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Jean Lievens: Motorola Project Ara, Building Smart Phones From Modular Open Source Hardware

Hardware
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Jean Lievens
Jean Lievens

Motorola Wants Everyone To Build Smartphones Like Lego Kits

Introducing Project Ara, an experiment from Motorola aimed to creating smartphones made out of modular open source hardware.

ReadWrite.com,

Google has teased us before. Rumors swirled for months that Motorola would introduce a customizable smartphone that would let consumers decide what kind of hardware—a bigger battery, choice of processor, a better camera—they wanted. The notion of a consumer-grade open hardware platform quickened the heartbeats of geeks across the globe.

What we got instead was the Moto X, a smartphone that can be “customized” by picking your colors, getting an engraving on the back and adding a personalized message to the startup screen. This was not the revolution in smartphone hardware we wanted.

Still, Motorola’s engineers were paying attention. Today the company announced Project Ara, an open hardware platform where users can pick and choose what type of components they want to build their smartphones.

Click on Image to Enlarge
Click on Image to Enlarge

The Module Connects To The Endoskeleton

Motorola has been thinking about Project Ara for a year. It started the campaign with a project called “Sticky,” a truck wrapped in Velcro and loaded with rooted and hackable Motorola smartphone components and 3D printing equipment. The truck would hold “MakeAThon” events with engineers who would take the raw components and build their own smartphones.

Project Ara aims to take that concept to its logical conclusion. According to Motorola, Project Ara is a “free, open hardware platform for creating highly modular smartphones.”

The devices are built out of what Motorola calls endoskeletons and modules. The “endo” is the frame of the device, while the modules are the hardware, which could be just about anything that a hardware developer could dream up. Want a smartphone that specializes in barometric readings and air humidity? If someone designs and builds a module focused on sensor capabilities, you could add it to an endoskeleton—although with other modules like a CPU, storage, a camera, a radio and so forth.

Read rest of article.

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Jon Rappoport: The hidden paranormal people

04 Education, 11 Society, Advanced Cyber/IO, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics
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Jon Rappoport
Jon Rappoport

The hidden paranormal people

Conventional physics argues that all the tiny particles which make up the universe are:

neutral and unconscious and dead—

And yet, say these same physicists, the brain, which is only a collection of such particles, is conscious.

The absurdity of this contradiction can only be sustained by monopolistic authority.

Consciousness is as non-material and paranormal as paranormal can be.

Without it, obviously, we would not be communicating right now. We would not be here. We would not Be.

Categories like telepathy, ESP, clairvoyance, and telekinesis don't tell the whole story. They're just a pale reflection of the fact that Existence itself is paranormal.

Consensus reality, on the other hand, is a stage play based on the notion of “normal.”

So here we are, and we're all paranormal, and we're living in a normal world. If that isn't a joke, if that isn't a sickness, if that isn't a conspiracy, what is?

The Matrix can spawn one Agent Smith after another, like a machine turning out products, and still the incalculable and magical fact of consciousness endures beyond the machine.

The stage play called reality is dedicated to top-down control, because consciousness, if unleashed as creative power, if allowed to flourish, would explode the stage flats and take us out into an open sky of such varied magic it would ring in a multiverse of unpredictable beauties…none of which require supervision from the psychopaths behind the curtain.

Making life into a machine is the goal of elites. We, on the other hand, see something else.

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Marcus Aurelius: LTG Dave Barno on Building Better Generals (and Fewer of Them…)

04 Education, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Military, Officers Call
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Marcus Aurelius
Marcus Aurelius

Interesting paper that came out a couple of nights ago from one of the DC think tanks.  The principal author, LTG Dave Barno, was my classmate in a school in the early '80s when we were both captains.  Biggest thing I see is the assertion that the major fraction of GO positions are “enterprise management” vice “operational,” or “tail” vice “tooth.”  Assuming correct numbers and analysis, that should be an ego-defeater given the culture of the military.  If you can buy into that, some of the other stuff seems reasonable.

EXTRACTS:

If left unaddressed, the divergence between the leadership skills of current senior military officers and the demands of an uncertain future may result
in a U.S. military led by generals and admirals who are prepared for neither the complexity of future warfare nor the efficient management of a hugely complex – and now resource-constrained – defense enterprise.

. . . . . . .

Many future flag officers will have no extended educational opportunities during the entire second half of their careers.

. . . . . . .

Once an officer is appointed to three-star rank, he or she will never pass before another promotion board, will never receive another written performance evaluation and will
rarely engage in setting formal expectations or goals with his or her boss in a new position.

PDF (40 Pages): (U) Building Better Generals (Barno et al,CNAS, 20 OCT 13)

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Naomi Klein: How science is telling us all to revolt

Cultural Intelligence, Earth Intelligence
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Naomi Klein
Naomi Klein

Posted by Contributing Editor Berto Jongman

Naomi Klein: How science is telling us all to revolt

Is our relentless quest for economic growth killing the planet? Climate scientists have seen the data – and they are coming to some incendiary conclusions.

By Naomi Klein

NewStatesman, 29 October 2013

In December 2012, a pink-haired complex systems researcher named Brad Werner made his way through the throng of 24,000 earth and space scientists at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union, held annually in San Francisco. This year’s conference had some big-name participants, from Ed Stone of Nasa’s Voyager project, explaining a new milestone on the path to interstellar space, to the film-maker James Cameron, discussing his adventures in deep-sea submersibles.

But it was Werner’s own session that was attracting much of the buzz. It was titled “Is Earth F**ked?” (full title: “Is Earth F**ked? Dynamical Futility of Global Environmental Management and Possibilities for Sustainability via Direct Action Activism”).

Texas.
Waste land: large-scale irrigation strips nutrients from the soil, scars the landscape and could alter climatic conditions beyond repair. Image: Edward Burtynsky, courtesy Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto/ Flowers, London, Pivot Irrigation #11 High Plains, Texas Panhandle, USA (2011)

Standing at the front of the conference room, the geophysicist from the University of California, San Diego walked the crowd through the advanced computer model he was using to answer that question. He talked about system boundaries, perturbations, dissipation, attractors, bifurcations and a whole bunch of other stuff largely incomprehensible to those of us uninitiated in complex systems theory. But the bottom line was clear enough: global capitalism has made the depletion of resources so rapid, convenient and barrier-free that “earth-human systems” are becoming dangerously unstable in response. When pressed by a journalist for a clear answer on the “are we f**ked” question, Werner set the jargon aside and replied, “More or less.”

There was one dynamic in the model, however, that offered some hope. Werner termed it “resistance” – movements of “people or groups of people” who “adopt a certain set of dynamics that does not fit within the capitalist culture”. According to the abstract for his presentation, this includes “environmental direct action, resistance taken from outside the dominant culture, as in protests, blockades and sabotage by indigenous peoples, workers, anarchists and other activist groups”.

Serious scientific gatherings don’t usually feature calls for mass political resistance, much less direct action and sabotage. But then again, Werner wasn’t exactly calling for those things. He was merely observing that mass uprisings of people – along the lines of the abolition movement, the civil rights movement or Occupy Wall Street – represent the likeliest source of “friction” to slow down an economic machine that is careening out of control. We know that past social movements have “had tremendous influence on . . . how the dominant culture evolved”, he pointed out. So it stands to reason that, “if we’re thinking about the future of the earth, and the future of our coupling to the environment, we have to include resistance as part of that dynamics”. And that, Werner argued, is not a matter of opinion, but “really a geophysics problem”.

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Owl: Sovietizing the Internet and TV

07 Other Atrocities, Corruption, Government, Idiocy, IO Impotency
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Who? Who?
Who? Who?

Sovietizing the Internet and TV

In connecting the dots, it is evident this remarkable development can only be be a direct consequence of the Powers that Be nervously noticing a significant and on-going abandonment by the populace of corporate controlled, that is, “mainstream” media, in favor of alternative media. Outside of an especially bad false flag attack, it will be in this particular arena – of controlling Internet media – where the bloody fangs of US fascism will first become evident to everyone, even the most sleepy, uninformed and ignorant Americans, which there are very many.

“The Federal Communications Commission will facilitate the government’s prospective sovietization of private sector media with its “Multi-Market Study of Critical Information Needs,” a survey planned for a field test roll-out in 2014, according to a story posted on The Daily Caller today. The FCC will “collect a remarkably wide range of information on demographics, point of view, news topic selection, management style and other factors in news organizations both in and out of the FCC’s traditional purview,” writes Tim Cavanaugh. “The airwaves regulator would also subject news producers in all media to invasive questioning about their work and content,” a move on a collision course with the First Amendment.

A document prepared by Social Solutions International enumerates the highly intrusive nature of the proposed questioning, including grilling station owners on their political philosophies and asking reporters if proposed stories were rejected by management. “In this study, the FCC will delve into the editorial discretion of newspapers, web sites and radio and TV stations,” Hudson Institute Fellow Robert McDowell, who served as an FCC commissioner from 2009 to 2013, told The Daily Caller. “This starts sticking the government’s nose into what has traditionally been privileged and protected ground. Regardless of one’s political stripes, one should be concerned.”

More:
FCC Prepares Fairness Doctrine for the Internet

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Owl: More Evil from Google

07 Other Atrocities, Commerce, Corruption, IO Impotency
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Who? Who?

More Evil from Google

“Portland Tugboat has posted a photo of another Google mystery barge on their Facebook page. On October 27, CNET reported that a similar barge was docked in the San Francisco Bay. “Is it a floating Google data center? A floating Google Glass store? Or something else altogether?” asked Daniel Terdiman, writing for the tech media website. The barge is docked at a former U.S. Navy station on Treasure Island. On October 26, Tom Bell, writing for the Portland Press Herald, reported “a four-story windowless building” docked in the Portland Harbor. “Its purpose and its owner’s identity have been kept secret.” Fred Burton, vice president of Stratfor and a former senior State Department official, described Google as “doing things the CIA cannot do,” according to documents acquired by Wikileaks.”

More:
Facebook Photo Shows Another Google Mystery Barge Off the Coast of Maine