Now that we have a neocon government bent on empire, how do we go about getting rid of them? Obviously not by sitting around in blogs and exhorting. Here is what I wrote on The Progressive Blog Alliance forum:

“The ineffectual Kerry campaign, some relevant new articles and personal meditation reveal that a revolution is necessary, but it has to be one that comes from outside the status quo. A great interview in Alternet also puts forth some of the same worries and ideas I have been entertaining in this vein.

“There are three interrelated things going on here:

“1. We cannot fight on the government’s terms. After 9-11 and the announcement of the war on Iraq, our “progressive” representatives …

Continue reading “Revolution From Without”

Update: John over at By The Bayou explains this much better than I ever can.

Music purchasing just gets easier and easier. The following artists have joined the fight against music piracy: the Eagles, the Dixie Chicks, Bonnie Raitt, Sheryl Crow, Stevie Nicks, Tom Jones and Beach Boys founder Brian Wilson. Oooh, I’m scared.

Don Henley, the voice that brought you All She Wants To Do Is Dance says, “There is no more important case for the future of our business. These systems promote copyright violations on an unprecedented scale.”

Stop. There is no more reason to buy your music.

Does this mean big business conservatives like the Dixie Chicks now?

According to The Pew Internet and American Life Project survey released recently, “only 1 in 6 users of Internet search engines can tell the difference between unbiased search results and paid advertisements.”

While D argues that most people don’t know how to use search engines because they aren’t all that computer-savvy in the first place, this is great news for my non-profit, anti-Google search engine that will take you to unbiased search results (based not on how many hits it gets, but on how well it fits your query) and weigh/normalize various other results as you refine your search. Coming to a computer near you in full color, 3D and surround sound.

Don’t know how I’m going to to do it, but I will.

Mainstream industry are not early adopters, as is obvious from the only recent boom of commodity Linux, OpenSource and database solutions. Observing Miron Livny’s work in grid computing at the University of Wisconsin since 2000, I wondered why companies didn’t absorb and utilize this concept, when SETI@Home, Cancer Grid and academic researchers have put it to great use. A system like Livny’s Condor could crunch through the oil industry’s petabyte seismic data sets just as it iterated our academic research group’s forward and inverse electromagnetic models. Some companies have internal grids and clusters, but what if all the oil majors could get together and host a super-grid and make it available to internal clients and then schools and research labs?

Globus which started as a government-funded project is now in the news because it has become a Consortium with backing from industry bigwigs such as IBM, HP, Sun and Intel. A great idea, but I foresee some problems: security and resource ownership. How secure is proprietary information and how much is company X going to pay the Consortium for time and resources used? Grids work well because so far they have been internal or non-profit. I can see a huge amount of bureaucracy created and time and money wasted by the various business/finance departments over this. Someone out there had already thought of this and wrote about it back in 2001.

Industry paranoiacs like oil companies may fall into this late in the game for fear of information loss/theft, but you never know. I maintain that it would be in their best interest to develop their own grid for data crunching and customize the necessary software and networks to their own business needs.

Grid Computing resources:
Cheat sheet: Grid Computing
grid.org