Go on, admit it. The news sounds more and more like a B movie.

I hate to read, listen or watch the news these days. I am strapped to a chair, like in Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, and forced – eyes pinned open – to watch all of those stupid horror movies in which incredulous violence seeks ever more to provoke a reaction from an increasingly desensitized audience.

Rumours mount over Google’s internet plan

“Last month, Google placed job advertisements in America and the British national press for “Strategic Negotiator candidates with experience in…identification, selection, and negotiation of dark fibre contracts both in metropolitan areas and over long distances as part of development of a global backbone network”.”

Google are apparently running around the country side buying up dark fibre – dot com era fibre optic cable that has never been lit – so that they can build their own Internet.

Perhaps they are doing it for the Chinese?

The furor over cartoon depictions of “the prophet” which I made reference to earlier has, if anything, intensified. By now just about every news outlet has reported on the developments out of Syria. The Syrians, not content to assassinate the politicians of neighboring states, nor merely to hold terrorist symposia, have now allowed the embassies of both Denmark and Norway to be stormed and burned.

Syria, being a police state, cannot dismiss these acts as civil disobedience. Read the rest of this entry »

I met Martin Varsavsky last March at the International Summit on Democracy, Terrorism, Business Plan, and Security last March in Madrid, where he’d invited me to join an Internet working group. He impressed me with his energy, vision and genuine belief that people working together could improve the world.

Late last year, Martin, a serial entrepreneur, invited me to join the U.S. advisory board for his new company. FON, boiled down, is a way to share Wi-Fi connections securely in a collaborative system that could turn into a global network of inexpensive (or, depending on how one participates) entirely free hotspots.

Today, on his blog, Martin announced fairly amazing news for a company so young:

FON can now count Google , Skype, Sequoia Capital, and Index Ventures as investors and backers. They’ve joined us to help advance the FON movement, leading a group that has put 18 million Euros into FON and also committed to give us a strategic boost that should help us make this great idea into a great platform for everyone who wants a faster, cheaper and more secure wireless Internet. Read the rest of this entry »

Cartoon Debate – The case for mocking religion. There can be no negotiation under duress or under the threat of blackmail and assassination. And civil society means that free expression trumps the emotions of anyone to whom free expression might be inconvenient. It is depressing to have to restate these obvious precepts, and it is positively outrageous that the administration should have discarded them at the very first sign of a fight.

Specter Says Surveillance Program Violated the Law. The Republican who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee said today that he believed the Bush administration had violated the law with its warrantless surveillance program and that its legal justifications for the program were “strained and unrealistic.” The program “is in flat violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act,” said the chairman, Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, who will open committee hearings on Monday.
Specter is a former prosecutor, and no liberal. But you can be sure the screw-the-Constitution crowd will be all over him for locating enough spine to tell the truth.

My girlfriend has just bought a new cellphone – a Sony-Ericsson – and she is all excited as she invests the hours necessary to learn the interface so that she can take digital pictures and movies with it. She now has a picture of her beloved cat as the wallpaper and she is as happy as can be. She spends the remaining time typing in selectively, by hand, all the phone numbers from her old phone, her computer and the relic Nokia that currently serves as her bedside clock.

She is particularly excited that it looks sooo cute and that she can “change its clothes.” She is really pleased that it has “Blue Tooth.”

Senate Panel Rebuffed on Documents on U.S. Spying. The Bush administration is rebuffing requests from members of the Senate Judiciary Committee for its classified legal opinions on President Bush’s domestic spying program, setting up a confrontation in advance of a hearing scheduled for next week, administration and Congressional officials said Wednesday.
Congress has invited such disdain through its spinelessness (Democrats) and cravenness (Republicans). Nothing is likely to change.

The wrath of the Mac zealots. When universities choose to donate some of their intellectual property to the citizens of planet earth, I think they should want to make it as accessible as it can possibly be. Although not in fact an open standard, MP3 is the de facto vendor-neutral format most universally supported by audio-playing software and devices.

Physics has always fascinated me, so when I saw this book I checked it out of the library. The title of the book is “A World Without Time” by Palle Yourgrau. It’s about a not too well known aspect of Einsteinian physics put together by Einstein’s friend and contemporary, Kurt Gödel.

The book was written by a college professor of philosophy, and quite frankly reads like it. Most of it has nothing to do with the title and is quite obtuse, so I’m just going to skip to the really cool part about time, which comes only after you’ve slogged through several chapters wondering if you’ve actually understood anything you’ve read.

After Einstein came out with his general theory of relativity, Gödel recognized that there was something interesting going on with the concept of time. Read the rest of this entry »