A long long time ago in a galaxy far far away were a bunch of dudes that thought your rights were worth something. They have long since been dead, here in Canada we still have some privacy advocates but their ideas are eroding as well. We passed an act similar to the Patriot act in the U.S. our "War on terror" is simply severely underfunded. The United Kingdom did the same thing, what's really odd is that theirs was sparked by train bombings.
A great man once said:
If we sacrifice liberty for security even temporarily, we deserve neither!
That's as true today as it was three hundred years ago. In the latest onslaught against the rights of an individual; Phoem in the United Kingdom is going to team up with BT, now I hate British Telecom for a number of reasons, one of them is that it's a federally subsidized monopoly on telecommunications. Any Monopoly on telecom is bad; I say let the companies play and kill one another and then the monopoly that comes out of that should be told to play nice and if it doesn't break it up too. Say whatever did happen to bell?
Actually I'm against federal regulations, anyone should be able to connect anything to any network with a minimal licensing fee to ensure standards compliance and that's it. Now you can't do that, in the united states it's a bit easier, in Canada it's neigh impossible without a huge hunk of money for the CRTC and in the UK it's against the LAW.
Another thing that I once read was a compelling argument by one of the anonymous lawyers over at Lex Situs Conflictus (upper right hand corner link), stating that packet shaping equated to in Canada an invasion of privacy since everything inside the frame beyond the data headers was the property of the originator and in Canada if your computer is talking to people than it's as good as you talking to people.
The issue is that now any government agency, or company for that matter may listen in on that conversation, initially this was to make sure you weren't planning to blow something up, now it's to sell you more crap you don't need.
Yet another reason to use Tor, or Adblock+ for Firefox.
Do it! Do it Now! Stick it to the man!
Websites need advertisements to create revenue right? Since they themselves all evolve into avenues for advertising screw em!
I will glady click on ads on sites I like from vendors i hate that link to thing's I'll never buy and that in turn hoses the company I don't like, the nice thing about tabbed brosing is I don't even have to look at the page.
As to those of you that would like to watch or listen in on my conversations i say; go right ahead, I have nothing to hide. And I tend to use a lot of encryption for regular shit so if you want to see how I asked my girl friend weather or not she wanted vex or beer last night you may have to crack some moderately weak encryption first.
Which brings me to my point, when did it become O.K. for the state to eavesdrop on it's people?
To those of you still clinging on to that myth of terror i submit to you this:
Don't Believe the Hype
Monday, March 17, 2008
Thursday, March 13, 2008
EPS E-mailed me YAY!
I feel important when people with lots of letters beside their name decide that some lay person like myself deserves a minute of their time.
I e-mailed Electron Power Systems asking them if there was anything I could do to help them with their research or information technology needs, I figured what the hell sustained continuous fusion's a volunteer worthy goal.
He thanked me for my time, and mentioned that they had already secured funding.
I'm excited, the websites a frankenstien but they have money, this is good. The niftey thing about the EPS device is that a number of them could fit in a car providing direct electrical power, Think Mr. Fusion in that movie i mentioned earlier, although I think that the hardest part about carrying around Hydrogen and boron is containment although if his system works the amount of H2 you'd need would be about a few liters, vs direct combustion, we are of course a few orders of magnitude more efficient here. Enough to POP,
I wonder if they've considered licensing the ammonia hydride storage system from Honda? or mabye they might just leverage this nice body of work:
Hydrogen Cars
I e-mailed Electron Power Systems asking them if there was anything I could do to help them with their research or information technology needs, I figured what the hell sustained continuous fusion's a volunteer worthy goal.
He thanked me for my time, and mentioned that they had already secured funding.
I'm excited, the websites a frankenstien but they have money, this is good. The niftey thing about the EPS device is that a number of them could fit in a car providing direct electrical power, Think Mr. Fusion in that movie i mentioned earlier, although I think that the hardest part about carrying around Hydrogen and boron is containment although if his system works the amount of H2 you'd need would be about a few liters, vs direct combustion, we are of course a few orders of magnitude more efficient here. Enough to POP,
I wonder if they've considered licensing the ammonia hydride storage system from Honda? or mabye they might just leverage this nice body of work:
Hydrogen Cars
Friday, March 7, 2008
I'm in love with stories, how about you?
It seems to me that the history of humanity is littered with stories, both fictitious and true. Plato would have us believe that knowledge is a blend of belief and reality, in fact the whole notion of epistemology seems lost or foreign to the general public.
A little note about it here
I came across a sound bite today, it was a lecture given by a man by the name of Stafford Beer, nice name I know, he states that it's the only thing in the universe that involves physics, biology and sociology, he is of course referring to beer.
Download it now
Here's the rest of his links:
Fan Fare for Effective Freedom
Lessons from Stafford Beer
Memorial Website
Now I listened to the lecture, it's amazing, the man at 22 years of age ran an R&D department by sheer hard work and luck. However he mentioned his favorite publication here:
Chroncles of Wizard Prang
Since Beer was trained as a philosopher he ended up dispossessing himself for a period of his life and during this period wrote this book. I've only read bits of it but it reminds me of the gems of GEB and Dr. Seuss combined, how could any publisher in their right mind not publish this?
He also mentions that Cybernetics as a field of study has been around since the 1940's, I mean like any good internet gen general nerdie type person I tend to think Cybernetics, Like Cyborg? as in Kevin Warwick in I cyborg? You know direct neural interconnection with various bits of hardware so you can turn lights on and off at a distance with your mind? not that a light switch isn't cool, it's just a nice party trick.
Low and behold here's an entire form of managerial science aimed at improving productivity by utilizing statically based feed back loops that has a proven track record yet I have never heard of it, and I'm studying managerial and project management based sciences to make myself a more effective peer.
In his book I came across this chapter:
The Pompous Man
It's quite clear to me that this is a dialog that occurred between him and the local educational establishment's representative, and it's quite funny due to the fact that here is a man that was awarded his PhD at a young age, applied his knowledge from too much school stating that it is in fact the method of our madness we should question.
During my own not so illustrious scholastic career which reads more like a littany of failures than a glowing review of a star pupil I find myself questioning our education in the same manner as mentioned in Chapter Two of Beer's book.
His notion of not teaching them what we know but asking them what we don't know seems a novel throw back to the mentality of the 1960's, however I know for a fact that as an individual I work far better when I am interested in my content matter; as I am certain every student does. I also realize that I need a whole whack of learning skills and base skills to survive in today's world.
Which brings me to my point, it seems to me that the goal of this entire process of educating our young is to produce functional wholeistic people with enough bits of everything to allow them to decide what they love and then enable them to follow that passion. People change, passions change, time arguably yet another broadly adopted illusion changes all things. Yet in retrospect as the proverb goes, we learn more and more about less and less until we know everything about absolutely nothing at all.
Perhaps that's why Beer worked so much as a Cyberstitician? because he wanted to experence gems of everything all the time? Or perhaps he was just another rambleing bearded mad man.
Either way here's an excellent site on Cybernetics:
Cybernetics and Systems Thinkers
They are all worth a read if you'd like to learn how to improve any process.
A little note about it here
I came across a sound bite today, it was a lecture given by a man by the name of Stafford Beer, nice name I know, he states that it's the only thing in the universe that involves physics, biology and sociology, he is of course referring to beer.
Download it now
Here's the rest of his links:
Fan Fare for Effective Freedom
Lessons from Stafford Beer
Memorial Website
Now I listened to the lecture, it's amazing, the man at 22 years of age ran an R&D department by sheer hard work and luck. However he mentioned his favorite publication here:
Chroncles of Wizard Prang
Since Beer was trained as a philosopher he ended up dispossessing himself for a period of his life and during this period wrote this book. I've only read bits of it but it reminds me of the gems of GEB and Dr. Seuss combined, how could any publisher in their right mind not publish this?
He also mentions that Cybernetics as a field of study has been around since the 1940's, I mean like any good internet gen general nerdie type person I tend to think Cybernetics, Like Cyborg? as in Kevin Warwick in I cyborg? You know direct neural interconnection with various bits of hardware so you can turn lights on and off at a distance with your mind? not that a light switch isn't cool, it's just a nice party trick.
Low and behold here's an entire form of managerial science aimed at improving productivity by utilizing statically based feed back loops that has a proven track record yet I have never heard of it, and I'm studying managerial and project management based sciences to make myself a more effective peer.
In his book I came across this chapter:
The Pompous Man
It's quite clear to me that this is a dialog that occurred between him and the local educational establishment's representative, and it's quite funny due to the fact that here is a man that was awarded his PhD at a young age, applied his knowledge from too much school stating that it is in fact the method of our madness we should question.
During my own not so illustrious scholastic career which reads more like a littany of failures than a glowing review of a star pupil I find myself questioning our education in the same manner as mentioned in Chapter Two of Beer's book.
His notion of not teaching them what we know but asking them what we don't know seems a novel throw back to the mentality of the 1960's, however I know for a fact that as an individual I work far better when I am interested in my content matter; as I am certain every student does. I also realize that I need a whole whack of learning skills and base skills to survive in today's world.
Which brings me to my point, it seems to me that the goal of this entire process of educating our young is to produce functional wholeistic people with enough bits of everything to allow them to decide what they love and then enable them to follow that passion. People change, passions change, time arguably yet another broadly adopted illusion changes all things. Yet in retrospect as the proverb goes, we learn more and more about less and less until we know everything about absolutely nothing at all.
Perhaps that's why Beer worked so much as a Cyberstitician? because he wanted to experence gems of everything all the time? Or perhaps he was just another rambleing bearded mad man.
Either way here's an excellent site on Cybernetics:
Cybernetics and Systems Thinkers
They are all worth a read if you'd like to learn how to improve any process.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)