Computerworld: Virgin Atlantic's IT director, David Bulman, has called upon the airline industry to work collaboratively on open source applications that create an .
Open source development is a platform which provides great content management solution inclusive of Joomla development, Drupal development, WordPress and much more.
It's been talked about in some other threads of the Phoronix Forums, but now there's a concerted thread about this proposed initiative for financing new open-source driver development.
I've used The Brain myself and have played a number of these webinars. It takes some commitment, but it's really an infotention tool far more than just a mind-mapping tool. –Howard
“Your Brain lets you make unlimited connections and instantly find any idea or file. This seminar will cover how to start, grow and manage a single Brain on every aspect of your life.”
Your Brain lets you make unlimited connections and instantly find any idea or file. This seminar will cover how to start, grow and manage a single Brain on every aspect of your life.
Visit www.thebrain.com for more information on TheBrain. TheBrain is knowledge management software for thinkers!
It's a commonplace now that the peer-to-peer movement opens up new ways of creating relating to others. But you've explored the implications of P2P in depth, in particular its social and political dimensions. If I understand right, for you the phenomenon represents a new condition of capitalism, and I'm interested in how that new condition impacts on the development of culture – in art and also architecture and urban form.
June 18, 2012 – Do you know how your tax dollars are spent?
US radio host Dennis Bernstein and investigative reporter Dave Lindorff illustrate just how much US tax money goes towards the country's war chest.
“People have to realise that 53 cents of every dollar that they are paying into taxes is going to the military to an astonishing figure there is an enormous, enormous amount of money being blown on war an killing and destruction.”
At a time when pressures to punish Iran with more sanctions or perhaps even war (I still consider the latter unlikely), it might pay to try to understand things from the Iranian point view. Attached below is an excellent essay in the London Review of Books analyzing Iran's recent history. It puts the CIA/MI6 overthrow of the popularly elected Muhammad Mossadegh (1953) in a historical context of the preceding 75 years as well its ramifications for the present crisis. Note how the author, Pankaj Mishra, also shows how the poisonous roles played by the Washington Post, The New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal in the heinous warmongering against Iraq is part of much longer tradition of yellow journalism in this part of the world.
Pankaj Mishra, London Review of Books, 20 July 2012
Patriot of Persia: Muhammad Mossadegh and a Very British Coup by Christopher de Bellaigue
Bodley Head, 310 pp, £20.00, February, ISBN 978 1 84792 108 6
Phi Beta Iota: Bob Seelert, Chairman of Saatchi & Saatchi Worldwide (New York) has it exactly right… When things are not going well, until you get the truth out on the table, no matter how ugly, you are not in a position to deal with it. The U.S. Government in particular, all Western governments generally (including the Nordics) have been so busy lying to their publics that they have not been able to connect to the truth. As Robert Steele likes to say, “The truth at any cost lowers all other costs.”
As I have indicated in earlier blasters, I find the parallels between the political forces corrupting defense “science” and climate “science” to be stunning (e.g., directly here or more subtly here).
Attached is a very thoughtful piece by the distinguished Australian scientist Garth Paltridge. His subject is the psychological state of play in the politicization of climate science, and without saying so, he reinforces the parallels. Note the author's reference to Eisenhower's farewell address toward the end of the essay. Most people remember Eisenhower's phrase for its snappy reference to the military-industrial complex. Ike should have included Congress, but deliberately chose not to and removed the reference to Congress from an early draft, in effect, placing sensibility before common sense. If you read the farewell address carefully (here), you will see that Eisenhower's warning was really a more nuanced one about public policy becoming prisoner to the special interests feeding off uncontrollable cash cows those interests helped to create — a point more in tune with the quote highlighted by Paltridge.
Readers should note I reformatted Paltridge's essay to highlight what I think are important points, but did not change any words or the order of those words. A link is provided to the original form, should you prefer it.
22 JUN 2012 00:06:00 | UPDATED: 22 JUN 2012 10:46:02
GARTH PALTRIDGE
Garth Paltridge is an emeritus professor with the University of Tasmania, a visiting fellow at the Research School of Biology at the Australian National University and a fellow of the Australian Academy of Science. He is the author of The Climate Caper: facts and fallacies of global warming, Connor Court, 2009. He was a chief research scientist with the CSIRO division of atmospheric research.
The broad theory of man-made global warming is acceptable in the purely qualitative sense.
EXTRACT:
The bottom line of all this is that deliberate understatement of the uncertainty of the science allows overstatement of the climate change problem. [CS note: in the Pentagon, downplaying the future consequences of current decisions and “threat inflation” are part of what is the known as the “front loading” power game, defined here.]
Phi Beta Iota: Within Climate Change, Carbon is less important than sulpher or mercury, but favored by Maurice Strong and Al Gore as a global financial derivatives scam. Climate Change is at best 10% of Environmental Degradation, high-level threat to humanity #3, after #1 Poverty and #2 Infectious Disease. Governments have become so corrupt — less the Nordics, Netherlands, and Singapore, with Brazil, China, India, Iran, Russia, and Venezuela having their own forms of making do — that only hybrid panarchy (M4IS2) rooted in the craft of (public) intelligence will scale to meet all these challenges. Governments–as a general statement–do not represent their publics but have instead sold out to the wealthy–the public servants having failed to hold the political class accountable with intelligence and integrity. As David Weinberger notes so ably, experts are not really expert, only all of us together will do. Organized people armed with organized knowledge can beat organized wealth and their corrupt political servants (self-made servants we might add — the wealthy did not bribe the politicals– the politicals fell from grace and shake down the wealthy).
