A LinuxDevices.com
article carries the news that five
manufacturers of single-board computers (SBCs) announced a new
industry standard form factor called EPIC at this year's Embedded
Systems
Conference. EPIC boards will be 115mm by 165mm which is larger than
PC/104 but smaller than the EBX
standard. The EPIC standard includes on-board PC/104 and PC/104-Plus
connectors for expansion boards. The standard also allows PC-style
connectors for I/O instead of the pin-headers common on PC/104
designs.
Build It: Small Form Factor PC04/13/2004 12:38 AM Small form factor rigs are all the rage now. Small, Shuttle-cube style
PCs have some limitations, though, and off-the-shelf compact systems
often limit expansion. Here's how we built a killer small form factor
PC without breaking the bank.
Small Form Factor PC Roundup09/15/2004 03:36 AM Over the past couple of years, we've reviewed lots of
small-form-factor PCs from companies such as Shuttle, AOpen, and EPoX.
This roundup brings them all together—don't buy a SFF PC without
checking it out.
Build It: Small Form Factor PC, Part II04/15/2004 01:09 PM Now that we've got all our parts, let's step through the assembly
process. It's a bit trickier than putting together a full-tower
configuration.
CES: Seagate to launch CF form-factor hard-disk01/05/2005 01:43 PM Seagate Technologies LLC will begin offering a Compact Flash (CF) card
form-factor hard-disk drive from February this year, the company said
at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, on
Tuesday.
Massive Small Form Factor Preview From Computex
Massive Small Form Factor Preview From Computex10/29/2003 06:04 PM Ultim8pc points to this "huge article covering almost every Small Form
Factor offering that was on show at Computex. Includes, details of
each manufacturers ...
Ars System Guide: Small Form Factor systems
Ars System Guide: Small Form Factor systems06/07/2004 10:24 PM The Ars Technica System Guide returns. This month, we introduce the
Small Form Factor Hot Rod and Ultimate Budget Box.
Iomega To Exit Small-Form-Factor Storage
Iomega To Exit Small-Form-Factor Storage07/23/2004 06:03 PM Iomega Corp. this week said it plans to wind down its DCT
small-form-factor storage operation, failing to find enough customers
to keep the operation afloat.
Shuttle Puts LGA775 Chips into Small Form-Factor PCs
Howard Computers First to Offer 1.6TB of Storage in a 1U Form Factor Server
Howard Computers First to Offer 1.6TB of Storage in a 1U Form Factor Server03/14/2005 06:15 PM Howard Computers leapfrogs the competition with their NX20 and NX400
servers – both offering 1.6TB of storage in a 1 U form factor. These
servers are ideal for any business environment demanding performance,
vast amounts of storage, but with limited space. [PRWEB Mar 11, 2005]
Memory Stick form-factor WiFi card coming from Sony
The Plasticsmith has done it again. The
company that brought the newly minted Mac mini its own "mini
skirt," a plastic riser with an optional glow, have added a new
stand to their line-up: the mini hover skirt.
EPIC standard SBC
EPIC standard SBC12/27/2004 04:36 AM Reed Business Information Dec 27 2004 8:49AM GMT
Oracle's Epic War11/12/2003 08:02 PM Yahoo!'s Overture and Google are the leaders in this category. Keyword
search is now responsible for nearly a third of all online ad revenue.
...
When I first started watching it, it was like a summary of
shiftedness, a timeline of topics my site has covered. By the end,
though, I felt like I was watching Terminator 3.
Samurai epic is a cut above
Samurai epic is a cut above07/13/2004 05:12 AM Onimusha 3: Demon Siege is a good old-fashioned hack'n'slash video
game adventure.
Circumcised at 22: A romantic epic.
Circumcised at 22: A romantic epic.12/04/2003 10:48 AM Circum
cised at 22: A romantic epic. It didn't feel as good. It
really didn't feel as good. It was an entirely different
experience from sex with a foreskin, kind of like Star Wars vs.
Star Wars: Episode I. I never realized how much sexual pleasure
was derived from my foreskin rubbing back and forth against my glans -
a little bit of masturbation mixed in with sex.
Voyager's epic journey may end04/11/2005 02:49 PM “Historic space mission could lose its funding under Bush
initiative In a cost-cutting move prompted by President Bush’s
moon-Mars initiative, NASA could summarily put an end to Voyager, the
legendary 28-year mission that has sent a spacecraft farther from
Earth than any object ever made by humans. The probable October
shutdown of a program that currently costs $4.2 million a year has
caused dismay among scientists who have shepherded the twin Voyager
probes on flybys…
VersaLogic Gecko EPIC SBC09/18/2004 04:33 PM VersaLogic has introduced
a new EPIC form-factor SBC called the Gecko. EPIC boards
are 4.5 x 6.5 inches and the new Gecko controller offers lots of
I/O that will be interesting to robot builders. The CPU used is a
366MHz AMD Geode
GX-500 and Linux is supported. The board supports of up 512MB of
RAM and includes AGP video, LCD support, 10/100 Ethernet, an 8 channel
12 bit A/D converter, 16 digital I/O lines, AC97 audio, four USB
ports,
an IDE controller, 2 RS-232 ports, 2 RS-422/485 ports, a PC parallel
port, PS/2 style keyboard and mouse ports, and a PC/104 expansion
connector. The board will be a bit pricey, however, at $650 in OEM
quantities.
Jon Udell has been
pioneering what he calls "screencasting," an unusual sort of online
journalism that involves taking over your browser screen with
screengrabs and animations while he narrates via the audio track. It
always seemed mildly interesting to me as a way to do technology demos
and product walkthroughs and the like; but with this
piece, Udell has taken the form to a higher level, and shown us
that it's something weird and wonderful -- and unique to our new Web
world.
Plus we get a full technical education in the difficulty of
producing an umlauted "n" on screen, an investigation into an act of
drive-by wiki vandalism, and an anthropological chronicle of the
behavior of Wikipedia contributors. Bravo!
Venter's Epic DNA Expedition
Venter's Epic DNA Expedition07/28/2004 06:17 AM He wanted to play God, so he cracked the human genome. Now he wants to
play Darwin and collect the DNA of everything on the planet. By James
Shreeve from Wired magazine.
Football: Blackburn win epic
Football: Blackburn win epic04/12/2004 04:58 PM Jon Stead scores a dramatic late winner as Blackburn win a seven-goal
thriller at Fulham.
Henman earns epic French win05/30/2004 10:32 AM Tim Henman saves a match point before beating Michael Llodra in five
sets at the French Open. Grok Description matches for EPIC: A New SBC Form Factor GrokA matches for EPIC: A New SBC Form Factor
Civilization III 1.29b2
Civilization III 1.29b206/02/2004 04:44 PM Adds a number of features and improvements to the epic simulation
game.
A Clash in Civilization06/18/2004 05:32 PM It's a busy time in this nation's government. At the same time as
chairing talks on the placement of new settlements along the disputed
eastern border, the Minister of the Interior is trying to defend his
share of this year's budget against the hawks in the Ministry of War.
Diplomats from the Foreign Office are generating headaches throughout
the government with their disturbing news of conflict in the south.
While the political parties bicker over an official response, worried
civil servants are hastily drawing up contingency plans for the
nation's defence and negotiators dash from meeting to meeting in a
Sisyphean effort to mediate peace between the foreign countries. This
could be a timeless description of politics anywhere in the world,
except these politicians have never met face to face before and the
worst harm that could come from war is bruised egos. The year is
610BC, and it's just another turn for the nation of Apolyton to play
in the first ever Intersite Democracy Game of Civilization 3, possibly
the most cerebral, complex - and unknown - game on the Internet.
The goal of this "visual sourcebook" is
to add to the material teachers can use to help their students
understand Chinese history, culture, and society. It was not designed
to stand alone; we assume that teachers who use it will also assign a
textbook with basic information about Chinese history. Several
pedagogical concerns shaped the design of this website. Although some
topics (e.g. philosophy, religion, social distinctions,
historiography) are best taught through written texts, many facets of
Chinese civilization are more easily conveyed through images (material
culture, technology, visual and performing arts, and so on). We have
therefore not attempted to illustrate all the major themes of a course
on China. Moreover, rather than give a few pictures of many topics, as
illustrated histories often do, we have instead prepared substantial
units on ten important subject areas spanning the length of Chinese
history: geography, archaeology, religion, calligraphy, military
technology, painting, homes, gardens, clothing, and the graphic arts.
Students should be able to view these units before coming to class,
much as they would read texts in a sourcebook of primary sources. This
will be added to International
Trade Resources 2004-05 Internet MiniGuide.
Civilization arises from agreements about shit
Civilization arises from agreements about shit01/08/2004 07:44 PM "Shit and Civilization" is a course offered at the London Consortium;
the syllabus looks very good indeed. Lenny Bruce once did a bit about
how all civilization begins with a social contract regarding where you
shit and where you don't. Living as I do in the public defecation capital of
North America, I'm inclined to agree: I think that this course
should be a prerequisite in all post-secondary degree programmes.
Our societies are, quite literally, founded on shit. Civilization
means living in cities and cities are confronted, in a way more
dispersed settlements are not, with heaps of garbage and ordure.
Ancient cities are now identified by the mounds raised above the
surrounding terrain, called tells. Tells are heaps of rubble, garbage
and ordure into which cities have crumbled. Cities have always left
the poor to scavenge and to live from re-cycling garbage. In many
contemporary third world cities slums have been built on and around
the town dump.
The Idea: Over the past two years I've been sharing my, and
others', ideas on a better way to live, and what needs to be done to
get there. This article is an attempt to recap many of those articles,
and draw them together into a cohesive and practical model for a
post-civilization culture.
For three million years human
society was built on a gatherer-hunter culture, based on community, a
culture we shared with the rest of life on Earth. When a series of
natural and man-made events created a sudden and severe food shortage
30,000 years ago, a new acquirer-settler culture evolved, based on
agriculture and more recently on energy-driven industrialization and
urbanization, and maintained by the establishment of political
hierarchy and unequal ownership which artificially created scarcity,
slavery and dependence, which were necessary to command obedience and
maintain law and order in such an 'unnatural' culture. Now we are
again
at a turning point, as we realize that this culture, which we call
'civilization', is not sustainable, and is running into a wall as it
attempts with greater and greater difficulty to defy the laws of
thermodynamics, the laws of finite capacity, and nature's balancing
mechanisms: pandemic disease and adrenaline-provoked lethal
aggressiveness, psychological breakdown and incapacity, as triggered
responses to overcrowding and scarcity.
I have argued
that the root causes of this overcrowding and scarcity, and hence of
all the
problems
we face today, are overpopulation and overconsumption, though some
think I am giving the ruling elites of our world too much benefit of
the doubt by not listing their psychopathic violence and greediness as
root causes. I have therefore maintained that to build a
post-civilization culture we need to do four things:
We need to tell
everyone a new
story of our planet's destiny, a new vision, and show them a new
model,
a better way to live that will realize that vision.
We need to achieve
broad consensus that
overpopulation and overconsumption are the root causes of our current
culture's unsustainability, and that they must be actively addressed
and solved.
We
need to tap into the collective wisdom of Earth's people to find the
best solutions to these two root problems, and help them test and
implement the solutions in their communities.
We need to help each other clear away
obstacles to success, through humanitarian and peacemaking assistance,
helping to
build new infrastructure that will work in the new community-based
world, redistributing resources from the rich to the poor, and
disarming those that will try to establish new wealth and power
hierarchies.
I thought it might be useful to set out a 'straw man' model of how to
go about the first three of these steps, something that people can
shoot at and refine and test out. My model is illustrated above and
has
four components: Principles (a basic set of standards to guide how the
new culture would operate), Learnings (what each of us must learn and
teach to make the new culture successful), Enablers (the tools and
systems we need to have at our disposal to make the new culture work),
and Infrastructure (what we need to build to show that the new culture
works, and to make it sustainable). Here's a quick walk-through of
what
I'm proposing be in each component:
Principles:
Because it's so difficult to get consensus on principles, and because
principles cannot be imposed, I think it's important that the new
culture have as few principles, and as inclusive and intuitive
principles as possible. The smallest set I can come up with that will
do the job is these five, and they're all about responsibility:
Legacy Principle: We must leave the world at least as
healthy, abundant and well-off for future generations as we found it.
Gaia Principle: We recognize that Earth is a single,
self-balancing, self-managing organism of which we are an inseparable
part, and we have a sacred responsibility to respect and live in
harmony with all other life on Earth, not treat it as our 'property',
and to waste nothing.
Stop at One Principle: Until we can restore a healthy
balance to life on our planet, and live up to the Legacy and Gaia
Principles, we must procreate no more than one child for each two
human
inhabitants until our population is reduced to one billion.
No
Debts No Deficits Principle: We must always live within
our means, be beholden to no others, and never encumber our
descendants.
Trade Only Surpluses Principle: We will buy from
other
communities only those things which we cannot reasonably produce
ourselves, and sell to other communities only those things which we do
not need ourselves.
Learnings:
We cannot expect to be able to live successfully in a new culture
without learning (or re-learning) how to make a living together and
how
to live together. Each one of us must learn critical skills to that
end, such as those depicted in the map above. Just as importantly, we
need to learn to reconnect with nature, with our instincts, and with
all other life in our communities. This will take time, patience,
practice, and immersion in wilderness -- not to 'conquer' our fear of
it, but to accept it as sacred and as our home, to understand after
millennia of forgetting that we
are animals, and that we are an integral part of the whole ecosystem.
Without this reconnection and re-learning we will simply revert to the
bad habits of the acquirer-settler culture.
Enablers:
The basic building blocks of the new culture are community, knowledge,
self-sufficiency, connection, collaboration and innovation. The
Internet will allow
us
to acquire and share these building blocks. We can use it to find
like-minds for our new communities, to teach and learn how to make
these communities successful and sustainable, and to collaborate with
others to share ideas and successes, and to find innovative solutions
to the problems we encounter in community-building. This will allow us
to realize the three pillars of Freeman Dyson's
Dream that will be essential to successful and sustainable
communities:
The free exchange of information (and of everything else
that can be reduced to bytes);
The development of community-based renewable energy
co-ops that will make each community energy self-sufficient;
and
The development of open-source innovations in sustainable
agriculture and biotech, which will allow communities to also become
self-sufficient in producing their own food, fabrics and other
more-with-less materials that encourage and enable sustainable, humane
low-footprint methods of meeting all the communities' essential
needs.
Infrastructure:
With the right principles that can guide our decisions, the learnings
to build the new culture properly, and the enabling building blocks,
we
can create the infrastructure that embodies the new culture. I think
this infrastructure needs three key components:
Model Intentional Communities: These are the new
political, social and
economic units of the new culture. They embody our choices on who we
want to live with and how we want to live, and manage ourselves, as
autonomous communities or 'tribes' of like-minded individuals. Much
has
been written about how to
construct these once we have the principles, learnings and
enablers to do so effectively.
Natural Enterprises: The
community of people with whom one chooses to live, and the people with
whom one may choose to make a living
(work), will not necessarily be the same people, and with
modern communications and 'virtual presence' technology it need not
be. The formation and principles behind Natural
Enterprises are different from, but entirely consistent with, those
that underlie Model Intentional Communities.
Collaborative
Solution Centres: There will be problems,
especially in the early going of the new culture, that cannot be
effectively solved by the members of a single community. There is some
doubt in my mind whether the Internet, even with much improved social
networking and 'shared space', communication and connectivity tools,
will have adequate resources to solve these problems effectively. I
see
a role, therefore, for Solution Centres that will aggregate the
people,
knowledge, skills and
practices
that will allow large and diverse groups of people with a shared
problem to answer it effectively. These Centres could also do
double-duty as sites (physical and/or virtual) for the teaching of
critical skills that cannot be more effectively taught in the field.
They could in fact become the 'community centres' of the new
culture.
That's the model. It's a straw-man, so kick away.
QX buddy, the Lensmen are here to save Civilization
QX buddy, the Lensmen are here to save Civilization08/04/2004 02:54 AM
If you like Science Fiction, if you like Star Wars, Babylon 5, or
the Green Lantern, then you've probably heard of E. E. "Doc"
Smith Ph.D., the man credited with getting powdered sugar to stick to
donuts and with creating several of the most influential tales to ever
spring from the "pulps" of the 1940s. The grandfather
of Space Opera his Lensmen books, while badly written and horribly dated,
still create that sense of wonder that all SF junkies crave.
I don't want to alarm you all, but a handful of papers presented at
Crypto
2004 conference last week could force most, if not all,
security software, services,
and certificates to be upgraded in the near future.
Why? Because
strength of two popular hashing algorithms, MD5 and SHA-1, are
being questioned
by those papers. These algorithms are used literally
everywhere so, if these
papers are right, the impact crater will be huge.
MD5 was known to be weak before but, according to one of the
papers, it's much
weaker than previously known. How weak? Supposedly,
just a few hours on
your desktop PC will break it, meaning you can find a bogus set of
bits that produce
the same hash as the bits you are trying to spoof. Oy!
Petición para liberar el código de Civilization II
findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1111/is_1837_306/ai_103124295/pri
nt track this
site | 4 links
Don't listen to cynical American reporters and played-out professors who laugh at the idea of civilization. Watch instead how dictators and monarchs in the region recoil at it all
I'm working on an update of the
long paper
that describes my 'journey' to environmental awareness and activism.
Rather than starting the revision at the beginning, I thought I'd
start
with what was most important -- the final section with the 'root cause
analysis' and the 'solution map' that ultimately became my How to Save the World Roadmap.
When I first published this paper on my blog, the charts that
accompanied it generated more buzz than the paper itself. You can find
them here and
here.
Since then, I've come to realize that these variables are less
cause-and-effect than components of a self-reinforcing and
self-perpetuating system. In Systems Thinking terminology, the
'virtuous circle' of life that existed in nature until about 30,000
years ago was 'disrupted' by events that upset the equilibrium and
rippled through the system, producing a new self-reinforcing and
self-perpetuating system that we call 'civilization'.
Based on the research I've since done on population, violence, and on
our political, economic and social systems, I've now updated the
charts
to show the circular nature and greater interrelationship of the 19
elements. The first chart shows how nature works as a self-managed,
self-balancing planetary organism -- a map perhaps of what is called
the Gaia Theory:
Chart 1
And the second chart shows the equivalent man-made
systems that have come into play with the dawn of civilization 30,000
years ago. This replacement system, alas, is not self-balancing -- it
is utterly unsustainable, though our awareness of that fact is only a
century old:
Chart 2
How did this unfortunate transformation occur? We don't
know for sure, but the most compelling theory I have seen is that, as
a
consequence of the last ice age, and/or the invention of efficient
hunting tools (like the spear, and the bow and arrow), there was a
sudden and massive shortage of the big, lumbering game that man had
hunted so easily since his emergence on the planet. So the element to
the right of the red box changed from "Abundant Resources and Energy"
(chart 1) to "Scarcity of Resources and Energy" (chart 2). Usually
when
this happens (except when it is a result of a major extinction event
like that caused by the meteorite impact 65 million years ago that
wiped out most of life on Earth), nature is able to fix the imbalance.
It does so by causing the species suffering the shortage to reduce its
fertility rate, temporarily increasing its mortality rate (more of
them
are eaten by predators, and epidemics arise to reduce over-crowding),
and the result is a reduction in their consumption of the scarce
resources (food, land etc.), until the scarce resources have had time
to replenish themselves (illustrated in chart 3, below, which is based
on the work of Darwin, Lovelock, and Edward T. Hall). In this sense,
our planetary organism Earth behaves analogously to a human
organism -- when there's a shortage of food, it goes into hibernation,
lowers metabolism, and draws on internal reserves (fat) to compensate
until a new external food supply is found.
Chart 3
But the situation 30,000 years ago was different. Man
had
developed enough intellect to institute some man-made solutions to
scarcity instead of relying on the ones nature had always used. These
human inventions included agriculture, animal domestication, and then,
to make those work, a whole series of social, political and economic
systems. We created man-made 'stores' of resources to offset the
natural shortages, and tools to protect ourselves and our food
supplies
from, and even eradicate, natural predators and diseases. Our
intellect
tipped the balance of power, at least temporarily, from nature to man.
Once that 'tipping point' had been reached, the rest of the 19
elements
on Chart 1 were transformed into the corresponding elements on Chart
2.
By enormous strength of ingenuity and will, we have entrenched this
New
World Order for 30,000 years, and exported it to every corner of the
globe.
The problem is that it's unsustainable, and the kind of tinkering with
it espoused by optimists and those that deny we are in crisis, just
won't fix it -- both nature and civilization are immensely complex
systems, and civilization is also immensely fragile. We need to
simultaneously work on many of these 19 elements to create a new
'tipping point' to restore the natural system that worked for millions
of years before civilization. That doesn't mean going back to a
pre-civilization lifestyle -- that would be foolish and impossible. It
means moving forward on many
fronts -- political, social, economic, ecological, technological and
in
the way we make a living. Let's take a look at some of the weakest
points in Chart 2 to see how we might, with coordinated or ingenious
small-group effort, flip some of them over to their corresponding
Chart
1 states:
Innovation: We need to develop:
Simpler, cheaper, more reliable birth control
technologies (and ban technologies that increase human fertility)
More efficient clean energy technologies (and
encourage
their development by banning technologies that create massive
environmental damage like coal-burning plants, dams, nuclear plants
and
internal combustion engines)
Technologies that prevent rather
than treat diseases (we could learn
much from nature in this area, but we had better do so before we
destroy her medicine cabinet, the tropical rainforests), because
families that live long, healthy lives are
smaller
Technologies that reduce the amount of poisons we
release into the air and the water
Production technologies
that produce no waste, and whose
products are 100% biodegradable -- If it can't be completely,
inexpensively, easily and quickly recycled, it should not be
produced
Technologies that eliminate expensive, polluting,
dependence-creating transportation of goods, and allow local
self-sufficiency and bioregionalism to work (Local wind and solar
energy co-ops, and new greenhouse technologies that expand the range
of
foods that can be locally produced, for example) -- Nothing should
have
to be imported unless it cannot be reasonably produced
locally
Technologies that allow us to do more with less, that
replace hardware with software and molecules with bits -- and where
there is no alternative to durable goods, they should be lightweight,
recyclable, and unconditionally guaranteed to work for many lifetimes,
so there is no need for landfills
Nutritious, delicious foods
that use no animal products,
to render obsolete current technologies that cause massive suffering,
like factory farms and pharmaceutical and chemical products using
laboratory testing
Technologies that produce more edible plant
mass per
acre, without using pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers or genetic
engineering
Networking technologies that allow people working
on
solutions to global problems to self-organize and collaborate more
effectively
Information technologies that allow citizen and
consumer
groups to organize and to identify, prosecute and defeat socially and
environmentally irresponsible corporations, governments and
organizations
Technologies that allow us to learn better from
nature --
the languages of other animals, the mechanisms of self-regulation,
self-organization, conflict resolution, and other important
lessons
Technologies that will prevent and treat mental
illness,
that can be inexpensively and easily provided to all, including those
on the streets and in our criminal institutions
Social Activism: We need
to:
Completely revamp our education systems and wrench
them
away from corporatist control -- they should be community-run,
autonomous, mobile, virtual, and dedicated to teaching responsible
citizenship, how to learn, how to think creatively and critically, how
to get along with others, and how to make a living with those one
cares
about (everything else they can learn by themselves -- they don't need
to be force-fed anyone's biased viewpoint)
Persuade people of
the need and advantage of limiting their families to one
child
Persuade people of the need and advantage of a
'radically simple' lifestyle
Demonstrate by example the
superiority of self-selected,
self-managed communities over both the nuclear family and larger
political units (cities, states) for effective, efficient,
self-sufficient social, political and economic
organization
Think critically and creatively, never stop
challenging, never stop thinking of ideas to make the world even
better
Learn to live a healthy vegan lifestyle, and make more
of our own foods instead of relying on prepackaged foods
Learn
to compromise, cooperate, collaborate, resolve conflicts amicably,
build consensus and negotiate better
Organize to use our very
real power as citizens and
consumers to end corporatism, devolve power to communities and
individuals, create a more open, fair, socially and environmentally
responsible and egalitarian society, and support local
enterprise
Learn to listen, be more respectful and pay
attention
better -- to nature, to each other (especially those with different
views), to women, to children, and to our own instincts
Pace
ourselves -- saving the world is going to take enormous energy,
passion, faith and courage
Community-Based Enterprise
Formation: We need to:
Encourage and facilitate the
formation of innovative, locally-owned, community-based
businesses
Pledge to buy local, so that we have more say in
our
economic lives, so that business is incented to invest in and take
seriously its responsibility to the local community, and so that
unnecessary, polluting, traffic-creating transportation of imported
goods is minimized
Encourage and enable community-based businesses to
take
an active role in the education system, showing our young people how
to
run their own successful local business enterprise
Create
community-based financial institutions that will
exclusively fund community-based businesses and hence enable people in
the community to invest locally
Political Activism: We need
to:
Revamp corporate law to make corporations once again
the
servants of man, not our masters -- rewrite corporate charters to make
them more restrictive and more responsible, and make corporations once
again mere 'economic shells' with no political power, no place
for
corrupt individuals to hide, no separate 'rights', democratic voting,
open information access and a strict size and salary cap
End agricultural and other business
subsidies
End the tax subsidies to religious organizations,
and treat them legally as political organizations
Reform election laws to introduce proportionate
representation and instant-runoff voting, eliminate gerrymandering,
prohibit corporate and group campaign financing, cap personal campaign
financing, and have all elections supervised by international
observers
Shift taxes away from income and employment and
towards
pollution, waste, resource consumption, speculation and wealth
accumulation -- and use these taxes to radically even out wealth and
power disparity
Change our measures of economic 'success' --
scrap GDP
and similar measures in favour of Genuine Progress Indicators and
similar measures of well-being and equality
Revamp
and reduce property rights to cap ownership by any
one individual, require public access to land with special social
attributes (e.g. ocean-front), increase ownership responsibilities,
prohibit property ownership by corporations and organizations (they
could still lease appropriately zoned lands from the public), prohibit
property ownership by non-residents, and solve the Tragedy of the
Commons
Set aside a significant amount of the Earth's area,
across all bioregions, as wilderness land, where no development,
economic activity or pollution would be allowed, and human access
would
be heavily limited
Strengthen, hone and globalize charters of human
rights
and freedoms to include absolute rights to free health care and
education, and give them legal status ahead of domestic
law
Scrap 'free' trade agreements that undermine local and
national social and environmental laws and traditions
Set
global standards for government spending -- a maximum
% of government revenues that can be spent on military activities and
a
minimum % that must be spent on international humanitarian aid, and
expel from the UN countries that violate these standards
Write
off all current third-world international
indebtedness, prohibit creation of new international debt, and ban
extraterritoriality (political and economic activities that compromise
local or national sovereignty)
Reinstate usury laws (limit
interest rates on consumer debts to no more than 3% above inflation
rate)
Introduce currency reform to allow LETS
systems
Extend anti-cruelty laws to all animals, and for the
purpose of such laws define them as living beings, not as property
I have deliberately put political activism as the final category of
this list, because the more I learn about change, the more I am coming
to believe that politics and law are much less effective levers for
change than innovation, social activism or community-based enterprise
formation. Political activism is an uphill battle against the status
quo and against entrenched wealth and power. Social activism and
community-based enterprises, by contrast, work peer-to-peer,
citizen-to-citizen and consumer-to-consumer and, thanks to the power
of
modern communications, can spread virally very quickly, undermining
the
political and economic establishment by working beneath their radar,
until, starved of its grass-roots citizen and consumer support, this
establishment simply crumbles, no longer needed. Most of the bullets
on
the Political Activism list above are, in fact, more about undoing
things that are contributing to ecological collapse, than about doing
something else. And innovation, which respects no political or
economic
authority, can help immensely.
Many of my readers have told me "that's fine, but I'm not rich,
powerful, expert, entrepreneurial or innovative, so what can I do now
to help, to make a difference?" That's a fair question, and I'm
developing the answer to it as the final section of the revised paper
(and also as a more practical replacement for the Roadmap). I should
have it finished next week, and I'll publish it here first.
TI OMAP5912 SoC Dev Kit
TI OMAP5912 SoC Dev Kit09/21/2004 10:26 PM TI has announced
a new development kit for their dual-core system-on-chip
microcontroller. The OMAP5912
Starter Kit includes TI's 192 MHz, OMAP5912
dual-core SoC (an ARM9 CPU and a
TMS320C55x DSP on the same chip). The development board also includes
32
MB DDR,
32 MB Flash, a 10 Mbs Ethernet port, USB port, RS-232 serial port,
JTAG
port, and expansion connectors for GPIO, LCD, and I/O. The starter kit
ships with Monte Vista Linux and
development software. The price $295.
Robots with vision or audio processing needs could probably make good
use of
this one. More
info is available in a recent LinuxDevices.com
story.
Shuttle SB75S Limited Edition
Shuttle SB75S Limited Edition05/04/2004 11:52 PM Review: Shuttle Computer brings us the first small form factor
cube PC to utilize the Intel 875P chipset. How does it perform?
Windows XP Starter Edition a No Starter06/23/2004 07:13 PM Breaking News | BetaNews has confirmation that despite
published reports, Microsoft is not preparing a major release of an
entry level version of Windows dubbed Windows XP Starter Edition.
Windows enthusiasts speculated that Windows XP Starter Edition was a
realignment of the software giant's Office and Windows releases with
Office 2003 Service Pack 1 and Windows XP Service Pack 2 that would
effectively re-launch both products; however, Windows XP Starter
Edition is merely the formal name given to a no-thrills version of the operating system that
will be distributed solely in Thailand and Malaysia.
Review: Ark Linux 1.0 Alpha 10.1
Review: Ark Linux 1.0 Alpha 10.101/22/2004 02:20 PM Adrift in a sea of difficult Linux distros? Sick of treading water
with Windows? Climb aboard Ark Linux and discover smooth sailing!
Review: SuSE Linux 911/13/2003 04:09 AM SuSE Linux 9, the latest release from Nuremberg, Germany-based SuSE
Linux, was released at the end of last month. I put SuSE Linux
Professional through its paces, and found it to be the most
user-friendly Linux distribution on the market. It's not a "must"
update for users of previous versions, but it does have some nice
perks.
Review: PlanMaker for Linux06/25/2004 02:22 AM Spreadsheet development has more or less solidified over the past year
-- the majority of the features that most people need are already
there in long-established proprietary programs like Excel and Lotus
123 -- and that means that the door is open for smaller companies and
free software projects to grab market share with capable, inexpensive
products. That's probably the best way to describe SoftMaker's $49.95
PlanMaker 2004 for Linux, which was released earlier this month:
capable, inexpensive, cross-platform competition for Microsoft Excel
2003. You won't find a more Excel-compatible spreadsheet on any
operating system, but Microsoft compatibility is far from PlanMaker's
only worthwhile feature.
qpsmtpd review in Linux Journal12/02/2003 01:19 AM Lots of things happened in my life in the last ~2 months. But they've
all been either too personal to post here or too insignificant
relatively to the important things for me to want to take time to
write them. I considered writing about the more personal things, but I
decided against it. I think I might be about ready to pick up the
stream of nonessential random tidbits again though... We'll see. The
December issues of Linux Journal includes...
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