Seven Generational Ruminations

In AT&T chief, FCC chair clarify on Net neutrality a C|NET News report offers a confused picture from the AT&T CEO. At issue are statements by several telephone company CEO's saying they need to charge large bandwidth users for access to their networks. That is, there are several bandwidth-hungry large and popular Internet services which represent a large amount of the Internet traffic. For example:

It's easy to lay the blame for loss of privacy on the Bush Administration. It is while the Bush Administration was in power when massive privacy invasion by the government was disclosed. While I'm quick to lay blame on the Bush Administration, in this case there's a heavy dose of inevitablity.

Let's consider these articles which make an interesting juxtaposition.

I wish I understood quantum theory a bit better so I could better understand this article: Quantum computer works best switched off. I want to read this as supporting spiritual or psychic awareness, but I don't know enough to quite follow the dots.

The article discusses what they call: "Even for the crazy world of quantum mechanics, this one is twisted. A quantum computer program has produced an answer without actually running."

Here's an interesting question ... suppose police capture a terrorists laptop and they want to get into the laptop to extract plans and other documents? Suppose the laptop is rigged so the file system is encrypted meaning the police can't get through the encryption? Suppose there's a ticking bomb, and the plans for the bomb are in the laptop?

Microsoft has a long history of copying ideas from elsewhere. I've been watching them for years, and have yet to see them come up with an inventive idea. Oh, wait, they have a visual effect for tooltips which has them "unfurl" from top-to-bottom, that's probably a true invention by Microsoft. Okay, they've had one minor original idea. In particular they seem fond of copying ideas from Apple -- in fact, its well understood that Windows was developed because Bill Gates saw the Mac and got scared and told his people he wanted something like that.

Okay, today is December 31, 2005. A posting on Scripting News had a pointer to five years ago and I suddenly remembered what that day was like. The big concern? Remember Y2K? The fear that come midnight that night, that the whole mechanised world around us would come crashing to a halt?

I remember being in San Francisco that night and passing by someone on the street shortly after midnight, and we exchanged the observation "Well, it all seems to still be working".