TeKnocratix

Obama Admits to Never Using Twitter

jcenters — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 02:13:59 +0000

Despite having over 2.6 million followers on his Twitter account, @BarackObama admitted to a Chinese audience that he has never used the service.

“I have never used Twitter, but I’m an advocate of technology and not restricting Internet access," Obama told an audience of Shanghai youth on Sunday.

"My thumbs are too clumsy to type in things on the phone," the president added.

Then what the heck is he doing on that Blackberry all the time? Playing tetris?

Yeah, he just broke 10 million points. Top that, Palin.

Voting Machine Company Sequoia to Publish Source Code

jcenters — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 05:13:18 +0000

In what appears to be an industry first, Sequoia Voting Systems announced Tuesday plans to publish the source code of their latest voting machine.

The company said it will publically release the code for their new Frontier Election System in November.

“I think Sequoia is recognizing that it won’t do anymore to just urge people to trust them,” said Princeton University computer scientist Ed Felten, “and that people want to know that the code that controls these machines is open and that experts have had a full chance to look at it.”

Sequoia, like most other voting companies, has been reluctant to reveal to the public exactly how their machines work. From the Wired article:

The company has long had a reputation for vigorously fighting any efforts by academics, voting activists and others to examine the source code in its proprietary systems, and even threatened to sue Princeton University computer scientists if they disclosed anything learned from a court-ordered review of its software.

However, pressure has been mounting on the secretive company after allegations of voting irregularities, and the introduction of a competing, open source solution by the Open Source Digital Voting Foundation.

If anything is open source and fully transparent to the public, shouldn’t it be our voting machines?

We’re Back! Here’s What We Missed

jcenters — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 05:02:41 +0000

The site’s been stagnant for over a week now, an unfortunate side effect of a sole contributor who has a pesky thing like a day job.

Fortunately, the past week has been kinda slow. John McCain, of all people, introduced a bill to block net neutrality. If you haven’t seen it, here’s John Stewart’s take on it:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c

From Here to Neutrality

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show
Full Episodes

Political Humor

Health Care Crisis

And a kind soul went to the trouble of updating that old, out of date illustration of a world without net neutrality:

McCain, Barr Supporters Lost Testosterone After Obama Election

jcenters — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 08:02:29 +0000

Duke University and the University of Michigan performed a joint study showing that the testosterone levels of male John McCain and Bob Barr supporters plummeted after the results of the 2008 election.

Females and Obama supporters did not show a change in hormone levels.

"This is a pretty powerful result," said Duke neuroscientist Kevin LaBar. "Voters are physiologically affected by having their candidate win or lose an election."

The tests were performed on 183 college-aged men and women on election night. They each chewed a piece of gum and spit it into a sample tube when the polls closed. They provided a second sample after the results came in, and then two more in 40 minute span. The spit was later tested for hormone levels.

"Voters participate in elections both directly by casting their ballots, and vicariously because they don’t personally win or lose the election," said researcher Steven Stanton. "This makes democratic political elections highly unique dominance contests."

Did the guys wimp out because Obama won, or because they realized that Sarah Palin wouldn’t be on television as much anymore? I’ll let you be the judge.

Scary Map of Job Losses

jcenters — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 07:50:57 +0000

The Geography of Jobs paints a frightening picture of job growth and loss between 2004 and today. Near the middle of 2008, it starts looking more like a game of DEFCON than a job map.

With Neutrality Looming, ISPs Eye Metered Internet

jcenters — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 07:46:05 +0000

The Wall Street Journal reports that ISPs are looking at metered internet connections in response to calls for net neutrality.

"This could come down to carriers saying, ‘If you don’t allow us to manage our networks the way we see fit, then we will just have to cap everything,’ " says Phillip Dampier, a consumer advocate focusing on technology issues in Rochester, N.Y. "They’ll make it an either/or thing: give them more control over their network or expect metered broadband."

Dampier helped force the end of Time Warner Cable’s metered internet rollout last year. But that’s not stopping other ISPs, such as AT&T, which is testing tiered internet services in Texas. $19.95 per month buys you 0.8 megabits a second with a 20 gigabyte download cap. For $65, you can get 150 gigabytes at 18 megabits a second.

Verizon is also considering tiered internet packages.

Some broadband providers argue that a pay-as-you-go Internet is unavoidable. "A flat-rate, infinitely expandable service is unachievable,"Dick Lynch, chief technology officer of Verizon Communications Inc., said at a recent industry conference, referring to the industry in general. "We’re going to have to consider pricing structures that allow us to sell packages of bytes."

Some would argue that it’s well within the rights of ISPs to do this, and it offers a pricing advantage for casual users. However, in my view, if this is allowed, it will be the same as a non-neutral internet, for a couple of reasons.

Connection speed, which is how internet connections are currently tiered, are already an effective bandwidth cap. This is just an additional restriction.
It still serves the ISPs purpose of hindering online video and telephone services.

What do you think? Share your thoughts below.

An Interactive Map of Nuclear Testing Sites

jcenters — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 21:04:59 +0000

The Atomic Archive has created an interactive Google Map of the over 2,000 nuclear testing sites between 1945 and 2008.

Nuclear Test Sites

Gizmodo Explains How Google Wave Will Destroy Us All

jcenters — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 01:00:00 +0000

You probably can’t even access it yet, and those in the loop aren’t even sure what it does or how it works. Well Adam Frucci over at Gizmodo has figured out Wave’s true purpose: Conquering the entire world.

Of course, if ad blockers are used to prevent Bottomfeeder’s ads from showing, or Stingrays are blocked or tampered with, Google reserves the right to use Great White to damage your online reputation by pulling private and humiliating information from your Wave history. It’ll spread the information to your contacts based on the Swordfish algorithm, which analyzes which people will be the most offended by each particular nugget of data. Great White will continue until the ad blocker is removed and/or Stingrays are returned to proper working order.

Thanks for the heads up, Adam! We’ll be sure to keep our tinfoil hats handy.

Bureaucratix: U.S. Government Launches Its Own URL Shortener, Epic Fail Ensues

jcenters — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 00:00:10 +0000

Techcrunch reports that the federal government has launched its own link shortening service. Not to be outdone by its hundreds of competitors, like the outgoing tr.im, the original Tiny URL, or the currently chic bit.ly, government employees can now use the oh so svelte http://go.usa.gov.

So http://recovery.gov gets “shortened” to…http://go.usa.gov/liO. Wait, that’s not shorter at all, it’s two characters longer! YOU ARE DOING IT WRONG.

Granted, this isn’t a bad idea…in theory. First, who knows how long any commercial shortening service will last? Second, it’s nice to have a trusted service, one that (hopefully) won’t direct readers to pictures of a repulsively ripped rectum.

Then again communism works…in theory. Seriously, how many .govs can there be? I think http://u.gov is wide open! No one else can even take it but you, the federal government of the United States! In fact, you’d be the shortest shortener in the biz! C’mon, prove that you can beat the private sector in at least one thing!

U.S. Department of Energy to Invest $32 Million in Cloud Computing

jcenters — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 02:00:01 +0000

The United States Department of Energy announced Wednesday that it will spend $32 million on cloud computing test beds.

Cloud computing is the technology behind many popular web services, such as Gmail and Twitter. As opposed to traditional server technologies that only use one server, a cloud uses many, both real and virtualized, as one unit. The advantage is that it is scalable, meaning that a user only uses as much as he needs, and that it is (usually) redundant, meaning that if one server goes down, the others can pick up the slack.

“As one of the world’s leading providers of computing resources to advance science, the Department of Energy has a vested interest in exploring new options for meeting the overwhelming demand for computing time,” said Michael Strayer, associate director of DOE’s Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research.

Magellan, as the project is called, will be powered by thousands of Intel Nehalem CPUs, and possibly solutions from companies like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft.

The DOE hopes that cloud computing’s commercial success will carry over into scientific research.

Let’s just hope the DOE’s data doesn’t get sidekicked, shall we?