World Affairs

Paul Grahm has published a must-read essay on What Businesses Can Learn from Open-Source. His observations are succinct, self-evident, and refreshingly open to the future that large corporations are so despretly trying not to acknowledge. Forgive me for the grandiose tone, but the rise of Open-Source is inextricably interwined with the highly disruptive rise of the network, as a new major form of social organization. It is not an exaggeration to say that the network will change the world as much as the free market.

Some proof of the bold claim I just made can be found in Iraq out of all places. In Iraq what we are really witnessing is a clash between an insurgency organized along the lines of a SPIN network (Segmented, Polycentric, Ideologically bound Network -- a very powerful and insidious foe) VS. the heirarchial US military (like Goliath, large, powerful, but very slow and clumsy) with virtually unlimited financial resources. Strangely, Microsoft is learning the exact same lessons as the US military in the realities of this emerging age of the network.

"There’s no nice way to say this: The world’s richest countries are deliberately, and as a matter of policy, promoting poverty and starvation in the world’s poorest countries."

The Hunger Barrier

LiveScience gives Dr. Evil (and all of those little and precious Dr. Evils to be) the top 10 ways to destroy the Earth. In #4, with tounges firmly in their cheeks, they suggest:

Basically, what we're going to do here is dig up the Earth, a big chunk at a time, and boost the whole lot of it into orbit.

...If we wanted to and were willing to devote resources to it, we could start this process RIGHT NOW. Indeed, what with all the gunk left in orbit, on the Moon and heading out into space, we already have done.

In a later section that discusses timeframes, they do admit that this plan has a downside:

Earliest feasible completion date: Ah. Yes. At a billion tons of mass driven out of the Earth's gravity well per second: 189,000,000 years.

I greatly admire their honesty.

The Chief Blogging Officer at High Beam Research brought forward some very disturbing news: A serious outbreak of Marburg Fever is occurring in Angola. What is Marburg Fever? To begin, like Small Pox, Ebola, Hanta and Lassa, its classified as a level 4 biohazard; in otherwords, Marburg is as dangerous as viruses and bacteria come. Its

How could anyone say "no" to that smile? Well, apparently the capitalist pigs at the Czech Foreign Ministry can... The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (who are mere parlor-pinkos, might I add) give us the full scoop:

See? That's all that he asks. But the imperialist lackeys in the Czech Republic continue to insist that they don't "ban films" in a Democratic society. I wonder if the Czechs might consider the fact that they might make Kim Jong-il cry. (Link Via Rebecca MacKinnon)

 The 10 Most Underreported Humanitarian Crises of 2004

Via American Samizdat

I was browsing through WavesofDestruction, when I stumbled upon a few videos of the tsunami which weren't all "cheese and crackers".

A BBC video of the tsunami hitting Aceh Indonesia, just 80 miles from the center of the earthquake. Link to video.

My new friend Suhit, the tech guru of the SEAEAT bloggers, wrote a wonderful post about what the Tsunami taught him. I suggest everyone read it for themselves.