Monthly Archives: October 2005

Our Tax Dollars at Work: Congress’s $3B TV Subsidy!

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Jennifer Kerr:

Lawmakers want to spend $3 billion to make sure millions of Americans won’t wake up to blank TV screens when the country makes the switch to all-digital broadcasts.

The subsidy was approved Thursday by the Senate Commerce Committee as part of legislation that would set April 7, 2009, as the firm date for television broadcasters to end their traditional analog transmissions and send their broadcasts via digital signals.

Meanwhile, we lag behind the world in deploying the future, broadband internet.

Voluntary Milking System

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DeLaval Voluntary Milking System:

The Voluntary Milking System (VMS) allows cows to decide when to be milked, and gives dairy farmers a more independent lifestyle, free from regular milkings, the company says.

DeLaval was started in 1883 by Swedish inventor Gustaf de Laval. It sells a variety of dairy supply and “cow comfort” products aimed at increasing dairy yields. It claims to lead the automatic milking machine market, with a 53 percent share, and says it has sold more than 1,000 VMSs, in all European countries, Canada, Japan, and Mexico.

Slashdot has more.

Feds Push Colleges to Upgrade Networks for Monitoring

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Sam Dillon and Stephen Labaton:

The action, which the government says is intended to help catch terrorists and other criminals, has unleashed protests and the threat of lawsuits from universities, which argue that it will cost them at least $7 billion while doing little to apprehend lawbreakers. Because the government would have to win court orders before undertaking surveillance, the universities are not raising civil liberties issues.
The order, issued by the Federal Communications Commission in August and first published in the Federal Register last week, extends the provisions of a 1994 wiretap law not only to universities, but also to libraries, airports providing wireless service and commercial Internet access providers.

Getting Things Done

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The Guardian:

All must be corralled in one place and then processed using Allen’s core mantra of “Do it, delegate it, defer it”. If the action takes less than two minutes, do it there and then. If longer, you either hand off to someone else or defer it into your pending tray. Otherwise it is trashed or filed. The in-tray thereby becomes sacrosanct. You never put stuff back into “In”. Never.

On the web, for example, Getting Things Done (GTD) has gone supernova. Web and IT professionals have taken Allen’s core ideas and refined them into ever more effective tips called “life hacks”. Adherents swap these across a broad network of blogs, wikis and websites such as 43Folders.com – all amid a considerable amount of one-upmanship over who has the biggest and best system.

Getting Things Done by David Allen

Mobile WiMix Discussion

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Glenn Fleishman:

In his latest informal white paper, Belk takes aim at mobile WiMax, a not-yet-finished standard that’s not expected to appear in base stations for deployment until 2007, although all tea leaves I read look like 2008 for any carrier deployment. (My only quibbles have to do with how he compares Wi-Fi usage to cell data usage, and how he boosts ubiquity over speed—but they’re not worth going into in length as the quibbles are small compared to agreement.)

WiMax “could” radically change wireless internet services. On the other hand, it’s been just around the corner for awhile….

T.E. Lawrence’s Middle East Vision

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Deborah Amos:

One of the most popular books among American military officers serving in Iraq is Seven Pillars of Wisdom — the accounts of T. E. Lawrence, the British colonel who rallied Arab tribal leaders during World War I. Lawrence wrote about unconventional warfare and the people of the region.

A new exhibition at London’s Imperial War Museum features a long-lost map of the Middle East drafted by Lawrence and presented to the British cabinet in 1918. It provides an alternative to present-day borders in the region, taking into account local Arab sensibilities rather than the European colonial considerations that were dominant at the time.

Fascinating stuff, particularly his map. More photos later.

Lassee on Ethanol

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Wisconsin State Senate President Alan Lassee on AB 15:

I hope to set the record straight that ethanol is a welcome choice for citizens and taxpayers statewide. As the price of gasoline continues to skyrocket, we need to examine the use of alternative fuels and other means to ease our burden every time we fill up our tanks. One of the main reasons I support Assembly Bill 15 is my belief that we need to reduce our dependence on Middle Eastern oil and break the stranglehold of foreign oil sheiks. To me, it is a no-brainer that ethanol, which can be produced in state by the corn grown by our farmers, is a good start to reducing our dependence on foreign oil.

The Renew Energy Blog has another perspective on this.