So, I'm reading the Castro story, and I notice this little ad on the right of the screen: Is Obama a Mac and Clinton a PC?

As a long-time Mac user I have to click.

Link...

pgs

The following quote is from an article (thanks to Glen Reynolds for the link) Link... that looks at new structures for governmental and regulatory decision-making:

"Our institutions of governance are characterized by a longstanding culture of professionalism in which bureaucrats–not citizens–are the experts. Until recently, we have viewed this arrangement as legitimate because we have not practically been able to argue otherwise. Now we have a chance to do government differently. We have the know-how to create "civic software" that will help us form groups and communities who, working together, can be more effective at informing decision-making than individuals working alone."

It's a fascinating concept, and one that (IMO) deserves some serious thought and investigation. The author proposes to create hybrids of the traditional "expert" decision-making process and the free-wheeling online discussions that we've all come to know and love (or hate, as the case may be). Can it work in real-world applications? Will it work in local government? I don't know, but I think it's worth a try. Maybe we could put together a "pilot project" of limited scope, but with enough on the line to make sure everyone involved takes the effort seriously.

I wonder, if we had already had such a structure in place to address land use decisions and related development impacts, would we have experienced the same sad results on Cherokee Trail?

In her new Book of the Dead, Patricia Cornwell's crime-solving forensic pathologist, Kay Scarpetta, uses Y‑12's Large-Chamber Scanning Electron Microscope to find crucial information that helps solve the crime.

I got an email from a colleague who still works in "the old country". He tells me Cornwell visited earlier this year and was fascinated with the SEM that has a chamber large enough to scan a V-6 engine block.

“For more than twenty years,” Cornwell said, “I've been researching scientific techniques and instruments here and abroad, and I've never seen anything as stunning as the LC-SEM at Y‑12.”

She has since used the instrument in her ongoing research as to the true identity of Jack the Ripper.

Last week NPR's Morning Edition ran an article about physicist Carl Haber and IRENE, a system to photographically digitize sounds recorded on discs. Even a broken record can be played if all the pieces can be found.

No stylus ever touches the groove and the disc does not turn.

Listen here.

Skimming devices placed over ATM card readers and cameras recording your PIN number entry resulting in unauthorized withdrawals.

I really thought this would only happen at the cheap ATMs like are located at convenience stores.

Be careful out there!

Wii has been showing up on TV advertisements the last few days. Having never owned, that I can remember, a home video game, I have always had trouble understanding the attraction. This Wii commercial just causes more confusion. There are people, not just teenagers or younger, standing in front of a television moving around oddly.

According to Gamasutra, the official Wii website explains; "the new name for the console "represents the answer", and "will break down that wall that separates video game players from everybody else." I couldn't find the claim on the official Wii website, but then I don't have the patience to peruse all their information.

Apparently some video game players find Wii so exciting, it is creating a problem with the wireless remote. "Legendary Nintendo producer Shigeru Miyamoto also commented on the problem, saying: "We are encouraging people to understand that you really don't have to be so excited, but rather you need to understand the control and then you're going to be the best player. We are looking into the situation to see if there are additional methods to encourage people to kind of calm down so they would never throw away the controller itself."

Some gamers are so excited when they play Wii, there are "Reports of users breaking the straps during more excited bouts of play emerged immediately after the console’s launch, with stories of remotes slipping from hands and smashing into televisions, furniture and even fellow players’ faces."

I suppose Nintendo has not closed the gap completely. I still don't see the attraction.

Be careful out there.

It's just started to hit the wire, but the news is IBM has sued Amazon over infringing patents.  I haven't had any luck tracking down the claims IBM submitted to a court in Texas yesterday, but it appears they cited 5 patents.  These patents are said to involve "Amazon's entire business" and cover ad targeting, storing data, and ordering from an electronic catalog.  The patents were filed in the 1980's though early 1990's.

When I get the text of the lawsuit, and the patents involved, I'll do a detailed breakdown of the case.  Right now however I can only comment on the issues this will present. 

Earlier this year a man destroyed a million dollar Ferrari Enzo in a 199 mph wreck. That wreck marked the end of the car and the end of a company called Gizmondo that had burned through hundreds of millions of dollars in investments. It would soon lead to the arrest of the car's driver, a Swedish criminal named Stefan Eriksson. Randall Sullivan has the bizarre story in Wired.

The Enzo has less than 6 inches of ground clearance, and at that speed, it took only a slight scrape under the front bumper to launch the vehicle. The airborne Ferrari landed in a skid that in a blink became a sidelong drift. Tires shredding, the car bounced over the shoulder onto a grassy slope wet with dew. All Eriksson could do was hold on as the slithering, swiveling Enzo again achieved liftoff, then slammed broadside into a wooden power pole.

It might have ended there, another high-flying company with big ambitions and a lousy product. But the crash put a spotlight on Eriksson and raised a series of questions: Who is he? What kind of person drives nearly 200 mph on a coastal highway? The answers led to even more puzzles. In just a few years, it seems, Eriksson went from languishing in a European jail cell to making millions as a tech executive to, even more improbably, becoming deputy commissioner of antiterrorism for an obscure Southern California transit police force. Before ­Eriksson lost control of his Ferrari in Malibu, no one in the US really cared about his strange story. But after the supercar came apart, Eriksson would find every inch of his life under scrutiny by the LA County Sheriff's Department, federal law-enforcement officers, and the media. That's when Eriksson and a tangle of cohorts would find out just how large a little bump could loom.

If you like that story, read Sullivan's even more amazing account of the murder of rapper Biggie Smalls. Sullivan makes a compelling case that David Mack was one of the people involved in the murder. Mack was by day a police officer in the LAPD's Rampart division, by night a private security guard for Death Row Records mogul Suge Knight, and by raising a Bloods gangmember. Mack is currently in prison for the armed robbery of the Bank of America.

Now this is using your gourd.

ANOTHER EXAMPLE of why Popular Mechanics it the go-to source for breaking foreign policy and national security news. The Bush Administration would do well to put Popular Mechanics on their daily must-read list.

As Redmondkr notes in comments, it appears KnoxViews has jinxed the Segway.

(Nice of Michael Silence to own up. At least KnoxViews had better photos.)

On September 13th, 1991, I received my first e-mail account as a part of a BBS set up by a friend in college. We were running a 386 with as much ram and hard drive that it could support (16MB and 700MB respectively, IIRC) with a copy of the one of the first regularly available Unix distro for PCs that he had purloined somehow. We had a 14.4KB leased line running to his apartment and a coax hub looped off his network device (some evil Synoptics deal, I think) that you could hook your own machine to if you had this cool thing called an ethernet card.

Anyhow, he typed a message to me and told mail(1) to send it. I telneted from my DOS PC (after fighting for 4 hours to get the TCP/IP stack to work) to the BBS server and, lo, I had mail. It read:

Take a bath, hippie.

From that point on to this day I have received on various accounts over 400,000 emails of differing types. I have kept most of my mail and I have the last 4 years worth on a Gmail account, the rest it tar'd and gzipped. A lot of it is meaningless or the context is lost. A lot of it is neat to look back upon.

Some notable moments I found after some searching:

• First spam -- July 11, 1993
• First Nigerian scam -- May 10, 1995
• First invitation to a party -- March 14, 1994
• First time I received more than 10 genuine emails in 24 hours -- October 20, 1996
• First day I received more than 100 genuine emails in 24 hours -- August 11, 1997 
• First day I received more than 1000 genuine emails in 24 hours -- January 14, 1998
• First e-mail from my mom -- January 1, 1997
• First urban legend e-mail from my mom -- January 1, 1997
• First e-mail asking to fix her 'messed-up' computer from my mom -- January 9, 1997
• First notice of a celebrity death by e-mail (Princess Diana) -- August 31, 1997
• First George Bush presidential aspirations warning via e-mail -- November 3, 1998.
• Last e-mail from my father before he died on March 9th, 2001 -- February 21, 2001. (complained how the cancer was eating him alive and made idle chitchat about NASCAR).
• First reprimand from a boss by e-mail -- December 12, 2002
• First e-mail from my future wife asking if I would like to come over for dinner and if I could swing by the store for some milk for her kids, thereby starting a pattern that carries on to this day -- October 11, 2004.

Seems so workaday now to have an e-mail account (or ten) but I now receive so much less e-mail even though my responsibilities are so much greater with teaching, school and family.

A new report by the Silicon Valley Leadership Group ranks the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill NC Research Triangle as the top U.S. tech center. Silicon Valley ranked last.

The rankings are based on "unemployment rate, the percentage of people able to afford a median-priced home, traffic congestion, 8th-grade math achievement, cost of electricity and state taxes."

According to that same article, "Seattle comes in second, followed by Denver, Austin, Texas, and Portland, Ore. Denver was new to the list of comparisons this year, as was Philadelphia (6), Washington, D.C., (7), Chicago (8) and New York (10). Boston was ninth and San Diego was 11th, next to last."

Silicon Valley, however, still ranks tops in venture capital with nearly $8 billion in capital investment, which is nearly as much as all competitors combined and nearly four times as much as Boston, their nearest competitor.

I saw a couple of weeks back Number 9’s Halls Shopper Tyler Harber string with a couple of posts about Bill Johns should be our county mayor.

I doubt that Mike Ragsdale will let the Sentinel ever cover this guy, but maybe the Metro Pulse will since he is also an organic farmer. As suggested, here is a new string about the guy I met last week:

It is funny about that "degrees of separation" thing since last Thursday; I met Bill Johns at the Society of Manufacturing Engineers Nanotechnology Conference in Oak Ridge. Bill Johns was the keynote speaker about nanotech business.

It just so happens, he is the guy who ran the "Marty" for mayor campaign (dog - voter awareness) in which I wrote about last month. Apparently, my wife also met him that same day at Bearden High School when he was talking about the new high school ( Link... ).

If you did not watch the County Commission meeting on this past Monday, you should have. With Mike Ragsdale sitting a few feet from him, Bill Johns gave probably one of the most serious, facts-based, and informative talks linking education, technology, and economic development that has ever been heard before the commission. He also laid down the law about financial management and proactive planning of our community.

I heard he blasted the proposal of the PBA conducting a $600,000 study to determine if our schools are overcrowded to the likes of studying if Al-Qaeda wants to kill us. Bill Johns also talked about how politics and bureaucracy are hurting us and referenced an e-mail group he had with the school board and the PBA.

During his talk, he mentioned his background and referenced his site:

Link...

For those who are interested in nanotechnology, education, politics, conservation, and other information, you should check him out.

If anything, check out the posts about education. Our community has really dropped the ball on education and Bill Johns clearly states it there.

Perhaps we should start shopping around for a new vision and leader. If the current guy is already looking at Nashville, then why not start?

Sept. 5, 2006 Issue (doesn't appear to be on-line yet)

We subscribe and have been for probably 20 years. Don't much read it anymore. For some reason I was attracted to the new issue we received in the mail today.

First thing to catch my eye was Yesterday (1979) and Today (2006). The 8088 chip was announced to power the IBM PC in 1979, then recently the Core 2 Extreme chip was announced. 5 MHz vs 29,300 MHz, 8 bit bus vs 128 bits, 1MB memory vs 8GB. The numbers are fascinating, to me, but the rest of the story is interesting, app of the moment 1979 VisiCalc, app of the moment 2006 iTunes. Bill Gates 1979 "Buy my BASIC", Bill Gates 2006 "I'm outta here".

Then, regarding the new chip, "What should u buy?". Twentysomethings categorized as gamer, Thirtysomethings as video ipod fanatic, Forty somethings as Engineer and Coder. 

As I have worried many times, when are our 20 and 30 somethings going to get under the covers of the systems and be designers instead of just users? I said in the past, "I find it hard to believe there is a "shortage of qualified technical talent" in the US." I could be wrong.

We always hear from politicians that education is our number one goal. Of course it is just talk but it sounds good. Do you ever wonder if someone will have a breakthrough that will change everything we see in our world?

Maybe this is such a breakthrough.

If the full potential of this invention is realized it could be as important as the steam engine, the assembly line, or the computer.

You might say that is all well and good but what inventions have come from our community? When you drive down Pellissippi Parkway you can barley see the offices of CTI. They were innovators with medical imaging devices. Weston M. Fulton, was called Knoxville's "Thomas Edison", he invented the metal bellows used in thermostatic devices and held over 125 patents for his inventions. Fulton High School was named after him. Inventor George Dempster invented the “Dempster Dumpster”. Lee Martin’s company invented the Ipix camera. Countless inventions and patents have come from the Oak Ridge National Labs and the University of Tennessee.

On August 28th at 2:00 PM in the City County Building the Knox County Commission will vote on both the funding for the Hardin Valley High School and the Midway Industrial Park. Two different issues that are interlinked in that Knox County has run out of money and must decide on what priorities must receive funding.

When you see what education can provide is there any question that education is the best investment our community can make? In a great irony our Knox County Mayor Mike Ragsdale, who has a Doctorate in Education, has brought our community to a cross roads. Should Knox County Commission vote for an industrial park that is certain to fail, or should it vote to build a needed school to educate the children of our community?

From my inbox:

Whether you've made a lot of progress in implementing SOA or are just getting started, you've probably run smack into its complexities. The solution? SOA Governance.

WE'RE HERE TO HELP.

The IBM(R) Rational(R) Method Composer SOA Governance Plug-in was created specifically to help you to implement SOA more easily. Our Webcast on planning for SOA governance was created to help you get started on the project, establish metrics and utilize a best-practices approach.

VIEW THE WEBCAST.

# LEARN SOA Planning and Best Practices.
# ALIGN people, processes, and information.
# BRIDGE the communication gap between business and IT.
# IMPROVE flexibility and time to market.

So many action words, so little time. I'm glad the metrics of my paradigm have shifted outside that box of best practices. At least for now. I may wake up someday begging them to take me back. It doesn't look like much has changed, so hopefully it will be easy to get back on the bicycle and run the ball down the field for a win-win. Or something.

P.S. "The IBM(R) Rational(R) Method Composer SOA Governance Plug-in was created specifically to help you to implement SOA more easily." Huh? How could something with a name like that be easy to implement?

There's a big FCC auction starting today for some frequency spectrum currently assigned to the military and law enforcement agencies which isn't being utilized. The auction is expected to bring in the neighborhood of $15 to $20 billion.

Cable, satellite, and cell phone companies will be scrambling to grab up the frequencies, which could significantly expand wireless broadband capabilities.

There are already cell-phone modem services, but they are not as fast as wi-fi type broadband service. Newer wireless broadband services are available, but are currently limited to major metropolitan areas. Both types are relatively expensive.

These new frequencies could, in a couple of years, not only widen the availability of wireless broadband for business users, but also offer new broadband hope for rural communities and others out in the sticks with nothing but aging copper wire and dial-up modems.

Rural Broadband is, or at least should be, this generation's Rural Electrification.

The NASA Channel has broadcast some spectacular live views of Discovery as it rolled to allow a photographic inspection by the crew of the International Space Station.  Docking is scheduled for 10:52 EDT.  One of the best features of this broadcast – there was no commentator who felt the need to fill the audio with cute remarks.

I bought a 250 Gigabyte outboard hard drive last summer to back up the data I considered important, but even the assurance of this safe storage doesn’t prevent the pain and suffering of building a new drive after a catastrophic failure.  We’re talking about hours of work installing your operating system, updating it and then reloading all your applications and data.

The solution . . . while your drive is still healthy, clone it.

Our friend Charles E. Young will be appearing on The Phil Williams show on WNOX (100.3 FM) today from 4:30-5:30 p.m. during the show's regular "Tech Tuesdays" segment. You can listen live on the web at:

Link...

They will discuss privacy issues and the intersection of law and technology. Listen and call in with your two-cents' worth.

I got a wonderful letter in my postal mail today:

In  2005, the electronic archive, which included names and social security numbers of certain individuals, was publicly accessible on a University website. The university permanently closed the archive and requested that the cached information be removed from the Google website. The information was temporarily suppressed from the Google website and could not be viewed by the public. Unfortunately, the information reappeared on Google in March of this year. It is unclear to the university why the names and social security numbers were restored to Google's web page. The University of Tennessee is notifying you of this event because you are one of the individuals whose information may have been available a second time.

 [snip more about how it's not their fault]

<signed>

Robert L. Ridenour, Jr.

Information Security Officer

The Office of Information Technology

The University of Tennessee

The bill carries the friendly moniker of COPE ( Communications Opportunity, Promotion and Enhancement Act of 2006).

Industry calls it a bill "to make cable TV more competitive."

Grassroots organizations call it a bill which would entirely cede control of the Internet to private interests.

Industry wins.

Link...

Tennessee reps voting to gut net neutrality:

Jenkins, William L.; Tennessee, 1st
Duncan, John J.; Tennessee, 2nd
Wamp, Zach; Tennessee, 3rd
Davis, Lincoln; Tennessee, 4th
Cooper, Jim; Tennessee, 5th
Gordon, Bart; Tennessee, 6th
Blackburn, Marsha; Tennessee, 7th
Tanner, John S.; Tennessee, 8th
Ford, Harold E.; Tennessee, 9th

Tennessee reps voting to preserve net neutrality:

...

Bipartisanship (n): The spirit of American political connivance between government and industry which dis-empowers the electorate.

Electronic diversion recovery. Too much information.

We have TV-Turn Off week. Missed it though, better check the 2007 season. We have Better Conversation week. Plenty of time to plan (and study) for this event. And, now, the TV-Turn Off week people are addressing "Reducing Electronic Media and Games". Keep your eyes and ears open for this campaign. It "officially launches in September".

Is electronic media a problem? It's hard to say. All the kids are doing it. Peer pressure. Child calming devices. You don't want to be techno-phobic, DO YOU? 1,000 songs on my iPod (ordinary MP3 Players are so passe). My favorite song is Constant Bird by TBop14. Have you heard it yet?

I am no outdoorsy purist. I don't think everyone has to read Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. I do wish people would drive more without talking on their cell phones. I do wish kids wouldn't bring their hand-held video games to the beach, lake, mountains, etc. I do wish people, young and old, would read more from books, magazines, and newspapers (non-electronic, of course). These are handy, portable reading devices, you can take them to the park, you can take them to the porch, you can take them most anywhere and no WiFi hookup required. Look at the stars, skip a rock, wade through a stream, visit the library, wave at a neighbor, walk to a friend's house, play with your dog. Or, spend 32 hours a week watching TV and playing video games to avoid bugs, scraped knees, sore muscles, dirt, confrontation, reality.

Anyone in Knoxville want to have an impromptu Net Neutrality brown bag type discussion? Borders in Turkey Creek is having its grand opening tomorrow (Saturday, June 3). How about we meet in the coffee shop at 7:00pm. We can chat for 45 minutes (give or take) then watch Todd Steed.

Todd Steed And Suns of Phere June 3, 2006 8:00 PM Knoxville, TN Knoxville - Turkey Creek The bands following is growing throughout the southeast. Their new CD is garnering super reviews for this rock n' roll crew.

If the coffee shop is where all the activity is happening we can just meet there and take the discussion to another part of the store or the fountain outside.

Update: I can be emailed at juggler at gmail.com. If you are coming tonight, I'll be holding onto something that says "net neutrality?"  

The theft of private information on 26 million veterans is pretty shocking. Everybody is freaked out and everybody wants something done. The trouble is, the cows have left the barn, the cat is out of the bag, and so on. In other words, there is not much hope that anything can be done about this particular case, other than the hope that the criminals don't know what they have.

What can be done going forward is serious and strict regulation of consumer data. Instead, we have a system where private consumer data is a commodity, freely and legally traded in the open market. We also have giant holes in the security that is supposed to protect this data. This latest case is Exhibit A. It wasn't even a sophisticated, high-tech hack and crack job. It was just a simple burglary.

And what are the odds? This is either one of the most freakish statistical anomalies in history, or there are millions of computers in private homes across America containing sensitive data on millions of Americans, thus making it a statistical probability that one would eventually get stolen.

(UPDATE: Actually it happens often enough, so I guess there is just too much sensitive data floating around unsecured.)

The investigation ought to be interesting.

The VA says they are working with the Justice Department and everybody under the sun to review security policies and prevent future breaches. The trouble is, there was already a policy in place. Employees weren't supposed to take sensitive data home with them. All the policies in the world won't protect your data unless you vigorously enforce them.

And speaking of consumer protections and what Congress should be doing about identity theft, here's an interesting item.

Do not pay Microsoft developer technical support nearly $300 to have some guy named Babu (no, I'm not making that up) diddle with your registry over a Netmeeting session. You'll be sorry.

On the other hand, I got to try out this new Dell Datasafe feature I wrote about earlier. It worked like a champ.

You open up Ghost, pick a recovery point, click OK, it says it needs to reboot into recovery mode, say OK again, and it's all automagic after that. Come back about an hour later and you are at the login prompt with your system in whatever state it was in when that recovery point was generated (one generated automatically at 3:00 that morning, in my case).

The Mrs. and I attended an information-packed panel discussion at U.T. this morning on "Online Journalism and News Web Sites." The panel was part of the U.T. College of Communication and Information’s Journalism and Electronic Media Week.

The panel discussion was moderated by Dr. Sam Swan, interim director of the School of Journalism and Electronic Media. The panel members were:

Got this spam, at least I think it's spam. Hard to tell. Started to delete it, but the forged "from" e-mail:

'missing.or.wrong.knowledge.syndrome@mindsnapper.zic'

...was odd so I looked at it. It was so brilliantly bizarre I couldn't stop reading. Here's an excerpt:

The EFF has filed a brief in support of a lawsuit against AT&T in which the newly reconstituted MABELL is accused of forwarding all internet traffic to the NSA. Before, I am accused of being a tinfoiler, consider the source of the brief. Also, my time as a networking person at UTK makes me reasonably comfortable in saying sarcastically "Really? No Kidding?" Can I get an "amen?"