I have done most of my work while anxious about whether I could do the job, and unsure that it would be enough to achieve the goal if I did.
But I tried anyway, because there was no one but me between the enemy and my city. Surprising myself, I have sometimes succeeded.

From this article about GNU HURD.

The game had a splash screen of a Far Side comic, then a short video of me tromping through the woods like a Neanderthal, which my Dad filmed and which I digitized with a very early video capture card.

In Borland’s Turbo C++ 3.0 I wrote a basic graphics engine to display the tiles of the world, and an event loop so I could move the main character around the world. I drew sprites for a proto-human (the micro zooid), dirt, rocks and sticks. He could walk around the world, and pick up and put down rocks or sticks.

Then I took a break to plan. I have a proto-human, rocks, and sticks. How do I get to civilization?

Instead of databases becoming available as a result of Freedom Of Information Act requests, government officials should be required to justify why any public data should not be freely available to the taxpayers who paid for its creation.

Wow, what an exciting time to be in North America.

From the O’Reilly Radar.

The pricing structure for air mail / air freight is closely linked to the costs faced by the airline.

When you travel with your parcels, a disconnect appears. You buy a certain amount of space – typically a seat for yourself, a small bag and one or two big bags. A bigger seat (’business’, ‘premium’, etc) is more money. Extra bags is more money. But you’re not paying by weight – and I think that will have to change.

Currently you get a fixed amount of weight for your bags, and an unlimited amount of weight for yourself. A 120lb (55kg) waif with no luggage pays the same as a 260lb (115kg) behemoth with their full complement of luggage (2x 50lbs in the hold plus 40lb in the cabin, on American Airlines). That’s the same price for 120lb as for 400lb! Try convincing an air freight company (UPS, Fedex, etc) to use that pricing structure!

The reason it works is that the 120lb person subsidizes the 400lb one, and the airlines hope it evens out. Now, whenever you see that type of setup, there is an opportunity. Attract only the most valuable customers (the light low-luggage ones, who are over-paying their share of the fuel), split the difference with them, and you have a business.

The reason I think this will happen is that it will only take one airline to switch. The first one to start charging by weight will get a lot of press coverage, and higher profits (from over-charging the light customers slightly less than the other airlines). Once the high-value customers start using an airline that offers them better rates, the balance stops working everywhere else. The other airlines end up with only the heavy high-luggage customers that are paying less than their share of the fuel. They have to change to survive.

Airline pricing should be a flat rate for your seat (depending on the ‘class’ of your seat), and a price per lb or kg you want the airline to carry. The weight price should fluctuate as often as the price at the petrol pump.

… a document (often XML-based) which contains content items, often summaries of stories or weblog posts with web links to longer versions. Weblogs and news websites are common sources for web feeds, but feeds are also used to deliver structured information ranging from weather data to “top ten” lists of hit tunes. The two main web feed formats are RSS (which is older and far more widely used) and Atom (a newer format that has just completed the IETF standardization process.) Feeds are subscribed to directly by users with aggregators or feed readers, which combine the contents of multiple web feeds for display on a single screen or series of screens

Aggregators and feed readers are widely used, but mainly by tech-savvy individuals. It’s time your company rolled out a feed reader on every desktop PC it owns. Here’s why:

It saves time

Most of your employees visit a certain set of sites regularly. Usually the sites of newspapers, their sports team, their friends site, and probably business specific sites such as financial information pages, industry insider sites, etc. All these sites will provide an feed – imagine the time your staff will save if the information comes to them, without them having to visit all these web sites every day. And feed readers are really easy to use – they make e-mail look complicated.

New business uses

Once your tech guys know everyone has a reader, they can start using it in internal applications. Feeds can include:

• Audit trails – what data is being entered where and by whom.
• CVs of job applicants.
• Human Resources announcements: List of staff changes (hired, resigned, promotions, etc).
• Management information – deal progress (bid, close, etc).
• Internal blogs.

Technology team uses

The technology / IT team can make great use of feeds:

• Version control check-ins.
• Bug tracking system activity.
• Changes to the internal Wiki.
• Logging / Monitoring of machines and applications.
• Reduce support – instead of an alert appearing on the support desk system, and someone being telephoned, the person responsible simply monitors the feed. No-one likes doing support – now they don’t have to !
• New clients – Konfabulator, Google desktop sidebar, probably the Mac dashboard, and most of the worlds programming languages, can consume feeds (RSS or Atom). You can easily develop new widgets or applications to act on your feeds. By having your internal apps expose their data in feeds, you are enabling your IT team to build a whole new generation of applications.

Reduce e-mail clutter

All of the above could also be sent as regular e-mails to internal mailing lists. And they often are. I bet you have a range of filters in your e-mail client to move all that e-mail clutter (internal spam) to various folders. By replacing e-mail with feeds you:

• Empower the users: Individuals monitor the feeds they want and don’t subscribe to the others.
• Reclaim e-mail: All machine generated e-mail becomes feeds; the only e-mail you get is from real people, and as you don’t have to deal with the clutter, you’ll have time to read it !

Much better communication

That’s what it’s all about, By putting a feed everywhere you can, you are opening up your organisation to its employees. Internal staff can go probe any particular part of a business or IT system, and monitor it, learn about it, watch it live. Result: A better informed more pro-active team !

So, what are you waiting for. Evaluate a few from this list of feed readers, pick your favorite, and deploy it !

Strategy is the art of distributing and applying military means to fulfill the ends of policy – Lidell Hart

Strategy must now be understood as nothing less than the overall plan for utilizing the capacity for armed coercion – in conjunction with economic, diplomatic, and psychological instruments of power – to support foreign policy most effectively by overt, covert, and tacit means. – Robert Osgood

Strategy is the theory and practice of the use, and threat of use, of organized force for political purposes. – Colin Gray

This section is sourced from Strategy in the contemporary world, An Introduction to Strategic Studies by John Baylis, James Wirtz, Eliot Cohen and Colin S. Gray. It is a book I highly recommend. Any miskates are my own.

Relevance

Strategic Studies is the bridge between military means and political goals; it is a sub-field of Security Studies, itself a sub-field of International Relations which is a sub-field of Political Science. From the 50’s to the 80’s it was the dominant sub-field of International Relations.

The Berlin Wall fell in 1989, but the NATO powers had barely had time to start re-appraising their military needs when Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, followed by a decade of Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Kosovo, leading straight into the attack on World Trade Center, then the American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. The end of the Cold War has not brought peace to everyone, nor given strategic planners much more sleep.

Mind-set

The philosophical viewpoint of contemporary strategists is what they call Realism.

Realism is a clear recognition of the limits of reason in politics: the acceptance of the fact that political realities are power realities and that power must be countered with power; that self-interest is the primary datum in the action of all groups and nations – Gordon Harland

Realism has a pessimistic view of human nature, subscribing to the views of Thomas Hobbes that people are inherently destructive, selfish, competitive and aggressive, and that these destructive traits can never be eliminated. Strategists attempts to minimise the likelihood and severity of international violence, but do not believe in the possibility of permanent peace.

Strategic studies focuses on the relationships between states. Unlike domestic society, there is no authoritative government to create justice and the rule of law. Realists note that states reserve the right to use lethal force to achieve their objectives, a right that individuals living in civil society have given up to the state. Who wins in international relations does not depend on who is right according to some moral or legal ruling but purely on the balance of power.

Realists see a limited role for ‘reason’, law, morality and supra-national institutions in world politics. As there is no ‘world government’ to enforce international law, to promote a universal moral code, or even to enforce the decisions of organisations such as the United Nations, states will agree with the law, moral code or decree when it suits them and disregard it when it threatens their interests. Realists see supra-national organisations not as truly independent actors but as agents set up by states to further their national interest.

Criticism

If you have read this far, you may well be thinking that the field of Strategic Studies is obsessed with conflict and force, insufficiently concerned with ethical issues, part of the problem, not the solution, and state-centric. These are the main points of criticism of Strategic Studies.

They respond by saying that yes they are interested in conflict and violence, in fact that is what they study, in the same way that computer programmers are interested in computers. They recognise that their field of study is only a sub-field of International Relations.

On the second point, they claim that they cannot let ethics interfere with their morally neutral scholarly detachment.

The third point, that strategists are part of the problem, not the solution, can be translated as: viewing military power as a legitimate instrument of policy helps to perpetuate a particular mind-set among national leaders and the public which encourages the use of force. Strategists respond that they reflect, rather than create, the reality of international relations. That most policymakers and elected officials tend to share their assumptions is because of the threats and challenges presented to them, not because of the strategists mind-set. They believe that conflict cannot be permanently avoided, but that effective strategy can mitigate it.

On that final criticism, that they are state centric, they say that they do concern themselves with intra-state conflict (Kosovo, Bosnia, Chechnya), but as the state is the main actor in world politics, that continues to be their main focus.

An 1888 law encouraging emigration to the colonies of unemployed adults and pauper children from the overcrowded cities of England and Wales was repealed in 2004.

The Internet abounds with weird outdated laws like these. A law is valid until it is repealed. As law makers (an elected assembly) make more laws than they repeal, we get more and more laws. Only a small section of them end up being relevant to the world we live in. There is a simple solution: Laws should expire.

I propose that every law passed should include its expiry date. 1 year for emergency legislation, 5 – 10 years for most laws, with probably a cap of 20 years. Laws forming part of a country’s constitution – i.e. the major ‘basis of society’ laws such as not permitting murder – could have 50 – 100 year renewable periods.

As the laws come up for review they can be modified and updated, for example to take into account new technology and new social patterns. In the case of emergency legislation the country will of had more time to consider the issue.

Regularly updating and revising laws would make them more directly relevant to our daily lives, easier to understand by non-legal professionals, and easier to apply and enforce. There would be less need for interpretation by a judge or jury, which would mean much smaller differences in how different people are treated for the same offense.

The maximum life-span of a law could be tied to how long it has already been in force, how long it was debated for, and how many members of the assembly participated in making it. This would prevent governments rushing laws through ‘in the middle of the night’ (The U.S.A. Patriot Act being a very good example of this). If the law was only presented (or amended) a few hours before the vote, and only a few people voted, then you are not representing the people. You should not be able to make a long-term law. If the law has already been in force for some years, or most of the assembly voted on it, then that is a more representative law and should live longer.

Shrimp is a term used to describe about 2000 species of small aquatic animals related to crabs, lobsters, and crayfish. The site here might help pick a variety for growing indoors. Aquarium hobbyists keep shrimp to eat algae and detritus, but those species are not the eating kind.

They are already farmed commercially (see here) so it is possible and commercially viable – although they grow them in the sea / rivers rather than in tanks. They are even farmed organically. The genus they use is Macro-brachium. I saw a mention that they take about five months to grow up to eating size. The only question remains as to whether they can grow in a small aquarium.

Has anyone heard of this being done before ? Is there a good reason why this wouldn’t work ? What about crayfish ?

Often you press the button whilst some cars go past, then realize there is no more traffic, so you cross the road. The lights don’t know you have already crossed so a bit later the traffic lights go red and the cars stop and wait whilst no-one crosses. Wouldn’t it be much better if there was a button you could press just before you crossed saying that you don’t need the lights to change any more ?

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OK, maybe this one won’t work :-)

So I propose a machine made of two soft rollers, upright facing each other, with a pressure sensitive pad in the middle. The cat presses the pad and the rollers rotate, one pressing against each of the cats cheeks. Think of the two upright rollers of a very small car-wash to visualise the two rollers.

At the start of major walking trails a dog rental business could setup. In the same way you can rent horses, you could rent dogs. They would have to be a friendly easy going breed that loves company, maybe golden retrievers ? The walkers get a friend to walk with and a more enjoyable walk, the dogs gets loads of walking and affection, and you get income.

If you run a high-tech company, have you ever thought that your techies were maybe a little childish ?. They need someone to feed them (at lunchtime), remember everything for them (such as renewing their passports), all the whilst putting up with their antics.

Enter the office mum. Think of an office mum as a PA on, euh, tea. Mums who’s children have left home adopt your company as their child, and manage everything whilst putting up with your techies. The Mum gets money and recognition, the techies get babysat and home cooked lunches, and you (the person-in-charge) get happy productive techies and don’t have to put up with any dramas.