ArsTechnica reports that NASA’s JPL scientists have identified optimal wind farm locations by analyzing eight years of global satellite data. And I missed this announcement: oil baron T. Boone Pickens (personal networth: $2.7bn) is investing $12 billion in a wind farm in west Texas. True to Texas mythology, it will be the largest in the world when completed, and it will start generating power in three years.
Newsweek compares the Pickens campaign with that of another Texan, H. Ross Perot in 1992. After all, oil prices and imports is not a headliner for either Sen. Barack Obama or Sen. John McCain, the presumed D and R presidential candidates. And Congress and the President aren’t talking about it either.
Pickens — who kicked off his $58 million campaign with an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal — thinks spending $700 billion annually on foreign oil — to import about 70% of the oil we use — is “dangerous, and it threatens the future of our nation.” He has done a complete about face on this topic (if he were a politician, someone would accuse him of flip-flopping) — in 2005, he pooh-pooed the idea of wind-based energy: Read the rest of this entry »
The FBI has withdrawn a secret demand that the Internet Archive provide details of a registered user’s personal information. This is reportedly only the third time an organization has succeeded in challenging a National Security Letter (NSL). The enormity of this success: the NYT reports that the “FBI issued nearly 200,000 NSLs between 2003 and 2006.”
With a national security letter, the FBI can “require businesses such as libraries, internet service providers, banks, hospitals or telephone companies to provide customer records on request — no court order (warrant) required.” Courtesy of the US Patriot Act.
At least one judge has ruled that NSLs are unconstitutional due to the gag order; the ruling is under appeal to the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Read the rest of this entry »
There are now four undersea cables out-of-service in the same general area of the Middle East (outage exceptions: Israel and Iraq) — all disabled in a three-day period last week. (tip) The cable bundle is only an inch in diameter (about the size of the average adult human thumb) — a mere speck on the ocean floor. (The fibre optics need power — up to 10,000 volts DC — so a power wire is bundled with four optical cables that, combined, are about the diameter of pencil lead.) Read the rest of this entry »
There’s double meaning in the word “new” in this headline: part is the delivery (video instead of “classified” text) and part is the skills requirement. Enjoy (especially if you live in Bristol!) (tip via Twitter) [I need to figure out how to get WordPress to open in the Code tab instead of Visual.]
The XO computer arrived sometime Friday. We got home late from a birthday event … so I didn’t open the package until this morning, right before we left for a birthday breakfast. I took it along, because it was a geeky group.
The universal response (including mine when I opened the box) … “It’s so cute!”
Fortunately, there was a nine-year-old at the breakfast … he sat down and explored and announced “cool!” every now and then. He figured out the mike … and recorded a snippet of the dinner table conversation (Iowa caucuses) … then got my attention with an urgent “Listen!” We (the adults) were appropriately impressed.
First impressions: Very sturdy! Boot-up is fast (about 90 seconds to complete boot up, but clear indication something is happening from the get-go with a “clock-like” series of status dots). Well-designed icons for applications (very learnable if not immediately recognizable), well-designed hardware (the games guy at breakfast immediately “got” the thumb toggle on the left of the screen border).
We weren’t able to figure out how to connect it to the wireless network; that’s next. The XO people assume (correctly, given how these were ordered) that anyone receiving this has an internet connection and another computer, even if it’s at the office.
I knew that it wasn’t going to be here by Christmas but I was not expecting it because of this 21 December mail:
As soon as your order ships, you will receive another email from us with tracking information as well as information on how to take advantage of T-Mobile USA’s offer to provide one year of complimentary access to T-Mobile HotSpot.
That “it has shipped” mail never arrived! Or it went into spam and is “gone” because I regularly delete the gmail spam folder.More (including pix) later. But it’s really a giggle!
Added:
Safari doesn’t do WordPress in visual mode, I just discovered. No graphs!
All I can say is that we adults were stupid. To connect to a network, click “Neighborhood” and all available networks show up. Our home network is there — and so are two other mesh networks! Does this mean two other homes in our neighborhood have this computer?
Addition #2:
The “it’s shipped” email was sent Sunday! Still haven’t gotten it connected to the Internet; issues with Airport Extreme networks, according to OLPC website.
Glen Greenwald takes aim at Joe Klein’s characterization of the Democratic-sponsored FISA bill, noting that Time magazine published an uncorrected column. This is the correction, run on the web:
In the original version of this story, Joe Klein wrote that the House Democratic version of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) would allow a court review of individual foreign surveillance targets. Republicans believe the bill can be interpreted that way, but Democrats don’t.
But according to Greenwald, a constitutional lawyer, if you just read the bill, you’ll see that “the bill could not be clearer. What Klein’s GOP source (and Time) said about the bill is indisputably false… I can’t recall a recent incident that has shone as much bright light on
the ugly, vapid, propagandistic practices of our national media. The
more they speak, the more they reveal what they are.”
This is for people who think that they can’t trust bloggers. (Note: Greenwald writes for Salon, an online publication.)
Questions for the candidates from techPresident, in cooperation with the NYT and in association with MSNBC. Currently in round two; not a lot of candidate responses.
The One Laptop Per Child promo has been extended to the end of the year. I received my “welcome to the community” email earlier today. They have good copywriters!
One of the most ingenious features of the XO laptop is its ability to create a “mesh” network. The little green antennae “ears” serve to automatically connect the XO with other XO laptops in the vicinity. What this means is that if your child has friends nearby that also have XO laptops, the children can chat, play and share information freely and safely, with or without an internet connection. If you would like to let other parents know about the XO laptop and Give One Get One, you can not only greatly increase your child’s enjoyment of the XO laptop, but also help us further our mission.
kegill
kegill2
seaphotog