David Cameron: The next age of government

h/t to Chairman Sterling. The talk is quite optimistic and not sure if this age of government is all that novel as there still is government to begin with and the ubiquitous corporate powers that be won’t likely let people power really be people power. but still an interesting talk.

• IT research firm Gartner estimates Google’s data centres contain nearly a million servers, each drawing about 1 kilowatt of electricity. So every hour Google’s engine burns through 1 million kilowatt-hours. Google serves up approximately 10 million search results per hour, so one search has the same energy cost as turning on a 100-watt light bulb for an hour.
• This doesn’t bode well. Even though the average American performs just 1.5 searches per day, it is hard to imagine that this will not rise dramatically.
• The US Environmental Protection Agency estimates that data centres are responsible for 1.5 per cent of US energy use. How much more will that be when we, and our gadgets, are doing hundreds of searches per day? Or when the planet’s 6 billion inhabitants all want equal access? We’ve all heard the future of information architecture is cloud computing. It just might be a cloud of carbon dioxide.

Human Energy Recycle System Can Generate Energy From The Movement Of Users

• The human energy recycle system is an innovative concept that can gather energy emitted by human or even pets. This energy is used to power other devices, ensuring a new lifestyle for mass people with reduced electric bills and complementing to the environment. The system comprises lightweight, compact and portable units named ‘Solution Units’, designed to be worn in different spots of the human body, which collects energy from spinning, shaking, human heartbeat, body temperature and various other types of movements, and stores the energy into the ‘Standard Battery’ inside. When emergency power is required for a mobile device, these units can be connected to the device directly. Alternatively, the energy of the battery can be stored in the ‘Application’ units for later use.

• What we said: This month, six breast cancer patients filed suit against Myriad Genetics, a company that owns both the patent on two genes that are associated with an increased risk for breast cancer and ovarian cancer and the patent on testing to measure those risks. Some of these women are suing because they can’t afford the $3,000 fee Myriad charges to determine their risk for breast or ovarian cancer. Some of them are suing because, thanks to Myriad’s patent, they can’t get second opinions about whether they should have their breasts or ovaries removed - no one else is allowed to perform another test for them.
• - Editorial, May 24, 2009
•  What happened: A federal judge struck down Myriad Genetics’ gene patents, deciding they involved a “law of nature” and had been “improperly granted.” The case could reshape intellectual property laws and have a big impact on biotech companies. About 20 percent of genes in the human body have been patented.
• What’s next: An appeal, of course. Expect this one to reach the Supreme Court. The high court should strike it down. Genes are the common property of humanity, not the private fiefdoms of individual companies.

Tarpley: US gov uses Google proxy to attack China

“Google is an arm of the US Gov’t. Google is cohabiting with the National Security Council…This is essentially a US Gov’t attack on China.”

• The trial of the Pirate Bay operators in Sweden has generated huge amounts of media coverage. But one of the most interesting things about Pirate Bay hasn’t got a mention.
• In his daily dispatches for WiReD, court correspondent Oscar Schwartz swoons over the boyish charm of “likeable” and “winning” Pirate Bay PR guy Peter Sunde. But there seems to be something about Pirate Bay that no one wants you to read: its debt to one of the most notorious fascists in Europe.
• Reg readers will already know a little about Carl Lundström’s background. But as Andrew Brown, author of the autobiographical Fishing in Utopia, points out, no English language coverage of the trial has mentioned this. Thanks to Brown’s blog, we know a little more about Lundström.
• For example, Lundström was linked to a gang of skinheads that attacked Latin American tourists in Stockholm in the mid-1980s. [Expo.se report (Swe) - 2005]. Over the years, Lundström has switched his support from Keep Sweden Swedish to the far-right headbangers party New Democracy - but was thrown out for being too right wing. He’s currently bankrolling 100 candidates for the Swedish equivalent of the BNP.
• Lundström is alleged to own 40 per cent of The Pirate Bay - the largest share - and gave it servers and bandwidth to get going. As one of the four defendants, been a regular attendee in court. But the presence of this significant national political player hasn’t been worthy of a WiReD mention since the trial kicked off. Or a mention anywhere else. Why would that be?
• For me, there are two interesting aspects to this peculiar, and very selective silence.
• One is that anti-copyright activists like to think of themselves as thoroughly decent, forward-thinking progressive people - because the internet is a new democracy, they’re reflecting a fairer world. They like to contrast the hygenic efficiency of the technology with the old (and implicitly corrupt) copyright businesses. It’s almost a badge of moral superiority.
• But like the Futurists a hundred years ago - the original Freetards - they don’t mind jumping into bed with neo-Nazis when it suits them. In this case, that’s so long as the free music and movies keep flowing.
• The second is WiReD’s choice of Oscar Schwartz to file courtroom dispatches from the Pirate Bay trial. He’s the only English language courtroom reporter, and bloggers and professional publications take their cue from his reports.

Swarm of Bacteria Builds Tiny Pyramid 

Nanotech Construction!

More HERE.

• UK patents are being declared state secrets more than three times as often as those filed in the US, according to information released to New Scientist.
• An average of nine secrecy orders were imposed for every 10,000 patents filed in the UK since 2003, compared with less than three per 10,000 filed in the US, figures released for the first time by the UK Intellectual Property Office (IPO) reveal.
• The difference is surprising because the US government spends far more of its overall R&D budget on military research than does the UK. In 2009, the Pentagon spent $80 billion (0.16 per cent of GDP), or 57 per cent of the US public research budget, on defence R&D - against the Ministry of Defence’s $3.4 billion (0.56 per cent of GDP), or 9 per cent of overall UK R&D funding.
• A secrecy order is applied to a patent if patent office staff and their military advisers think the idea could be used to threaten national security. A patent cannot then be published until the technology is no longer considered to be a threat.
• Inventions related to cryptography, uranium enrichment and biological and chemical weapons are often made secret. Governments won’t confirm it, but seemingly benign inventions can also be made secret if they could be “dual-use”, for example, an airborne crop duster that might be used to spread bioweapons.

• Full patent data released by UK IPO (online spreadsheet)

  Data on R&D spending from OECD Science, Technology and Industry Scoreboard 2009

Making the USA into one state…

• Most intelligent people recognize that suburban sprawl is a blight. A lot of people also realize that walkable cities and well-planned communities would be a huge improvement on ghost malls, suburban slums and other hideous after-effects of developer greed and stupidity. Livable cities are the hallmark of a true civilization.
• That being said, there are a lot of radical ideas out there that have the strong whiff of elite social engineering. This may or may not be one of them, but fitting the entire population of the US into a territory the size of New Hampshire seems a bit extreme, don’t you think? But we’re living in a time when plans are being drawn up to bulldoze any number of Rust Belt ghost towns back into farmlands. All bets are off.
• We’re also living at a time when it seems that the country is being goaded into disintegration, mainly through media shills rejiggering our political symbols and myths into social weapons. It could turn out that certain parts of the US could be radically transformed into sci-fi habitats surrounded by forest and farmland. Keep an eye out for signs of this in the days to come.

My favorite line from the infographic: “we’d all be neighbors!”

• By early 2008, top U.S. military officials had become convinced that extremists planning attacks on American forces in Iraq were making use of a Web site set up by the Saudi government and the CIA to uncover terrorist plots in the kingdom.
• Elite U.S. military computer specialists, over the objections of the CIA, mounted a cyberattack that dismantled the online forum. Although some Saudi officials had been informed in advance about the Pentagon’s plan, several key princes were “absolutely furious” at the loss of an intelligence-gathering tool, according to another former U.S. official.
• Four former senior U.S. officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified operations, said the creation and shutting down of the site illustrate the need for clearer policies governing cyberwar. The use of computers to gather intelligence or to disrupt the enemy presents complex questions: When is a cyberattack outside the theater of war allowed? Is taking out an extremist Web site a covert operation or a traditional military activity? Should Congress be informed?
• “The point of the story is it hasn’t been sorted out yet in a way that all the persons involved in cyber-operations have a clear understanding of doctrine, legal authorities and policy, and a clear understanding of the distinction between what is considered intelligence activity and wartime [Defense Department] authority,” said one former senior national security official.
• CIA spokeswoman Marie Harf said, “It’s sheer lunacy to suggest that any part of our government would do anything to facilitate the movement of foreign fighters to Iraq.”
• The Pentagon, the Justice Department and the National Security Agency, whose director oversaw the operation to take down the site, declined to comment for this story, as did officials at the Saudi Embassy in Washington.

• More than 100 drivers in Austin, Texas found their cars disabled or the horns honking out of control, after an intruder ran amok in a web-based vehicle-immobilization system normally used to get the attention of consumers delinquent in their auto payments.
• Police with Austin’s High Tech Crime Unit on Wednesday arrested 20-year-old Omar Ramos-Lopez, a former Texas Auto Center employee who was laid off last month, and allegedly sought revenge by bricking the cars sold from the dealership’s four Austin-area lots.
• “We initially dismissed it as mechanical failure,” says Texas Auto Center manager Martin Garcia. “We started having a rash of up to a hundred customers at one time complaining. Some customers complained of the horns going off in the middle of the night. The only option they had was to remove the battery.”
• Ramos-Lopez’s account had been closed when he was terminated from Texas Auto Center in a workforce reduction last month, but he allegedly got in through another employee’s account, Garcia says. At first, the intruder targeted vehicles by searching on the names of specific customers. Then he discovered he could pull up a database of all 1,100 Auto Center customers whose cars were equipped with the device. He started going down the list in alphabetical order, vandalizing the records, disabling the cars and setting off the horns.

uncertaintimes:

The Automata / Automaton Blog:

Hero (or Heron) of Alexandria (c. 10-70 AD) was a prolific inventor and mathematician and is one of the first known creators of automata in the history of Western civilization. His original works were destroyed in the fire that consumed the ancient library in Alexandria, but some of his work survived by way of copies that were made in Arabic. Here is his work on Pneumatics, which included a working steam engine — an invention that was perhaps several thousand years ahead of its time.

The Pneumatics of Hero of Alexandria

Google Books: The Pneumatics of Hero of Alexandria (full text)