Life as an Artificial Lifeform

The step that will go into history as the turning point for a new war of the worlds has been successfully accomplished last night in a nightly hush hush meeting of the ambassadors of the veto nations +germany. Iran will be referred to the UN Security Counsel for breaking the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty. The funny thing is that Iran has even signed that treaty in a form of respect for the international community - a step that Israel and India - both US backed nuclear powers - have not done at all and are free to make use of their nuclear ambitions however they like.
Now this step is exactly what Iran - rightly - sees as illegal because it just bridges over the next normal step - a discussion in the International Atomic Energy Agency. Now with India NOT backing a referral and opposing the US - the "emergency" meeting had been called in to stall any effort by Americas unreliable friends to thwart the referral.
Iran has repeatatly said that it will use all mean necessary to defend itself as an independent self ruled country - and they have a lot of things that could disrupt the western world.
With a warchest - mainly because of the high oil price - of around 41 billion dollars they can easily afford to cut off oil supply to any nation for the next year. Keeping in mind that they are the fourth biggest oil producer in the world and the second largest in the price setting OPEC - the oil price would double in the scope of one two month as there would surely be a supply issue arising very soon - non of the other OPEC members can raise their pumping output -they are all maxed out already. In addition the Iraniens have a big say in the new Iraqi government with Sistani "a born and die Iranien" as the spiritual leader of the Shiite majority in Iraq. Its easy to see how the Shiites could just join the Sunnis in their fight against the US.
Any and all messure by Iran will probably be seen as an act of aggression and bombing sessions from a US-Israeli (and maybe even Nato or EU support isn´t out of the question this time) would soon follow. That would mean nuklear bombs because there is a consense that otherwise the Iraniens would just strike back with a lot of force and there is no possibility for a ground invasion.

Now the big question: Why the urgency?
First there are midterm elections in the US and the war president needs a new war to justify spying on their own citizens and altering electronic voting records. Secondly Iran poses a threat to the Petro Dollar with its plan to install an Oil bourse that will trade oil in Euro which would lead to a massive currency change while all countries (China Japan Russia) just waiting to get rid of the highly overvalued Dollar that is backed by nothing else then oil and a US national debt of quadrillions multiplying over time.

Time has come and a new war is imminent - everyone still believing the slimy politicians (including our own corrupt government with the slimeball and former head of the intelligence agency of a foreign minister and our "be not intelligent - thats what people like - just follow our big brother america" chancellor) telling us that "war is just the last option" need to be booked into a hotel in Theran for the next year and chained to the room watching the beautiful looking mushroom clouds rising to the sky next to them.

Posted by fALk at 15:03 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The 1960s video pioneer who to this day still inspires the VJ and Video Installation artforms to great length died yesterday at the age of 74 in New York. His installations with lots of monitors are well known. I would also point to his support of "The Kitchen" - the New York video pioneers group operating in an old kitchen on New Yorks Broadway in the 60s/70s - testing out the boundaries of video in unique ways. Also he had a great hand in the development of video synthesizers - his invention the Paik-Abe Videosynthesizer has set a look favored by lots of artist to this day. Paik is one of those few great video artists that made it to world wide fame and has given the whole video art movement a voice and recognition. I thank him for that with all respect. May he rest in peace.

Posted by fALk at 12:15 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Back in those times where a 24k modem was something to be proud of, times where you had to dial into local BBSes because there just was no interconnected net. Times when you had to wait for a full ascii 10 lines menue to load for 20 seconds. Times when you first got into contact with the truth of cyberspace - back in those days an artform was born that still to this day has a lot of followers and has lost nothing of its beauty - ascii art and everything derived of the 256 members holding ascii table.
A side devoted to preserve the best of all ascii in pure nonwebenabled ascii form is to be found here.
Get all the Amiga favorites in ascii with your current monospaced font, in the topaz font, or the pOd noOdle or the PC versions in ANSI or PNG.
Its a timewarp and the creativity is outstanding - so I do miss some of the cooler ones from the sites - I have to dig around if they are still on my old floppies somewhere and if I can get them over to my newer gear somehow as well. Still an ASCII art museum is a great idea.

Posted by fALk at 13:07 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Listen to what a Singularitarian is all about.

Posted by fALk at 12:33 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The german government is about to sign a law that would make it necessary for every ISP to save all and every connection data you are doing from your home/bussiness computer - putting 450 Mio. users in the european union into the crosshair of criminal investigations - total surveillance. "Tell me were you surf to and I tell you what kind of crime you will do in the future" seems to be the Minority Report rivaling motto of todays governments.
Now that I am not very keen on the idea that the government sees what kind of websites I am visiting - especially since there are websites that I visit to get a greater understanding of the world that could be used as evidence that I am a member of a terroristic organization - I am thinking about how to swarth this effort.
One idea that came to my mind is that if every netactivist would create an email account somewhere and then a net of mailbot is using like 112kpbs of the participants bandwidth bandwidth (like 5% with a 2k connection) to constantly send mails to those accounts. Would that successfully spam their database out of usability? I do believe there are technical counter measures to that law.
Then there are the anonymizer projects that were never really successful - maybe they get a rivival with such laws.
Pure encryption is not a solution as it doesn´t hide WHO you communicate with just WHAT you communicate. They want to find out where your emails go - the content is not so important as of yet.
Id say spam de hell out of those bases. Use bandwidth to create erroneous connections - like half a million a day for each participating user - that should keep any ISP busy for the next time buying new data-centers to store all that data.

Posted by fALk at 12:18 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

What seems like a bad joke in the light of a failing Iraq war and terrorism threats popping up like corn in a microwave the majority of the US population is supporting a war between the US and Iran under any circumstances (because a cause has not been made yet that would be sufficient to declare a war on the state). 57% of Americans want the US to nuke out the bunkers under Theran with millions of people suffering the consequences - just so they can continue to drive their SUVs for another two years.
Now I always believed that its mostly the american government getting into the wars and hoped that the majority of the population would want peace. Now even before any rationale has been made and the war propaganda of the administration has just started the US population is already liking the idea of a war with nuklear consequences - it seems "finally a good time to test out those nukes" is something "they, the people" would like to see happen. This war is likely a war that will inflame the world - I for one know which side I would be taking if it comes to that - and I for one do not support our own government in any actions that lead toward a war (like referring Iran to the Security Counsel so it gets an ultimatum it can under no circumstances hold and then gets sanctions which would be seen as an act of aggression in the Iranian government which would lead to attacks on american forces in Iraq through Iraqi factions, the closure of the Persion gulf, an infinite increase in Oil prices an attack on Israel through Hizzbollah, actions from the US like Nuklear Bunker Buster Bombs that are 6 times as big as the Hiroshima Bomb and the whole arab region rightfully getting out of control in an eyeblink. Pakistanis government overthrown nuklear missles on Israel - Israel nuclear missiles on Iran and Pakistan and some on Syria, Saudi Arabia getting out of control, Oil Price going over the top, western civilization going under, eastern civilization blanketed with atomic dust.
Well that is one scenario that the majority of citizens of the US would like to see happen. Don´t say afterwards you didn´t want it.
And towards the other 47% -> Get your ass to Washington and get the puppet president with his shadow cabinet back into the black pages of the history book - or you are silently supporting an exodus of this otherwise wonderful world.

Posted by fALk at 11:56 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

What do you do if you are a totalitarian regime and can not control the media enough to change world opinion? Fight it - kill it by all means.
A recently declassified document on "information operations" from the inner circles of the US government reveals how much a threat the evil bloggers are to the godly empire. Not only can the "psyoped" altered truth meant to influence opinions outside the land of god filter back into local media and create a backlash. No the new participatory medium called "the internet" can create credibility problems for altered news and shines difficult lights onto topics a certain big government wanted to hide.
Now the quintessence of this is easy to guess: Fight the Net. This slogan is scattered across the document multiple times. How do you fight the net? Take out all and every means of communication infrastructure that could enable the net to function - basically nuke the net out of existence. The plans are clear inside that document and the pentagon takes this paper as a serious guide to the future of the one and only nation with the one and only ruler.

"Strategy should be based on the premise that the Department [of Defense] will 'fight the net' as it would an enemy weapons system,"

is an excerpt from that document and it throws a bleak future on net activism - as soon as netactivists gain a strong momentum the US government will do everything to disrupt the communication of the net as a whole.

More information on the BBC newssite

Posted by fALk at 11:41 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Its nice if you read about a new technology that you think would be a great fit for your work. I mean like most VJs dream about a transparent screen for the VJ Apps interface so the crowd can actually see how hard it is to generate the life content for them and that its actually work and not just posing behind a powerbook - right?
OLED displays are the hype for the last few years but only a minimal amount of actual products have hit the market. Yet the Frauenhofer Institut (those with the MP3 codec patent) of Germany has developed a new form of those displays that are transparent. What is even cooler? When searching around where I could grab a test unit I found out that the very same university - University of Applied Sciences in Potsdam - I am still enrolled in and soon finishing at has a group in the same department as I am studying (communication design, product design, interface design) that is at work with those displays to probably develop a new ultra cool interface. Be sure that I will check out the displays myself very soon - if they have them for touching at the school.

Posted by fALk at 11:24 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Shoot some blurry photos of protesters, make a poster, put out a 500 Euro fine for identification of each person shown on the photo and put every one to trial that gets identified by someone who thinks that he knows who the person in question is. Thats the ritual the german police is doing at the moment to "identify leftist protesters that made illegal things at a demonstration against NeoNazis in Potsdam". The problem? Mogreens got wrongly identified (he is supposed to be Nr.20) - even though he was in town and is a little lefti he did not take part in the demonstration and the photo they are referring to is so surely not him thats ridiculous to even think it might be him - yet he has to appear before court and defend himself.
What gives? Surveillance of any kind is shit and surveillance with help of greedy ordinary people is absolutely unreliable. I would think about a litigation process against the wrongful "witness" claiming the money for the lost time - but I guess you wouldn´t stand a chance against bigo brother and his little helpers.

Posted by fALk at 22:22 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Three years ago a company producing audio gear marketed towards the live musicians introduced a bomb to the VJ world - the first videomixer since the early 1980s that was especially geared towards the VJs - the Edirol V4. The V4 has proven to be one of the coolest tools I have ever layed my hands on and was at a reasonable price for VJs to afford. It featured an innovative interface - a crossfader that you could switch over from horizontal to vertical, a very clean cut over and some okish fx (so I never liked the original video mixer fxs that came with the V4). Very lovely machine overall.

Now another company that never appeared on the average VJs radar and is also coming from the music supplier scene is topping Edirols product - by length.
The company is Vixid from France. Their innovation is a "4 Channel Dream Mixer" as Spark writes on the appropriate VJForums thread.
It has true uncompressed 4:4:4 processing. It has blend modes - something unseen in any videomixer yet - it has 16(!) inputes! Three independend output - four output total. It has a hardware driven audio-analysis and midi in-out and 30(!) different mixmodes and no trashy 80s looking video blendovers to be seen! Apperently they want to bring it to market "soon" a demo unit was at avit paris show and the market price will be "around 2000 Euros".

Posted by fALk at 16:54 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The german society to fight copyright infringment and part of a global network sponsored by the Motion Picture Association (MPA) in the US is under legal scrutiny as evidence was found that they sponsored a warez server (one of the biggest fastest in germany) to "track down illegal file downloading".

It seems like the biggest joke of the century. The very same company that made multiple stupid "filesharing is illegal" spots that you had to pay for to see in the cinema and on rental dvds is now in legal trouble because they seem to have supported a big download server sitting on the network knot of germany in Frankfurt. Apparently they sponsored the server to get access to the log data. It will be interesting to see how this case pans out. The hilarious thing is that some of the spots have shown "evil hackers" in prison - being visited by their wife and children singing them birthday songs once a year outside the prison wall or being shown almost sexually harassed by male inmates - lets see if those very same people making up those spots actually landing in prison for the exact crime they tried to make us believe is the uttermost evil to society.
This all after the rootkit fiasco from Sony that exposed millions of computers and installed sony made malware. Give people too much power and they will misuse it.
Story developing - more indepth information on heise.de.

Posted by fALk at 16:28 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Philadelphia based company Bit Editions is selling what looks like a blinkenlights picture frame for the living room. Their press release says that you can display up to 1984 frames (yes yes big brother in there as well) on the simple LED screen. This sounds all good until you read further. For easy use you are to upload your animation to the company - means there is no easy USB interface to make you animations appear on the screen and a rather arcane custom eprom setup only lets you inside if you are experienced in hardware hacking - and if you are an expert in this field the hefty price tag of $400 for the framed and assembled package will let you think twice if you don´t want to roll you own from beginning for about 23 Euros. Instructions to do so are found on the BlinkenLEDs page. Happy hacking - ahem blinkin.

Posted by fALk at 12:27 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Amid rising concern of online privacy in the light of subpoenas issued to the major search engines I have a look at alternatives that ensure privacy in a world that runs amok on private citizens right of anonymity.

How many of you can remember times when the site to look for information on the net was NOT google but some other obscure search engine? Infoseek, Webcrawler, Yahoo and many more competitors in the late 1990s net where searching for the holy grail in Internet search. And then one day someone asked me through a chat that if I had tried out google yet - I didn´t and when I went over to the google.com page I was won over instantly and have not used any other websearch engine since then.
The question bumming in my head today was why - why did I switch over to google so instantly like many other early adopters of the net?
First of all it was the interface - while you had to click through heavy graphic pages on slow internet connections back then to get to the search queries just to be presented with an even uglier search result page that loaded even slower because it had a trillion of ads and banners and buttons on it. The navigation through results was shady at best and it took you longer to find out which result would work best for you then it took the server to actually find the results - Google in all this respects was much better. The same clean (and it was even cleaner in the old times) interface that you see today and the result page that does make sense and allows you to see and analyze your results fast.
When more and more information about google surfaced netizens agreed that it was an independent company that worked for the good of the net and respected the basic principles of privacy.
Time changes things and so Google today is one of the biggest technology companies catering to their shareholders. Search results are infested with google ads and other things have put a shady light on the netizens darling. If you have a google account and forget to log out then you searches are "personalized" and surely put into a database together with your name - and even if you do not have a google account your searches end up in a database - very probable together with your IP address. That database is what the recent subpoena from the US government was aiming at and even so google declined the request - unlike Microsoft and Yahoo who fully or partially complied and handed over all the data big brother wanted - it seems just a matter of time until some terrorist laws surface that require google to hand over the information and looking at what google is doing in China - complying with all and every rule against free speech - you would think that the once so activistic looking search giant is turning into the overpowered tentacle that misuses its trust.
In the light of all this a look at alternatives is in order. The problem like with so many other problems facing the internet today - seems to be the central server philosophy. Have one central server (or a private cluster) just gives the people who would regulate the net to death an easy target and once something becomes to big there are easy ways to curb this power easily - pull the plug or sue the hell out of the entity running the server - a look at the all so Popular Napster is in order. Since we seem to turn from a free open internet to a private controlled network with rules and without privacy searching that old wild net seems to be an offense to the government - I mean who needs search if you get bombarded with tons of URLs on TV commercials and if you look for something else on the net you must be an enemy of the state - well its not that bad yet but its easily visible that we are heading towards this direction.
Now the most interesting thing about the Napster phenomenon is that Napster was never extremely big compared with the millions of users using the net. Since the shutdown other technologies have taken over and they seem to be much more efficient - I am talking of course about Peer to Peer networks. Workload and traffic distribution has made it possible for the "Napster" community of filesharing to grow ten to hundredfold and the subject to sharing is not only music any more but also movies, code and about any stuff that is digital. The peer - to - peer concept seems to work so much that the government wants to outlaw it all together - which is besides some claims not possible because the Peer to Peer networks have shown a lot resistance to such trials and the further they are threatened the more they do to protect them self - the once so common tracker sides which run on just one server have been made distributed as well for examples. The data is split up into tiny pieces and controlling such a network seems to be extremely difficult.
Now I woke up this morning with the thought that someone must have started to build a distributed search engine - its such a simple idea and indeed I was greeted with some search results from google itself.
By further examining what was turned out I found that the most popular in the news was GRUB from looksmart, Inc. - a company that was once a popular search engine itself before the rise of google. This distributed search engine concept seems not operational anymore.
Then there are some Distributed Search Engines coming from the Open Source Community. The Windows only GPU originally just another Peer to Peer Client based on the popular Gnutella P2P client it has a plugin architecture with one plugin supporting a Distributed Search - the windows only nature will make it not very successful with the geek community who would be the needed early adopters for a such a project. Another seemingly succesful one is Majestic 12 even sporting a user-ranking which looks like the community is active and alive - yet there is no Mac version for me to try out - only Windows and Linux are supported at the moment.
The last one I want to mention is YaCy this comes as a java binary and runs flawlessly on OSX. Unfortunately there is no graphical user interface for it and only a shell command to start the crawler. Yes once you found the right command (a shortcut is in the directory "startYACY.command") everything runs smoothly and after the startup phase you are presented with an interface within your browser to further configure the distributed crawler - and so I am crawling away at the moment. Using the search (of your own crawl together with the accumulated crawls from the other users) is on the same local page that opened in your browser - making a bookmark is in order.
Now I do actually like the concept and the results - so far fewer then what you get with google - are very accurate and usable. Massadoption will not come until nice shiny likable interfaces are put on top but its a good step in the right direction.
Yet not everything is great yet and again a look at current Peer to Peer networks shows us what the pitfalls might be. Even if you cancel out the central server mentality of the google, yahoo, mcrsft giants there is still a week point between you and the government which would so badly look at what you look at. This weak point is the ISP you connect to of course and the big ISP do not seem to hesitate much when it comes to record all your movement and even with the smallest threat from big brother are handing this information over. The big rage right now is to encrypt all and every communication over peer to peer with a good enough key. There is still not a workable solution to P2P encryption out there but there are open source groups working on it and in the light of the current search engine fiasco you can bet that it will be introduced to the distributed search engines as well - once they become widespread that is.

Posted by fALk at 12:03 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

One of the best researched articles on Peak Oil ever is found on the independent. It is written by Jeremy Leggett a former geologist for big oil companies looking throughout the world to find black gold. If you want to live for the next 10 years and be prepared of what there might come I suggest taking the half hour to read through this informed in-depth analysis on our near future. Leggett goes through length to dismantle the current estimates from big oil corporations as to when the Peak Oil might come. He shows that not only Peak Oil is a problem but also that overproduction - as seen in one of the biggest oil fields on earth in Saudi Arabia - might shorten the life span of our oil reserves considerably. He even slips into the shoes of the big corporation estimates and shows that even with that nice estimate we are in for total crash of our current civilization by the year 2011 - thats in five years. He shows that the dependency of the west will be challenged by the energy hunger of China that will not stop short of global military confrontation with their one billion people. What really convinced me is the example he gives from the past where industry estimates turned out as big lies - namely the estimate given for the US oil field peak in 1956.

In 1956, a Shell geologist called M King Hubbert famously calculated that oil production in the "lower 48" states of America would peak in 1971. Almost nobody believed him. Shell censored the written version of Hubbert's address to the American Petroleum Institute, changing the wording of his conclusion to read that "the culmination should occur within the next few decades". The US Geological Survey, in particular, did everything it could to hike the estimates of ultimately recoverable American oil to a level that would make the problem go away. The US had 590 billion barrels of recoverable oil, the survey said, in 1961, meaning that the industry had 30 years of growth to look forward to.

The years went by and the "lower 48" did indeed hit their topping point. It came a year ahead of estimate, in 1970, at 3.5 billion barrels. Since then, production has sunk down the second half of the curve at a steady rate.

An exact dupe of what seems to happen now - especially in the light that Shell has already lowered their estimated oil capacity by 20%. The article goes further and is an informed read - apparently there are more people like Leggett who come out of the foggy big oil industry countering the claim for the most optimistic peak oil scenario and I tend to believe them. In the end of the article Leggett gives an example of an english town that made itself self-proficient and cutting carbon emission by 70% and external energy need to one quarter.

What they don't want you to know about the coming oil crisis

Posted by fALk at 13:43 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In my current (three years ongoing) research on the origins of VJing I just stumbled across a quote from the Videosynthesizer Pioneer Eric Siegel.

"The American Dream no longer is evolving. It's in a state of decay. Television must be liberated."

Eric Siegel
in the 1960s

Posted by fALk at 12:17 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Some experts say an attack on Iran is less then ten weeks away and the question remains what kind of gain would that bring the US. Surely they are not planning a ground invasion - as Iran unlike Iraq has lots of mountains and a pretty intact millitary and a population that voted for the current president and is said to be very nationalistic. So other then the non existing nuclear weapons program - what exactly is the gain the US will get? Its about the black gold again - but this times its not about securing wast amount of untouched oilfields but Irans thread that they want to install their own Petrolium market that will be based on the Euro instead on the Dollar - a world wide first if it comes to fruition. The thing is so that Saddam Hussein had exactly the same plan in mind shortly before the invasion of Iraq. A trade market for oil that would have all transactions based on the Euro would be a disaster for the US who pays for their wars and their expensive live style with the backup that all the world needs dollars to pay for oil. A shift to the Euro in that field would be absolutely devastating for the Dollars value and the US economy.
Now the EU would gain tremendously from such a shift in the world market - why we are supporting the US is a myth to me - there must be big bribes involved for individuals or the like unless someone can give me a clear idea of what exactly is going on here.

MMN on the Petrodollar Warfare:

Indeed, there are good reasons for U.S. military commanders to be 'horrified' at the prospects of attacking Iran. In the December 2004 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, James Fallows reported that numerous high-level war-gaming sessions had recently been completed by Sam Gardiner, a retired Air Force colonel who has run war games at the National War College for the past two decades.[9] Col. Gardiner summarized the outcome of these war games with this statement, "After all this effort, I am left with two simple sentences for policymakers: You have no military solution for the issues of Iran. And you have to make diplomacy work."

and

The Pentagon, acting under instructions from Vice President Dick Cheney's office, has tasked the United States Strategic Command (STRATCOM) with drawing up a contingency plan to be employed in response to another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States. The plan includes a large-scale air assault on Iran employing both conventional and tactical nuclear weapons. Within Iran there are more than 450 major strategic targets, including numerous suspected nuclear-weapons-program development sites. Many of the targets are hardened or are deep underground and could not be taken out by conventional weapons, hence the nuclear option. As in the case of Iraq, the response is not conditional on Iran actually being involved in the act of terrorism directed against the United States. Several senior Air Force officers involved in the planning are reportedly appalled at the implications of what they are doing – that Iran is being set up for an unprovoked nuclear attack – but no one is prepared to damage his career by posing any objections.

Now see that in the light of the recent warning from Osama that a new terrorist attack in the US is imminent and look ahead that the US has midterm elections coming up and you know well how all this will pan out - they don´t even need a fog screen anymore - they have collected so much power - political and media - that they can just fabricate anything and won´t be questioned.

and also more news here:Israeli National News on the imminent attack on Iran

Posted by fALk at 9:04 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I usually not talk about the weather on this blog but something odd is happening - not only do we have snow in Berlin almost constantly since November - and its freaking cold (especially if you have to heat seven coal ovens by hand) but today we have -4 C and its raining – encrusting the snow. Its very weird - raindrops fall and instantly freeze once on the ground - the snow looks and feels like cake icing. Interestingly enough the Apple weather widget had the perfect graphic for the situation.

Posted by fALk at 8:44 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A article in the New York Times catched my attention today. It titled Hillary Clinton Says White House Has Mishandled Iran. Now everyone seems to be dissing the Bush administration and most sane people in the world would like him step down (or better be forced to step down) as president. What would be the options for a post Bush era? Hillary Clinton comes into play. At the moment she is the Senator for the state of New York but everyone agrees that she will probably run for the presidents office in three years time.
Now you think back at the day of Mrs. Clintons husband and think "oh its much better". Think again. In that article Mrs. Clinton is cited that she would not rule out military action against Iran - and therefore use the new nuclear bombs. She is not alone - other democrats have also voiced that a military options against Iran is entirely justified - it must be the American Nation that wants that war then when both political parties who speak for the nation want to nuke out another independent state somewhere else in the world. The credibility of the United States as a whole is rapidly on a downfall.

Posted by fALk at 8:39 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I am refraining from reciting all the Mac News regarding the Intel switch. I still have very mixed feelings - of course I want the faster processors - but I would like even more is clean code running on my computer that is optimized and if the switch killed one thing its architecture optimization and clean programming. I let the developers surprise me with their marvelous code that runs on two architectures as fast as it runs on their native one.
What just struck me so and I have not heard much discussion about it yet is drivers. Of course there are all the printerdrivers a normal mac user ever needs included and most point and shoot cameras have drivers as well, but the professional crowd has things attached that even in the age of plug and play need a driver installation. Scanners, Midigear, Video Output Cards (Firewire IOs) etc etc. Now most of those drivers need to communicate with the kernel on some level and this is where it gets nasty because Rosetta - even in its newest G4/Altivec compatible mode - does not support ANYTHING that talks to the kernel - including 95% of all drivers. Now device makers - especially those that offer products on Wintel and Mactel - are known to be not very fast and responsive when it comes to driver updates - especially for slightly older gear. I can remember waiting for an OSX Scanner driver from Epson about two years. In that regard past transitions in the Mac world did not bode well and the tiny market share had a lot to do with it. I do fully expect a big hassle in this area in the coming six to nine month. At the moment I just would tell everyone with a professional need for their computer equipment that goes beyond the "iApps" to sit out the transition for a while - no matter what Apple says it will not run totally smooth.

Posted by fALk at 8:25 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

One for the "the scary future is near" department comes surprisingly from Apple. While I love the general innovation Apple puts into its product its never THAT far ahead of the loop with its products that I would file them under "future fantasie". Not so if the newest patent application makes it into an actual product. The patent talks about a screen that can also look back at you just like you see in the cheesy Starfire movie from Sun and with that Orwell touch to it that your computer looks you straight in the eyes while you are working.
The concept is easy. Put a sensor between every pixel on the LCD panel the sensor then records while the pixel displays.

__ sensor
|
oxoxoxoxoxo
xoxoxoxoxox-----pixel
oxoxoxoxoxo
xoxoxoxoxox

The question of why is easy answered. The number one problem of webcams and webchats is that you can not look your oponent in the eye while you are talking. You either see him/her on the screen and he sees you looking down or you don´t see him/her at all while looking in the camera and he/she sees you looking at him/her. The "integrated" display would solve that problem. At the same time it could act as (fingerprint)scanner.
Now how you would focus such a beast is not clear (nanomicrolenses only on top of the sensors?). Also have a blanket ready to cover your screen while not using - just in case its watching.

Posted by fALk at 20:43 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The MIT advertising lab informs the world on their blog that a company called NextMedia is installing 3D flatpanel screens in high value bars. Without any glasses or other enabling gear guests will be bombarded with 30 seconds true 3D commercial interupted with the bars own program and other stuff that is displayed in 2D on the same screens. Interesting way for 3D viewing to gain a foothold in the media realm - so I am not sure if I would like to be assailed with adverts while I am in a bar paying for drinks - but modern day capitalistic realities seem to have no ethics anymore as more products you pay for sport advertising (lots of rental DVDs in the UK have an unskippable advert in the beginning and recent pushes from cellphone telcos see the new video functionality on the modern phones as a perfect way to push advertising - there is hope so that consumers will resist and a marketing backlash will occur at one point)

Posted by fALk at 11:26 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

You have to love modern day politicians and the journalist who recite their nonsense. After one of the most important meetings of the decade where in a group consisting of those countries representing the UN security counsil with veto powers + germany a high ranking diplomat is quoted by the New York Times:

Everyone agrees we must agree; the question now is what will we agree on.

Indeed. How about agree on that the people of this world do not want another war. How about trying to pursue a diplomatic approach - maybe even offering Iran help with their future energy needs beyond peakoil - giving them blueprints for solar power plants delivering them some windmills or some other forward looking step other then discuss a whole day long that you need to agree to agree on something. Its so sad its not even funny anymore....

Posted by fALk at 21:37 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

As the standoff between the the western leaders and Iran deepens more and more details become available at how advanced the plans for a military intervention towards Iran already are. Even so Iran tries to put itself in a non evil light by reassuring the people of the world that its only ambitions are in civil use of nuclear energy - in compliance with the nuclear non-profilation treaty - the west is flexing is muscles while it seems more and more obvious that Israel is the driving force behind the demand of a total destruction of Iran - one of its last remaining enemy in the region.
The Kölner Stadtanzeiger reports (google translation) that Israelies are inside Iran with forged german passports (of living germans that probably will never leave germany according to the article) to mark targets for Israeli bombers. The former President of Israel has adviced the Israeli military to be ready for an attack in March and the current leadership stays course. The US ambassador to the UN - John Bolton - is threatening Kofi Annan and the UN to stop "anti-Israli actions" or get all US funding for the UN scraped. And the US wants to eagerly try out their new "mini"nukes that have the power of SIX TIMES the hiroshima bomb. Generally everything point to a nuclear standoff in the scope of three month.

Posted by fALk at 16:57 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

So you complain and bitch about the sad state of the world with all its killings and grasp for every little hope that things would take a positive spin at any time. Then you stumble over an article and think "hey this it it" "this could change everything" until you recognize the huge propaganda machine behind current day politics and economics. Yet its my place here to at least put one little grain of gold to the counterbalance propaganda. The Kuala Lumpur Initiative To Criminalise War was a peace forum in early december 2005 and they have put out a very notable declaration that is worth bringing to the world attention. Those brave people want to simply outlaw any and all warfare - west east red blue. Whoever kills innocent civilians in whatever name is put on a war trial. Is human kind ready for a step like this? Are we ready to leave our bloody past behind and descent into a new era of prosperous peace? One can hope and dream - but as long as blood and oil stained dollars rule this world I see not much hope. Nevertheless here is the declaration for a world without war:

THE Kuala Lumpur Global Peace Forum of concerned peoples from all five continents

Posted by fALk at 16:29 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Just as the 1950s witch hunt that was geared toward all "communists" - or basically people differing in opinion from the then president - we are witnessing history repeating itself - without any checks and balances that should be in place after people died and people got in prisons for their believes and desires. As MSNBC reports that the National Security Agency of the USA has set up a database of anti-war protesters and student organizations that are against war - no word of what they would do with it - but there has been evidence that some of those organizations had "spies" inside them to ensure that no "terrorism" would be tolerated by those organizations. Now who finds evidence that this is an act of an emperor who grabs for full executive power without dissent might be added to that database - so be aware...

Posted by fALk at 14:31 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Now that we have a neoconservative led chancellor(in) in germany all of the sudden the news media is reporting everything goes well and that the former evil US is now our friend again. A reverse in only two month that is unjustified in all regards - neither is our economy going a tiny bit stronger nor did we have more jobs to offer nor has the american president changed - but yet all of the sudden the german media is talking about "everyone is happy" "study:new chancellor is supported by most germans" "study proofs:most germans like to get back into atomic energy" "most germans would like better relationship with the USA".
I really absolutely do not understand. NOTHING has changed. We have the same jobless rate, the same number off layoff from big companies, america is preparing a new war which most germans do not support.
I guess it has to do with an intense media push sponsored by the neocons in america and germany. Heavily financed by big industry groups (atomenergy lobby, military suppliers - which we have plenty in germany, energy suppliers etc etc) and government speakers preparing those nice psychological speeches that will sink in with the masses on both sides of the ocean - just to show in what happy Brave New World we are living where everything is just fine - only that we are on the brink of a nuclear war and that some of the most obvious problems for the next years are not even in the public discussion at all and that the economical divide is just getting bigger and bigger - some argue it never has been as big in humans history - not even in the darkest times - then it is now. So when you read that article in Spiegel or Focus in the take it with a pound of grainy salt.

Posted by fALk at 14:12 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In a recent critique on google the economist writes that google founder Larry Page always saw himself as a world changer (for his own personal vision of a "good" world). The article isn´t giving much information and reads like a google dissing - but the really interesting part is the last paragraph where the unknown author of the article claims:

Google is already working on a massive and global computing grid. Eventually, says Mr Saffo, “they're trying to build the machine that will pass the Turing test”—in other words, an artificial intelligence that can pass as a human in written conversations. Wisely or not, Google wants to be a new sort of deus ex machina.

So the race is up with IBM building a supercomputer last year that makes more then double the number of calculations per second thought the human brain would be capable of and the company with one of the biggest database structure in the world employing a world wide computer grid actually simulating humans intelligence to the degree of a formerly only theorized super intelligence. Lets see if they will be able to control the thing ones they breed it.
On a side note I find it rather fitting that Google undertakes such a project. They likely have the largest database to feed an intelligence in its infancy. The thing could access all and every data of the internet which would make it extremely powerful and knowledged. I think they are in a good position to make this happen - I would give them no more then six years to pull the Turing test.

Posted by fALk at 15:54 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I would like the human race to flourish to acknowledge their great gift of consciousness to live in harmony with nature and the universe. Yet we destroy each other with the fruits from the labour of our ancestors, we destroy our planet and everything on it for our greed and our over-comfort. Instead of going forward - using our acquired knowledge to gain that harmony to see what is around us to advance to a state where a biblical heaven looks like a bad theory - we are going back - back to the dark ages where men was controlled by man and slaughtered for believing in nature, tortured for not obeying to the rich and wealthy, killed for trying to advance ourselves. In believe that nature would make the planet more livable, technology to free the slaves, information to end all wars the brightest and the bravest where killed - the most loving burned to death. Today it seems they died to make those matters worse. Most of the world population is enslaved by governments and corporations - spend most of their live in the wrath of their superiors who keep them entertained, those who connect to nature are few and far in between without much voice there message is burned by oil hungry countries and their deeply networked overlords. The scientists want to believe, believe that the future will get better if we have better technology become even evangelists of post-humanity turning blind that they are siting in the same cage like the rats they breed directed to still the hunger for more and more power of those few that bath in billions and kill millions with a snip of a finger.
Yet it seems we can resist. Resist the feeling to be trapped of what Aldus Huxley called the "Brave New World". We still have the chance to evolve to advance and to have that bright individual post-human future with pain uncontrollable experiences and not foreseeable experiences - good and bad. We can break out of the spiral of money that makes us slaves of our own consumerismic demands for plastic toys that break after a year so we buy new one damaging our environment enslaving more people and giving the powerful more control over us in return. Meanwhile we are taught that humans of other nations, rationalities, nationalities, believes are evil that need to be killed and that war is necessary for our survival - all while we get distracted by the wars on and in mankind's world - reducing us to the fulfillers of an unwanted destiny - killing ourselves and the base for our living to make some few a happy 60-100 years or elevating them to the posthuman stage while nullifying ourself in the meantime.
We are at a crossroad to either understand our potential and fight for a living worth living based and what has been and will be achieved in the short future trying to find the balance to live in the heaven we are born and using our achievements for freeing us from enslavement of hard labour and using our shared information to understand each other without any more killing or see a devastating mixture of Brave New World and 1984 dawning on us where we the slaves will have turned this planet into a huge ugly prison camp ruled by a handful of posthumans that will never die and have all the power of the universe to keep the slave forgetting that they are slaves while controlling every step they take.
With a nuclear war dawning in this new year, with more and more jobs beeing replaced by machines while putting the people behind the jobs on a social downfall and with an information architecture that lets everyone communicate with everyone instantly this year is here to make a decision its here to give our future a direction and everyone living in this world and in this time is called upon to make our future a loved past, unite those that understand, those who feel, who believe in living. For this unity to free us from a mind numbing consumeristic over-controlled world that is powered by hate against ourselves fused by the few who gain the most. Let us fight against more wars now and for the future. Let us help those who suffered with the energy and wealth saved by not waging the slaughtering and spilling of the same blood that could get us to and advanced state where all this does not matter - where we could for once be independently free within our own reasons believes - a world where everything could be possible.
I wish for all those peace loving people for all those scientist, consumeristic slaves working in offices, bureaucrats fearing the future, Islamist, Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhist and believers of all other religions who look for their own version of enlightenment, for the music fans, the vjs, the doctors the programmers the poor and the middle classes of this world to come to peace to come to reason to spend their time communicating on paths to a future we all might love and enjoy equally no matter where we come from, where we are, what we are, what we believe in and what we have.

Final Peace.

Existential Risks:Analyzing Human Extinction Scenarios and Related Hazards

Peace on Earth means No More War (information clearinghouse)

Let's Stop a US/Israeli War on Iran (counterpunch)

War without end (the independent)

Speculations over US attack against Iran
(Spiegel, Informationclearinghouse)

Posted by fALk at 20:04 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)