Tuesday, November 15, 2005
Helen Clark seems to be intent on making sure that the United States stays cool towards New Zealand. Her new foreign minister, Winston Peters, raised hopes a week or two back that there might be the chance for new dialogue between our two countries. But the Prime Minister has dashed that hope.
"They came in buses to the small village of Sangla Hill in the Nankana district of Punjab in Pakistan. Some 2,000 organized Muslims first vandalized three churches, a nuns' convent, two Catholic schools, the houses of a Protestant pastor and a Catholic priest, a girls' hostel and some Christian homes, according to Asia News. Then they burned them to the ground, while about 450 Christian families fled yesterday. They have not returned. The Justice and Peace Commission accuses the police of "criminal negligence" because they did not intervene.
Michael Newdow, perhaps America's best known atheist, has a new target in his personal war against God in the public domain: "In God We Trust" on US money. "I am about to file [in the courts] to get 'In God We Trust' off the front of our currency," he told the Oklahoman. "I plan to do that this week." "The key principle is that we're supposed to treat everybody equally especially in terms of religious belief," Newdow told KWTV in Oklahoma City. "Clearly it's not treating atheists equal with people who believe in God when you say 'In God We Trust' or we are a 'nation under God.'"
"The new methods of communicating are creating intriguing services that beat old ways of sending information. But law enforcement makes a sombre claim: these new networks will become a boon to criminals and terrorists unless the government can easily listen in. Authorities are justified in trying to reduce the ways that technology helps dangerous people operate in the shadows, said Daniel Solove, author of The Digital Person. But a parallel concern is that technology can end up increasing the government's surveillance power rather than just maintaining it."
A battle has begun over your ability in years to come to read archives of computer documents. Currently, the bulk of word processing documents are created in Microsoft Word. So, effectively, archiving for future generations is controlled by a commercial company that jealously guards its software and the computer code that creates it. But many governments, to say nothing of individuals, are not happy about this state of affairs. So they are trying to have an OpenDocument format accepted worldwide, which does not rely on Microsoft and which can be read by public domain software.
If you think Google is big now, you've not seen anything yet. The company's future plans encompass just about every aspect of information technology you could imagine - plus a lot you probably can't.
In one of the best (if not THE best) science fiction series written -- "Enders Game" by Orson Scott Card -- Ender Wiggins has an assistant by the name of Jane, a super-intelligence who inhabits all the computers of the universe. (She doesn't pop up until Book 2 of the 4-book series. Please read them all - they are brilliant.) Anyway, it appears that the fictional "Jane" is about to be overtaken by reality. Within 10 years, what we now know as the Internet will have become a World Wide Brain. This article examines the implications.
Archaeologists digging at Gath, the biblical home of Goliath, have unearthed a shard of pottery bearing the Philistine's name, lending credence to the Biblical tale of David's battle.
"They came in buses to the small village of Sangla Hill in the Nankana district of Punjab in Pakistan. Some 2,000 organized Muslims first vandalized three churches, a nuns' convent, two Catholic schools, the houses of a Protestant pastor and a Catholic priest, a girls' hostel and some Christian homes, according to Asia News. Then they burned them to the ground, while about 450 Christian families fled yesterday. They have not returned. The Justice and Peace Commission accuses the police of "criminal negligence" because they did not intervene.
Michael Newdow, perhaps America's best known atheist, has a new target in his personal war against God in the public domain: "In God We Trust" on US money. "I am about to file [in the courts] to get 'In God We Trust' off the front of our currency," he told the Oklahoman. "I plan to do that this week." "The key principle is that we're supposed to treat everybody equally especially in terms of religious belief," Newdow told KWTV in Oklahoma City. "Clearly it's not treating atheists equal with people who believe in God when you say 'In God We Trust' or we are a 'nation under God.'"
"The new methods of communicating are creating intriguing services that beat old ways of sending information. But law enforcement makes a sombre claim: these new networks will become a boon to criminals and terrorists unless the government can easily listen in. Authorities are justified in trying to reduce the ways that technology helps dangerous people operate in the shadows, said Daniel Solove, author of The Digital Person. But a parallel concern is that technology can end up increasing the government's surveillance power rather than just maintaining it."
A battle has begun over your ability in years to come to read archives of computer documents. Currently, the bulk of word processing documents are created in Microsoft Word. So, effectively, archiving for future generations is controlled by a commercial company that jealously guards its software and the computer code that creates it. But many governments, to say nothing of individuals, are not happy about this state of affairs. So they are trying to have an OpenDocument format accepted worldwide, which does not rely on Microsoft and which can be read by public domain software.
If you think Google is big now, you've not seen anything yet. The company's future plans encompass just about every aspect of information technology you could imagine - plus a lot you probably can't.
In one of the best (if not THE best) science fiction series written -- "Enders Game" by Orson Scott Card -- Ender Wiggins has an assistant by the name of Jane, a super-intelligence who inhabits all the computers of the universe. (She doesn't pop up until Book 2 of the 4-book series. Please read them all - they are brilliant.) Anyway, it appears that the fictional "Jane" is about to be overtaken by reality. Within 10 years, what we now know as the Internet will have become a World Wide Brain. This article examines the implications.
Archaeologists digging at Gath, the biblical home of Goliath, have unearthed a shard of pottery bearing the Philistine's name, lending credence to the Biblical tale of David's battle.
