Just as it was in the first place: “Most of all, we need to recognize that 11/7 was Independence Day for citizens, not just a victory for the Democrats in Conres. The Republicans took a ‘thumpin’ indeed; but they took it from voters expressing their independence. As the new majority party, Democrats need to recognize that, or they’ll get thumped too, next time around.”
(Via The Doc Searls Weblog.)
I’m not telling anyone anything they don’t know when I say we’ve entered a new phase in US politics. Though I’m generally behind the Republican party on things, I’m glad this happened. We’re in complex situations, and this last Rep. leadership (incl. the President) was ill-equipped to deal with them.
If you get a chance, read Peggy Noonan’s piece in the WSJ today (11/11). This captured almost exactly how I feel right now - lets get refocussed and move forward.
If you’re at all interested in climate change and its possible effects on the world, then spend some time reviewing the findings of the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change issued by Sir Nicholas Stern, The UK’s Head of the Government Economics Service and Adviser to the Government.
The presentation and speaking notes are easy places to start, but at least take a look through the table of contents of the 600 page report and get an idea of the scope and depth of what’s presented here.
Continuing to enjoy my Sony w810i GSM cell phone. Tonight I’m using the FM radio feature listening to the Patriots on MNF on the Acela as I cruise back to Boston. Pretty nice!
Mark Cuban decides to move beyond the random noise and figure out what reality is with the new NBA basketball design.
Again, Mark reminds us to keep asking the right questions…
Last night I got back from Pop!Tech and found that I had 110 new emails. While I always get a lot of email, this was a surprise since I’d just checked it 4 hours earlier. The trigger for this email was a posting by Tim Bray on his Ongoing blog where he dropped the F-Bomb, and which had been picked up and written about by the Inquirer citing Tim as a Sun employee.
Need to move 2 petabytes from LA to San Francisco? If your data was already stored in a Blackbox, you could get over 350Gb/sec!
Here’s the calculation:
12 hours to load, travel and unload, or 43,200 seconds 2 petabytes (that’s 2 million billion bytes) ~46 GBytes/sec or 368Gb/sec Maybe our disks better come with a MPG rating!
By now I’m sure you’ve seen the news about Project Blackbox. I’ve been on the project for the last 6 months, and its one of the most exciting things I can remember. Rarely do you get to work on something that has the potential to change 50 years of standard practice. Ever since we started making computers we’ve had computer centers and then data centers, specialized rooms colocated with office employees.
Nova’s lengthy post talks about the growing tendency for our media to sensationalize all bad news, asks what effect it may be having on us, and proposes some fixes.
For awhile I’ve had a different reaction to this. In the US (and some other countries) we’ve built the world’s most advanced system for finding and distributing (over and over) bad news. No one has ever been able to detect, dig into, hyper analyze, and force feed more bad news than the media system we’ve gotten to today.
My last activity in Europe was the KyotoPlus meeting in the renovated Energie Forum in the eastern part of Berlin (nee East Berlin).
It was a great conference in a great space. There were lots of different types of people (“strange bedfellows” as one speaker put it), including big business, finance, NGOs, governments, etc. The talk by Jerome Ringo, President of the Apollo Alliance was amazing, and I thought that the argument put forth by Sky Trust was compelling.