I was looking around for some equipment and stumbled upon this artist, and his performances. And another.

Marks and Spencer seems to be exploiting the goldfish attention span of the media today, last week it was reported;

Marks & Spencer suppliers have reacted angrily to the retailing giant turning the screw on them, just one year after demanding better terms from all its food, textile and accessory manufacturers.

“People are being squeezed to the bone. There will come a point where we will either go bankrupt or throw in the towel and walk away,” said one small textile supplier.
[…]

whereas today M&S proudly announce;

Marks & Spencer is to stock only Fairtrade coffee and tea from next month as it extends it commitment to ethical sourcing.

…

Stuart Rose, chief executive of Marks & Spencer, said: “Our customers have told us they care about how our products are made and we want to help them make Fairtrade part of their retail habit.” M&S, as an own-brand-only retailer, was in a “unique position” to make the change.
[…]

Call me a stickler for consistency but it seems somewhat two-faced to force UK suppliers to be barely profitable and at the same time call yourself ethical for stocking Fairtrade products from countries where the cost of being ‘ethical’ is markedly less. (Anyhow the UK suppliers are free to take their trade elsewhere – given that all the other supermarkets operate on similar lines maybe they should try local independent retailers).

An analogous doublethink situation to the government calling for ‘freedom and democracy’ abroad whilst imposing repressive legisaltiuon at home?

A friend brought this preview of a game to my attention that has blown me away and considering that I’m not really much of a games player, thats saying alot.

The basis of the game is evolution [oh yes, the ID crowd will love this!!]. You begin as a single cell lifeform, eating bits of food until you reach the stage where you can reproduce and lay an ‘egg’. At this stage you can select what direction to evolve by choosing body parts which determine what you can eat, how you can defend yourself when attacked by foes, kill your prey or increase mobility, thus opening different paths to evolve throughout the game. The game enviroment also evolves according to the choices you make. Pure emergent game play.

This really excites me as I don’t like the main stratergies of what most games are built on: you hold a gun and kill everything in sight or you organise armies on an overview level to conquer and kill everything in sight.

What I also like about this game is that it is a different mental challenge and so will create and reinforce different neural pathways in the minds of the people who play it. For too long, the vast majority of games have been about annihilation and so instill/install that the best method to respond to a situation is ‘KILL! KILL! KILL!’. It is only games like The Sims, et al, that through emergent based gaming systems, that provoke a different mental response to situations. Build, sustain and evolve rather than destroy and conquer.

I’m tingling through the thought of how software programming has evolved so that games like this are now a possibility. I have been since reading Steven Johnson’s book ‘Emergence’. (thanks for that one Anthony!).

There is this 30 minute preview video with running commentary describing gameplay and possibilties of evolution, etc on video.google. The official site is here:

Did I say I was excited about this?

>I have been reading BLOGDIAL for years now
>and the new design has prompted me to finally
>write you a note to say how much it inspires me.
>How do you all keep writing such great posts day
>after day? Keep doing it!

The secret to BLOGDIAL’s success can now be revealed:

It’s all in the Paper Hats.

AT&T’s 1.9-Trillion-Call Database

This whole article is worth reading, but I found this tidbit particularly interesting:

He was alluding to databases maintained at an AT&T data center in Kansas, which now contain electronic records of 1.92 trillion telephone calls, going back decades. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital-rights advocacy group, has asserted in a lawsuit that the AT&T Daytona system, a giant storehouse of calling records and Internet message routing information, was the foundation of the N.S.A.’s effort to mine telephone records without a warrant.An AT&T spokeswoman said the company would not comment on the claim, or generally on matters of national security or customer privacy.

But the mining of the databases in other law enforcement investigations is well established, with documented results. One application of the database technology, called Security Call Analysis and Monitoring Platform, or Scamp, offers access to about nine weeks of calling information. It currently handles about 70,000 queries a month from fraud and law enforcement investigators, according to AT&T documents.

A former AT&T official who had detailed knowledge of the call-record database said the Daytona system takes great care to make certain that anyone using the database – whether AT&T employee or law enforcement official with a subpoena – sees only information he or she is authorized to see, and that an audit trail keeps track of all users. Such information is frequently used to build models of suspects’ social networks.

The official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was discussing sensitive corporate matters, said every telephone call generated a record: number called, time of call, duration of call, billing category and other details. While the database does not contain such billing data as names, addresses and credit card numbers, those records are in a linked database that can be tapped by authorized users.

New calls are entered into the database immediately after they end, the official said, adding, “I would characterize it as near real time.”

According to a current AT&T employee, whose identity is being withheld to avoid jeopardizing his job, the mining of the AT&T databases had a notable success in helping investigators find the perpetrators of what was known as the Moldovan porn scam.

In 1997 a shadowy group in Moldova, a former Soviet republic, was tricking Internet users by enticing them to a pornography Web site that would download a piece of software that disconnected the computer user from his local telephone line and redialed a costly 900 number in Moldova.

While another long-distance carrier simply cut off the entire nation of Moldova from its network, AT&T and the Moldovan authorities were able to mine the database to track the culprits.

[…]

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/03/atts_19trillion.html

Decades woth of telephone calls, stored and searchable. Who wants to bet that they are using some of those Google appliances to serach through them all.

Now, imagine for yourself, the 8000 Trillion records that the UK NIR will accumulate, and what a goldmine it will be for everyone except the public. Every ounce of alcohol sold, every parcel posted, every aspirin dispensed, every car, train, plane and boat journey…everything that ever happens that is done by a human.

AT&T is a private company, and look what they have done, without any oversight, no ones explicit permission. Imagine this in the hands of government.

Now we know what the true inspiration for TIA and NIR was; AT&T.

I had a phone interview with Google today. I took notes; some of the questions they asked were interesting. We were allowed to ask questions. The interviewer didn’t ask many questions in response to my answers, except to occasionally say “interesting”. There’s almost certainly more than one answer to each of these, and a few are probably wrong answers or could be improved in some way; I only include my answers for comparison. Any intermediate questions that I asked for clarification or otherwise have been omitted.

Without further ado, a few of the more interesting ones:

Q: “You are shrunk to the height of a nickel and your mass is proportionally reduced so as to maintain your original density. You are then thrown into an empty glass blender. The blades will start moving in 60 seconds. What do you do?”

(my answer): Take off all my clothes, wedge them between the blades and the floor to prevent it from turning. Back up against the edge of the blender until the electric motor overheats and burns out. Using the notches etched in the side for measuring, climb out. If there are no such notches or they’re too far apart, retrieve clothes and make a rope to hurl myself out.

My answer: go down to the base of the blades and duck. Mixer blades in blenders normally have a gap underneath them, and in some blenders, the blades are curved. You could survive for a long time crouched down there. With your fingers in your ears.

Q: “How would you find out if a machine’s stack grows up or down in memory?”

(my answer): Instantiate a local variable. Call another function with a local. Look at the address of that function and then compare. If the function’s local is higher, the stack grows away from address location 0; if the function’s local is lower, the stack grows towards address location 0. (If they’re the same, you did something wrong!)

My answer: The last time I programmed in Assembler was 1979.

Q: “Explain a database in three sentences to your eight-year-old nephew.”

(my answer): A database is a way of organizing information. It’s like a genie who knows where every toy in your room is. Instead of hunting for certain toys yourself and searching the whole room, you can ask the genie to find all your toy soldiers, or only X-Men action figures, or only race cars — anything you want.

My answer: A database is like a pack of Top Trumps in its plastic box. Instead of Gumball Cars, Fast Boats or other Top Trumps stuff, you can make up your own deck. You can then do all kinds of Top Trump like things, comparing cards and stuff like that.

Q: “How many gas stations would you say there are in the United States?”

(my answer): A business doesn’t stick around for long unless it makes a profit. Let’s assume that all gas stations in the US are making at least some profit over the long run. Assume that the number of people who own more than one car is negligibly small relative to the total American population. Figure that 20% of people are too young to drive a car, another 10% can’t drive because of disability or old age, 5% of people use public transportation or carpool, another 5% choose not to drive, and another 5% of the cars are inventory sitting in lots or warehouses that a dealership owns but which no one drives.

There’s about 280 million people in the US; subtracting 50%, that means there’s about 140 million automobiles and 140 million drivers for them. The busiest city or interstate gas stations probably get a customer pulling in about twice a minute, or about 120 customers per hour; a slower gas station out in an agrarian area probably sees a customer once every 10 or 15 minutes, or about 4 customers per hour. Let’s take a weighted average and suppose there’s about one customer every 90 seconds, or about 40 customers an hour. Figuring a fourteen-hour business day (staying open from 7 AM to 9 PM), that’s about 560 customers a day.

If the average gas station services 560 customers a day, then there are 250,000 gas stations in the US. This number slightly overstates the true number of gas stations because some people are serviced by more than one gas station. [Actual number in 2003, according to the Journal of Petroleum Marketing: 237,284, an error of about 5%.]

My answer: There are too many gas stations and too many cars in the United States of America.
[…]

http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=299692 

Look throught each of these pictures in turn. Astonishing cuisine!

http://www.yupoo.com/view/ed51f17c1644469b987a2a3c560dc1af

Nabbed from this MSN BLOG (wordpress ate the html, sorry):
Why our Government will attack Iran before March 20
On March 20- Iran will do what Iraq and Venezuela were PREVENTED from doing by U.S. Interference.

“On the start of the Iranian New Year- March 20, 2006 on our calendar, Iran intends to open its own commodity market for oil and gas. This new bourse will be similar to markets in NY and London with one critical exception…

Trades will be conducted in Euros, not dollars.”

from www.isecureonline.com/reports/mtr/emtrg206/home.cfm

This is why Dick Cheney and the Bush administration are rushing to validate some kind of attack on Iran, not the supposed Nuclear capability. It’s another red herring to prevent an Oil power from going Petro-Euro on the U.S.Dollar. Ever since Nixon refused to pay Gold in exchange for the Dollar, The American dollar has been been backed by an agreement with OPEC to price oil exclusively in U.S. Dollars. So in effect, Oil backed the U.S. dollar since that time.

This is one of the primary reasons Foreign countries like China have been hoarding U.S. Treasuries for the past 20 years. At this time last year, China was spending 7.8 million an hour, 187 million a day, buying U.S. treasuries and dollars and holds in excess of 120 Billion in U.S. treasuries, not to mention what the Saudis own as well.

This is the ONLY reason our economy HAS NOT Collapsed into a major recession for the past ten years. The foreign money has been propping up our economy as we rack up record National Debt and Trade deficits under the “Conservative” policies of the Bush administration.

Saddam threatened to pull the plug on the U.S. dollar in 2000 and we ousted him. Venezuela’s ambassador spoke to Russia of doing the same in 2001. Within a year there was a coup attempt against Chavez, reputed to be supported by the CIA. The coup failed, but Chavez pulled back against moving to the Euro.

……

Sharks with implants are planned to be released off Florida

Pentagon scientists are planning to turn sharks into “stealth spies” capable of tracking vessels undetected, a British magazine has reported.They want to remotely control the sharks by implanting electrodes in their brains, The New Scientist says.

[…]

Like Dr Moreau’s island for the 21st century neocon.

You know what the next logical step is.

And you know that as soon as they can, they will.

It’s beem snowing in Leeds!

It’ll be front page news on BBQ when it causes traffic mayhem in Essex, no doubt.

via digg (The big DRM mistake)

After it arrived, I took out the first DVD and stuck it in my Linux box, expecting that I could start looking at the collected issues
[…]
It turned out that The New Yorker added DRM to their DjVu files, turning an open format into a closed, proprietary, encrypted format, and forcing consumers to install the special viewer software included on the first DVD. Of course, that software only works on Windows or Mac OS X, so Linux users are out of luck (and no, it doesn’t work under WINE … believe me, I tried).

via Spyblog (re Computer Misuse Act):

For the purposes of subsection (1)(b) above the requisite intent is an

intent to do the act in question and by so doing—

(a) to impair the operation of any computer,
(b) to prevent or hinder access to any program or data held in any computer, or
(c) to impair the operation of any such program or the reliability of any such data,

whether permanently or temporarily.

I’m sure that the DRM problems described in the first story fall into the emboldened sections of the legislation.

Does this mean UK government will be outlawing DRM? It’s a nice thought anyway.

An audio recording made on November 18, 1978, at the Peoples Temple compound in Jonestown, Guyana immediately preceding and during the mass suicide or murder of over 900 members of the cult.

Author: The Rev. Jim Jones, et al. (The Peoples Temple cult)
Date: 1978-11-18 00:00:00
Source: ? > cassette > CD-R > Sound Forge > FLAC Frontend > FLAC
Recorded by: Unknown; FLAC’ed by Olen Sluder (olenATacmDOTorg)
Keywords: Spoken Word; Historical

Creative Commons license: Public Domain

Notes

I acquired the source cassette tape c. 1979 from a high school friend whose father was an FBI agent.

The sound levels were increased as close as possible to clipping when I transferred to CD-R from cassette and then normalized to -18 dB average RMS power (loudness) in Sound Forge after extracting from CD-R

An interesting web site for further research is the Jonestown Institute (http://jonestown.sdsu.edu/), which contains transcripts as well as commentary on this and other recordings recovered by the FBI from Jonestown

Individual Files

Wow.

I came across this whilst checking up on the TCP stats at Archive.org, which are over 45,000 now.

Pay too much and you could raise the alarm

By BOB KERR
The Providence Journal
28-FEB-06

PROVIDENCE, R.I. — Walter Soehnge is a retired Texas schoolteacher who traveled north with his wife, Deana, saw summer change to fall in Rhode Island and decided this was a place to stay for a while.

So the Soehnges live in Scituate now and Walter sometimes has breakfast at the Gentleman Farmer in Scituate Village, where he has passed the test and become a regular despite an accent that is definitely not local.

And it was there, at his usual table last week, that he told me that he was “madder than a panther with kerosene on his tail.”

He says things like that. Texas does leave its mark on a man.

What got him so upset might seem trivial to some people who have learned to accept small infringements on their freedom as just part of the way things are in this age of terror-fed paranoia. It’s that “everything changed after 9/11” thing.

But not Walter.

“We’re a product of the ’60s,” he said. “We believe government should be way away from us in that regard.”

He was referring to the recent decision by him and his wife to be responsible, to do the kind of thing that just about anyone would say makes good, solid financial sense.

They paid down some debt. The balance on their JCPenney Platinum MasterCard had gotten to an unhealthy level. So they sent in a large payment, a check for $6,522.

And an alarm went off. A red flag went up. The Soehnges’ behavior was found questionable.

And all they did was pay down their debt. They didn’t call a suspected terrorist on their cell phone. They didn’t try to sneak a machine gun through customs.

They just paid a hefty chunk of their credit card balance. And they learned how frighteningly wide the net of suspicion has been cast.

After sending in the check, they checked online to see if their account had been duly credited. They learned that the check had arrived, but the amount available for credit on their account hadn’t changed.

So Deana Soehnge called the credit-card company. Then Walter called.

“When you mess with my money, I want to know why,” he said.

They both learned the same astounding piece of information about the little things that can set the threat sensors to beeping and blinking.

They were told, as they moved up the managerial ladder at the call center, that the amount they had sent in was much larger than their normal monthly payment. And if the increase hits a certain percentage higher than that normal payment, Homeland Security has to be notified. And the money doesn’t move until the threat alert is lifted.

Walter called television stations, the American Civil Liberties Union and me. And he went on the Internet to see what he could learn. He learned about changes in something called the Bank Privacy Act.

“The more I’m on, the scarier it gets,” he said. “It’s scary how easily someone in Homeland Security can get permission to spy.”

Eventually, his and his wife’s money was freed up. The Soehnges were apparently found not to be promoting global terrorism under the guise of paying a credit-card bill. They never did learn how a large credit card payment can pose a security threat.

But the experience has been a reminder that a small piece of privacy has been surrendered. Walter Soehnge, who says he holds solid, middle-of-the-road American beliefs, worries about rights being lost.

“If it can happen to me, it can happen to others,” he said. […]

http://www.shns.com/shns/g_index2.cfm?action=detail&pk=RAISEALARM-02-28-06 

So, NOW you see what has been happening while you were asleep.
The one comforting thing about this story is that this man went bezerk, and called everyone he could to ‘expose’ this ‘scandal’. Note how he describes himself and his generation. I fear that the youth of today would not raise even an eyebrow had this happened to them, shoulder shrugging eloi that they are.

That is the tragedy.

And of course, the decades long crusade to spread democracy and exert control over the middle east has all been for nothing. Now that the Iraqui resistance has engineered a civil war, the american press is actually saying out loud that us troops will have to pull out until the fighting dies down should it all get any worse. Had they never gone in there in the first place, and left ‘The Lion of the Desert’ in place, none of this would ever have happened.

Now they are set to leave Iraq as it self destructs, and they have the audacity to try and provoke an attack against Iran, which is completely stable.
Wasted lives, wasted money, mass murder, the destruction of the American way of life, the discrediting of democracy, all for nothing…nothing. What an unmittigated disaster.

http://www.designobserver.com/archives/011733.html

Doesn’t say anything new, but at least people are paying attention.

Take a look at http://wink.com

Where you can look at people’s collections of related links; for example:

This is SandervanderHeide’s Search Guide. You can look at SandervanderHeide’s tags, check out the newest links, or add the favorite “Collections” to your private page. This is a great way to stay updated on the things you care about from people you trust.

If you look at this users page, you can see, for example, all of his links that are to do with the NSA’s domestic spying.

You will remember that Higher Though works (heh, will work) by users manually linking together URLs that are related to each other, so that you will be able to browse them as collections of semantically linked pages, or images or any other type of object that can be accessed with a URL.

Wink doesn’t do this however; it merely allows people to collect related links together in a static list. To make it more like HT, they would need to allow you to go to another related link from any link, instead of the links only available destination being straight to the article.

HT works better than tagging. For example, on this users page, he has a colection of URLS all tagged witht the word ‘citizen’. Now, this tag essentially sits between any two URLS as a semantic mediator. The word ‘citizen’ doesn’t in and of itself contain the meaning of the two links, so if I click on any of these tags in his list, in the Wink results, I get a wildly different set of links, all tagged with this same word.

Higher Thought eliminates the semantic ambiguity of tags, by directly linking two URLS; the urls themselvs are the tags. Since the URL has the meaning of its content ‘encoded’ into it, if the HT connection is made correctly, once you jump into the HT stream of linked tags, each one will relate to the next without ambiguity. The objects a URL represents have very subtle meanings; this is why you have to use multiple tags to pin down the category of a blog post or news article. By linking URLS together directly, you eliminate the need for multiple tags, and allow the meaning of the information to organize itself.

Think of HT as a way of implimenting ‘fractional tagging‘, in the same way that an imaginary object in fractal geometry has a demensionaltiy that is between two whole numbers, the beauty of HT lies in the subtle graduations of meaning that single, one dimensional words can’t convey very well.
Obviously, we can build a moderation system so that bad users links (noise) are pushed out of site. Once we have a critical mass of users, good users links will all connect to each other, and the broken bridges between clusters of HT links cause by bad uers will be eliminated.

It would become a self organizing, semantically correct cloud of all objects with urls, with entry points at each url, from which you will be able to surf from one node to another, viewing semantically linked collections and lines of related urls.

I made a buzzword….

‘fractional tagging‘
‘fractal tagging‘
‘fractagging‘
‘fraagging‘