on Chicago’s North Side, there was no warning when the floor caved in, sending dozens of people hurtling down in an avalanche of wooden planks.“I fell through both the second and the first floor decks into the basement area in just a pile of bodies,” said Rasin, a University of Chicago law student whose friend, Henry Wischerath, was one of the 12 killed. At least 57 others were injured, some critically.
Left: Inspectors survey the damage of a collapsed third floor balcony in Chicago that killed 12 people and injured dozens. (AP via MSNBC)
AS AUTHORITIES searched for clues into the early Sunday tragedy in an affluent Chicago neighborhood, survivors described a harrowing scene: bodies stacked upon bodies, trapped under rubble, some victims moaning for help.
“There were people covering me. It was pitch black and people were yelling, ’I’m dying.’ I was assuming I was going to die,” said Natalie Brougham, 22. “I guess I got lucky and only had two or three people on top of me.”
NO PORCH PERMIT FOUND
By Sunday evening, workers had torn the porch down. Lumber and red plastic cups littered the alley behind the building.
A structural engineer conducted a preliminary examination and determined that the porch was sound, said City Building Commissioner Norma Reyes. She said the city was unable to find a construction permit for the porch, which was built in 1998.
Officials found permits for other repairs at the building that year, but Reyes said it was unclear whether the porch exceeded the scope of those documents.
“Thus far, there is no evidence of any criminal activity whatsoever,” Police Superintendent Terry Hillard said.
As many as 50 people, most of them in their early 20s, had squeezed onto the apartment porch for a party in the Lincoln Park neighborhood when the floor fell at about 12:30 a.m. Sunday.
Seven men and five women, most of them apparently on the porches directly below, were sandwiched between the falling floors and killed, said Larry Langford, spokesman for the city’s Office of Emergency Management.
“There was chaos,” Chicago Fire Commissioner James Joyce said. “There were people screaming and crying in the alley.”
Partygoers who had been safe inside the apartment said they tried to rescue their friends from the pile of lumber and bodies, while people poured out of a nearby tavern to help.
“They were bloodied and covered in rubble, their clothes were ripped. Women were looking for husbands, men were looking for wives. It was horrible,” said Geraldine Schapira, 33, who lives nearby.
Eleven people were pronounced dead at the scene, and the Cook County Medical Examiner’s office confirmed that a 12th person was dead on arrival at hospital.
HIGH SCHOOL FRIENDS
Most of the people at the party were friends in their early 20s, many of them graduates of New Trier High School in Chicago’s northern suburbs, said Fina Cannon. She had been in the apartment’s kitchen, looking out at the porch when it gave way.
“All of a sudden I saw all these heads going down,” Cannon said. “The floor just dropped out from underneath them. They all went down in unison.”
“It was simply a case of too many people in a small space,” Joyce said. He urged people to be careful about safety, particularly with the upcoming July 4 holiday.
Authorities released the names of all the victims: Wischerath, 24, of Buffalo, N.Y.; John Jackson, 22, of Kansas City, Mo.; Katherine Sheriff, 23, of Chicago; Eileen Lupton, 22, of Lake Forest; Shea Fitzgerald, 19, of Winnetka; Muhammed Hameeduddin, 25, of Chicago; Margaret Haynie, 25, of Evansville, Ind.; Sam Farmer, 21, of Winnetka; Eric Kumpf, 30, of Hoboken, N.J.; Robert Koranda, 23, of Naperville; and Kelly McKinnell, 26, of Barrington; and Julie Sorkin, 25, of Glenview.
Sunday’s accident was the latest to hit America’s third largest city.
In February, 21 people trying to flee a Chicago nightclub were crushed to death when a crowd became trapped in a narrow staircase. The panic was set off by a club worker using crowd control spray to quell a fight.
© 2003 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
June 27, 2003
U.S. Again Uses Enemy Combatant Label to Deny Basic Rights
(New York, June 23, 2003) The Bush Administration’s designation of Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, a Qatari national living in the United States, as an "enemy combatant" threatens basic rights safeguards, Human Rights Watch said today. The Justice Department announced today that it was dropping criminal charges against al-Marri and that he would instead be held without charge by the U.S. military.
“The Bush Administration has once again done an end run around the criminal justice system,” said Wendy Patten, U.S. advocacy director at Human Rights Watch. “It is invoking the laws of war in the United States to justify locking people up without charge and without access to a lawyer. This kind of military detention has no place in a country committed to the rule of law.”
Al-Marri is the third person held in the United States under military authority as an “enemy combatant.” Human Rights Watch maintains that there should be a strong presumption that anyone arrested in the United States, far from any battlefield, be granted the full legal protections of the criminal justice system – including the right to counsel and not to be held without charge.
Human Rights Watch disputes the government's contention that international humanitarian law, commonly referred to as the laws of war, permits the president to unilaterally designate al-Marri an "enemy combatant." The United States cannot declare a criminal suspect, including a suspected member of al-Qaeda, an enemy combatant, except where there has been direct participation in an international armed conflict. International humanitarian law is inapplicable outside areas of armed conflict and where there is no direct connection to an armed conflict. Instead, the protections of international human rights law apply. In the case of a person detained in the United States, the protections of U.S. constitutional law apply as well. These protections include the rights to be formally charged and permitted access to counsel.
“Rather than afford al-Marri basic due process and other constitutional guarantees, the Bush administration has circumvented these rights by unilaterally designating him an enemy combatant,” said Patten. “The government is claiming a virtually unlimited power to deprive people of their liberty and hold them incommunicado based only on the president’s say-so.”
According to news reports, al-Marri, who lived in Peoria, Illinois, has been in U.S. custody since December 2001. He was first held as a material witness and then later charged with lying to the FBI and credit card fraud.
SARS is not one of the true mass killers
Michael Fumento, National Post, writes:
SARS was supposed to be the worst disease outbreak since the Spanish Flu of 1918-19. But as it flickers out, it has killed fewer people in six months than died every 10 minutes during that great pandemic.
SARS didn't merit mentions in more than 500 stories in The New York Times, nor 350 in The Washington Post. It had no business occupying the cover of all three major U.S. news magazines in the same week.
As a worldwide threat, SARS never amounted to more than a mite on a mammoth. As I write this, in the past half year there have been 8,460 SARS cases reported and 808 deaths. By comparison, malaria kills more people every 2.5 hours and tuberculosis more every three hours.
Here's the annual butcher's bill for true mass-killers that have no media cheerleading squad:
- diarrhea diseases: 2.2 million deaths;
- measles: 900,000 deaths;
- typhoid fever: 600,000 deaths;
- hepatitis B: 600,000 deaths;
- influenza: 250,000 to 500,000 deaths.
But the purveyors of panic -- primarily the media, the World Health Organization, and to a lesser extent national health services such as the Federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention -- will offer no apologies or explanations beyond, "Well, it could have been huge."
Yes, and I could have played for the New York Yankees. But it was clear early on that neither I nor SARS were ever big league material. Consider that my first column on SARS hysteria was printed in this paper March 28 -- before those three magazine covers appeared featuring a frightened face covered with a surgical mask.
Yet I'm hardly Nostradamus, else I'd be out playing the lottery right now. I simply did what any good public health official or science writer should have done, observed how the disease was spreading.
Yet that simple technique was ignored, such that while the WHO's own figures -- readily available on its Web site - show that the epidemic peaked at the end of April, the agency and the media waited until June 5 to announce it.
The media obsessed over the allegedly high percentage of deaths among SARS victims, even though many far more common diseases have vastly higher death rates.
Moreover, death rates mean nothing if you don't also look at incidence. Which infectious disease is more worrisome: One with a 100% death rate that afflicts one person per year or one with a one per cent mortality rate that afflicts half a million
To the consternation of many criers, there was no wolf.
In fact, referring to "a" SARS death rate is inherently disingenuous. In China it's long been nine per cent, whereas in Europe and the United States there hasn't been a single death. Obviously, as with most diseases, the death rate is dependent on the quality of health care.
Nobody pretends the death rate from TB in Africa or malaria in Thailand represents the whole world. Why was it done with SARS For the same reason everything was hyped about the disease: It sold newspapers and magazines; it raised TV ratings; and it promised to increase the prestige and budget of the WHO.
That's also how a disease in which over 80% of all cases came from one nation and the vast majority of countries never got a single case came to be labeled a worldwide scourge.
The purveyors of panic won't apologize because they never do. Further, they still have a card to play. "OK," they can say, "perhaps those 808 SARS deaths didn't quite reach the level of the Spanish Flu. But maybe SARS will re-emerge next winter and fulfill our prophecy!" Not likely. As poorly as SARS spread this time around, next time authorities will be ready. The only worry would be complacency from people who got tired of hearing the cry of "Wolf!" the first time around.
Moreover, there's no undoing the economic damage of the SARS hysteria. Some economists believe that losses in tourism, business travel, and business generally could send both Hong Kong and mainland China into a recession.
That could lead to further decay in health care and hygiene, which in turn would mean more deaths not just from SARS but from the diseases that truly plague these countries.
It's a good bet that through the economic damage inflicted, SARS the panic will kill far more people than did SARS the disease.
Michael Fumento is the author of numerous books. His next book, BioEvolution: How Biotechnology Is Changing Our World, will be published in 2003 by Encounter Books.
© Copyright 2003 National Post
U.S. Supreme Court Strikes Down Last Sodomy Laws
David Rennie, UK Telegraph, writes:
In a landmark decision likely to revolutionise the legal standing of American homosexuals, the United States Supreme Court yesterday struck down laws banning sodomy, which are still found in 13 states.
The decision reversed the court's own position of 17 years earlier, when it ruled that the constitution's talk of liberty did not cover the right to engage in what society considers "deviant" acts.
That 1986 ruling, in which the Supreme Court cited the "ancient roots" of proscriptions against homosexuality, became a rallying point for liberal activists across North America. At that time, there were 24 states which criminalised homosexual behaviour.
By six votes to three, the highest court ruled yesterday that the state cannot make "private sexual conduct a crime".
Gay rights groups reacted with delight to the Supreme Court's change of course, but Christian conservatives expressed disgust.
The ruling will have far-reaching significance far beyond gay rights, strongly reinforcing the presumption that public morality should halt at the threshold of an American's home - a point seized on by supporters and opponents of the decision.
"Liberty protects the person from unwarranted government intrusions into a dwelling or other private places . . . Liberty presumes an autonomy of self that includes freedom of thought, belief, expression and certain intimate conduct," wrote Justice Anthony Kennedy, for the majority.
Though sodomy laws are rarely enforced, gay rights groups say they enshrine society's formal disapproval of homosexuality, and act as the legal underpinning for court decisions on such issues as employment, marriage and parental rights for practising homosexuals.
Justice Antonin Scalia, a staunch conservative and devout Roman Catholic, took the unusual step of reading his dissenting opinion aloud from the bench. He said his colleagues had "largely signed up to the so-called homosexual agenda".
Mr Scalia, who was joined in his dissent by the chief justice, William Rehnquist, and Justice Clarence Thomas, gave warning that the ruling would make it harder for states to resist demands such as gay marriage.
The test case before the Supreme Court involved a rare arrest of two men caught in a sexual act in their own home in Texas in 1998.
© Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2003.
June 25, 2003
the difficult path of the gradualist
"When Milarepa was first taught the Great Perfection, he thought he could attain Buddhahood without meditation. He remained relaxed without meditating, and thus attained no mental development. Therefore, when his lama tested him and found that he had made no progress, he said, "I have made a mistake. Though the Great Perfection is indeed inconceivable, you are too lax and not fitted for this difficulty on the gradual path. Therefore, you should go to the south, consult the translator Marpa, and take the difficult path of the gradualist. You have failed at the easy way to Buddhahood.' Thus the lama had to send him away, whereupon Milarepa underwent untold difficulties but through the power of devoted effort was able to achieve Buddhahood"
-- from 'Tantric Practice in Nying-ma' by Khetsun Sangpo, published by Snow Lion Publications.
Fed Cuts Bank Lending Rate to 1%, Lowest Since 1958
June 25 (Bloomberg) -- Federal Reserve policy makers reduced the benchmark U.S. interest rate to 1 percent, the lowest since Dwight Eisenhower was president 45 years ago, in an effort to boost the economy and ward off deflation.
Members of the Fed's rate-setting Open Market Committee voted 11-1 to lower the overnight bank lending rate a quarter percentage point from 1.25 percent. The decline was less than the half-point cut some investors expected, and stock and bond prices fell.
``Recent signs point to a firming in spending, markedly improved financial conditions, and labor and product markets that are stabilizing,'' the Fed said in a statement. ``The economy, nonetheless, has yet to exhibit sustainable growth.''
Chairman Alan Greenspan and the other central bankers cut the overnight bank lending rate for the 13th time since January 2001 to help lift an economy that has lost 324,000 jobs in six months and that grew at just a 1.9 percent annual rate last quarter. The so-called federal funds rate is now the lowest since it averaged 0.68 percent in July 1958.
The Fed said the risks to the economy ``are roughly equal.'' At the same time, ``the probability, though minor, of an unwelcome substantial fall in inflation exceeds that of a pickup of inflation from its already low level,'' the statement said. ``On balance, the Committee believes that the latter concern is likely to predominate for the foreseeable future.''
Fed's Next Move
Greenspan has warned of possible ``corrosive'' effects from slowing inflation or from a broad decline in prices, called deflation, that might sap profits and change spending behavior.
Today's statement delivers three basic messages, said Ian Shepherdson, chief U.S. economist at High Frequency Economics in Valhalla, New York, who correctly predicted the quarter-point cut. ``One, things are getting better, slowly,'' he said. ``Two, the Fed is ready to ease again if the data don't improve further in the near term. Three, they won't be hiking anytime soon.''
The Fed next meets to review rates in August. The last time the FOMC lowered the overnight rate was Nov. 6.
With expectations for inflation low, policy-makers said they ``judged that a slightly more expansive monetary policy would add further support for an economy which it expects to improve over time.''
U.S. Treasuries fell after the Fed cut rates less than the half-point reduction some traders expected. The 1 1/4 percent note due May 2005 fell more than 1/4 point to 99 31/32 at 4 p.m. in New York as its yield surged 16 basis points to 1.25 percent. The 3 5/8 percent note maturing in 2013 fell more than a point, pushing its yield up 14 basis points to 3.39 percent.
The Standard & Poor's 500 Stock Index fell 8.1 points, or 0.8 percent.
Cost of Borrowing
Today's rate cut will affect the cost of borrowing for everything from corporate bank loans to home mortgages and credit cards.
``The interest rate cut certainly can't hurt,'' said James Young, chief financial officer of Union Pacific Corp., the largest U.S. railroad owner. ``I'm not as optimistic that it will actually turn around consumer demand. The real key here is job creation and getting a national energy policy. High energy costs are really a constraint on growth.''
The central bank also reduced the cost of direct loans to commercial banks, a rate known as the discount rate. The so-called primary credit discount rate fell to 2 percent; a secondary rate for distressed banks fell to 2.5 percent.
All but 11 of the 157 economists and analysts surveyed by Bloomberg News expected today's policy move. Of the total, 97 expected a 25 basis-point cut, 48 predicted 50 basis points and one split the difference at 37.5 basis points.
Fed Voters
Fed Bank of San Francisco President Robert Parry dissented from the decision, calling from a 50-basis point cut. His district is the largest, covering nine Western states and 26.9 million workers who account for a fifth of the nation's total employment. The district includes four of the top 10 states with the highest unemployment rates: Oregon at 8.2 percent, Washington and Alaska at 7.3 percent, and California at 6.6 percent.
Jamie Stewart, acting president of the New York Fed Bank, voted with the majority today, standing in for William McDonough, the former president, who resigned earlier this month. The bank's board of directors has not yet appointed a successor.
Buffeted by the Iraq war, accounting scandals, tepid business confidence, and job losses, the U.S. economy has been unable to maintain a steady, broadening pace of growth for the past six quarters.
The nation's factories used only 74.3 percent of their capacity in May, down from an average use rate of 82.7 percent in the five years before the recession began.
Company Views
Some corporate officers said that the latest rate reduction, while welcome, won't necessarily spur them to speed up their business plans.
``This is directed at businesses to build inventory and to generate employment'' said Hal Upbin, chief executive officer of clothing maker Kellwood Co. ``I don't know personally a quarter is going to make a difference, but it's better than not doing anything.''
As for St. Louis-based Kellwood, the company's lower borrowing cost after 13 rate cuts, ``while very welcome, hasn't been a factor in our decision-making process,'' he said.
Business investment in equipment and software, a measure frequently cited by Fed officials, fell by $14.7 billion on an annualized basis, or 6.3 percent, in the first quarter. The economy lost 17,000 jobs in May and the national unemployment rate stands at 6.1 percent.
Deflation Risks
Fed officials are concerned that sluggish demand, excess capacity and falling prices for many goods and some services may conspire to increase deflationary expectations among business executives and consumers.
Greenspan described this process earlier this month as ``an interactive corrosive force'' that the Fed needed to insure against. His comments created some of the expectations for today's rate cut.
Consumer prices, minus food and energy, rose 1.6 percent over the 12 months ending May, a rate analysts suggest is too low to keep the economy out of deflation in the event of some kind of economic shock.
The Fed's action is aimed at ensuring that U.S., the world's largest economy, continues to grow at a time when other major economies also are sluggish.
Growth Forecasts
The new fed funds rate compares with benchmark rates of 2 percent for the European Central Bank and 3.75 percent at the Bank of England. Japan's average overnight bank-lending rate fell below zero for the first time earlier today.
Economists expect low rates and recent tax cuts to lift the economy to a 3.3 percent annual rate of growth in the third quarter and a 3.5 percent rate in the fourth, from 1.9 percent in the first three months of the year. Manufacturing, one of the hardest hit sectors of the 2001 recession, is showing signs of a rebound, according to two Fed bank surveys.
``All signs seem to be pointing to a stronger second-half,'' said Tracy Mullin, president and chief executive officer of the National Retail Federation in Washington, which represents 1.4 million retailers. ``This is just more icing on the cake.''
Last Updated: June 25, 2003 16:33 EDT
©2003 Bloomberg L.P. All rights reserved.
Digital Version of the Tibetan Kangyur
Snow Lion Publications reports:
The Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center (TBRC), a not-for-profit organization in New York, has just announced the release of a digital version of the Tibetan Kangyur. This great collection comprises 100+ volumes of scriptures believed by the Tibetan Buddhist tradition to be the direct word of Lord Buddha in has manifold manifestations. The Kangyur is kept on the shrines of most monasteries, retreat centers, and Buddhist laymen throughout the Tibetan Buddhist world. The Kangyur scanned by TBRC is from the Derge Parpu edition reprinted in India by H. H. the Sixteenth Karmapa.
This release of a digital edition marks the completion of a year long project of text preparation, scanning, quality control, and production. The 103 volumes of the original edition have been reduced to just 10 CDs which have been packaged in an attractive case. The volumes are in Adobe Acrobat PDF format readable on both PC and Macintosh platforms. This set is priced for practitioners, other individuals, and dharma centers at $195 inclusive of shipping anywhere. The pricing has been kept low in order that this extraordinary collection can be made available to all. This subsidized price covers the cost of text preparation, scanning of the original texts, quality control, burning on to CDs, materials, and handling and shipping. The price for libraries and academic research institutions is a very reasonable $1030, including shipping. (If you are ordering for a library, please don't cheat and use the individual price! The small amount being asked directly supports the scanning of further materials!)
Your purchase of a set of the Kangyur supports and TBRC's charitable mission of digitally preserving, cataloging, and distribution of the whole of Tibetan Buddhist tradition. To order, or for further information on this and other materials, go to http://www.tbrc.org. One may order using the online Charity Wave website, accessible from the TBRC website, and pay by credit card. It may be easier to pay by wire transfer or by sending a personal check in US dollars. To order the Derge Kanjur on the website, use TBRC Work Number W22084 and put this in any text box on the secure web site of Charity Wave.
The TBRC has also scanned and is now doing quality control on the Derge Tengyur! This collection represents the Indic language commentaries on the Kangyur which have been translated into Tibetan. TBRC expects that this will be available soon. A large number of other works of Tibetan masters are also available; for details see the website. The full catalog can be downloaded as a searchable *.pdf document at the URL: http://ww.tbrc.org. In this catalog one can search for titles, authors, and key words including the sectarian affiliation of the work or collection. The file is 1.4MB.
The Kangyur of Derge was produced under the patronage of the ruler Tenpa Tsering (1678-1738). The great Karma Kagyu scholar, Situ Panchen Chokyi Jungne (1699/1700-1774), was charged with the oversight of the project. The blocks were carved deeply and well. The established rule was that the blocks could only be printed in vermillion ink. Black ink was never allowed to touch the Derge Kangyur blocks. When the blocks were deemed by the Situ's editing team to be in a final form, a limited number of sets were struck and sent as offerings to the great lineage holders of Tibet. These were known as parpu or "first fruit printings". One parpu printing which reached the young 13th Karmapa Dudul Dorje (1733/34-1797/98) at Tsurpu was especially highly regarded. This parpu was brought to Sikkim from Tsurpu by H.H.the 16th Karmapa and was the original used for the "facsimile edition" which he issued between 1976 and 1979. Copies of this printing were acquired by the New Delhi Field Office of the Library of Congress and is found in a few research libraries in the US. Because of the reputation of the Karmapa, this "edition" spread widely throughout the Tibetan speaking Buddhist lands. It is this "facsimile edition" that has recently been reissued in Chengdu and has now been distributed throughout China.
The release of the digital set of the Derge Kangyur marks TBRC's commitment to sustaining, preserving and making available the rich heritage of the Tibetan people. In the near future, TBRC intends to issue the post-parpu additions to the Derge Kangyur as well as a searchable digital index with the accompanying Derge Tangyur. For those interested in further supporting TBRC's work, in order that other materials be made available, TBRC has an active program for the sponsorship of the digital preservation of its holdings. Currently TBRC is seeking support for the scanning of the Narthang Tengyur. The sponsorship of a single volume costs only $100. To find out more about TBRC's digital text preservation sponsorship program, please contact TBRC at . All donations for scanning of texts are tax deductible.
June 24, 2003
HP, Intel Join PlanetLab
Peter Sayer, IDG News Service (June 24, 2003), writes:
As the Internet grows, it is becoming harder to change and easier to break, according to the researchers from the PlanetLab consortium. New, distributed technologies could be used to identify denial-of-service (DoS) attacks before they cause damage, or to enable the Internet to heal itself quicker after a cable break, they say.
One of the biggest problems they face is how to develop and test such services, given that building a prototype requires a testbed on the same scale as the Internet itself, with a volume of traffic to match.
One group of researchers has been quietly building just such a testbed for a little over a year now, and is about to transform its project, PlanetLab, into an academic-industrial consortium with support from Intel and HP.
Intel and Hewlett-Packard are joining a consortium that aims to build a platform on which to develop "disruptive" Internet technologies, they announced Tuesday. These technologies are needed because the Internet is becoming "ossified," according to HP and Intel researchers.
As the Internet grows, it is becoming harder to change and easier to break, according to the researchers from the PlanetLab consortium. New, distributed technologies could be used to identify denial-of-service (DoS) attacks before they cause damage, or to enable the Internet to heal itself quicker after a cable break, they say.
One of the biggest problems they face is how to develop and test such services, given that building a prototype requires a testbed on the same scale as the Internet itself, with a volume of traffic to match.
One group of researchers has been quietly building just such a testbed for a little over a year now, and is about to transform its project, PlanetLab, into an academic-industrial consortium with support from Intel and HP.
Of course, the researchers haven't really built a test network the size of the Internet: They've piggy-backed their project on the real thing. PlanetLab, as the testbed is called, is a network of computers, linked by the Internet, on which researchers can test distributed, networked applications and services such as search engines, or new routing and naming protocols.
The goal of the project is to provide a space to test the disruptive technologies they hope will enable the Internet to develop further.
"The research community is full of ideas about new services they want to deploy. ... The problem is, there is a very high barrier to entry," said Larry Peterson, one of the project's founders and a professor of computer science at Princeton University in New Jersey, who also works for Intel Research. Peterson and other project members spoke in a conference call with journalists.
That barrier is the cost of deploying a planet-wide network. No one university research group could hope to achieve it, but by pooling resources and agreeing to share processor time and disk space, researchers from 62 institutions have built a network of 160 servers at 65 locations across the Internet. And it's not finished yet: the goal is to link around 1,000 computers.
"If I have the viewpoint of 1,000 machines, I have the ability to see the beginnings of a distributed denial of service [DDoS] attack, or to route traffic differently than the route I would have chosen looking in from the edge of the network," Peterson said.
Applications running on PlanetLab share resources on some or all of the computers in the network, executing in many places at once. While this might sound like a grid computing system, it's not the same, according to another of the project's founders, David Culler, a professor in computer science at the University of California at Berkeley and also academic director of Intel Research at Berkeley.
"We have a number of grid researchers using PlanetLab as a way to try their ideas out, but there's a big difference. Grid is a way to get access to cycles that happen to be in other places, but if they happened to be in the same machine room, that would be better. With PlanetLab, the Internet between the nodes is what it's all about," Culler said in the same conference call.
Fields of research that could be opened up by PlanetLab are plentiful, according to Culler.
"People are looking at distributed search engines. Distributed storage is particularly interesting as you start to integrate that with various kinds of sensors streaming information from the physical world," he said.
Enhancing massively multiplayer games is another potential application but, said Culler, "We believe the most important ones are the ones we haven't seen yet because people haven't had the tools available."
Those tools are starting to come online. Peterson expects the network will almost double in size to 300 nodes by the end of this year, and hopes for 1,000 nodes within two years.
Intel Research has already donated around 100 servers to the project, Culler said. HP is donating 30, according to Rick McGeer of HP Labs. McGeer is HP's liaison officer with CITRIS, the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society at Berkeley.
The servers PlanetLab uses are based on Intel's Pentium III processor, and run a customized version of Red Hat's version of the Linux operating system, Peterson said. "It's convenient to get things running quickly, and a lot of the research community uses Linux," Peterson said.
There are still holes in PlanetLab's net, though. "We don't have nodes in Japan. We are very interested in seeing sites come up there," Culler said.
June 23, 2003
Gen. Clark says White House Pushed Saddam Link Without Evidence
According to Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting:
Former General Wesley Clark told anchor Tim Russert [of NBC's Meet the Press on June 15th] that Bush administration officials had engaged in a campaign to implicate Saddam Hussein in the September 11 attacks-- starting that very day. Clark said that he'd been called on September 11 and urged to link Baghdad to the terror attacks, but declined to do so because of a lack of evidence.
FAIR Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting
112 W. 27th Street New York, NY 10001
MEDIA ADVISORY:
Media Silent on Clark's 9/11 Comments:
Gen. says White House pushed Saddam link without evidence
June 20, 2003
Sunday morning talk shows like ABC's This Week or Fox News Sunday often make news for days afterward. Since prominent government officials dominate the guest lists of the programs, it is not unusual for the Monday editions of major newspapers to report on interviews done by the Sunday chat shows.
But the June 15 edition of NBC's Meet the Press was unusual for the buzz that it didn't generate. Former General Wesley Clark told anchor Tim Russert that Bush administration officials had engaged in a campaign to implicate Saddam Hussein in the September 11 attacks-- starting that very day. Clark said that he'd been called on September 11 and urged to link Baghdad to the terror attacks, but declined to do so because of a lack of evidence.
Here is a transcript of the exchange:
CLARK: "There was a concerted effort during the fall of 2001, starting immediately after 9/11, to pin 9/11 and the terrorism problem on Saddam Hussein."
RUSSERT: "By who Who did that"
CLARK: "Well, it came from the White House, it came from people around the White House. It came from all over. I got a call on 9/11. I was on CNN, and I got a call at my home saying, 'You got to say this is connected. This is state-sponsored terrorism. This has to be connected to Saddam Hussein.' I said, 'But--I'm willing to say it, but what's your evidence' And I never got any evidence."
Clark's assertion corroborates a little-noted CBS Evening News story that aired on September 4, 2002. As correspondent David Martin reported: "Barely five hours after American Airlines Flight 77 plowed into the Pentagon, the secretary of defense was telling his aides to start thinking about striking Iraq, even though there was no evidence linking Saddam Hussein to the attacks." According to CBS, a Pentagon aide's notes from that day quote Rumsfeld asking for the "best info fast" to "judge whether good enough to hit SH at the same time, not only UBL." (The initials SH and UBL stand for Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.) The notes then quote Rumsfeld as demanding, ominously, that the administration's response "go massive...sweep it all up, things related and not."
Despite its implications, Martin's report was greeted largely with silence when it aired. Now, nine months later, media are covering damaging revelations about the Bush administration's intelligence on Iraq, yet still seem strangely reluctant to pursue stories suggesting that the flawed intelligence-- and therefore the war-- may have been a result of deliberate deception, rather than incompetence. The public deserves a fuller accounting of this story.
20th Anniversatry of DNS
Kari L. Dean, WIRED news, reports:
Twenty years ago [today], two computer scientists at the University of Southern California created a key component essential to the modern Internet.
Jon Postel and Paul Mockapetris ran the first successful test of the automated domain name system, or DNS, which allows computers to find each other on the network and send information back and forth to each other without having humans manually look up the addresses of each machine.
The concept sounds simple now, but it was revolutionary 20 years ago. "Just like the white pages, you had to look up" the addresses of computers to exchange information, said Joe Touch, director of the Postel Center for Experimental Networking. "The telephone book got too heavy and too old too fast." The innovation was "like calling 411."
The anniversary of the event will go mostly unnoticed Monday, but the scientists at USC's Information Sciences Institute will celebrate with a private champagne popping at the Postel Center.
DNS remains almost exactly as it was 20 years ago, and the system should be able to expand along with the Internet for the foreseeable future, said Mockapetris. The next big enhancement will be to make it more secure.
"The system was built to expand but not necessarily to be secure," said Herbert Schorr, executive director of the Information Sciences Institute. The fundamental information to make the whole thing work, for example, still lives on just 12 so-called root servers. "It can be brought down. You have to be technically proficient, but there are enough people who can do it," Schorr said.
Schorr said the most likely miscreant won't be a spike-haired hacker. More likely, it will be "blocks of office buildings in a foreign capital somewhere," he said.
June 20, 2003
The Child Medication Safety Act of 2003
According to a Press Release:
On May 19th in San Francisco, actresses Kelly Preston, Kirstie Alley and her daughter protested against the American Psychiatric Association's (APA) recent opposition to two federal legislative initiatives. The legislation is designed to protect parents from being coerced by schools into drugging their children with potentially addictive psychiatric drugs. The march included parents whose children have tragically died from prescribed psychiatric drugs.
The APA opposes federal bill, H.R. 1170, The Child Medication Safety Act of 2003, and an amendment to the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act (IDEA), that would prohibit school personnel from forcing parents to drug their children as a prerequisite for educational services. However, on May 21st, the U.S. House of Representatives passed HR 1170 by a vote of 425 to 1services..
Ms. Preston said, "This is a tremendous step in the right direction for children, their parents and teachers. However, we must ensure that both bills are enacted to protect children against these abusive psychiatric drugs. Certainly, parents should never be forced to drug their child."
PRESS RELEASE:
May 21, 2003
Contact: Marla Filidei
1-
CELEBRITIES KELLY PRESTON AND KIRSTIE ALLEY LEAD PARENTS IN MARCH AGAINST THE COERCIVE PSYCHIATRIC DRUGGING OF AMERICA'S CHILDREN
U.S. House of Representatives Passes H.R. 1170 to Protect Parents and Children
On May 19th in San Francisco, actresses Kelly Preston, Kirstie Alley and her daughter protested against the American Psychiatric Association's (APA) recent opposition to two federal legislative initiatives. The legislation is designed to protect parents from being coerced by schools into drugging their children with potentially addictive psychiatric drugs. The march included parents whose children have tragically died from prescribed psychiatric drugs.
The APA opposes federal bill, H.R. 1170, The Child Medication Safety Act of 2003, and an amendment to the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act (IDEA), that would prohibit school personnel from forcing parents to drug their children as a prerequisite for educational services. However, on May 21st, the U.S. House of Representatives passed HR 1170 by a vote of 425 to 1.
Ms. Preston said, "This is a tremendous step in the right direction for children, their parents and teachers. However, we must ensure that both bills are enacted to protect children against these abusive psychiatric drugs. Certainly, parents should never be forced to drug their child."
The Citizens Commission on Human Rights International (CCHR), the leading international psychiatric watchdog, organized the march. CCHR president, Ms. Jan Eastgate, declared that, "with eight million children now on stimulants and antidepressants, young lives have already been lost and many more are at stake. Parents must take back the reins. These laws will help them and improve the teacher/parent relationship."
Four states have already passed similar bills and another 16 have introduced bills this year. While the APA claims this legislation could "effect communications between teachers and parents," parents who have lived the terror of coercive psychiatric interference in their child's education vehemently disagree.
One such parent, Lawrence Smith, was threatened with criminal charges if he refused to drug his son, Matthew. In 2000, a Michigan coroner determined that 14-year-old Matthew's tragic death was caused by the Ritalin forced on him through his school. Now paying the ultimate price, Smith stated, "This legislation will prevent parents from being terrorized because they choose to have a drug-free child. Most importantly, it will save young lives and save families."
Mrs. Vicki Dunkle was pressured by a Pennsylvania school psychologist to seek out drug treatment for her daughter Shaina, and referred her to a psychiatrist who, after a 30-minute evaluation with no tests or physical exams, diagnosed her with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and prescribed her an antidepressant. On February 26, 2001, at age 10, Shaina died due to toxic effects of the drug prescribed, according to a coroner's determination. Both parents have subsequently become outspoken critics of the psychiatric drugging of children, and have helped form a grassroots parents organization.
CCHR further charged that opposition to these bills is about protecting the more than $1 billion-a-year child drugging industry in the United States. Millions of children are being labeled with ADHD, which was voted to be a "disorder" by APA committee members in 1987. Since then there has been a 900 percent increase in the number of children "diagnosed" with ADHD and a 665 percent increase in the production of cocaine-like stimulants for children. Passed off as a "neurobiological" disorder when there is no scientific evidence to prove ADHD exists, Eastgate said, "Children can have behavioral or academic problems but that doesn't mean this is a 'disease' requiring psychiatric intervention, usually drugs."
Ms. Preston added, "If a child is struggling in class, he or she may be creative or highly intelligent and be simply bored. Environmental toxins or allergies may also be affecting the child. I am sure parents would prefer a workable alternative to drugging a child. They must have the right to choose, instead of being coerced into a situation where it's drugs or dismissal."
Other well-known celebrity activists have been outspoken on this issue. Last September, Lisa Marie Presley testified before the House of Representatives Government Reform Committee in support of federal protections against coerced child drugging. Recently on Capitol Hill in March, Juliette Lewis visited members of Congress to voice her support for the issue. Priscilla Presley was a featured speaker and presenter at an annual CCHR awards banquet to help focus attention on the matter. Isaac Hayes has recently spoken out on the overrepresentation of African American children being prescribed psychiatric drugs and supports the federal bills. Anne Archer, Catherine Bell and Lynsey Bartilson have supported this issue.
Established in 1969 by the Church of Scientology, CCHR is a social reform group that has been responsible for more than 100 laws worldwide that now protect the rights of the mentally ill. For further information contact Marla Filidei at .
55th Anniversary of the Vinyl LP Record Album
According to 97.1 FM - The Drive:
Today is the 55th Anniversary of the Vinyl LP Record Album.
Nukular GM Apocalyptic Singularity Tropical Fish
Robin McKie, Guardian Science Editor, writes:
Scientists have created the ultimate pet: genetically modified fish that glow in the dark. In future, there will be no need for aquarium lights - fluorescent fish will provide their own illumination.
And that is just the start. Scientists believe Night Pearl bio-fish represent the shape of pets to come. Our household animals will come with extra genes that will stop them shedding fur or triggering allergic reactions. And when one dies, its owner will simply clone it.
(via BoingBoing)
'Fluorescent fish' give the green light to GM pets
Sunday June 15, 2003
The Observer
Scientists have created the ultimate pet: genetically modified fish that glow in the dark. In future, there will be no need for aquarium lights - fluorescent fish will provide their own illumination.
And that is just the start. Scientists believe Night Pearl bio-fish represent the shape of pets to come. Our household animals will come with extra genes that will stop them shedding fur or triggering allergic reactions. And when one dies, its owner will simply clone it.
But the prospect of GM pets has outraged pet dealers. The nation's aquarium industry last week said it had backballed the Night Pearl. 'This is the thin end of the wedge,' said Keith Davenport, chief executive of the Ornamental Aquatic Trade Association. 'You could put all sorts of different genes in animals and do all sorts of damage.'
The Night Pearl began as a research tool created by HJ Tsai, a professor at National Taiwan University. He was looking for a way to make fish organs easier to see when studying them, and isolated a gene for a fluorescent protein that he had extracted from jellyfish and inserted it into the genome of a zebrafish. To his astonishment, the jellyfish gene made whole zebrafish glow.
Prof Tsai thought no more about it until he showed a slide at a conference - where it caught the eye of the Taikong Corporation. The fish produce company agreed to fund his experiments in exchange for the use of his techniques.
Now the first fruits of this collaboration have gone on sale in Taiwan and will soon appear in the US. The Night Pearls glow in different red and green patterns thanks to genes from jellyfish and marine'Fluorescent fish' give the green light to GM pets
Robin McKie, science editor
Sunday June 15, 2003
The Observer
Scientists have created the ultimate pet: genetically modified fish that glow in the dark. In future, there will be no need for aquarium lights - fluorescent fish will provide their own illumination.
And that is just the start. Scientists believe Night Pearl bio-fish represent the shape of pets to come. Our household animals will come with extra genes that will stop them shedding fur or triggering allergic reactions. And when one dies, its owner will simply clone it.
But the prospect of GM pets has outraged pet dealers. The nation's aquarium industry last week said it had backballed the Night Pearl. 'This is the thin end of the wedge,' said Keith Davenport, chief executive of the Ornamental Aquatic Trade Association. 'You could put all sorts of different genes in animals and do all sorts of damage.'
The Night Pearl began as a research tool created by HJ Tsai, a professor at National Taiwan University. He was looking for a way to make fish organs easier to see when studying them, and isolated a gene for a fluorescent protein that he had extracted from jellyfish and inserted it into the genome of a zebrafish. To his astonishment, the jellyfish gene made whole zebrafish glow.
Prof Tsai thought no more about it until he showed a slide at a conference - where it caught the eye of the Taikong Corporation. The fish produce company agreed to fund his experiments in exchange for the use of his techniques.
Now the first fruits of this collaboration have gone on sale in Taiwan and will soon appear in the US. The Night Pearls glow in different red and green patterns thanks to genes from jellyfish and marine coral. Now the team is working on a glowing dragon fish, which many Asians believe is a lucky species.
Prof Tsai does not worry about his fish contaminating local populations of zebrafish, as more than 90 per cent have been sterilised. However, marine researchers say that this is not enough to prevent GM fish polluting natural populations.
And that is the scenario that worries British aquarium enthusiasts. 'One idea being explored is to add genes - taken from cold water fish - that will allow tropical fish to live in unheated aquarium,' said Derek Lambert, editor of Today's Fishkeeper. 'Just imagine what would happen if they got released. You could end up with strange coloured GM tropical fish in our waters.'
Scientists have not restricted their GM work to aquarium creatures. In other experiments, scientists have attempted to engineer cats that do not produce allergens.
Several US biotechnologists are working on cloning pets. However, customers could get a shock. Last year, scientists in Texas created Cc, for Copy Cat, but the resulting kitten looked nothing like its originator.
Printable version | Send it to a friend | Save story
EducationGuardian.co.uk © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003 coral. Now the team is working on a glowing dragon fish, which many Asians believe is a lucky species.
Prof Tsai does not worry about his fish contaminating local populations of zebrafish, as more than 90 per cent have been sterilised. However, marine researchers say that this is not enough to prevent GM fish polluting natural populations.
And that is the scenario that worries British aquarium enthusiasts. 'One idea being explored is to add genes - taken from cold water fish - that will allow tropical fish to live in unheated aquarium,' said Derek Lambert, editor of Today's Fishkeeper. 'Just imagine what would happen if they got released. You could end up with strange coloured GM tropical fish in our waters.'
Scientists have not restricted their GM work to aquarium creatures. In other experiments, scientists have attempted to engineer cats that do not produce allergens.
Several US biotechnologists are working on cloning pets. However, customers could get a shock. Last year, scientists in Texas created Cc, for Copy Cat, but the resulting kitten looked nothing like its originator.
Printable version | Send it to a friend | Save story
EducationGuardian.co.uk © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003
June 19, 2003
An architectural perspective
"When a private individual mediates an undertaking, however directly connected it may be to the welfare of society, he never thinks of soliciting the cooperation of the government, but he publishes his plan, offers to execute it himself, courts the assistance of other individuals, and struggles manfully against all obstacles. Undoubtedly he is often less successful than the state might have been in his position, but in the end, the sum of these private undertakings far exceeds what the government could have done."-- Alexis de Tocqueville (1835)
This observation by Alexis de Tocqueville, published in 1835, speaks volumes about both Americans and about the architecture of democracy in America. Namely, that democracy is not a limited political theory nor a limited political mechanism, but that the concepts and values of individual empowerment could spread even to every activity of the private sector. Thus, American democracy is one of those rare creations that transcends even itself. For what better compliment could there be of a democratic government, but that society could be improved by working quite independently from it
Today, when we consider the successes and failures of the technology industry, the perspective must be an architectural one. Technology itself cannot be viewed on its own, nor even in the context of its application, but instead from the perspective of what creates, and then destroys or sustains the technology over time. I will argue that when it comes to technology, architecture matters, and that architecture matters absolutely. Moreover, in a democratic society driven by free-market principles, architectures that support rather than subvert choice will be the only architectures to endure, and that technologies inconsistent with such architectures are doomed to fail.
(from 100 Million Reasons Why Architecture Matters by Michael Tiemann, Red Hat's Chief Technical Officer)
Linus Joins OSDL
List: linux-kernel
Subject: Linux v2.5.72 and a move to OSDL
From: Linus Torvalds
Date: 2003-06-17 4:35:09
[..]
The other big news - well, for me personally, anyway - is that I've
decided to take a leave-of-absense after 6+ years at Transmeta to
actually work full-time on the kernel.
Transmeta has always been very good at letting me spend even an
inordinate amount of time on Linux, but as a result I've been feeling a
little guilty at just how little "real work" I got done lately. To fix
that, I'll instead be working at OSDL, finally actually doing Linux as
my main job.
[ I do not expect a huge amount of change as a result, testament to just
/how/ freely Transmeta has let me do Linux work. My email address will
change to "" effective July 1st, but everybody is
trying to make the transfer as smooth as possible, so we'll make sure
that there will be sufficient address overlap etc to not cause any
problems ]
OSDL and Transmeta will have a joint official (read: "boring". You
should have seen the bio - that didn't make it - that I suggested for
myself for it ;) press-release about this tomorrow morning, but I just
wanted to say thanks to Transmeta. It has been a special place to work
for, and hello to OSDL that I hope will be the same.
Snif. I'm actually all teary-eyed.
Linus
[..]
June 18, 2003
Satellite Audio Networks...Bits of History
Bill Sepmeier (), NSN Network Services,Avon, CO, writes in theTechnology Interface/Winter97:
A few weeks ago, a friend posed what seemed like a couple of simple questions in one of my technical mailing lists: What's up with subcarrier audio over satellite these days What exactly does SCPC mean How did we get to this state of the art I was in Korea, sitting in a hotel room checking my mail after finishing up some work there, and figured I would take afew minutes to reply. The answers turned into a writing project that filled up the rest of my afternoon in Seoul. After a bit more thought, the answers turned into this brief history of satellite audio networking. I hope youfind it enjoyable.
Audio transmission over satellite began with analog aural subcarrier with video carriers -- TV programming needed to have sound, and conventional TV had long used an FM subcarrier to deliver it. People soon realized that one could add an extra subcarrier or two to a video channel, and radio networking began to re-emerge as a programming source after its near deathwith the advent of high-fidelity FM broadcasting in the early 1960's. (WhenFM began to become popular, the traditional networks, still transmitting over telephone lines, didn't sound good enough for the new FM listeners,and were relegated to short newscasts and sports programming.) With satellite subcarriers, one could get FM's 15 kHz quality, and music programming began to reappear at the network level. The first of these new radio networks is still one of the biggest - the Satellite Music Network, founded by JohnTyler and now a division of ABC Radio.
It wasn't too long before entrepreneurs began to put up satellite signalst hat contained no video at all - just audio (and quickly, FSK data) subcarriers riding a top full-transponder FM carriers. Named "FM Squared"by its champion, United Video / SpaceCom Systems, and commonly called FM/FM by other service providers, this type of analog audio transmission was very efficient in its day. Programmers could backhaul their programming to a central satellite transmission hub, where many programs would be combinedonto one FM carrier. Receivers were easy to manufacture, and relatively inexpensive, since acquisition of the powerful analog FM carrier required a simple design and manufacturing process. Since the cost of the full transponderwas shared by many users, the service was perceived as relatively inexpensive, especially when a very large base of receivers was being served.
Shortly after this type of service was inaugurated, the USA's National Public Radio Service developed a different type of analog audio satellite network. NPR's requirement that programming be available from a varietyof locations inspired the deployment of analog SCPC, or Single Channel Per Carrier, technology. Analog SCPC enabled NPR to deploy many smaller, relatively inexpensive satellite uplinks around the country. Each SCPCFM carrier could transmit a single channel of audio in a relatively small amount of satellite bandwidth -- rather than requiring a full or nearly-fulltransponder -- which enabled many uplink locations to share a single satellite resource without interfering with each other's transmissions. FM SCPC delivered up to 15 kHz audio fidelity per carrier, with two carriers required for stereo audio transmission. Signal to noise performance was acceptable with companding techniques and maintenance of high carrier to noise signal levels. Partly because of the high C/N requirements, C band satellites were chosen for analog SCPC networks because of their inherently low rain-fade susceptibility.
In the early 1980's, digital SCPC satellite audio transmission became popular with the adoption of Scientific Atlanta's DATS technology by several major commercial American radio networks. DATS utilized a " straight" PCM analog to digital format, and could transmit 15 kHz audio channels at T1, or 1.544 mbps, data rates. These large digital carriers utilized a new form of modulation in the private satellite industry, BPSK, or Bi-polarPhase Shift Keying, to transmit in a true digital format the ones and zeros that contained the audio information. DATS still used the lower-frequency C band satellite frequency band, but due to the digital format, had much greater audio signal to noise performance than analog FM/FM or analog SCPC services. In addition, low speed data services could be easily multiplexed into the audio data stream. The DATS service still required a large sharedhub, and therefore programming had to be delivered to the hub before it was uplinked to the satellite network affiliates.
During this time, a small southern California company, now known as Titan Linkabit, began developing a revolutionary new satellite transmission system -- the digital PSK (phase shift keying) Ku band VSAT, or Very Small Aperture Terminal. Led by Dr. Andrew Viterbi, Linkabit envisioned a new, all digital, Ku-Band satellite network architecture that would permit large businesses to establish low-cost low to medium speed data communications enterprise networks linking thousands of locations across the country. The original Linkabit VSAT network concept survived and grew large, from about 150 digital VSAT's in 1986 to over 150,000 installed worldwide only 10 years later. These TDM/TDMA VSAT networks are now manufactured by many leading space and microwave technology companies.
A small Colorado startup company in 1988, the National Supervisory Network Ltd, adopted this then-new Ku band VSAT technology to implement a broadcast radio transmitter data acquisition system. At the same time, NSN engineers began experimenting with the transmission of ADPCM compressed digital audio over their early low speed BPSK digital VSAT network. Non-real-time results were acceptable, but a real-time method of transmitting CD quality audio over the VSAT's relatively low data rates was not available at that time.
At about the same time NSN was experimenting with digital audio over VSAT, several former Linkabit engineers who left the company after mergers with new owners had founded a new manufacturing company in San Diego. These alumni of the original Linkabit called their new firm the ComStream Corporation,and quickly became known for their high-quality Ku-band digital PSK satellite modems and small VSAT earth stations. In 1989 / 1990, ComStream introduced the world's first Ku band real-time CD quality digital satellite audio system, using a new form of psycho acoustic digital audio bit rate reduction named apt-X. Apt-X delivered CD quality stereo audio within a 256 kbps data stream -- one quarter of the old DATS rate of 1.544 mbps. The driving customers behind ComStream's apt-X development were ABC Radio Network sand Gannett Broadcasting, both of whom needed a small, inexpensive meansto originate satellite programming from multiple locales.
By 1992, ComStream had abandoned the apt-X algorithm, and adopted anewer MPEG digital audio compression standard. MPEG provided the same stereo audio fidelity of apt-X in a 128 kbps data stream, using a newer QPSK (quadrature phase shift keying) modulation and sequential error correction format. The National Supervisory Network, which had recently adopted the new name NSN Network Services, and which had been a ComStream distributor since 1991, installed the first MPEG digital audio network in the USA in early 1993.
The impact of MPEG Ku VSAT technology on the radio broadcast industry has been nothing short of revolutionary. This new MPEG QPSK digital transmission required only 200 kHz of satellite bandwidth, at minimal power levels --typically under 18 dB/W Ku band satellite downlink EIRP -- to deliver 20kHz CD stereo audio, 9600 bps ancillary data, digital relay control signal sand even over-the-air satellite network management signals with 99.9% network availability. Satellite networks at this power and bandwidth could be operated at unheard-of low costs -- under $1,500 per month for nationwide coverage.(Older FM/FM analog costs averaged some $30,000.00 per month for lower quality service!) Uplinks could be located anywhere, using antennas as small as 1 meter in diameter, and licensing was greatly simplified since the Ku band required no prolonged terrestrial interference studies. No central shared hub or backhaul was needed.
Within 3 years, NSN and ComStream had sold and installed over 300 MPEG digital VSAT audio networks, with thousands of low-cost integrated receiver/MPEG decoders worldwide. Most of these new mini and micro networks are usedby broadcasters who previously would not have been able to afford networking at all, yet today originate daily programming and production from various sites across the country and around the world with ease.
In 1995, National Public Radio opted to abandon its obsolete analog SCPC system and adopt Digital SCPC MPEG transmission on its C band satellite transponders. At about the same time, most commercial radio networks previously using analog FM/FM or DATS shared hub services began to update their services to new digital MPEG PSK subcarriers, or to partial or full transponder shared MCPC (multi-channel per carrier) services. Other satellite manufacturers,such as Wegener and International Data casting, began to deliver QPSK digital audio product. ABC Radio and Scientific Atlanta adopted a proprietary digital audio compression format, termed SEDAT, to increase space segment availability and lower transmission costs.
At the close of 1996, the satellite term SCPC no longer means " single channel per carrier " in the old audio or data sense. Today's SCPC audio systems do contain one digital data stream, but this digital streamtypically contains two audio channels, coding and decoding information, ancillary and control data, and network identification data. So why call it SCPC Habit -- and the fact that in most cases, the data content all belongs to a single format or customer.
" Digital FM Squared" is a real misnomer, since the former FM subcarriers are now PSK digital subcarrier signals riding atop a conventional FM main carrier.
Digital MCPC, used by background and commercial-free subscription music programmers like DMX, multiplexes over 100 CD quality audio channels into a single 30 mbps aggregate full transponder carrier. With the full-transponder digital modulation format, very inexpensive receivers are possible to manufacture, offsetting the high satellite transponder time charges over very largereceiver and subscription bases.
Narrowband digital MCPC is also becoming popular, since less than full-transponder segment and power may be used, resulting in lower hub operations costs, while keeping receiver costs somewhat less than narrowband SCPC prices.
Today's technology offers a good solution for almost every network application. Smaller networks (under 500 sites) choose SCPC digital technology withits low uplink earth station installation and operation costs and very low recurring spacetime charges. Slightly higher receiver costs are morethan offset by savings on recurring satellite spacetime access charges,and the overall quality of the network technology is known to be reliable and stable.
Very large commercial networks and background music services now typicallyopt to use digital subcarrier and true multiplexed MCPC shared hub services, since the receivers used by these formats are less expensive than SCPC digital format units and therefore easier to deploy in great quantities.The higher satellite access and hub service costs associated with the shared hub formats are easily absorbed across these customers large user base.
Original analog subcarrier audio transmission is still very popular, particularly with broadcasters who want to reach the millions of individual listeners still using older TVRO backyard satellite receivers. Analog SCPC technology is fading away fast, since it cannot compete with the newer digital services in cost, quality, or programming security, and isn't compatible with the "backyard" TVRO receiver market in most cases.
NSN's industry analysts think that the majority of the domestic USA broadcast network marketplace has now been retrofitted with digital technology,and with the exception of some as yet unexploited broadcast capability on high-powered DBS television satellites, there will be little movement within this market over the next five years, when compared to the previous five years.
Internationally, digital SCPC services and narrowband MCPC sales are expected to continue to increase on par with the deregulation and privatization of broadcasting worldwide. Full-transponder MCPC will probably not grow as rapidly as narrowband digital MCPC and SCPC, due to the higher space time access cost of international satellites and more fragmented markets served.International satellites tend to cover many countries with differing cultures, languages and customs, all of which combine to limit the total installed base across which these higher costs may be absorbed.
©1996 Bill Sepmeier All Rights Reserved
Bill Sepmeier is Vice President, Satellite Engineering, for NSN NetworkServices, Ltd. NSN is a Colorado company that provides worldwide satellite network systems and international Internet connectivity. For more information,contact Bill at or visithttp://www.nsn.net onthe World Wide Web.
Bullfighter
Hannibal, Ars Technica Newsdesk relays from Reuters via CNET:
A new software program sends a clear message to corporate America: Cut the bull.
New York-based Deloitte Consulting admits it helped foster confusing, indecipherable words like "synergy,'' "paradigm'' and "extensible repository.'' But now it has decided enough is enough. On Tuesday, it released Bullfighter to help writers of business documents avoid jargon and use clear language.
First, there was that English-to-Swedish-chef thing (at least it's the first one I remember), and then the jive server, and then the pornolizer, and a whole host of other dialectizers. But until now, nobody had bothered to invent what we all needed the most: a de-jargonizer.
"We've had it with repurposeable, value-added knowledge capital and robust, leverageable mind share,'' Deloitte Consulting partner Brian Fugere said.
Bullfighter, as the software is called, could potentially help investors spot troubled companies. Used to test language used by now-bankrupt energy trader Enron from 1999 through 2001, Fugere said the program found that "it got progressively more obscure as they got deeper and deeper into trouble."
First, there was that English-to-Swedish-chef thing (at least it's the first one I remember), and then the jive server, and then the pornolizer, and a whole host of other dialectizers. But until now, nobody had bothered to invent what we all needed the most: a de-jargonizer.
[..article quoted above goes here..]
I have a friend who works for Accenture, and I was always trying to talk him into introducing fake business jargon terms at meetings, especially terms that had some type of attendant hand gesture. Note that the hand gesture is essential if the term is going to have its full impact.
You know, it just occurred to me that the only argots that don't come with an attendant set of poses and bodily motions are the strictly online ones, like l33t speak and text messaging shorthand. Even when spoken idiomatic English is written, it still connotes certain movements; who can read the output of the jive server without it conjuring some kind of mental image of a linguistic performance that involves the entire body L33t speak, in contrast, seems entirely disembodied when compared to the physicality of offline dialects. I bet that l33t speak's extensive use of ASCII and alternate spellings are a direct visual analog for the equally visual bodily context of offline speech.
I know from my work in paleography and philology that accentuation and punctuation only start to show up in manuscripts when there's enough temporal and/or geographical distance between a text's original context and that of its copyists/readers to where the aural elements of the text (pronunciation, meter, etc.) either have been lost or are in danger of being lost. So you might say that, as a general rule in oral-chirographic societies, diacriticals and punctuation make up for a lost aural context. A similar rule for online "speech" in our present visual-typographic society might be that the idiom's elaborate visual presentation--where many of the ASCII-based symbols don't really represent "words" or "phrases" at all, but are more gestural in nature--provides a visual context that would otherwise be lacking. Anyway, it's just a thought for the anthropologists in the audience to ponder. (Speaking of anthropologists and online vs. offline dialects, I thought this was cool, though I haven't read all of it yet.)
June 17, 2003
Club 27
Many people often talk about this exclusive club, but do you know what it is and who belongs to it
It isn't a very complicated theory. It doesn't have lots of rules to join. It is very simple. Club 27 is a group of musicians and artists who succeeded in their careers to great levels gaining respect, wealth and power at young ages but it wouldn't last, as fate would have them die at the age of 27. Below you will find some the members of this much-discussed club.
(link via zanwat)
Brian Jones (Rolling Stones, Musician)
Born: February 28, 1942
Died: July 3, 1969
Cause of death: Drowning
Age: 27
Jimi Hendrix (The Experience, Musician)
Born: November 27, 1942
Died: September 18, 1970
Cause Of death: Overdose
Age: 27
Janis Joplin (Musician)
Born: January 19, 1943
Died: October 3, 1970 (found on October 4, 1970)
Cause of death: Overdose
Age: 27
Jim Morrison (The Doors, Musician)
Born: Dec. 8, 1943
Died: Jul. 3, 1971
Cause of death: heart failure officially, Overdose rumored
Age: 27
Jean-Michel Basquait (Artist)
Born: December 22, 1960
Died: August 12, 1988
Cause of death: Overdose
Age: 27
Kurt Cobain (Nirvana, Musician)
Born: February 20, 1967
Died: April 5, 1994
Cause of death: Suicide
Age: 27
Robots Without a Cause
Stuart Jeffries of The Guardian writes:
'Our response to being bored and rich is not to discard our possessions and live more simply, but to buy more stuff to reduce the space in which we might contemplate our shame.'
(via /.)
Robots without a cause
Thanks to the newest wonders of technology we can get robots to do our vacuuming, transmit pictures on our mobile phones and unlock our cars (and adjust their seats) merely by touching them. In the face of this wizardry, Stuart Jeffries has only one question: why
Tuesday June 17, 2003
The Guardian
You don't need a key to get into the new Audi 2004 A8. You just wave your hand in front of a tiny sensor consisting of 65,000 electrodes that scan your fingerprints and the doors open. But they will do so only if you're the owner of this £60,000 luxury automobile with its 12-speaker spatial sound system. Otherwise it will sit there, locked against the world in smug perfection.
The Audi A8's sensor, though, is more than a security device. After fingerprint identification, the car's computer tunes the radio to your favourite stations, the mirrors swivel according to your established preferences, and the driver's seat sculpts itself to your bottom. While it would be churlish not to admire these innovations, it's hard not to balk at how much brainpower has been directed at this techno-tweaking. Is this what our most creative engineers are doing with their lives
We used to invent things not to satisfy idle whims, but to change our world. The wheel, powered flight, the telephone - these were important developments about which one could get excited. Slippers with headlights (as featured in the doomed Innovations catalogue) and a remote control-operated sliding door for the new Peugeot 807 GLX 2.2 people carrier are not. Yes, you say, but what am I going to do with a kid in one hand and a tray of skinny lattes in the other How am I going to get into my Peugeot then And then: how did I manage before So the fatuous becomes the essential, and we become more decadent, more hungry for diversion and suckered into buying things that will improve our lives negligibly, if at all.
Our consumerist technological zeitgeist is summed up in a question from Stuff, the techno-geek mag, in a recent article despairing of cyborg technology: "We've launched missions to Mars, so why can't we build a robot to pour us a drink" The proper answer, surely, is that while interplanetary exploration is conceivably a noble human aspiration, needing a robot to pour your pop is the hallmark of the idle ponce.
Even recently, there have been inventions devised expressly to solve important social problems. Trevor Baylis's clockwork radio is among the most feted of these, not just because the simplicity of its concept matches the nobility of its intended purpose, but also because it very readily shows that innovation can be noble and socially useful even in our decadent era. In 1991, Baylis saw a TV documentary on the spread of HIV in Africa and recognised that remote African communities needed a means of accessing health and news broadcasts that didn't rely on mains electricity or batteries. He was inspired to invent his wind-up radio.
Increasingly such innovations stand out as exceptional in the rich west. We seize on them as examples of what technology can achieve, even though much of it is bent towards satisfying degraded needs. We are rich and bored, and have plenty of disposable income to spend on things that mildly titillate us. Like colour wallpaper for our mobile phones' screens or such things as the £475 Gaggia-Nespresso Automat, which has a 20-capsule coffee-release system to give you four choices of espresso flavour and automatically cleans up the machine so you don't have to.
Still the dubious gadgets keep coming. Consider the £9.99 Bug Buster. This battery-operated vacuum cleaner exerts enough gentle suction to pull a spider into its tube without damaging the baffled arachnid. Not tempted Then how about the £34.95 Soundbug The size of a computer mouse, it turns any hard surface into a speaker. Plug it into your CD player or computer, stick the sucker to a door, window or desk, hit play and prepare to be amazed when your surface of choice starts singing at you.
Technological accomplishment is often the product of a can-do rather than a why-do culture. That is why the recent TV ads for Orange phones suggesting that 80% of us are using only 10% of the facilities on our mobiles and need to be educated to do so are misplaced. Orange should be considering instead why 90% of the facilities on their phones are of no practical use to the vast majority of us.
The low take-up of 3G phones tells a similar story. The fact that so few of them have been sold in the UK two months after their delayed launch is not entirely about cost, since introductory prices have been slashed. It is also because it's not immediately clear what they're for, and that mystery is not sufficiently seductive to make many of us shell out.
Today our best minds are all too often engaged working on innovations that demonstrate their ingenuity or other technological prowess. For instance, researchers at MIT's prestigious media lab are currently working on a project to use stationary car windows as screens for projecting films or web pages, or even as advertising hoardings aimed at passing pedestrians or motorists. Such a project, of course, will be steeped in technical ingenuity. But where would this lead us Our streets and car parks will be lined with vehicles advertising duff burgers and bad Hollywood films from their windscreens. Ah, you say, but the authorities will leap in to thwart such lucrative pollution. Will they They didn't with car alarms or police sirens. There's often a downside to technological innovation, be it ever so clever.
"I like to call it a Faustian bargain," says Neil Postman, professor of media ecology at New York University. "This means that for every advantage that a new technology offers, there is always a corresponding disadvantage. The disadvantage may exceed in importance the advantage, or the advantage may well be worth the cost. Think of the automobile, which, for all its obvious advantages, has poisoned our air, choked our cities and degraded the beauty of our natural landscape."
You don't have to be a neo-Luddite to be queasy about the current tenor of technological innovation. You only have to ask yourself: "Do I need that" or "Will this make me happier" about a new gadget. And very often you'll find that the answer is no.
But that honest "no" is regularly drowned out by the exuberance of the marketing for new pieces of kit. We are being bombarded now with sales pitches for videophones. One television ad for a 3G phone focuses on how an embarrassed bloke will be able to confess to his burly best friend about having sex with the mate's sister. Thanks to this new device, he can do it face to face, though without the risk of getting smacked in the kisser as a result. Was this really worth the innovative effort Is it really worth shelling out between £200 and £450 so you can do this sort of thing
"Forget the ads. The marketers and ad people have no idea how wonderful this technology is." So says Patrick Dixon, Fellow of the Centre for Management Development at London Business School, and author of Futurewise. "I know what you're saying about decadence, and there is something obscene about £450 3G phones and the nature of information apartheid that there is. I have friends in Uganda who live on $1 a day and others in eastern Europe who live on $450 a year. That said, I don't just want a 3G phone, I need one."
Dixon proceeds to deliver a eulogy to the 3G phone's impact on our lives. "Let's say there's a big terrorist bomb in London and say there are 500,000 video phones there and it's well known that CNN, Sky and the BBC pay for video clips, and you're just walking past. Within one second you can press record and the send button to CNN and suddenly your video could be on CNN live.
"Or imagine you're sitting at the Guardian's morning conference and the editor doesn't know you're filming him, and you've got the phone on a live feed to your girlfriend who works at the BBC." It sounds like a sacking waiting to happen, but go on.
"Or say I'm abroad - and I do travel a lot - flying between 40 and 80 times a year. I want to see my family, not just phone them. And they will want to see, well perhaps not me, but where I am. They'll want to see what Malaysia looks like, take in a shot of the café, see the waitress waving at them back in London."
This all sounds great fun, but only in a society where all our basic needs are met could we be so pleasurably diverted by gadgets. It's not only fun to be excited by the latest gadget, it gives us the feeling too that we're part of the forward flow of life. It also gives us something easy to talk about: we make connections with people by discussing what our gadgets can do, even by laughing at our own silliness.
Maybe the definition of need has changed. For techno festishists such as Dixon, the need for diverting technology is intense. Recently Stuff magazine published a supplement on the "50 gadgets every man should own". Each product was introduced with an account of "Why you can't live without this", and the answers were unremittingly feeble. You needed the X-Box games console, for example, because "More than half gamers are now over 25 and that means software is getting seriously sophisticated and grown-up. [The game] Splinter Cell is far more challenging, satisfying and complex than most employment." But when a game becomes more satisfying than your job, maybe you should think of getting a new career rather than immersing yourself in ever more sophisticated games software.
You might argue that we fickle things are getting tired even of this decadence. The news that the Innovations catalogue is about to close might seem to be evidence for this. Trevor Baylis once said that anyone who has "slightly more perception than the average wrapped loaf" is capable of invention. The Innovations catalogue exists as proof that there are people with less perception than a wrapped loaf who are inventing things; and more, even dimmer, who are prepared to buy them.
The closure of the Innovations catalogue doesn't show we are tired of gadgets; rather, we are tired of ones that don't work. Our obsession with gadgetry goes on and the appliance of science to satisfying our laziest desires continues. That's why the people at Electrolux have spent the best part of a decade devising the Trilobite, the world's first automatic vacuum cleaner, packing into it all kinds of ingenuity. Even though it suffers from the Dalek-effect and so cannot be used to clean stairs, this 13 cm high, 35 cm wide vac is low enough to clean under really low furniture and beds and, thanks to its sonar, can avoid such potentially disastrous obstacles as dogs' bowls. "The machine 'sees' the same way a bat does," says Lars Dahl, technical project manager. "The two wheels with independent suspension are powered by individual motors. This means that the vacuum cleaner can easily navigate over cables and the edges of rugs."
Ingenious. But why did the clever people at Electrolux spend so much time and brainpower on the Trilobite "Our intention is to make life easier for people," says Michael Treschow, Electrolux's president. "And what could possibly be easier than an automatic vacuum cleaner"
This is what people who want to flog us fatuous kit are always saying. In an electrical store the other day, I put on a pair of Olympus FMD-700 Eye-Trek TV glasses. By looking into them one is supposed to be able to simulate the effect of watching a 52in television from six feet away. The bigger question, though, is what are they for. "They're fantastic," said nice Alan, who really wanted to sell me a pair for £149. "You can use them to watch anything - videos, DVDs, TV, camcorder or your Playstation 2." What - all in the privacy of my own head "That's right. It's all about making the entertainment experience easier. You don't have to crane your neck, you just lie in whatever position is comfortable for you. You won't have to leave bed ever again."
If people like Alan are right, one of technology's ends is to reduce our lives to such blob-like stasis that we hardly ever have to interact with other human beings. Another is to distract us from the shame we feel about our decadent lifestyles. Our response to being bored and rich is not to discard our possessions and live more simply, but to buy more stuff to reduce the space in which we might contemplate our shame.
Which is why I'm watching E4's round-the clock coverage of Big Brother on a pair of Olympus TV glasses.
· You mean you haven't got one of these
TV glasses
"Imagine being able to enjoy your favourite magazine, book or TV programme while lying in bed," says the sales pitch at www.dynamic-living.com/glasses_angled.htm Well, now you can! These lightweight glasses are prisms that change the normal line of sight without any distortion. You can be flat on your back and still enjoy reading and TV as though the image were straight ahead. They work over prescription glasses too. Just the thing for the person in your life too lazy just to sit up straight and watch the box. Retail price: $39.99 (£25.40).
Cart XL
Is it a mower or a go-kart or a go-kart dressed up as a mower Who cares! It costs £1,199.99 and will make you the Michael Schumacher of your garden! It has formula-one steering, a six horsepower electric-start engine, a bucket-style seat and a so-called mulching mower that recycles as you race along, cutting clippings into tiny bits as though they were in a food blender. It is, however, suitable only for gardens larger than 400 square metres.
Sony NW-MS70 Network Walkman
It's the world's smallest personal stereo, measuring 36 x 40 x 18mm. According to Stuff magazine it renders "drain covers potentially disastrous, especially if you've eaten greasy chips before handling its titanium shell". It can handle 22 CDs' worth of music, but weighs only 54g. It is, to be sure, very cool, though the likelihood of it getting yanked from your lugholes by street toughs is high, given that the thing retails at £280.
Dualit four-slice toaster
It costs £175 and combines a silvery retro-toaster look with four slots that can produce 130 slices an hour in your home. Ask yourself this, though: if you and your family need 130 slices of toast an hour, perhaps you should spend £175 on consulting a dietician instead. There's a six-slice version, but that's beyond a joke.
Sony Aibo Robot Dog
Aibo means "companion" in Japanese. It is also an acronym for Artificial Intelligence roBOt. "But Aibo is not a toy!" says the Sony website. "He is a true companion with real emotions and instincts" - a remark that should make philosophers seethe with conceptual disgust. Aibo has six different emotional states - happiness, dislike, anger, love, sadness, and surprise - which is several more than my cat. My cat's emotions, however, like her other discharges, come free. Aibo will set you back £1,500.
June 16, 2003
Television Brings Crime to Bhutan
Four years ago, Bhutan, the fabled Himalayan Shangri-la, became the last nation on earth to introduce television. Suddenly a culture, barely changed in centuries, was bombarded by 46 cable channels. And all too soon came Bhutan's first crime wave - murder, fraud, drug offences. Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy (The Guardian) report from a country crash-landing in the 21st century.
Fast forward into trouble
Saturday June 14, 2003
The Guardian
April 2002 was a turbulent month for the people of Bhutan. One of the remotest nations in the world, perched high in the snowlines of the Himalayas, suffered a crime wave. The 700,000 inhabitants of a kingdom that calls itself the Land of the Thunder Dragon had never experienced serious law-breaking before. Yet now there were reports from many towns and villages of fraud, violence and even murder.
The Bhutanese had always been proud of their incorruptible officials - until Parop Tshering, the 42-year-old chief accountant of the State Trading Corporation, was charged on April 5 with embezzling 4.5m ngultrums (£70,000). Every aspect of Bhutanese life is steeped in Himalayan Buddhism, and yet on April 13 the Royal Bhutan police began searching the provincial town of Mongar for thieves who had vandalised and robbed three of the country's most ancient stupas. Three days later in Thimphu, Bhutan's sedate capital, where overindulgence in rice wine had been the only social vice, Dorje, a 37-year-old truck driver, bludgeoned his wife to death after she discovered he was addicted to heroin. In Bhutan, family welfare has always come first; then, on April 28, Sonam, a 42-year-old farmer, drove his terrified in-laws off a cliff in a drunken rage, killing his niece and injuring his sister.
Why was this kingdom with its head in the clouds falling victim to the kind of crime associated with urban life in America and Europe For the Bhutanese, the only explanation seemed to be five large satellite dishes, planted in a vegetable patch, ringed by sugar-pink cosmos flowers on the outskirts of Thimphu.
In June 1999, Bhutan became the last nation in the world to turn on television. The Dragon King had lifted a ban on the small screen as part of a radical plan to modernise his country, and those who could afford the £4-a-month subscription signed up in their thousands to a cable service that provided 46 channels of round-the-clock entertainment, much of it from Rupert Murdoch's Star TV network.
Four years on, those same subscribers are beginning to accuse television of smothering their unique culture, of promoting a world that is incompatible with their own, and of threatening to destroy an idyll where time has stood still for half a millennium.
A refugee monk from Tibet, the Shabdrung, created this tiny country in 1616 as a bey-yul, or Buddhist sanctuary, a refuge from the ills of the world. So successful were he and his descendants at isolating themselves that by the 1930s virtually all that was known of Bhutan in the west was James Hilton's novel, Lost Horizon. He called it Shangri-la, a secret Himalayan valley, whose people never grew old and lived by principles laid down by their high lama: "Here we shall stay with our books and our music and our meditations, conserving the frail elegancies of a dying age."
In the real Bhutan, there were no public hospitals or schools until the 1950s, and no paper currency, roads or electricity until several years after that. Bhutan had no diplomatic relations with any other country until 1961, and the first invited western visitors came only in 1974, for the coronation of the current monarch: Dragon King Jigme Singye Wangchuck. Today, although a constant stream of people are moving to Thimphu - with their cars - there is still no word in dzongkha, the Bhutanese language, for traffic jam.
But none of these developments, it seems, has made such a fundamental impact on Bhutanese life as TV. Since the April 2002 crime wave, the national newspaper, Kuensel, has called for the censoring of television (some have even suggested that foreign broadcasters, such as Star TV, be banned altogether). An editorial warns: "We are seeing for the first time broken families, school dropouts and other negative youth crimes. We are beginning to see crime associated with drug users all over the world - shoplifting, burglary and violence."
Every week, the letters page carries columns of worried correspondence: "Dear Editor, TV is very bad for our country... it controls our minds... and makes [us] crazy. The enemy is right here with us in our own living room. People behave like the actors, and are now anxious, greedy and discontent."
But is television really destroying this last refuge for Himalayan Buddhism, the preserve of tens of thousands of ancient books and a lifestyle that China has already obliterated over the border in Tibet Can TV reasonably be accused of weakening spiritual values, of inciting fraud and murder among a peaceable people Or is Bhutan's new anti-TV lobby just a cover for those in fear of change
Television always gets the blame in the west when society undergoes convulsions, and there are always those ready with a counter argument. In Bhutan, thanks to its political and geographic isolation, and the abruptness with which its people embraced those 46 cable channels, the issue should be more clearcut. And for those of us sitting on the couch in the west, how the kingdom is affected by TV may well help to find an answer to the question that has evaded us: have we become the product of what we watch
The Bhutanese government itself says that it is too early to decide. Only Sangay Ngedup, minister for health and education, will concede that there is a gulf opening up between old Bhutan and the new: "Until recently, we shied away from killing insects, and yet now we Bhutanese are asked to watch people on TV blowing heads off with shotguns. Will we now be blowing each other's heads off"
Arriving at dusk, we pass medieval fortresses and pressed-mud towers, their roofs carpeted with drying scarlet chillies. Faint beads of electric light outline sleepy Thimphu. Twisting lanes rise and fall along the hillside, all of them leading to the central clock tower, where the battered corpse of Tshering, a 50-year-old farmer, was found. In this Brueghel-like scene, crowded and shambolic, where the entire population shares fewer than two dozen names, TV is omnipresent. Potato stores sell flat-screen Trinitrons; old penitents whirl their prayer wheels outside the Sony service centre; inside every candle-lit shop-house a brand new screen flickers.
His Excellency Jigmi Thinley, Bhutan's foreign minister, greets us wrapped in an orange scarf, a foot-long silver sword hanging over his ceremonial robe, or gho. He sweeps us into a pillared hall embossed with golden dragons to explain why the king welcomed cable television to the Land of the Thunder Dragon. "We wanted a goal different from the material concept of maximising gross national product pursued by western governments," he says with a beatific smile. "His Majesty decided that, as a spiritual society, happiness was the most important thing for us - something that had never been discussed before as a policy goal or pronounced as the responsibility of the state." And so, in 1998, the Dragon King defined his nation's guiding principle as Gross National Happiness.
But happiness proved to be an elusive concept. The Bhutanese wondered whether it increased with a bigger house or the number of revolutions of a prayer wheel. A delegation from the foreign ministry was sent abroad to investigate whether happiness could be measured. They finally found a Dutch professor who had made its study his life's work and were disappointed to learn that his conclusion was that happiness equalled £6,400 a year - the minimum on which one could live comfortably. It was a bald and irrelevant answer for the Bhutanese middle classes, whose average annual salary was barely £1,000 and whose outlook was slightly more metaphysical.
The people of Bhutan, however, finally decided for themselves what would make them happy. France 1998 was driving the football-mad kingdom into a frenzy of goggle-eyed envy of those who were able to watch the World Cup on television. The small screen had always been prohibited in Bhutan, although the kingdom was crisscrossed by satellite signals that it was finding increasingly difficult to keep out. Even the king was rumoured to have a Star TV satellite package installed at his palace. Faced by recriminations, the government relented and Bhutan's Olympic Committee was permitted to erect a giant screen in Changlimithang stadium - but only temporarily.
A TV screen in the middle of Thimphu was a revolutionary sight. The kingdom, for so long an autocracy, had only recently forged links with the outside world. In 1959, China quelled an uprising in Tibet, spilling war into the north of Bhutan, forcing the previous Dragon King to forge diplomatic ties for the first time in the country's history. "Even then," says the foreign minister, "we were determined not to become pawns on a chessboard and decided not to have formal relations with the superpowers. We also sensed the regret of many nations across the world at what they had lost in terms of values and culture."
The current Dragon King's father initiated a careful programme of modernisation that saw his people embrace the kind of material progress that most western countries take centuries to achieve: education, modern medicine, transportation, currency, electricity. However, mindful of those afraid that foreign influences could destroy Bhutanese culture, he attempted to inhibit conspicuous consumption. No Coca-Cola. No advertising hoardings. And definitely no television.
By France 1998, Bhutan had a new Dragon King and, under growing pressure from an unsettled country, he had a new political agenda. That year, King Jigme Singye Wangchuck announced he would give up his role as head of government and cede power to the national assembly. The people would be consulted about the drafting of a constitution. The process would complete Bhutan's transformation from monarchist Shangri-la into a modern democracy. And television would play its part.
The prime minister of Bhutan, Kinzang Dorji, has invited us to tea and we sit with him beneath a large thangka painting of the Wheel of Life. "His Majesty wants the Bhutanese people to run their own country. But many are frightened of the responsibility. A lot of things have changed very quickly in Bhutan, and we do recognise that some people feel lost, at sea," the prime minister explains. "Watching news on the BBC and CNN enables them to see how democracies work in other parts of the world, how people can take charge of their own destinies. The old feudal ways have to end."
The year after France beat Brazil 3-0 in the World Cup final, the people of Thimphu gathered once again in Changlimithang stadium, this time to celebrate the Dragon King's silver jubilee. On June 2 1999, he stood before them to announce that now they could watch TV whenever they wanted. "But not everything you will see will be good," he warned. "It is my sincere hope that the introduction of television will be beneficial to our people and country."
The prime minister insists that the introduction of television was carefully prepared: "To mitigate the impact of negative messages, we launched firstly the Bhutan Broadcasting Service [BBS] to provide a local educational and cultural service." Only after the BBS had found its voice would a limited number of foreign channels be permitted to beam programmes into Bhutan via local cable operators.
News footage from the first BBS broadcast of June 2 1999, records the cheer that resounded around Changlimithang. Bhutan's spiritual and cultural leaders were all agreed that TV could only increase the country's Gross National Happiness and help the people to pave the way to a modern, democratic nation. Mynak Tulku, the reincarnation of a powerful lama, is the Dragon King's unofficial ambassador for new technology. Light pouring in through the carved wooden windows catches his large protruding ears and bathes the monk in a golden glow. Nearby, in the main library, some of the oldest surviving texts in Tibetan Buddhism, dharmic verses penned in liquid gold, are being digitised. "I am so excited about technology," beams the Tulku, the epitome of the king's notion of Gross National Happiness. "And let me tell you that TV's OK, as long as you appreciate that it is a transitory experience. I tell my students that it's like rushing in from the cold, going straight to the heater and ending up with frostbite. Ha, ha. TV can make you think that you are being educated, when in fact all you're doing is blinking your life away with a remote control. Ha, ha."
The Bhutan Broadcasting Service was intended to be a bulwark against cable television. When we call by, it is clear the studio is still not finished: the team of technicians hired from Bollywood has gone home for Diwali. The state broadcaster has only one clip-on microphone, but the features producer cannot find it. There are a bundle of programmes "in the can", he says, but none is ready for broadcast. A list of feature ideas hangs on a board, each one eclipsed by a large question mark: Bhutanese MTV Candid Camera Pop Idol Big Brother
There is no one else on any of the three floors of the BBS building, but there is a distant clamour coming from outside. There, behind a garden shed, we eventually find the BBS cameramen and reporters dressed in their billowing ghos, throwing giant darts at a clay target. It is a badly needed team-building exercise, says Kinga Singye, the BBS executive director, with a doleful voice that makes him sound as if he has had enough of the royal experiment in television. He describes how, in 1999, the last people to learn of the lifting of the television ban were those then charged with setting up the new national station. "They were given three months to make it work. It was done with incredible haste - to be ready in time for the king'ssilver jubilee. What the government wanted was hugely ambitious and expensive, yet we didn't have experience and they had no funding to give," he says. Everyone was surprised when the ministers then issued licences to cable TV operators in August 1999, a bare three months after BBS went on air.
Three years later, in the absence of investment, BBS can still be transmitted only in Thimphu; tapes of its shows bound for the remote eastern town of Trashigang take three days to arrive, by bus and mule. "Our job was supposed to be to show people that not everything coming from outside is good," Kinga Singye says. "But we are now being drowned out by the foreign TV signals. People are continually disappointed in us." That evening, the nightly BBS News At Seven begins at 7.10pm. A documentary on a Bhutanese football prodigy is mysteriously canned halfway through. It is followed by some footage of an important government event, the Move For Health. The sound is indistinct, the picture faded, the message lost.
Downtown, at the southern end of Norzin Lam high street, a wriggling crowd of children press their faces to a shop window. Inside the headquarters of Sigma Cable, the walls are papered with an X-Files calendar and posters for an HBO show called Hollywood Beauties. Beneath a portrait of the Dragon King, the in-store TV shows wrestling before BeastMaster comes on. A man in tigerskin trunks has trained his marmosets to infiltrate the palace of a barbarian king. When the monarch is decapitated and gore slip-slaps across the screen, the children watching outside screech with glee. Inside the Sigma office, the staff are scrapping over the remote control, channel-hopping, mixing messages. President Bush in a 10-gallon hat welcomes Jiang Zemin to Texas. Midgets wrestle on Star World. Female skaters catfight on Rollerball.
Today, Sigma Cable, whose feed comes from five large satellite dishes at the edge of the city, is the most successful of more than 30 cable operators. Together, they supply virtually the entire country, ensuring that even the folks in remote Trashigang can sit down every night to watch Larry King Live.
Rinzy Dorje, Sigma's chief executive, wears a traditional gho but his mind is on fibreoptics and broadband. He was one of the first people in Bhutan to learn to program a computer, and back then (the 1980s) his machine came housed in a home-made wooden box. When he launched Sigma on September 10 1999, he captured the market in Thimphu, signing up the queen mother, the king and his four wives, among others. Between calls on his new mobile telephone, he defends cable TV: "Look, Bhutan couldn't hold back any longer - we can't pretend we're still a medieval, hermit nation. When the government finally got around to announcing cable TV, I was ready, that's all. All the information you need to know on cable technology is on the net. I got prices and sourced the parts in Delhi and Taiwan. And cable came to Bhutan. It's no big deal."
A disgruntled subscriber rings to complain that MTV has gone down. Are there are too many channels "I couldn't cut back on the channels even if I wanted to - the customers would go elsewhere and Star TV wants us to show more channels, not fewer."
Have Bhutan's values been corroded by TV "We are entitled to watch what we want, when we want, if we want. And we are quite capable of weeding out the rubbish; turning off the crap," he retorts.
However you look at it, it's obvious that the BBS has been charged down by the juggernaut of Star TV. "If the government wanted to control what people watched, they should have legislated, not tried to compete," says Rinzy Dorje.
It takes three days to pin down Leki Dorji, the deputy minister of communications, an overloaded crown appointee who is also responsible for roads, urban renewal, civil aviation and construction. He readily admits that, in its haste to introduce TV, the government failed to prepare legislation. There is no film classification board or TV watershed in force here, no regulations about media ownership. Companies such as Star TV are free to broadcast whatever they want. Only three years after the introduction of cable did the government announce that a media act would be drafted. Leki Dorji says his ministry is also planning an impact study, but adds that he does not believe cable television is responsible for April's crime wave. "Yes, we are seeing some different types of crime, but that just reflects the fact that our society is changing in many ways. A culture as rich and sophisticated as ours can survive trash on TV and people are quite capable of turning off the rubbish."
Whether the truck-driver Dorje was influenced by something he had watched on television when he began smoking heroin or when he clubbed his wife to death has yet to be established. We will not know whether the death of Sonam's niece had anything to do with the impatient, selfish society promoted by television until the impact study is completed. But there is a wealth of evidence that points to television having been a critical factor.
The marijuana that flourishes like a weed in every Bhutanese hedgerow was only ever used to feed pigs before the advent of TV, but police have arrested hundreds for smoking it in recent years. Six employees of the Bank of Bhutan have been sentenced for siphoning off 2.4m ngultrums (£40,000). Six weeks before we arrived, 18 people were jailed after a gang of drunken boys broke into houses to steal foreign currency and a 21-inch television set. During the holy Bishwa Karma Puja celebrations, a man was stabbed in the stomach in a fight over alcohol. A middle-class Thimphu boy is serving a sentence after putting on a bandanna and shooting up the ceiling of a local bar with his dad's new gun. Police can barely control the fights at the new hip-hop night on Saturdays.
While the government delays, an independent group of Bhutanese academics has carried out its own impact study and found that cable television has caused "dramatic changes" to society, being responsible for increasing crime, corruption, an uncontrolled desire for western products, and changing attitudes to love and relationships. Dorji Penjore, one of the researchers involved in the study, says: "Even my children are changing. They are fighting in the playground, imitating techniques they see on World Wrestling Federation. Some have already been injured, as they do not understand that what they see is not real. When I was growing up, WWF meant World Wide Fund for Nature."
Kinley Dorji, editor of Kuensel (motto: That The Nation Shall Be Informed), warns that Bhutan's ruling elite is out of touch. "We pride ourselves in being academic and sophisticated, but we are also a very naive kingdom that does not yet fully understand the outside world. The government underestimated how aggressively channels like Star market themselves, how little they seem to care about programming, how virulent the message of the advertisers is." Kinley Dorji, a member of the taskforce charged with drafting the kingdom's first media act, believes Bhutanese society is in danger of being polarised by TV. "My generation, the ministers, lamas and headteachers, have our grounding in old Bhutan and can apply ancient culture to this new phenomenon. But the ordinary people, the villagers, are confused about whether they should be ancient or modern, and the younger generation don't really care. They jettison traditional culture for whatever they are sold on TV. Go and see real Bhutan, see how the people are affected."
A fanfare of Tibetan trumpets booms through the pine forest. A rough choir of a thousand voices sings out: "Move for, move for health." It is so early in the morning that the birds are still asleep. But Sangay Ngedup, minister for health and education, has been on the path for hours. His gho is bunched beneath his backpack, and a badge with the king's smiling face is pinned on to his baseball hat. In the past 15 days, he has climbed and scrambled over some of the world's most extreme terrain, from sea level to a rarefied 13,500ft in the Bhutanese Himalayas. Is there anywhere else in the world where a cabinet minister would trek 560km to warn people against becoming a nation of couch potatoes "We used to think nothing of walking three days to see our in-laws," he says. "Now we can't even be bothered to walk to the end of Norzin Lam high street."
He pauses at an impromptu feeding station, gulping down salt tea and buttered yak's cheese. "You can never predict the impact of things like TV or the urbanisation it brings with it," he says. "But you can prepare. If the BBS was intended as our answer to the cable world, I have to say that, at the moment, it is rather pathetic." Sangay Ngedup is one of the only government ministers willing to voice concerns about television.
For the first time, he says, children are confiding in their teachers of feeling manic, envious and stressed. Boys have been caught mugging for cash. A girl was discovered prostituting herself for pocket money in a hotel in the southern town of Phuents-holing. "We have had to send teachers to Canada to be trained as professional counsellors," says Sangay Ngedup. This march is not just against a sedentary lifestyle; it is a protest against the values of the cable channels. One child's placard proclaims, "Use dope, no hope." "Breast is best," a girl shouts. "Enjoy the gift of sex with condoms," reads a toddler's T-shirt.
The next day, as they do every day at Yangchenphug high school, teachers prepare their pupils for the nightly onslaught of foreign images on television. They pray to Jambayang, the Buddhist god of wisdom, a recent addition to the school timetable insisted upon by the clergy. A class of 15-year-olds are inquisitive and smart. How many of you have television, we ask. Laughter fills the room. "We all have TV, sir and madam," a girl at the front pipes up.
"What's your culture like" they ask. "Do you have universities Does it rain a lot where you come from"
What do you like about TV, we ask the class. "Posh and Becks, Eminem, Linkin Park. We love The Rock," they chorus. "Aliens. Homer Simpson." No mention of BBS. No one saw its documentary on Buddhist festivals last night. Superficially, these pupils are as they would be in any school in the world, but this is a country that has reached modernity at such breakneck speed that the god of wisdom Jambayang is finding it virtually impossible to compete with the new icons.
A new section entitled "controversies" in the principal's annual report describes "marathon staff meetings that continue on a war footing to discuss student discipline, substance abuse, degradation of values in changing times". On another page is a short obituary for ninth-year pupil Sonam Yoezer, "battered to death by an adult in the town". Violence, greed, pride, jealousy, spite - some of the new subjects on the school curriculum, all of which teachers attribute to the world of television. In his airy study, the principal, Karma Yeshey, whose MA is from Leeds University but whose attitude is still otherworldly, pours Earl Grey tea. "Our children live in two different worlds, one created by the school and another by cable. Our challenge is to help them understand both, and we are terribly afraid of failing."
Outside Thimphu, the two worlds of Bhutan are already beginning to blur into one. In the heart of the kingdom's spiritual capital of Punakha stands the Palace of Great Happiness, where the Shabdrung, the country's founding father, is interred. Today a black wire crosses the drawbridge to the 17th-century fortress, running through a top-floor casement and taking cable television into the sacred shrine. So high is the demand for Oprah and Mutant X that in this town the size of London's Blackheath there are now two rival operators vying for business.
The children of Punakha are, by the dozen, abandoning their ghos for jeans and T-shirts bearing US wrestling logos; on their heads are Stars and Stripes bandannas. On the whitewashed mud wall of the ancient crematorium, they have scrawled in charcoal a message in English: "Fuck off Kinley and die."
How quickly their ancient culture is being supplanted by a mish-mash of alien ideas, while their parents loiter for hours at a time in the Welcome Guest House, farmers with their new socks embossed with Fila logos, all glued to David Beckham on Manchester United TV. A local official tells us that in one village so many farmers were watching television that an entire crop failed. It is not just a sedentary lifestyle this official is afraid of. Here, in the Welcome Guest House, farmers' wives ogle adverts for a Mercedes that would cost more than a lifetime's wages. Furniture "you've always desired", accessories "you have always wanted", shoes "you've always dreamed of" - the messages from cable's sponsors come every five minutes, and the audience watching them grows by the day.
There is something depressing about watching a society casting aside its unique character in favour of a Californian beach. Cable TV has created, with acute speed, a nation of hungry consumers from a kingdom that once acted collectively and spiritually.
Bhutan's isolation has made the impact of television all the clearer, even if the government chooses to ignore it. Consider the results of the unofficial impact study. One third of girls now want to look more American (whiter skin, blond hair). A similar proportion have new approaches to relationships (boyfriends not husbands, sex not marriage). More than 35% of parents prefer to watch TV than talk to their children. Almost 50% of the children watch for up to 12 hours a day. Is this how we came to live in our Big Brother society, mesmerised by the fate of minor celebrities fighting in the jungle
Everyone is as yet too polite to say it, but, like all of us, the Dragon King underestimated the power of TV, perceiving it as a benign and controllable force, allowing it free rein, believing that his kingdom's culture was strong enough to resist its messages. But television is a portal, and in Bhutan it is systematically replacing one culture with another, skewing the notion of Gross National Happiness, persuading a nation of novice Buddhist consumers to become preoccupied with themselves, rather than searching for their self.
June 13, 2003
Aurora Australis, As Seen From Space
A high-speed solar wind stream blasted our planet last week, triggering a geomagnetic storm. High above earth, astronauts on the International Space Station science captured the Southern Lights -- aurora australis -- in a digital movie.
(via BoingBoing)
June 12, 2003
HHDL: War in These Times
"In order to promote non-violence and reduce violence, ultimately we
have to address motivation through education, through awareness.
Here, I want to share with you a few thoughts about the concept of
war. In ancient times, when people remained separately, more or less
independently, there was no need for other people's cooperation. You
could survive, you could live, completely independently. Under those
circumstances, the concept of war, destruction of your enemy, and the
victory of your side were a real possibility. Today's world is no
longer that kind of reality. Your survival, your success, your
progress, are very much related with others' well being. Therefore,
under these circumstances even your enemies- for whatever reason you
categorize them as an enemy in the economic field and in some other
fields- and you are still very much interdependent. In such a
situation, destruction of your enemy is actually destruction of
yourself. Judging from that viewpoint, the concept of "we"
and "they" no longer applies. Thus the concept of war, destruction
of the other side, is not relevant to today's situation. Therefore,
I think it is very important to make it clear that the concept of war
not only is a painful experience but also is self-destructive."
-- His Holiness the Dalai Lama, from 'The Art of Peace: Nobel Peace
Laureates discuss Human Rights, Conflict and Reconciliation',
published by Snow Lion Publications.
18 Companies; 16,777,216 IPv4 Addresses Each
Eighteen companies currently hold Class A allocations: Apple, AT&T, BBN Planet, Computer Sciences, Compaq, Ford, Eli Lilly, GE, Hewlett-Packard, Interop Show Network, IBM, MIT, Mercedes Benz, Merck, PSINet, Prudential Securities, Stanford University and Xerox.
(via /.)
June 09, 2003
The Revolution Will Not Be Blogged
Hannibal (Ars Technica) writes:
It has often been noted since the rise of the Web that journalism is undergoing a forced makeover, but I'm actually just as fascinated by the ways in which things haven't changed. [..] Web publishing is still a very exclusive business, with its own gatekeepers, institutions, hierarchies, etc. For instance, out of about 5 billion people in the world, how many of them read, write, and use a computer regularly Now, how many of those people have enough tech savvy to publish on the Web And of that select group, how many have the motivation/inclination/ambition to actually publish anything online Finally, if your voice turns out to be at all popular, it's going to cost you to continue publishing--and if you're really popular, it'll cost you a lot. So what you wind up with is an "amateur" tech publishing sphere that draws from the exact same narrow demographic slice as traditional journalism: white, college educated, middle- and upper-middle-class people who've been professionally trained with a very specific skill set. Regardless of how many of these types of people you know, when you look at the Big Picture it's a very small slice of the population. So while it may be true that, as Dan Gillmor says, "the rules of journalism are changing," the faces making the new rules are the same as the ones making the old rules. "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss..."
At a recent Wall Street Journal tech conference, the Journal had instigated a gag rule for reporters to the effect that whatever some speaker said on stage was considered "off the record." This was ostensibly to get the speakers to loosen up and talk more candidly to the audience about their companies and their work. The problem with this plan was, nobody informed the bloggers of the rules, so they reported it all. This Wired article has the scoop on the incident, which goes to show just how definitions of "journalist" are shifting.
It has often been noted since the rise of the Web that journalism is undergoing a forced makeover, but I'm actually just as fascinated by the ways in which things haven't changed. It's very easy to fool yourself about the supposed "democratizing" nature of Web publishing, and I even fell prey to the myth initially before Caesar (the guy who signs the checks for our monthly server bills) set me straight. But all you have to do is think about it for a moment to realize that Web publishing is still a very exclusive business, with its own gatekeepers, institutions, hierarchies, etc. For instance, out of about 5 billion people in the world, how many of them read, write, and use a computer regularly Now, how many of those people have enough tech savvy to publish on the Web And of that select group, how many have the motivation/inclination/ambition to actually publish anything online Finally, if your voice turns out to be at all popular, it's going to cost you to continue publishing--and if you're really popular, it'll cost you a lot. So what you wind up with is an "amateur" tech publishing sphere that draws from the exact same narrow demographic slice as traditional journalism: white, college educated, middle- and upper-middle-class people (anecdotally, the male/female ratio is very good for blogging) who've been professionally trained with a very specific skill set. Regardless of how many of these types of people you know (I and most of my friends fall into this demographic), when you look at the Big Picture it's a very small slice of the population. So while it may be true that, as Dan Gillmor says, "the rules of journalism are changing," the faces making the new rules are the same as the ones making the old rules. "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss..."
So am I trying to downplay the impact of Web publishing on traditional journalism If we're talking about Web publishing giving a voice to the voiceless, then yeah, I definitely am. There are a few important counter-examples that you might drag up to contradict me (like the homeless guy who runs a blog), but I'd just remind you that the plural of "anecdote" is not "data." What's amazing about the Web as a social space is that it has succeeded in reproducing and in many ways even reinforcing traditional power relations between social groups. So I guess the take-home point is that, not only will the revolution not be televised, but it won't be blogged, either.
Of course, online journalism is having a very interesting and subtle impact on the way that news gets reported and stories develop, and through the years at Ars I've been fortunate enough not only to witness some of that but also to be a part of it. So I could write a whole other editorial about the ways in which online journalism is evolving to work within existing media structures to affect "the news," but that'll have to wait for another day.
6/5/2003 - 12:16PM
June 08, 2003
No WMDs; Big Crisis
Dr. George Friedman, Stratfor Weekly, writes:
The inability to discover weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has
created a political crisis in the United States and Britain.
Within the two governments, there are recriminations and brutal
political infighting over responsibility. Stratfor warned in
February that the unwillingness of the U.S. government to
articulate its real, strategic reasons for the war -- choosing
instead to lean on WMD as the justification -- would lead to a
deep crisis at some point. That moment seems to be here.
From: Strategic Forecasting Alert
Date: Thu Jun 5, 2003 7:03:09 PM America/Chicago
To:
Subject: Stratfor Weekly: WMD
Reply-To:
Please feel free to send the Stratfor Weekly to a friend
or colleague.
THE STRATFOR WEEKLY
5 June 2003
by Dr. George Friedman
WMD
Summary
The inability to discover weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has
created a political crisis in the United States and Britain.
Within the two governments, there are recriminations and brutal
political infighting over responsibility. Stratfor warned in
February that the unwillingness of the U.S. government to
articulate its real, strategic reasons for the war -- choosing
instead to lean on WMD as the justification -- would lead to a
deep crisis at some point. That moment seems to be here.
Analysis
"Weapons of mass destruction" is promising to live up to its
name: The issue may well result in the mass destruction of senior
British and American officials who used concerns about WMD in
Iraq as the primary, public justification for going to war. The
simple fact is that no one has found any weapons of mass
destruction in Iraq and -- except for some vans which may have
been used for biological weapons -- no evidence that Iraq was
working to develop such weapons. Since finding WMD is a priority
for U.S. military forces, which have occupied Iraq for more than
a month, the failure to find weapons of mass destruction not only
has become an embarrassment, it also has the potential to
mushroom into a major political crisis in the United States and
Britain. Not only is the political opposition exploiting the
paucity of Iraqi WMD, but the various bureaucracies are using the
issue to try to discredit each other. It's a mess.
On Jan. 21, 2003, Stratfor published an analysis titled Smoke and
Mirrors: The United States, Iraq and Deception, which made the
following points:
1. The primary reason for the U.S. invasion of Iraq was strategic
and not about weapons of mass destruction.
2. The United States was using the WMD argument primarily to
justify the attack to its coalition partners.
3. The use of WMD rather than strategy as the justification for
the war would ultimately create massive confusion as to the
nature of the war the United States was fighting.
As we put it:
"To have allowed the WMD issue to supplant U.S. strategic
interests as the justification for war has created a crisis in
U.S. strategy. Deception campaigns are designed to protect
strategies, not to trap them. Ultimately, the foundation of U.S.
grand strategy, coalitions and the need for clarity in military
strategy have collided. The discovery of weapons of mass
destruction in Iraq will not solve the problem, nor will a coup
in Baghdad. In a war [against Islamic extremists] that will last
for years, maintaining one's conceptual footing is critical. If
that footing cannot be maintained -- if the requirements of the
war and the requirements of strategic clarity are incompatible --
there are more serious issues involved than the future of Iraq."
The failure to enunciate the strategic reasons for the invasion
of Iraq--of cloaking it in an extraneous justification--has now
come home to roost. Having used WMD as the justification, the
inability to locate WMD in Iraq has undermined the credibility of
the United States and is tearing the government apart in an orgy
of finger-pointing.
To make sense of this impending chaos, it is important to start
at the beginning -- with al Qaeda. After the Sept. 11 attacks, al
Qaeda was regarded as an extraordinarily competent global
organization. Sheer logic argued that the network would want to
top the Sept. 11 strikes with something even more impressive.
This led to a very reasonable fear that al Qaeda possessed or was
in the process of obtaining WMD.
U.S. intelligence, shifting from its sub-sensitive to hyper-
sensitive mode, began putting together bits of intelligence that
tended to show that what appeared to be logical actually was
happening. The U.S. intelligence apparatus now was operating in a
worst-case scenario mode, as is reasonable when dealing with WMD.
Lower-grade intelligence was regarded as significant. Two things
resulted: The map of who was developing weapons of mass
destruction expanded, as did the probabilities assigned to al
Qaeda's ability to obtain WMD. The very public outcome -- along
with a range of less public events -- was the "axis of evil"
State of the Union speech, which identified three countries as
having WMD and likely to give it to al Qaeda. Iraq was one of
these countries.
If we regard chemical weapons as WMD, as has been U.S. policy,
then it is well known that Iraq had WMD, since it used them in
the past. It was a core assumption, therefore, that Iraq
continued to possess WMD. Moreover, U.S. intelligence officials
believed there was a parallel program in biological weapons, and
also that Iraqi leaders had the ability and the intent to restart
their nuclear program, if they had not already done so. Running
on the worst-case basis that was now hard-wired by al Qaeda into
U.S. intelligence, Iraq was identified as a country with WMD and
likely to pass them on to al Qaeda.
Iraq, of course, was not the only country in this class. There
are other sources of WMD in the world, even beyond the "axis of
evil" countries. Simply invading Iraq would not solve the
fundamental problem of the threat from al Qaeda. As Stratfor has
always argued, the invasion of Iraq served a psychological and
strategic purpose: Psychologically, it was designed to
demonstrate to the Islamic world the enormous power and ferocity
of the United States; strategically, it was designed to position
the United States to coerce countries such as Saudi Arabia, Syria
and Iran into changing their policies toward suppressing al Qaeda
operations in their countries. Both of these missions were
achieved.
WMD was always a side issue in terms of strategic planning. It
became, however, the publicly stated moral, legal and political
justification for the war. It was understood that countries like
France and Russia had no interest in collaborating with
Washington in a policy that would make the United States the
arbiter of the Middle East. Washington had to find a
justification for the war that these allies would find
irresistible.
That justification was that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
From the standpoint of U.S. intelligence, this belief became a
given. Everyone knew that Iraq once had chemical weapons, and no
reasonable person believed that Saddam Hussein had unilaterally
destroyed them. So it appeared to planners within the Bush
administration that they were on safe ground. Moreover, it was
assumed that other major powers would regard WMD in Hussein's
hands as unacceptable and that therefore, everyone would accept
the idea of a war in which the stated goal -- and the real
outcome -- would be the destruction of Iraq's weapons.
This was the point on which Washington miscalculated. The public
justification for the war did not compel France, Germany or
Russia to endorse military action. They continued to resist
because they fully understood the outcome -- intended or not --
would be U.S. domination of the Middle East, and they did not
want to see that come about. Paris, Berlin and Moscow turned the
WMD issue on its head, arguing that if that was the real issue,
then inspections by the United Nations would be the way to solve
the problem. Interestingly, they never denied that Iraq had WMD;
what they did deny was that proof of WMD had been found. They
also argued that over time, as proof accumulated, the inspection
process would either force the Iraqis to destroy their WMD or
justify an invasion at that point. What is important here is that
French and Russian leaders shared with the United States the
conviction that Iraq had WMD. Like the Americans, they thought
weapons of mass destruction -- particularly if they were
primarily chemical -- was a side issue; the core issue was U.S.
power in the Middle East.
In short, all sides were working from the same set of
assumptions. There was not much dispute that the Baathist regime
probably had WMD. The issue between the United States and its
allies was strategic. After the war, the United States would
become the dominant power in the region, and it would use this
power to force regional governments to strike at al Qaeda.
Germany, France and Russia, fearing the growth of U.S. power,
opposed the war. Rather than clarifying the chasm in the
alliance, the Bush administration permitted the arguments over
WMD to supplant a discussion of strategy and left the American
public believing the administration's public statements -- smoke
and mirrors -- rather than its private view.
The Bush administration -- and France, for that matter -- all
assumed that this problem would disappear when the U.S. military
got into Iraq. WMD would be discovered, the public justification
would be vindicated, the secret goal would be achieved and no one
would be the wiser. What they did not count on -- what is
difficult to believe even now -- is that Hussein actually might
not have WMD or, weirder still, that he hid them or destroyed
them so efficiently that no one could find them. That was the
kicker the Bush administration never counted on.
The matter of whether Hussein had WMD is still open. Answers
could range to the extremes: He had no WMD or he still has WMD,
being held in reserve for his guerrilla war. But the point here
is that the WMD question was not the reason the United States
went to war. The war was waged in order to obtain a strategic
base from which to coerce countries such as Syria, Iran and Saudi
Arabia into using their resources to destroy al Qaeda within
their borders. From that standpoint, the strategy seems to be
working.
However, by using WMD as the justification for war, the United
States walked into a trap. The question of the location of WMD is
important. The question of whether it was the CIA or Defense
Department that skewed its reports about the location of Iraq's
WMD is also important. But these questions are ultimately trivial
compared to the use of smoke and mirrors to justify a war in
which Iraq was simply a single campaign. Ultimately, the problem
is that it created a situation in which the American public had
one perception of the reason for the war while the war's planners
had another. In a democratic society engaged in a war that will
last for many years, this is a dangerous situation to have
created.
[..]
http://www.stratfor.com
====================================================================
(c) 2003 Strategic Forecasting LLC. All rights reserved.
June 07, 2003
The Freedom Festival
The Freedom Festival: June 20-22
1542 and 1550 n milwaukee ave. chicago il 606022
Freedom Festivals are gatherings of artists, thinkers, activists, citizens and friends who wish to celebrate and strengthen, through performance and art, music, discussions and theater, the spirit and intent of the founding documents of this state and other free and democratic societies—freedom of expression, pursuit of happiness, freedom from persecution, and other various civil liberties. Freedom Festival is an open attempt to use our remaining rights, understand how to keep them, and reclaim the ones we have lost.
Freedom Festival is a gathering of cultural, social, and artistic communities seeking to expand our networks, challenge the dominant assumptions, strengthen our activities, and work towards defending our rights to work outside, beside, or without the occupied life.
Creative responses, satiric guerrilla theater, infowarfare, music, workshops, video screenings, performances, debates, talks, and fashion coalesce into a weekend laboratory and creative resistance camp to help kick off a Summer of Resistance and make a Response to Un-american Activities.
June 04, 2003
'Marvin The Martian' On NASA's Mars Mission Patch
From a Warner Brothers Press Release:
"It is exciting that our characters, which for so many years have been associated with space adventures in the animated world, should now have a chance to become part of a real and important space exploration," said Jordan Sollitto, Executive Vice President of Worldwide Marketing, Warner Bros. Consumer Products. "We are thrilled about teaming up with NASA on these exciting missions and are looking forward to giving our characters the opportunity to touch down upon the Red Planet."
"More accurately, the planet is an understated fiery umber," Marvin interjected.
"I know."
PRESS RELEASE
Date Released: Monday, June 02, 2003
Warner Brothers
Marvin The Martian and Daffy Duck as Duck Dodgers Prepare for Upcoming NASA Missions to Mars
Warner Bros. Consumer Products Commissioned by TEAM DELTA to Design Out-Of-This-World Patches Featuring The Beloved Space Traveling Looney Tunes Characters
Marvin The Martian and Daffy Duck (as the fearless Duck Dodgers) will be showcased on official 1st Space Launch Squadron patches for two NASA Mars Exploration Rover Missions this summer. The special patches will act as the defining logo and will be worn by TEAM DELTA crews, comprising members from NASA, the United States Air Force, and Boeing. Additionally, they will be found in the mission control booth and at the Air Force 1SLS launch pad, and will be carried on mission control and launch pad crew suits, jackets and mugs. The Delta rockets will send the Mission Exploration Rover (MER) on special research operations to study the Red Planet, which the delightfully droll Marvin calls home.
"Daffy Duck and Marvin The Martian struck us as such a perfect fit, capturing the fun and adventurous spirit of these important explorations, that we were delighted to be able to include them as honorary members of the team," said Captain David Krambeck of TEAM DELTA.
"Well said," added Daffy Duck, who plays the courageously cowardly Duck Dodgers on Cartoon Network's new original series from Warner Bros. Animation, debuting this summer. "And check out the spiffy outfits."
Representatives from the Air Force working with Warner Bros. Consumer Products created the official patch designs for both the Mars-A and Mars-B missions, one patch featuring Marvin The Martian saluting the Mars Rover and the other, Daffy Duck as Duck Dodgers posed proudly with the American flag. The first launch is scheduled for June 8th, and the second launch will be slated for June 25th.
"It is exciting that our characters, which for so many years have been associated with space adventures in the animated world, should now have a chance to become part of a real and important space exploration," said Jordan Sollitto, Executive Vice President of Worldwide Marketing, Warner Bros. Consumer Products. "We are thrilled about teaming up with NASA on these exciting missions and are looking forward to giving our characters the opportunity to touch down upon the Red Planet."
"More accurately, the planet is an understated fiery umber," Marvin interjected.
"I know."
About Warner Bros. Consumer Products
Warner Bros. Consumer Products, a Warner Bros. Entertainment Company, is one of the leading licensing and retail merchandising organizations in the world.
LOONEY TUNES, characters, names and all related indicia are trademarks of and © Warner Bros.
Produced for Warner Bros. Consumer Products
Contact:
Erin Snider
Warner Bros. Consumer Products