Monday, December 30, 2002
That's okay, Dav. I will confess to waking up with Eminem in my head. Scary. It snuck in durring the compulsory trip to the mall with the wee cousins, confronted with oh too much I did not want to see, hear, etc ... but I was an accomplice in ear piercing, which was fun x 10000000. And pleasantly surprised that the next requested trip is to the art gallery ... darlings!
Mom's Butter Tarts (it just isn't the holidays without them ...)
12 unbaked tart shells (try to make these yourself, but the plug-and-play work too)
Beat 1 egg, mix in 1 cup of brown sugar. Beat in the juice of 1/2 a lemon, 1 teaspoon vanilla, 2 tablespoons melted butter. Stir in 1 cup of raisins and 1/2 cup of chopped walnuts. You can use currants, pecans, coconut, whatever. Spoon into tart shells. Bake at 375 for 8-12 minutes, until filling is bubbling. MMMphphphphph!
Alison, have a lovely time off! I feel envy ...
Sunday, December 29, 2002
and zey are all ze zame. a-mu hahaha!
Saturday, December 28, 2002
Ooop! My inner Luddite was speaking ... we will have a better world with replicas. Once the technique is perfected (as natural mothering is so flawed), we can have a Master Race. More sameness, predictability ... it will be a relief, to know what to expect, and to love what you already know! I'm sure that's what the aliens had in mind.
I'm sure you have heard about this already.
One giant leap for science, one huge step back in emotional development ...
Happy holidays, my dear friends!
Friday, December 20, 2002
Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. I do not have to go back to work until the 6th. Upon contemplation I have realized:
1. I have been very tightly wound lately.
2. Coffee is better in the morning in your robe.
3. WTF have I been doing with my life???
4. Those trees outside are lovely.
Make Trade Fair. Wow, the world is full of jerks. I read these stories, and I think: Make it yourself. Don't buy corporate brands. Buy stuff from your friends. Here's a good chocolate company: Denman Island Chocolates. You will never go back to Nestle. No way.
Thursday, December 19, 2002
I think it was a product of having an Iroquois grandmother and a British grandmother in the 1940's! Damn, cultural confusion! Would you rather go hunting and fishing in the outback, or strap on your Sunday best and go to catecism? hmmmmmmmm ... and both are spiritual! tough for young minds ...
St. Nick, Old Nick, and the good god Thor
Wednesday, December 18, 2002
I think someone else was using my login, as i don't remember posting an xmas greeting ...
Perhaps all the energy i put into greeting cards last night magically erupted in a blogdial post ... HA!
We don't call our northern natives eskimos, that is not the 'correct' name, they are Inuit. It is very sad, what has happened to our native people in Canada, very shameful. My great grandmother was Iroquois (scroll to Culture!), but I never understood why my native heritage was so played down. The common reaction in Canada is, get your status card, you get benefits, but my dad never would. He thought it was hypocritical, as he wasn't living a native lifestyle, so why? And he was embarrassed, as many Canadians were/are, of their heritage, to be connected to a group that was so obviously in pain. An ill contradiction, because the things that were so absolutely him (excellent hunter, fisherman, outdoorsman), were wrapped in the things he absolutely didn't want to be ...
Monday, December 16, 2002
mary13, i thought you were in canada or the northern u.s. somewhere...?
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
A friend of mine gave me some Oil of St. John's Wort that she made (f**king love naturekind) to combat the SAD. Epidemic in Vancouver, rains constantly all winter. I rub it on the inside of my big toes, there is a pressure point there that affects the thyroid glands. (Research does show that any amount of foot-rubbing will aid in sour moods.) Or you can do a shoulder stand*, the world will look different after a shoulder stand.
Saturday, December 14, 2002
Pancakes are not at all greasy; they are normally griddled on non stick surfaces, and are light and fluffy in taste. The best pancakes I ever ate in a diner was at a place called "Beauties" in Montreal....dreamy...
Think Unix...made me Think Unix...
The next book I want is the Perl Cookbook; has lots of things in it that you need to do over and over. I need to learn about PIDs, Forking processes and that stuff.
The White Stripes: Cheap beer. LOTS of cheap beer.
Would that beer be...
And from the Red Stripe site:
"People from around the world want to see how great RedStripeBeer.com is. But sometimes their countries don�t think that�s a good idea. And since lawsuits are very expensive, if you are in any of the following countries, you shouldn�t be here. Especially the French:
Afghanistan
Azerbaijan
Bahrain
Denmark
Egypt
Ethiopia
Finland
France and the French overseas territories and departments France et Departments ou Territoires d�outre mer francais (French Guiana, Guadeloupe, Martinique, R�union, Mayotte, St. Pierre and Miquelon, French Polynesia, New Caledonia, Southern and Antarctic Territories, Wallis and Futuna Islands)
Hungary
Iceland
Iran
Iraq
Jordan
Kazakstan
Krygystan
Kuwait
Libya
Norway
Oman
Pakistan
Poland
Qatar
Saudi Arabia
Sudan
Sweden
Syria
Tajikistan
Togo
Turkmenistan
United Arab Emirates
Uzbekistan
Yemen"
My Old Dutch sells crepes and not Pancakes.
Pancakes are never more than 6" in diameter, are always stacked more than two high on a plate, and are served with maple syrup, and either bacon or sausages, in the same plate. They are not thin like crepes, but are normally 1cm thick and fluffy in texture when they are done right. The batter for pancakes is never thin and runny like the batter for pancakes, it is viscous, and normally yellow-ish due to the egg yolks.
The British cringe at the thought of bacon and sausages slathered with maple syrup, but hey, they cancelled thier orbital launch vehicle program because "it could be used for delivering weapons". Go figure.
And before anyone stands up and says "wassitmattah, its awl the saim innnaaaat", food is to the body as music is to the soul. Everything about food matters, how it looks, how it is prepared, how it is eaten, the origin of the ingredients, and the atmosphere at the table (or the floor).
Hmmmm, lets see, if food is to the body as music is to the soul, then we can correlate music to different dishes.
Lets see:
YMO: Bacon Cheesburgers, Chocolate shake float and family fries at an immaculately clean Dairy Queen® in rural north east America.
Godspped YBE: a dog turd, spread on two pieces of stale bread, in a deserted and filthy rail station, somewhere in the USSR, mid to early 1970's
Ladytron: A perfect warm lobster salad, accompanied by a fine chablis on a hot summers day at a family run riverside Relais, somewhere in France.
Anita Baker: Coffee and donuts in a diner almost anywhre in Manhattan.
Bob James (Any CTI recording): Grilled Japanese specialities (Tskune, Shisomaki, Ginnan, Asparamaki...) chilled cedar brewed Sake, and plumb wine to finish...anywhere where they do it right!
And, for the love of all thats holy, DONT DO ANY ARTIST THAT IVE DONE, or SUFFER THE CONSEQUENCES!
Thanks to everyone who offered temp space so we dont have to read blogdial in blogger! That means you Chris!
the 1104 massive stupmed up first:
http://freakypeople.ca/blogdial/blogger.html
Its been another "hell of a year"...the obl, the tia...a neverending stream of bullshit.
One thing however, has consistently been great; the posting, intelligence, humor and sheer class of the BLOGDIAL elite.
Nuff said.
Friday, December 13, 2002
Do you know that there is not one place in London where you can go and order pancakes?
Not ONE.
that is a shame.
did i mention they are also good with peanut butter? with syrup too OF COURSE!!!
alison, i hope you are going to email me a translation for your lovely story ... je parle seulement anglais et francais ... :(
i am waiting for the carpet man to show up. he has not shown up three times now ...
From: "Mordechai"
To: Declan McCullagh
Date: Thu, 12 Dec 2002 11:53:28 +0200 Subject:
TIA feasability and costs Reply-to: quality@computer.org
Declan,
My name is Mordechai Ben-Menachem. I am a lecturer at Ben-Gurion University, Beer-Sheva, Israel. My areas of speciality are software engineering and project management. Bob Bauman asked me to write to you to express certain views concerning the DARPA project called TIA.
I have read the Aldrige testimony. Most of the following was written in reaction to that.
Much of what Aldrige says walks a very narrow line between outright lies and obfuscation. It is simply not correct. The areas for objection are too broad to cover here, but I shall try to give a few examples.
1. You cannot talk about "... if they choose to use it." The system ONLY has value if there is a critical mass of data in it. This means, by definition, that the database must be massively populated and this must be constantly maintained. This is not a situation where one can query and THEN the system will go off to a thousand different databases around the world to search for transactions you may want. There is a fine line here between data collection and data retrieval. The "if they choose" part can relate to data retrieval, but that makes it a very sticky wicket. Existing legal controls (e.g., search warrants, Miranda) are designed to control data collection, not use of that data once it has been collected.
2. Speech recognition / rapid translation: The statements are very misleading. No such software exits today. The state-of-the-art of voice recognition / voice response systems is that of a watch (you can also tell your phone to dial your wife, but only after rigorous training of the system). The accuracy of translation systems used today is mostly used as Computer Science jokes. The distance to workable systems is quite profound. Intel has recently announced a 3 Giga Hertz chip. This infers (via Moore's Law) that we shall see a 6 Giga Hertz chip in 18 months. Many authorities have called 6 GH a milestone that will allow a new set of applications. In other words, when those capabilities exist, we may be able to intelligently discuss rapid, real-time translation. However, by definition, we do not know how to conceive of those applications now. Perhaps it can be on a supercomputer, as cost is not the governing factor -- no, the basic computational complexity may be solvable on a supercomputer (no proof of that exists) but there are many other aspects that requires a different type of architecture for real time usage. He also stated that there will be voice recognition capabilities to recognise who is speaking. Totally science fiction, has never been tried in real life. What exists is the ability to match "voice prints" via pattern recognition techniques. Very time consuming and with a very low level of accuracy and reliability. I do not recall it being recognized by any court, for example.
3. Connections between transactions: Echelon gathers data from some 8-billion telephone conversations today. How successful has this been in the "war on drugs"? The answer is, almost not at all. Add to that, all airline transactions, chemical purchases, credit card ... How many daily transactions are we talking about -- 20 billion, more? (Visa alone has some 110 million transactions per day.) There is no way to even imagine how to query this size of database, much less, make any sense of the answer. In other words, if they manage to simulate the data (we do not know how to simulate that), and if they manage to perform a query, what do we do with the results of such a query? The data visualization techniques do not exist. The quantity of false positives will overload any investigative agency (tens of thousands per day). As a matter of fact, the database technology that would allow this type of query does not exist, either. I must add, on small scales, tens of thousands of transactions, this is being performed. The distance to be able to process five orders of magnitude more is perhaps a decade.
4. Collaborative reasoning: This part is probably practical, though the development is still quite a way off. I have done a little bit of work in this area. (I have an article submitted to a major journal that I can send you, but it has not yet been published.) The major issue here is reliability. We are talking about using massive webs of hierarchical data (that is, the data has both hierarchical attributes and network attributes). With this level of complexity, testing such a system is very far beyond our capabilities -- we simply have no idea how to ensure that the answers we are given are correct because we do not know how to test it. This is not the only difficulty. The definition of interrelationships is an open issue -- they are not static.
As I said, space and time do not permit me to do a full analysis and I have not read the full specification. The bottom line is composed of two points. The report by Pete Aldridge cannot simply be taken at face value. The system / project, as presently defined reminds me greatly of Reagan's SDI project. Brilliantly thought of, but much too early. Some of the fruits of that effort are just now coming on line, 20 years later (e.g., the Arrow anti-ballistic missile and the Nautilus anti-tactical rocket laser gun). When SDI was conceived, it was not technologically possible. This is not today. In 20 years, who knows, this may be reasonable. Today, the base technologies do not exist. The complexity is too great, the size is impossible to conceive. I don't care how passionate Poindexter is. It sounds wrong.
Additionally, I spoke with a colleague of mine whose expertise is in the area of face recognition and other "bio" technologies. My objective was to double-check that my initial guess-timates were reasonable. He confirms and even thought me rather optimistic on some of the things. For instance, "rapid translation" based on speech recognition: I said I thought it a few years off. He says it is AT LEAST 7-10 years off. The capabilities we see today are very primitive.
In any case, we are talking about a 10-20 year timeframe to demonstrate capabilities -- similar to SDI. You are talking about spending billions of dollars for a project to develop a system that has no hope of being useful in a significant time-frame -- the size of the project is much larger than what has been reported, the base technologies do not exist.
best regards, I hope this is helpful and I shall be most pleased to further explain if you like,
Mordechai Ben-Menachem
Dept. of Industrial Engineering & Management
Ben-Gurion University
P. O. Box 5613; Beer-Sheva;
84156; Israel
Tel. 972-86-433231,
mob. 972-57-433231,
off. 972-86-479374
quality@computer.org
Amazingly, people are PAYING ATTENTION:
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/?021209ta_talk_hertzberg
December 12, 2002 | home
COMMENT
TOO MUCH INFORMATIONIssue of 2002-12-09
Posted 2002-12-02
When it comes to concocting fevered visions of the future as a way of
illuminating the present, Jules Verne got some things right in his
time, Aldous Huxley got others, and George Orwell got still others. In
our time--in this terror-haunted interlude (we hope) of background-hum
dread and well-founded paranoia--no literary divinator gets it righter
than the sci-fi pulp master Philip K. Dick, author of "Clans of the
Alphane Moon" and dozens of other books, and inspirer of some of
Hollywood's spookiest dystopias, including "Blade Runner," "Total
Recall," and "Minority Report." And this is odd, given that he has
been dead for twenty years. Too bad he's not still around. It would be
interesting to get his take on the Information Awareness Office of the
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of
Defense.
The Information Awareness Office plays it so weird that one can't help
suspecting that somebody on its staff might be putting us on. The
Information Awareness Office's official seal features an occult
pyramid topped with mystic all-seeing eye, like the one on the dollar
bill. Its official motto is "Scientia Est Potentia," which doesn't
mean "science has a lot of potential." It means "knowledge is power."
And its official mission is to "imagine, develop, apply, integrate,
demonstrate and transition information technologies, components and
prototype, closed-loop, information systems that will counter
asymmetric threats by achieving total information awareness."
[...]
From: Nomen Nescio
Subject: Hooray for TIA
Date: Tue, 10 Dec 2002 21:20:11 +0100 (CET)
For years we cypherpunks have been telling you people that you are
responsible for protecting your own privacy. Use cash for purchases, look
into offshore accounts, protect your online privacy with cryptography
and anonymizing proxies. But did you listen? No. You thought to
trust the government. You believed in transparency. You passed laws,
for Freedom of Information, and Protection of Privacy, and Insurance
Accountability, and Fair Lending Practices.
And now the government has turned against you. It's Total Information
Awareness program is being set up to collect data from every database
possible. Medical records, financial data, favorite web sites and email
addresses, all will be brought together into a centralized office where
every detail can be studied in order to build a profile about you.
All those laws you passed, those government regulations, are being
bypassed, ignored, flushed away, all in the name of National Security.
Well, we fucking told you so.
And don't try blaming the people in charge. You liberals are cursing
Bush, and Ashcroft, and Poindexter. These laws were passed by the entire
U.S. Congress, Republicans and Democrats alike. Representatives have
the full support of the American people; most were re-elected with
large margins. It's not Bush and company who are at fault, it's the
whole idea that you can trust government to protect your privacy.
All that data out there has been begging to be used. It was only a
matter of time.
And you know what? It's good that this has happened. Not only has
it shown the intellectual bankruptcy of trust-the-government privacy
advocates, it proves what cypherpunks have been saying all along, that
people must protect their own privacy. The only way to keep your privacy
safe is to keep the data from getting out there in the first place.
Cypherpunks have consistently promoted two seemingly contradictory
ideas. The first is that people should protect data about themselves.
The second is that they should have full access and usability for
data they acquire about others. Cypherpunks have supported ideas like
Blacknet, and offshore data havens, places where data could be collected,
consolidated and sold irrespective of government regulations. The same
encryption technologies which help people protect their privacy can be
used to bypass attempts by government to control the flow of data.
This two-pronged approach to the problem produces a sort of Darwinian
competition between privacy protectors and data collectors. It's not
unlike the competition between code makers and code breakers, which has
led to amazing enhancements in cryptography technology over the past
few decades. There is every reason to expect that a similar level of
improvement and innovation can and will eventually develop in privacy
protection and data management as these technologies continue to be
deployed.
But in the mean time, three cheers for TIA. It's too bad that it's the
government doing it rather than a shadowy offshore agency with virtual
tentacles into the net, but the point is being made all the same.
Now more than ever, people need privacy technology. Government is not
the answer. It's time to start protecting ourselves, because nobody
else is going to do it for us.
----- End forwarded message -----
Canadian Pancakes
just like Mom used to make ...
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon salt
3 tablespoons of sugar
1 3/4 teaspoons double-acting baking powder
2 eggs
3 tablespoons melted butter
1 1/4 cups milk
2 cups fresh blueberries
and/or
1 sliced banana
Preheat the griddle to 350 C. Sift dry ingredients together in medium bowl. Beat the eggs and add melted butter and milk. Stir into dry ingredients, but not too much! Fold in blueberries and/or bananas. If you want to use frozen blueberries, thaw them out a bit so they don't impede the cooking. If you want to use frozen bananas, well, we don't suggest that. Make a smoothie like a real person and get out of the kitchen. Drop (the batter) onto the hot surface in generous spoonfuls (at least 3" round, none of these 1" pancakes, that's for sissies). Cook until edges are golden brown and tops are dry (careful, they do burn easily, so check once in a while). Flip, cook, and you are done. Stack at least 3 high, butter in between and douse with maple syrup. MMMMM ...
Monday, December 09, 2002
hmmm is there anyone (else) online who has not seen goatse?
Anyone who reads Slashdot has certainly seen it; its one of the most trolled URLS, its an "institution" and phenom. at the same time.
Whis is saying something....im not sure what though. Its on that list of ten worst sites on the net...i mean honestly, its everywhere. "Goatse" is an adjective. Nuff said.
World Sousveillance Day: http://wearcam.org/wsd.htm
("sousveillance" is inverse surveillance: accountability from below)
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
An international coalition that includes artists, scientists,
engineers, scholars, and others is declaring December 24, to be "World
Sousveillance Day".
THE SHOT SEEN AROUND THE WORLD:
At noon on Tuesday, December 24, 2002, ordinary people all over the
world will call into question the growing and dehumanizing effects of
increased video surveillance, automated face recognition, and
Covernment (Corporate+Government) tracking in public places, as well
as private places.
Often Covernment officials that use video surveillance try to prohibit
others from taking pictures or video within their establishments or
regimes, but on this day, many people will photograph these officials,
their establishments, and their security systems.
As high noon sweeps past various time zones, the shot heard around the
world will be that of clicking cameras.
Rather than protesting by carrying signs, or by marching, citizens
will protest by going on shooting sprees. Armed with their own
photographic or videographic cameras and recording devices, ordinary
citizens will dish out some accountability.
HOW CAN I PARTICIPATE?
All you need to do is bring a camera --- any camera (even a fake or
broken camera, or one with an empty film magazine) --- to a place
where video surveillance is used.
HOW WILL I KNOW WHO I SHOULD SHOOT?
Taking pictures of the surveillance cameras will cause models to
appear very quickly for you to photograph. When you point your
camera at their cameras, the officials watching their television
monitors will very quickly dispatch the models for you to shoot.
This is a universal phenomenon that happens in nearly any large
organization where video surveillance is used. Models often carry
two--way radios and wear navy blue uniforms with special badges.
Why December 24th?
This is a day when security forces are very busy watching for
shoplifters, and it is also a time when folks are reflecting on the
year's activity and it's something to do rather than merely buy
something. For more info, see http://wearcam.org/wsd.htm
Sunday, December 08, 2002
In reverse order:
PGP8 For free.
Get a clue; READ what Zenith is offering you.
Bit torrent is simple, all you have to do is READ about it.
Friday, December 06, 2002
Yes even I was once like you. Of course now I am the Master of
Deception, but that's besides the point. Either way, I got my first
hit of Goatse.
Damn did it hit me. It scarred me for life. It left an image so
rotten and morbid inside my mind that I would never forget about him.
Visiting the Goatse man is like watching porn. Everyone's done it, but noone admits to it. It's dirty. It's not something you want anyone to know you do. Once you've done it you feel different. You want to jump in the shower and scrub until you're skin and bones. You want to go back 5 minutes before you saw this image. You want to do anything that can get rid of this forsaken image. It's probably banned in some country. Probably afghanistan, but everything's banned there. Once you've seen it though, you never forget it.
The initial reaction of people when they see this image is to immediately close it. Whether it's throwing your mouse to the little 'x' in the corner or alt+f4, you immediately close that fucken browser window. You don't want anyone seeing you looking at that! You think about how the hell he managed to open his asshole that wide. The image is in your brain, but not your screen thank god. Unfortunately your brain can't keep small details when it only gets to view an image for 2 seconds.
Oh, and I believe Gold (without checking) is close to lead, which is the middle element, the one which all other elements will one day become, due to decay (am I right or am I pouring it out my ass?).
Thats pretty much it, lead and gold are really close "atomically".
Also, PHP, I heartily recommend O'Reilly's books, they're the shit.
I REALLY want the perl cookbook.
Perl vs PHP is becoming a religious war, like vi vs emax, debian vs $otherdistros gnome vs kde....oh well.
Drink Cobra beer? Do!
SETI? THATS EVEN WORSE.
Excerpted from here http://www.seti.org/science/ufo.html
"Investigations of UFO sightings or alien abductions are not conducted at the SETI Institute. A practical reason for this is that the distance to the star nearest to our own is over 4 light years. That's about 24 trillion (24,000,000,000,000) miles away. With our current rocket technology, it would take around 300,000 years to travel there. This poses a daunting engineering problem even for a more advanced civilization.
In addition to the unlikelihood that we have been visited by extraterrestrials, there is no scientific evidence to prove it. Personal accounts are not physical or verifiable evidence. These reasons are sufficient to exclude UFO's from the research objectives of the SETI Institute. Anyone interested in contacting organizations that do investigate UFO's and other paranormal phenomena can refer to the following:"
And then they give a link to the number one site whose sole purpose is to spout irrational garbage.
Allow me to translate; "..if we accept that some UFOs are alien spacecraft, our life's work will have been shown to be a waste of time...and we will be out of a job, so we are not even going to "go there"."
" Every time you buy software from companies such as Microsoft, IBM, Sun and Adobe you hand over much more than just money, you also give up basic freedoms and human rights."
"A whole generation has grown up with the idea that it is normal for them to have no freedom," says Mr Stallman.
"We should destroy the record companies and put an end to institutions that are this arrogant and trying to take away our freedom," he says. [...]
BBC
The bbcnews website is patchy at the best of times. Sometimes they have the mad rantings of pig-ignorant hysteria whipping, witchburning psuedo scientists, and then othertimes, gems of clarity like this one.
Can you say "Senior Editor Needed"?
c) our currency should be SEX.
This is the rich man, in that scenario, having recieved a lot of "payments".
Currency is based on the value 'we' place on precious metals: GOLD. Now why would we want to do something like that? After all, gold is, in practical terms, worthless.
All the gold ever mined would form a cube measuring only 19m on each side.
There is nothing of practical value that can be made of gold that could not be made of another metal with better inherent properties (conductivity, tensile strength and so on).
Gold is rare. Its rarity is very well understood, by just about everyone. It is practically immutable, extremely durable. This is why it, over the other precious metals (which are named that for a reason) has served as currency for thousands of years.
So we all go around (literally, until quite recently) with bits of paper that say "I am worth 10 pounds and if you take me to the bank of England they'll give you about 1.3 grams of gold for me" and it is the trust that there is an intrinsic value associated with the paper that gives it worth. More or less.
The first paper money was issued by the Bank of England in the 1690s. But it was not widely used or trusted. Banknotes began to be issued in quantity in 1797 when an economic crisis stopped the Bank making payments in coins for more than �1. It issued the first �1 notes in March that year. Notes for �2, �5, �10, and �15 are also known. These notes continued until 1828 and values up to �1000 were issued in small numbers. They were all very simple, hand-signed and until 1808 numbered by hand as well. From 1817, after the troubles of the wars against Napoleon and France were over, the gold sovereign became used and trusted as the common unit for �1. For most people, who weekly wages were less than �1, the sovereign more than fulfilled their needs. Wealthy people though needed higher value currency and from 1829, when the Bank stopped issuing �1 and �2 notes, it continued with the �5 note.
The concept of legal tender is often misunderstood. Contrary to popular opinion, legal tender is not a means of payment that must be accepted by the parties to a transaction, but rather a legally defined means of payment that should not be refused by a creditor in satisfaction of a debt. This makes legal tender a rather narrow legal concept that has little to do with the way in which most payments are made. In practice, people are often willing to accept payment by cheque, standing order, debit or credit card - in fact by any instrument that they are confident will deliver value.
In 1759, gold shortages caused by the Seven Years War forced the Bank to issue a �10 note for the first time. The first �5 notes followed in 1793 at the start of the war against Revolutionary France. This remained the lowest denomination until 1797, when a series of runs on the Bank, caused by the uncertainty of the war, drained its bullion reserve to the point where it was forced to stop paying out gold for its notes. Instead, it issued �1 and �2 notes.
The Restriction Period, as it was known, lasted until 1821 after which gold sovereigns took the place of the �1 and �2 notes. The Restriction Period prompted the Irish playwright and MP, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, to refer angrily to the Bank as "... an elderly lady in the City". This was quickly changed by cartoonist, James Gillray, to the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street, a name that has stuck ever since.
The first fully printed notes were issued in 1855, an event that brought relief to the Bank's team of cashiers, who no longer had to sign each note individually. The practice of writing the name of the Chief Cashier as the payee on notes was halted in favour of the anonymous "I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of ...", which has remained unchanged on notes to this day. The printed signature on the note continued to be that of one of three cashiers until 1870, since when it has always been that of the Chief Cashier.
The First World War saw the link with gold broken once again; the Government needed to preserve its stock of bullion and the Bank ceased to pay out gold for its notes. In 1914 the Treasury printed and issued 10 shilling and �1 notes, a task which the Bank took over in 1928. The gold standard was partially restored in 1925 and the Bank was again obliged to exchange its notes for gold, but only in multiples of 400 ounces or more. Britain finally left the gold standard in 1931 and the note issue became entirely
fiduciary, that is wholly backed by securities instead of gold.
Anyway, this bizarre collective illusion keeps society running in a capitalist way with exchange of goods being a darn sight easier than bartering.
Some people have been trying to bring back the gold standard. This and the superb e-cash, invented by Dr Chaum, are excellent, but the sheeple are just too STUPID to understand how they work, and the incredible benefits that would be had from useing them. Paypal is a slim shadow of what a true e-cash economy could be like.
But. Why gold? The idea should be that there is only a finite amount, so nobody can 'make' gold and get rich quick.
That isnt just the idea, thats the reality this is why Alchemists tried so hard for centuries to synthesise it.
But why not something that is relevant to the current society?
Because different people assigne a different value to the same non-rare things. You might have a china plate that you think is worth my electric bycycle; it may be the case that the value of the two things are comparable, but how do I know this? Currency, whose value is well understood solves this problem. We both know how much a pound coin is worth, and from that, we can extrapolate the value of almost anything. Currency is a point of intersection between strangers, so that negociation can be made, whilst minimizing the risk that you will be cheated.
I know this is all abstract from the start so it may as well be based on... salt or granite or comet fragments or moon rock or penguins.
None of these things has a value like currency, because you cannot easily take them somewhere and exchange them for something else. They are not "fluid". Currency as an intermediary, solves this problem. You can carry it around with you, and unlike Penguins, you dont have to feed it. Currency does have something in common with comet fragments however, in that it burns a hole in your pocket.
Har Har.
Soon cash will become extinct and everything will be electronic. So the basis for currency will change.
like it says above, the basis of currency right now is fiduciary, and it is not based on Gold, so nothing will change there. Electronic money will not take over any time soon. The Nat West MONDEX project failed utterly, so did ecash. The former because your last 300 transactions were exposed to whoever want to see them, and there were arbitrary limits to how much you could spend, the latter because of the sheer stupidity of the unwashed 10th.
There may only be one currency with any luck.
that would be a disaster.
But will it still be based on an abstract irrelevant impractical metal? Or maybe RAM, for example, will be the basis.
as long as its not volatile RAM....har!
Nice bottle of wine?
perishable. useless as currency
New hovermobile?
segway? :]
24,000 Megs please.
Paying in chips for egg & chips?
Fuggedabhatit®
Thursday, December 05, 2002
Claus, I know, I just cracked up when I saw it....doesnt it just sum up Efnet IRC? So cruel, horrid..."You were kicked by <$op>, <$reason>".
You know the score.
Here are the rest:
http://www.ermac.org/Images/
15) Blogger: Have you ever heard that old saying, "make a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door?" Well, in their own way, Blogger made a "better mousetrap". They made creating your own website and getting it hosted so quick and simple that anyone could do it. Then as the whole "world was beating a path to their door" they let it all slip away. Horrible technical problems, non-existent technical support, and grindingly slow hosting became the rule with their service, not the exception. The people who revolutionized creating your own website and inspired terms like "blogs", "blogging", "blogosphere", etc, have turned blogger into the "Geocities" of their industry. Now Blogger is only for amateurs to cut their teeth on before they move on to better digs. That's sad...
http://www.rightwingnews.com/
"The Perpetual War Portfolio is an evenly weighted basket of five stocks poised to succeed in the age of perpetual war. The stocks were selected on the basis of popular product lines, strong political connections and lobbying efforts, and paid-for access to key Congressional decision makers."
wow!
http://www.dack.com/war/portfolio/
Wednesday, December 04, 2002
By the way, the humor about the Rump(ofsteelskin)feltd quote, is that "evidence of..." has been used to counter skeptics for years, and now, all of a sudden, rumplestiltskin picks it out of the air to justify bombing the shit out of people.
Good enough evidnce to bomb and kill people, but not good enough to prove that UFOs piloted by you know whos are absolutely real.
Now "Thats Real!®"
I saw "Bowling for Columbine" this evening at the cinema. Canada looks better and better every day, especially when you watch "The Orielly Factor".
Then of course, there is the pancake incentive.
1. Why are 'they' hiding? One minute's appearance in Trafalgar Square would suffice.
This is the classic "White House Lawn" argument that the skeptics keep coming up with year after year. Absence of evidence is not Evidence of absence. These are the words of Donald Rumpsfeldt.
2. Why are people afraid? I know there are many answers... including religious faith, government propaganda, Hollywood... Fear of the unknown? We know nothing about anything as it is. What will happen tomorrow?
As the tenured resident scientist at Irdialani Limited, its your job to tell us that!
3. Why governmental suppression of information? Our best interests? No. Power, tech, money? Maybe. To maintain a state of fear (of the 'unknown')? Thats my best guess.
This is a good question...personally, if anyone, anywhere could get a hold of a silent anti gravity device that could lift tonnes of wieght and float at 200 feet for thousands of miles, this would be "A Bad Thing®". And God only knows what other incredible technology these being have, that once let loose, would catastrophically change everything over night. Perhaps its better that everything remains "primitve" until the earths population is more sedate and culturally homogenous.
Thats what I would do, for certain.
Uh u oh time to put away these childish flat earth, circled by the sun and planets in perfect circles ideas and face THE FACTS David Whitehouse!
BBC Science editors view of UFOs.
Ah yes, the pathetic establishment rears its backwards and ugly head! I read that link yesterday. Astounding, and frankly not very surprising.
These are the same people who burned witches, astronomers, and for 50 years, violently "opposed" the idea of Black Holes when they were first postulated.
If you want to really understand what is happening in the minds of kooks like David Whitehouse (the man who wrote that piece of trash) then you need to read this:
The Logical Trickery of the UFO Skeptic
Of course, imbeciles like David Whitehouse have not seen any evidence, will not point to links that have it, nor read them when they are given them.
This is one of the most fascinating aspects of the UFO subject, the ostritch posturing of "scientists", too small minded and rigid with stupidity to accept some simple facts.
OMG, Ive been trolled!!!!!
Tuesday, December 03, 2002
I'm certainly not confusuing cold with cool. Cool is everything associated with James Dean posing and Miles Davis' Birth of Cool. It is inhuman posturing, a distancing from the heat and passion that regularly occurs within this flesh. I am interested in countering that, and lending my support to those artists who celebrate and sing the body electric.
Why the metric system is wrong
Author takes 'The Measure of All Things' (CNN) -- The meter is a crock. Originally, you see, the metric unit of distance was supposed to be one ten-millionth of the span from the north pole to the equator. But the Earth isn't a perfect sphere -- it's an oblate spheroid, flattened at the poles -- and every meridian isn't equal because the Earth isn't perfectly smooth, either. So the meter is an average, a compromise -- a figure agreed upon by men, not handed down by nature. It's arbitrary, in other words. [...] His book stresses the importance of a uniform system and how one is developed. In the United States, the reluctance to adopt the metric system caused trouble as recently as 1999, when NASA's Mars Climate Orbiter failed because engineers used English measurements instead of metric. [...] This is a lie, the orbiter failed because NASA mixed imperial and metric measurements incorectly, not because they "used English measurements instead of metric". CNN
Monday, December 02, 2002
Demographics and the Dustbin of History:
Karl Zinsmeister's essay Old and In The Way presents a startling � but all too plausible � forecast of Europe's future. To the now-familiar evidence of European insularity, reflexive anti-Americanism, muddle, and geopolitical impotence, Zinsmeister adds a hard look at European demographic trends.
What Zinsmeister sees coming is not pretty. European populations are not having children at replacement levels. The population of Europe is headed for collapse, and for an age profile heavily skewed towards older people and retirees. Europe's Gross Domestic Product per capita (roughly, the amount of wealth the average person produces) is already only two-thirds of America's, and the ratio is going to fall, not rise.
Meanwhile, the U.S population continues to rise � and the U.S. economy is growing three times as fast as Europe's even though the U.S. is in the middle of a bust! Since 1970 the U.S. has been more than ten times as successful at creating new jobs. But most impportantly, the U.S.'s population is still growing even as Europe's is shrinking � which means the gap in population, productivity, and economic output is going to increase. By 2030, the U.S will have a larger population than all of Europe � and the median age in the U.S. will be 30, but the median age in Europe will be over 50.
Steven den Beste is probably correct to diagnose the steady weakening of Europe as the underlying cause of the increasing rift the U.S. and Europe's elites noted in Robert Kagan's essay Power and Weakness (also recommended reading). But Kagan (focusing on diplomacy and geopolitics), Zinsmeister (focusing on demographic and economic decline) and den Beste (focusing on the lassitude of Europe's technology sector and the resulting brain drain to the U.S.) all miss something more fundamental.
Zinsmeister comes near it when he writes "Europe's disinterest in childbearing is a crisis of confidence and optimism.". Europeans are demonstrating in their behavior that they don't believe the future will be good for children.
Back to that in a bit, but first a look on what the demographic collapse will mean for European domestic politics. Zinsmeister makes the following pertinent observations:
1. Percentage of GDP represented by government spending is also diverging. In the U.S. it is roughly 19% and falling. In the EU countries it is 30-40% and rising.
2. The ratio of state clients to wealth-generating workers is also rising. By 2030, Zinsmeister notes, every single worker un the EU will have his own elderly person 65 or older to provide for through the public pension system.
3. Chronic unemployment is at 9-10% (twice the U.S.'s) and rising.
4. Long-term unemployment and drone status is far more common in Europe than here. In Europe, 40% of unemployed have been out of work for over a year. Un the U.S. the corresponding figure is 6%.
Zinsmeister doesn't state the obvious conclusion; Euro-socialism is unsustainable. It's headed for the dustbin of history.
Forget ideological collapse; the numbers don't work. The statistics above actually understate the magnitude of the problem, because as more and more of the population become wards of the state, a larger percentage of the able will be occupied simply with running the income-redistribution system. The rules they make will depress per-capita productivity further (for a recent example see France's mandated 35-hour workweek).
Unless several of the key trends undergo a rapid and extreme reversal, rather soon (as in 20 years at the outside) there won't be enough productive people left to keep the gears of the income-redistribution machine turning. Economic strains sufficient to destroy the political system will become apparent much sooner. We may be seeing the beginnings of the destruction now as Chancellor Schr�der's legitimacy evaporates in Germany, burned away by the dismal economic news.
We know what this future will probably look like, because we now know how the same dismal combination of economic/demographic collapse played out in Russia in the 1980s and 1990s. Progressively more impotent governments losing their popular legitimacy, increasing corruption, redistributionism sliding into gangsterism. Slow-motion collapse.
But there are worse possibilities that are quite plausible. The EU hase two major advantages the Soviets did not � a better tech and infrastructure base, and a functioning civil society (e.g. one in which wealth and information flow through a lot of legal grassroots connections and voluntary organizations). But they have one major disadvantage � large, angry, totally unassimilated immigrant populations that are reproducing faster than the natives. This is an especially severe problem in France, where housing developments in the ring zones around all the major cities have become places the police dare not go without heavy weapons.
[...]
ESR
Who Owns Ideas? The War Over Global Intellectual Property
by David S. Evans
Foreign Affairs, November/December 2002
A review of: Copy Fights. Edited by Adam Thierer and Wayne Crews. Washington: Cato Institute, 2002, 295 pp. $19.95.
...
[I]ntellectual property protection is not a field of bright lines and clear rules. Protecting ideas always demands a delicate balance between competing objectives and values: stimulating creativity but thwarting monopoly; creating knowledge yet disseminating it broadly; enforcing rules while responding to change. Economic, technical, and social changes have complicated the balance between these competing goals and renewed debate over who should own what ideas and for how long. Nevertheless, it is a time-tested proposition that society benefits enormously when the expression or product of some ideas is owned and exploited for profit. The time has come to discuss once again the limits of that proposition, not its centrality...
http://www.foreignaffairs.org/
Wow, Last.fm: i just signed on and listened to three whoppers in a row: Dr. Octagon, Fennesz and RaviShankar/PhilipGlass.
Speaking of Mr. Glass. I watched Koyaanisqatsi with my extended family on Thanksgiving. It was being shown on public television and most of my relatives had never heard of it or Godfrey Reggio or even Phillip Glass before. The images are enticing, beautiful even. But ultimately they reveal a depressing overall view of the world and our relationship/altercation of it. An appropriate thanksgiving experience, though. A holiday initially devised to set aside time to give thanks to the world for all its splenders that has subsequently turned into a feast of overconsumption. Koyaanisqatsi sheds some much needed light on what there is to give thanks for, and how it is slowly being paved over with shopping malls, McDonalds and 50 lane highways.
Read This!
(Q1) Why are we fighting and opposing you? (c) Under your supervision, consent and orders, the governments of our countries which act as your agents, attack us on a daily basis; The Guardian
"BBC Domesday has become a classic example of the dangers facing our digital heritage," said project manager Paul Wheatley.
"But it must be remembered that time is of the essence. We must invest wisely in developing an infrastructure to preserve our digital records before it is too late."
"We must not make the mistake of thinking that recording on a long-lived medium gives us meaningful preservation,"
BBC
Dutch tapped
"According to anonymous sources within the Dutch intelligence community, all tapping equipment of the Dutch intelligence services and half the tapping equipment of the national police force, is insecure and is leaking information to Israel..."
Sunday, December 01, 2002
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