Outstanding news. Unless these politicos are simply trying to extort more in 'campaign contributions' before they'll approve this egregious invasion of privacy:

Charter's Web monitoring draws intervention from Capitol Hill
Two prominent members of the U.S. Congress are asking Charter Communications to hold off on its plan to monitor its customers' Web browsing and deliver relevant advertisements.

In a letter to Charter chief executive Neil Smit, Reps. Ed Markey and Joe Barton say the monitoring plan may violate federal privacy laws and that the company "not move forward" until "we have an opportunity to discuss" it. Markey is the Democratic chairman of a House Internet subcommittee and Barton is the senior Republican on the House Energy and Commerce committee.

Charter did not immediately respond on Friday to our questions about whether it would delay its monitoring-and-advertising plans as a result of the letter. Although Markey and Barton have no legal authority to order a halt, they could make life difficult for Charter by convening hearings and lambasting the company for alleged privacy violations...

Source: CNET News

...it is as if the telephone companies listened in on all your conversations and sold subject matter summaries to catalog snail-mail spammers...

posted 5/16/2008 12:35 pm - permalink | comments[0]

This seems about right to me. And to think, you were able to witness it, like being around during the demise of the Italian city-states. Now, as to whether you'll survive it, well, that depends:

Early morning thinking
The fastest way to tell whether a book about globalization is a waste of time, is to read the first couple of lines in the introduction. If it begins with:

“The rise of China, India, and Brazil will end American dominance in the 21st Century…”

quickly place it back on the bedside table, curl up, and go to sleep. Your time will have been better spent.

While a book of this type appeals to the great power mindsets of those educated in classical political science, it does little to describe our current situation. Nation-states, as organizational systems, are in deep decline. By every measure of power from control over borders to finances to warfare, nation-states are suffering nearly complete erosion.

Our world isn't ruled by a collection of nation-states anymore, instead, it is under the control of autonomous markets and systems -- that are too large, fast, complex, and broad to control in any meaningful way. Where we end up in the next decades will be a function of how these systems operate, and not any considered process of deliberation made within and among national governments. Those days are past. Our legacy rather than our future.

Source: John Robb's Weblog

...this is what the transnational elite understand, right down in their DNA. And it is why your blathering about patriotism (as anything other than a campaign gimmick or stunt) seems so quaint to them...

posted 5/16/2008 10:54 am - permalink | comments[0]

Harvesting the social network goobers:

Data Portability: It’s The New Walled Garden
The scuffle today between Facebook and Google has very little to do with user privacy and everything to do with user control. A huge battle is underway between Google, MySpace and Facebook around control of user profiles and, therefore, users themselves. And their three new products, Data Availability, Facebook Connect, and Friend Connect, are all designed to further that goal.

Internet giants know that the days of getting you to spend all of your time inside their walled gardens are over. So the next best thing is to at least maintain as much data about the user as possible, and make sure they identify with your brand while they are out there not being on your site. The most valuable information a user has is his or her identity (that’s why the big guys are so eagerly adopting the issuing side of OpenID so you log in with, say, your Yahoo account on other sites), as well as their friend list (valuable, plus users hate to keep redoing it all over the Internet) and other information.

The companies with the profiles (mostly MySpace and Facebook) know this. And they know that to keep users happy, and to stop them from entering in all that friend data into other sites, they need to make their data at least somewhat portable. Not too portable, mind you. That means they’d lose control. But just portable enough. That’s why they are launching their products, and that’s why they are being justifiably criticized...

Source: TechCrunch

...an impending bubble-burst of huge proportions. I suspect that the smart people have already taken their money and run far away...

posted 5/16/2008 8:39 am - permalink | comments[0]

I've maintained that current crude oil prices are incompatible with middle-class suburban life in America. You should read that sentence again. It means that if these prices continue (and I have every reason to suspect they will) we will have to change the way we live. And there is no good way to do that:

De facto if not de jure
In a previous post, I asked what plans our presidential candidates have to address the sheer financial drain implicit in importing $120 a barrel oil. In the resulting comments, the discussion quickly turned into a debate over the reality (or unreality) of the Peak Oil hypothesis. Given that most oil reserves are now held by national oil companies that prefer to keep their production and reserve data secret or announce figures that cannot be independently verified, I know of no way to prove or disprove this hypothesis. (The whole question has become awfully metaphysical.)

But there is some publicly available data that would seem to provide us with guidance here. As the blogger Hellasious remarks:

Exxon is the world's largest non-state oil company and the largest publicly traded corporation by market capitalization ($478 billion). If anyone has both the incentive and the resources to find and sell more oil, it is them. But they can't. In the last five years, as the average price of oil more than tripled, their production has been flat...And it's not as if they haven't been trying: their capital and exploration expenses for upstream operations have nearly doubled in recent years...

What do I take from this? Well, de jure peak oil may or may not exist, but de facto peak oil looks like our current reality.

Some additional confirmation of this comes from a story by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard from the Daily Telegraph:

Chris Skrebowski, Editor of Petroleum Review, said the awful truth is that Saudi Arabia cannot raise oil output much even if it tries. "The myth of Saudi spare capacity is convenient for everybody: it gives OPEC leverage, and it gives the West hope.

"But Saudi reserves are secret. They have never been verified," he said.

Mr Skrebowski said oil is soaring because output is falling in Mexico, the US, and the North Sea. Russia stunned the markets with a 1pc fall in first quarter in Russia. "We are running the system flat out," he said...

Source: 3quarksdaily

...and we have done nothing to prepare for this. May you live in interesting times, you poor bastards...

posted 5/16/2008 8:25 am - permalink | comments[0]

I love it when the affluent come out to play. Such a grand entertainment, and you don't even have to buy tickets::

Yahoo in faceoff with Icahn
NEW YORK (Fortune) -- Carl Icahn is picking up where Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer left off. And Yahoo is still digging in its heels.

Icahn, the billionaire corporate raider, launched a battle for control of Yahoo's board of directors in the hopes of forcing a sale to Microsoft. In a letter to Yahoo, Icahn said he would nominate 10 directors to replace Yahoo's existing board at the company's annual meeting in early July. Shareholders have until the end of the day Thursday to nominate an alternate slate.

The move adds a new twist to the fight for Yahoo, which kicked off in early February when Microsoft announced a blockbuster $44.6 billion bid for the Internet portal. Months of jockeying between the two companies ended in early May when Microsoft walked away after Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang rebuffed a higher bid valued at $47.5 billion...

...In effect, Icahn is attempting what Ballmer had publicly threatened to do: try to overthrow Yahoo's board of directors in the hopes of brokering a buyout by Microsoft. But Ballmer backed away from a proxy contest because, he concluded, a drawn-out war would be too damaging...

Source: CNN Money

...you and him fight, I'll make some popcorn...

posted 5/16/2008 7:53 am - permalink | comments[0]

I'm a bit of a muzzle-sniffer myself, yet I still scoff when the amazingly adolescent Instapundit-types proclaim, 'An armed society is a polite society.' Pshaw. A polite society is a polite society, whether it is armed or not. And thugs are thugs. Only cubicle nerds, almost universally without military experience, blather otherwise. They daydream their lives away, wishing they were leading players in a Red Dawn resistance movie, or icy vigilantes wreaking vengeance on evil doers:

Can the army out-gun the drug lords?
“FEAR is our chief safeguard,” Pericles declared in his funeral oration, “for it teaches us to obey the magistrates and the laws.” In Mexico, however, fear has become the chief aid not of the state, but of those who are trying to subvert it. On May 8th, Edgar Millán Gómez, Mexico's acting chief of police, was shot nine times as he arrived home late at night. One of his bodyguards, who was also wounded, managed to wrestle the police chief's assailant to the ground and arrest him. Mr Millán was conscious for long enough to ask his killer who was behind the hit, but died before he could get a reply...

...In addition to Mr Millán's assassination, the past few days have seen the murder of a top official in Mexico City's police force; of the police second-in-command in the border town of Juárez; and of the administrative head of the Estado Mayor, a military body charged with protecting the president. Such targeting of senior law-enforcement officials is unprecedented in Mexican history.

The gangs have not restricted themselves to killing senior policemen, though. According to Guillermo Zepeda of CIDAC, a think-tank in Mexico City, the week leading up to May 12th saw a total of 113 murders in Mexico, including 17 people on a single day. Estimates of the total number of deaths linked to drugs and organised crime so far this year range from 1,100 to 2,500 people. The war on drugs has never seemed less like a metaphor...

Source: The Economist

...you'll be importing more than compliant wage-serfs with your illicit guest worker program, my polite GOP friends. And, maybe it's time to re-think the whole drug war, given that it's been nothing but a grotesque failure...

posted 5/15/2008 5:34 pm - permalink | comments[0]

Here's hoping they've got the meters-to-yards conversion right this time:

NASA Holds Breath for Phoenix Mars Lander's Touchdown
"Follow the water" has been NASA's mantra as it has explored Mars for signs of present or past life. It will be no different later this month when the Phoenix Mars Lander touches down on the Red Planet for what researchers hope will be their closest encounter yet with extraterrestrial water.

Powered by solar panels, Phoenix is set to take a three-month tour of the plains near the north pole of Mars, enduring surface temperatures from –100 to –28 degrees Fahrenheit (–73 to –33 degrees Celsius). The craft is designed to dig into the cementlike layer of ice that researchers believe lies buried a few inches below the surface in the planet's polar regions, scanning for signs of past liquid water and organic compounds, the carbon-rich molecules that make life on Earth possible.

If all goes according to plan, "Phoenix will touch water for the first time" on Mars, Doug McCuistion, director of NASA's Mars Exploration Program, said at a press conference this week at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C.

Assuming, that is, it survives entry. Only five of 13 attempts to land on Mars have succeeded. (Although five of six U.S. probes have made it.) The $420-million Phoenix is the sibling mission of the doomed Mars Polar Lander (MPL), which crashed during landing in 1999.

Since then, however, NASA has successfully carried out four missions to Mars, including landing the twin rovers Spirit and Opportunity. And NASA says that it has taken steps to prevent Phoenix from suffering its predecessor's fate.

If so, Phoenix will be the first craft to touch down using rocket thrusters since the Viking 2 lander, some 32 years ago...

Source: Scientific American

...bots in space, I love 'em...

posted 5/15/2008 5:22 pm - permalink | comments[0]

Hahaha .. this'll bring teh Intertubes to its knees, crushed under the load of people looking for the offshore pharma sites:

My experiment with smart drugs
...That’s when I stumbled across a small story in an American scientific magazine. It said there was a spiky debate across America’s universities about the increasing use by students of a drug called Progivil. It was, they said, Viagra for the brain. It was originally designed for narcoleptics in the seventies, but clinical trials had stumbled across something odd: if you give it to non-narcoleptics, they just become smarter. Their memory and concentration improves considerably, and so does their IQ...

...A week later, the little white pills arrived in the post. I sat down and took one 200mg tablet with a glass of water. It didn’t seem odd: for years, I took an anti-depressant. Then I pottered about the flat for an hour, listening to music and tidying up, before sitting down on the settee. I picked up a book about quantum physics and super-string theory I have been meaning to read for ages, for a column I’m thinking of writing. It had been hanging over me, daring me to read it. Five hours later, I realised I had hit the last page. I looked up. It was getting dark outside. I was hungry. I hadn’t noticed anything, except the words I was reading, and they came in cool, clear passages; I didn’t stop or stumble once.

Perplexed, I got up, made a sandwich – and I was overcome with the urge to write an article that had been kicking around my subconscious for months. It rushed out of me in a few hours, and it was better than usual. My mood wasn’t any different; I wasn’t high. My heart wasn’t beating any faster. I was just able to glide into a state of concentration – deep, cool, effortless concentration. It was like I had opened a window in my brain and all the stuffy air had seeped out, to be replaced by a calm breeze.

Once that article was finished, I wanted to do more. I wrote another article, all of it springing out of my mind effortlessly. Then I go to dinner with a few friends, and I decide not to tell them, to see if they notice anything. At the end of the dinner, my mate Jess turns to me and says, “You seem very thoughtful tonight.”

That night, I lay in bed, and I couldn’t sleep. I wasn’t restless or tetchy; I just kept thinking very clearly, and I wanted to write it all down...

Source: Johann Hari

...better living through chemistry...

posted 5/15/2008 4:15 pm - permalink | comments[0]

What an exciting world of innovation we'll be in once we throw the current BigOil shills out of the White House:

FloDesign's jet engine-inspired wind turbine wins prizes
The wind power business, dominated by international conglomerates deploying mature technology, is a tough nut to crack.

A small Massachusetts-based start-up, FloDesign Wind Turbine, this week won two clean-energy competitions with a "shrouded turbine" design that it says can generate three to four times more electricity than today's hulking wind turbines.

The company has gotten attention from Al Gore in his role as partner at venture capital firm Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers, according to news Web site Xconomy...

...FloDesign Wind Turbine's design resemble a jet engine, an approach that allows it to capture much more wind energy while taking up less space than traditional turbines.

When wind hits a turbine, it's constructed so that different air flows create a rapid-mixing vortex. A fin directs it to face the direction of the wind to maximize the amount of energy it receives.

The company said its machines can be used for utility-scale wind farms or corporate customers.

On Monday, the company won a prize valued at more than $100,000 in cash and services from the MIT Enterprise Forum...

Source: CNET News

...it'll be like a fresh breeze blowing throughout the country...

posted 5/15/2008 3:57 pm - permalink | comments[0]

John Cole rebuts Karl Rove's piece in the WSJ this morning:

The Soul Searching Continues
...That is just it, Uncle Karl- the GOP does in fact stand for things. It stands for the Iraq war, it stands for $126 dollar a barrel oil, it stands for $4 a gallon gasoline, it stands for bloated budgets and huge deficits and diddling pages and secret detention and opposition to stem cell research and hostility to homosexuality and torture and domestic surveillance and permanent war and the Bankruptcy Bill and Terri Schiavo and the Prescription Drug Plan and the failed response to Katrina and blocking SCHIP and the breakdown of the military and and Global Warming denial and Guantanamo Bay and torture and the AG scandal and, most of all, it stands for partisan name-calling while the country is flushed down the drain...

Source: Balloon Juice

...w0ot!...

posted 5/15/2008 3:46 pm - permalink | comments[0]