- If It Feels Good to Be Good, It Might Be Only Natural
The e-mail came from the next room.
“You gotta see this!” Jorge Moll had written. Moll and Jordan Grafman, neuroscientists at the National Institutes of Health, had been scanning the brains of volunteers as they were asked to think about a scenario involving either donating a sum of money to charity or keeping it for themselves.
As Grafman read the e-mail, Moll came bursting in. The scientists stared at each other. Grafman was thinking, “Whoa — wait a minute!”
- Bill Gates — computing’s Nostrodamus?
As luck would have it, there are plenty of media clippings, memos, books and official transcripts for comparing the Microsoft Corp. chairman’s past comments with the harsh reality of 2007. And the result is a mixed bag. In some of his previous forecasts, Gates was right on the mark, and in others, well, he wasn’t even close.
Especially interesting to note was this one:
One quote frequently attributed to the Microsoft chairman is that “640K of memory should be enough for anybody.”
However, Gates has long denied ever saying it, and no evidence has ever surfaced to show that he did. In 1996, when Gates was writing a syndicated newspaper column, a reader asked about the quote, and he replied, “No one involved in computers would ever say that a certain amount of memory is enough for all time.”
“I’ve said some stupid things and some wrong things,” he wrote, “but not that.”
- Municipal Wi-Fi Networks Run Into Financial, Technical Trouble
Across the United States, many cities are finding their Wi-Fi projects costing more and drawing less interest than expected, leading to worries that a number will fail, resulting in millions of dollars in wasted tax dollars or grants when there had been roads to build and crime to fight.
This is completely retarded. If there were any real effort being made on these projects, then they would succeed. It’s a wireless network — it doesn’t take a whole lot to set up. In fact, there’s a good chunk of many cities that already have wi-fi. It seems to me that all you really need to do is just network them together and call it good. Maybe I’m missing something here, but planning a wireless network seems really simple. With a little bit of money, you’d think it would be a trivial thing to set up.
- Jerry Falwell finally dead
A particularly ironic quote from his obituary on CBC.com:
“I shudder to think where the country would be right now if the religious right had not evolved.”
- The Death of Film
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You have forty-minute takes, automatic focus. They’re lightweight. And you can see what you’ve shot right away. With film you have to go into the lab and you don’t know what you’ve shot until the next day, but with DV, as soon as you’re done, you can put it into the computer and go right to work. And there are so many tools. A thousand tools were born this morning, and there’ll be ten thousand new tools tomorrow. It happened first in sound. Now everybody’s got ProTools, and you can manipulate these sounds, just fine-tune them unbelievably fast. The same thing’s happening with the image. It gives you so much control.
- Son Of JFK Conspirator Drops New Bombshell Revelations
As the explosive revelation of E. Howard Hunt’s deathbed confession, in which the former CIA agent and Watergate conspirator admits that he was part of a CIA conspiracy to assassinate JFK, continues to rage across the Internet, the establishment media remains almost mute on what is undoubtedly one of the biggest stories of the decade.
For more reading, check out E. Howard Hunt’s Wikipedia entry.
- Masters of Their Domain
Mikko Hypponen:
Why do banks and other financial institutions operate under the public top-level domains, like .com? The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the body that creates new top-level domains, should create a new, secure domain just for this reason—something like “.bank,” for example.
- An Embarrassment of Riches
Howard Gardner:
Since the dawn of civilization, markets have been ubiquitous. Many of us have benefited from their focus and efficiency. Yet two widely held beliefs—that markets are best left unregulated and that markets are inherently benign—are naive and outdated. In fact, all markets require some regulation; and it is as likely that there will be clear winners and losers, as that all will benefit from a market economy. For many, perhaps most, Americans, markets are sacrosanct. Most people in the United States cannot even envision a society that doesn’t revolve around an untrammeled market. In interviews with Americans (particularly young Americans), my research team has found a widespread assumption that any governmental intervention is bad, that the most accurate measure of success is how much money you have accumulated, indeed that general merit can best be gauged by one’s net worth—with perhaps an exception made for Supreme Court justices. People find it hard to believe that chief executive officers and star athletes did not always earn millions, that the marginal tax rate on high incomes was once more than 90 percent, and that some lead happy lives without numerous cars, homes, and private-school educations.
- A Global Magna Carta
Garry Kasparov:
In his famous 1946 speech in Fulton, Missouri, Winston Churchill warned that the newly established United Nations must be “a force for action, and not merely a frothing of words.” We can see today that his warnings went unheeded. The so-called leaders of the free world talk about promoting democracy while treating the leaders of the world’s most autocratic regimes as equals. A global Magna Carta would forbid this hypocrisy and provide a powerful inducement for reform.
- Censors for Free Speech: Jack Valenti’s legacy
The MPAA has a lot of influence, but it can’t really block an unrated film from theaters. It has become much less difficult, though hardly painless, to put out a movie without its stamp of approval, and even the big studios are happy to avoid their own rules when it comes time to call in those theatrical prints and issue an uncensored director’s cut on DVD. But even as the system grows weaker, battered by the less-regulated alternatives of the Internet and home video, the drive to control what people can say and hear continues unabated. It merely shifts its focus to a different medium.