Peter Murphy shares a beautiful VR scene from the Botanic Gardens in Sydney where there was the rare flowering of the Titan Arum.
Monthly Archives: October 2004
Lessig MP3 on fair use….
Spaceship One Photos
Alan Redecki just posted some gorgeous photos from SpaceShipOne’s most recent flight. Somehow, I doubt that NASA tows its vehicles with a pickup truck. Classic.
Ray Kurzweil on slowing down the aging process
Inventor Ray Kurzweil takes 250 nutritional supplements a day in his quest to live long enough to reap the benefits he expects from biotechnology. He says he’s trying to reprogram his body, as he would his computer.
“I really do believe it is feasible to slow down the aging process,” Kurzweil told Technology Review magazine’s Emerging Technologies Conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology here last week. “We call that a bridge to a bridge to a bridge — to the full flowering of the biotechnology revolution.”
A look at 527 Groups
Financial Data on 527 Groups
Section 527 political organization must file Form 8872 quarterly with the IRS listing their contributions received and expenditures. OpenSecrets.org has mined these IRS filings and produced a wonderful web site with helpful lists, including:
Forms 8872 filed by ? 527 groups are searchable on the IRS web site. Here are the most recent Forms 8872 filed by some of the “major players” in the 2004 election on both sides of the aisle:
Democrat-Backed Groups:
America Coming Together America Votes Billionaires for Bush Media Fund MoveOn.org Voter Fund Sierra Club Voter Education Fund
Republican-Backed Groups:
Club for Growth Leadership Forum Progress for America Voter Fund Swift Boat Veterans for Truth Taxpayers for Conservative Government
For further web commentary, see PLI’s How Fast Can A Swift Boat MoveOn? Election 2004 And The 527 Groups and Corporate Political Activities 2004: Complying with Campaign Finance, Lobbying & Ethics Laws.
Publicly financed Stadiums: Dallas says no to a giveaway
THE POSSIBLE RETURN OF THE DALLAS COWBOYS to their 1960 birthplace at Fair Park seemed so right that you just knew it was going to go wrong. Until the Cowboys moved to an Irving freeway intersection in 1971, they were Dallas’s team?all of Dallas, not just the rich suburbs?and certainly not America’s team. But with the announcement in August that the team’s new home would be Arlington, which isn’t even in Dallas County, the dream died, doomed by the laws of physics: the collision of an irresistible force like Cowboys owner Jerry Jones with an immovable object like Dallas mayor Laura Miller and the political inertia that resulted.
I applaud UW Grad and current Dallas Mayor Laura Miller’s realistic position on this. Quite different than the local Miller Park fiasco….. Background links: Alltheweb | Clusty | Google | Teoma | Yahoo
United cuts domestic flights, expands international routes
I doubt this means much for Madison flyers, other than more connections to similar sized 50 and 80 seat jets [I once flew Madison – Denver – Boise – San Francisco in one day, all on 50 seat jets 🙁 ].
I have to think one or two of the “major” airlines will be gone in the next two years.
Japan: one Gigabit/sec for $40 a month
Norie Kuboyama and Tomomi Sekioka:
Softbank, the second-largest provider of high-speed Internet access in Japan, said Monday that Yahoo Japan and Softbank BB would start offering a new optical fiber-based broadband service. Softbank will provide the service at speeds of up to one gigabyte per second and charge users ?4,200, or $38, a month, the company said in a statement.
(Surely this is a typo — the word here has to be Gigabit.)
Softbank and NTT, the nation’s former state monopoly for domestic telephone services, are competing to become Japan’s largest provider of high-speed Internet access . . . NTT last week said that it would cut its basic monthly fee by ?50 in order to compete with Softbank and KDDI, Japan’s second-largest mobile phone company.
TV’s last gasp? Sony at 70″
Likely a last gasp before projectors and high resolution laptops take over: Sony’s new $10K 70″ TV (!).
Cisco CEO Chambers calls for education reform & broadband push
Chambers did not get specific with respect to education reform, but did mention some problematic data:
- Fewer than 6 percent of master’s degrees issued in the U.S. in 2001-02 were in engineering, and fewer than 1 percent were in math, Chambers noted.
- The U.S. is also lagging behind most industrialized nations in broadband adoption, Chambers said. Japanese consumers have access to broadband speeds 400 percent to 500 percent faster than in the U.S., he said. “We’ve got to move faster,” Chambers added.
David Isenberg summarizes Japan’s successful broadband approach here. He also notes that the US has fallen to thirteenth vis a vis other nation’s broadband adoption rate.