When we embarked on the Ndiyo Project we always knew that the realisation of the vision depended on shrinking the thin client down to a chip. Well, our colleagues at DisplayLink have done it! This is the USB version of the Nivo, and it’s now in the back of monitors from two of the world’s leading manufacturers of displays — Samsung and LG. It’s an amazing achievement. And there’s more to come. Stay tuned.
Maureen Dowd in the NYT has been mulling over the Blackwater affair…
Americans have been antimercenary since the British sent 30,000 German Hessians after George Washington in the Revolutionary War.
But W. outsourced his presidency to Cheney and Rummy, and Cheney and Rummy went to war on the cheap and outsourced large chunks of the Iraq occupation to Halliburton and Blackwater. The American taxpayer got gouged, and so did the American reputation.
The mercenaries inflame Iraqis even as Gen. David Petraeus tries to win their trust.
Henry Waxman, the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, summoned the 38-year-old crew-cut chairman of Blackwater, Erik Prince, to defend his private security company yesterday.
Once there was the military-industrial complex. Now we have the mercenary-evangelical complex.
Mr. Prince, a former intern to the first President Bush and a former Navy Seal, is from a well-to-do and well-connected Republican family from Michigan.
He and his father both have close ties to conservative Christian groups. His sister was a Pioneer for W., raising $100,000 in 2004, and Erik Prince has given more than $225,000 to Republicans…
Dowd says that Blackwater has been “the beneficiary of $1 billion in federal contracts, including a no-bid contract with the State Department worth hundreds of millions.”
Billg spoke thus:
“For something we pulled together in six months, we are very pleased with the satisfaction we got,” Bill Gates, Microsoft’s chairman, said in an interview Tuesday. “The satisfaction for the device was superhigh. The satisfaction on the software actually is where we’d expect to see a huge uptick this year. It was just so-so on the software side.”
Fact: Thus far, the Zune has sold 1.2 million units worldwide. I expect this gives Steve Jobs a huge uptick. Er, what exactly is an ‘uptick’? I’ve led such a sheltered life, you see.
Tech Review has an interesting interview with John Palfrey of the Berkman Center. Preface to the interview reads:
The Burmese government’s recent shutdown of the country’s Internet connections amid pro-democracy protests was a new low for what is already one of the most censorious nations in the world. Earlier this year, the OpenNet Initiative–a collaboration among researchers at Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge, and the University of Toronto–found that the nation’s rulers blocked 85 percent of e-mail service providers and nearly all political-opposition and pro-democracy sites. (See “Internet Increasingly Censored.”) All this in a nation in which less than 1 percent of citizens have Internet access in the first place.
Last week–after images of the beatings of Buddhist monks and the killing of a Japanese photographer leaked out via the Internet–Burma’s military rulers took the ultimate step, apparently physically disconnecting primary telecommunications cables in two major cities, in a drastic effort to stop the flow of information from Burma to the rest of the world. It didn’t completely work: some bloggers apparently used satellite links or cellular phone services to get information outside the country.
One chilling exchange in the interview goes:
TR: How does this shutdown compare with other state-controlled actions you’ve documented?
JP: I’ve never seen anything like this cutoff to the Internet at such a broad scale so crudely and completely. They’ve taken the nuclear-bomb approach. We’ve witnessed what appear to be denial-of-service-type attacks during elections, for instance, but nothing so large-scale like this shutdown. Still, information has leaked out. So the military junta has found that given the many roots to the global telecommunications infrastructure, it’s very hard to cut off a place entirely.
So much for John Perry Barlow’s utopian dreams — to which (full disclosure) I once also subscribed. Sigh.
From Simon Heffer…
The other day I went to one of the most disturbing events of my life. Together with a number of others, I listened for the best part of two hours to two American security experts: their area of expertise was Iran and the threat it poses.
The burden of their observations can be summed up as follows: that an American strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities is not a question of if but when.
And, it was emphasised, this certainty is not dependent on the man the world regards as the warmonger Bush still being in office: his successor, be he or she Republican or Democrat, will see that there is no option but to deal with Iran’s nuclear ambitions too.
The terrifying thought is this: what he heard at that seminar may well be right — that the US will eventually go for it.
We have such short memories. It’s not that long ago since: we (Britain and the US) egged on– and armed — Iraq in its war on Iran; turned a blind eye to Iraqi use of poison and nerve gas against Iranian troops (there are still people in Iran dying from the after-effects of Iraqi gassing); and did everything in our power to prevent UN intervention to stop the conflict. Why? Because it was deemed necessary to stop Iran at all costs.
Nothing’s changed, really. But the Iranians have learned the lesson. In a world that is irredeemably hostile to them, nukes are the only safeguard. Which is why they’re going for them. We’d do the same in their position.
Browsing the Telegraph‘s video stream (now there’s an interesting idea for a newspaper), I came on this.
Just heard a news snippet on a radio station about a life-sized cardboard cutout of a police officer which had been installed in a Nuneaton shopping mall to deter thieves. Yes — you guessed it! — it’s been stolen!
… that if I ever again hear anyone say “awesome” when they mean “good”, “pretty good” or even “terrific” then I won’t be answerable for the consequences.
‘Awe-inspiring’, however, is a different matter entirely. Think of Yosemite on a crisp spring or autumn day.
Lovely snippet from Lorcan Dempsey’s Blog…
From the personal ads in the current London Review of Books:
Divorced, 1950s born man, deeply at odds with the frivolous and incomprehensible nature of everything outside of this typeface and that pair of brogues seeks absolutely anyone who isn’t on facebook at box no. …. [London Review of Books 20 September 2007]
Hmmm… should that headline read “anti social networking”?
This is a really smart idea.
Thanks to Pete for the link. And to James Miller for the link to the BBC report.
And thanks to Tony Hirst for explaining that CAPTCHA stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”.