19 Dec 2005
Sending the future you e-mails

Kind of an interesting idea - what would you say in an email to yourself, 20 years from now? All this assumes that email addresses remain fairly constant, of course, but the devil's always in the details...

In the year 2009, on the 25th of April, a man named Greg is supposed to get an e-mail. It will remind him that he is his own best friend and worst enemy, that he once dated a woman named Michelle, and that he planned to major in computer science.

(link) [CNN.com]

00:00 /Technology | 0 comments | permanent link

Pro-Hollywood bill aims to restrict digital tuners

Clueless morons ... I wonder when some movie mogul is going to catch on to the fact that people remember movies, and demand mandatory mind erasure after every theater visit? Those memories are, after all, copyrighted "intellectual property"!

Proposal, backed by movie studios, aims to plug "analog hole" by banning sale of noncompliant digital devices.

(link) [CNET News.com]

00:00 /Copywrongs | 0 comments | permanent link

Testing Drugs on India's Poor

Outsourcing comes home to roost ...

Pharmaceutical companies rush to try experimental medications on India's never-ending supply of poverty-stricken test subjects. By Scott Carney.

(link) [Wired News]

00:00 /Politics | 0 comments | permanent link

Western music banned in Iran

I wonder if Kim Jong Il is feeling less lonely these days? It would appear that he's no longer the only certified wingnut in charge of minor world power with nuclear aspirations.

Hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has banned Western music from Iran's radio and TV stations, reviving one of the harshest cultural decrees from the early days of the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

(link) [CNN.com]

00:00 /Politics | 0 comments | permanent link

The Restless Children of the Dalai Lama

Tibetan FlagNonviolence only works when the target is a moral entity - if Germany had been the colonial power in India, Mahatma Gandhi would've been at the end of a rope before Hitler got settled into the Chancellors office. Can you imagine the scene if the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto had gathered and sang "We Shall Overcome" to the stormtroopers?

Non-violent protest depends on public opinion - where public opinion is controlled or denied, non-violence is useless. In fact, the path the Tibetan leadership has chosen thus far to oppose Chinese occupation of their country, along with the lackluster response of the Western powers at it's beginning has virtually guaranteed the emergence of a "Jewish-Palestinian" problem in central Asia a hundred years hence. Mark my words, circumstances have conspired to make the Himalayan plateau the "Middle East" of the 22nd century.

A new generation of Tibetan militants no longer sees nonviolence as the only path to independence from China. What will they do to free Tibet?

(link) [NYT > Home Page]

00:00 /Politics | 0 comments | permanent link