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The BBC reports that George W Bush is paying a surprise farewell visit to Iraq. I do hope it's to apologise. Okay, Saddam was a cruel tyrant, but the coalition caught the tiger of insurgency by the tail and it's difficult to see how exactly it can ever hope to extricate itself from the mess it's created other than by leaving a vacuum into which tyrants even worse than Saddam will surely pour. Sorry would be the decent thing to say as Bush walks away from the mess. Nuff said...
I've just received a review copy of Massimo Banzi's new book, "Getting Started with Arduino". I'll review it properly in a later post, but from what I've seen so far, it looks like an excellent introduction to this fabulous piece of kit.
How evil do you have to be to claim that a deadly epidemic, whose outbreak is the direct result of your callous attitude towards millions of people, has actually been extinguished - while people continue to die from it? That's what's happening in Zimbabwe, and it has to stop.
The Times reports Robert Mugabe's televised speech in which he says: "I am happy to say our doctors have been assisted by others and WHO (the World Health Organization)... so now that there is no cholera.” This is a lie. As of Wednesday 10th December 2008, there were 16,403 cases of cholera in Zimbabwe, and there have been 783 deaths from the disease.
According to the report, Mugabe went on: "Because of cholera, Mr Brown, Mr Sarkozy and Mr Bush want military intervention. Now that there is no cholera, there is no need for war." Er... what?
Genetic algorithms are strange, almost creepy, but also remarkably cool. This, for instance, is a remarkably cool project by Roger Alsing which seeks to evolve an approximation of the original Mona Lisa using just 50 semi-transparent polygons.
Essentially, to use a genetic algorithm, you only need know what you're looking for in a solution to a problem - not how to solve it. The software does the rest.Genetic algorithms work using a set of parameters to control their output. By running the algorithm with a population of sets of these parameters and selecting those sets that give outputs that a re closest to the desired output, a "natural selection" routine breeds the next generation of parameter sets (adding slight mutations as it goes) and the genetic algorithm runs again. Eventually, a stable design emerges.
I can't help but notice that creationists are very quiet about genetic algorithms. Is there an "elephant in the room" here, I wonder?
PC World reports that Scott Cleland of Precursor LLC released a report last week claiming that Google uses 21 times more bandwidth than it pays for. Facts like this are used to argue for an end to net neutrality, but maybe there's a better way.
Put simply, an end to net neutrality would mean that people pay more the more bandwidth they use. This at first sight seems fair enough, but isn't it like saying that if you make more calls on your mobile phone, you'll be charged more? And what about if your web site becomes popular through no fault of your own and becomes "slashdotted"? What if you're the victim of low level botnet attack designed to bankrupt you through increased ISP bandwidth charges? Has no one considered this may be a vulnerability waiting to happen?
It's probably also worth speculating here that an end to net neutrality might potentially even see people being charged more by their ISPs for receiving more spam than average. It's improbable, but certainly possible.
So, perhaps rather than abandoning net neutrality to charge the likes of Google more due to its success, maybe it would be better to give such companies tax breaks for investing in companies that provide bandwidth in the first place so that they can in turn create more bandwidth. That way, everyone wins.
More proof, if proof be needed, that teddy bears are superior to humans. The BBC reports that four bears have become the first Teddynauts following their historic 2-hour sub-orbital flight aboard a helium weather balloon.
The bears took off from Cambridge University's Spaceflight centre and travelled 30km to the edge of space as part of the Nova 9 mission. There are some great pictures on the mission web site, the curvature of the Earth clearly visible behind them. Bears are natureally curious about space and one of the crew seems to have removed his helmet to get a better view of things. To get home, the bears had to wait for a lack of atmospheric pressure to burst the balloon before they could parachute safely back to Earth, landing near Ipswich.
Putting teddies in space might sound frivolous, but it's all in aid of serious science. The plan is to use a similar technique to enable a satellite to be put into orbit for about £1000. Using a rocket, getting into space from the ground is an expensive and dangerous undertaking, but launching a payload from from a balloon already touching the void is far easier.
Well, well... The Register reports that Atari has ended its association with attack dogs Davenport Lyons. Could this be because, like other companies are discovering, the idea of sending nastygrams to people who really shouldn't be allowed out on the internet isn't so good - or profitable.
In an undated press release on Davenport Lyons' web site, David Gore, a partner at the firm, says: “Illegal file-sharing is a very serious issue resulting in millions of pounds of losses to copyright owners. As downloading speeds and Internet penetration increase, this continues to be a worldwide problem across the media industry which increasingly relies on digital revenues. The damages and costs ordered by the Court are significant and should act as a deterrent. This shows that taking direct steps against infringers is an important and effective weapon in the battle against online piracy.”
The problem is, if law firms keep going for the technically incompetent without stopping to think about the ways in which they may have become unwitting P2P peers through infection, the bad publicity generated means this deterrent becomes increasingly meaningless as more people come forward to challenge their nastygrams. For example, by typing "Davenport Lyons" into Google, I found this thread on a consumer action forum suggesting ways to bog down such actions and otherwise fight back.
It can only be a matter of time before an employee of Davenport Lyons is found to be unwittingly illegally sharing files. As I said in October, the way forward is protection of the innocent from themselves, not their prosecution. That requires technology they can't forget to install or update. The ideal situation is Microsoft putting anti malware protection in the Windows kernel. Great idea, you'd think, but there's now a huge anti-virus industry predicated on them not doing so. It's my guess that not only is this a situation that won't go away, it'll get worse.
