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Terremark's building in Miami is the physical meeting point for more than 160 networks from around the world. They meet there because of the building's excellent security, its redundant power systems, and its thick concrete walls, designed to survive a category 5 hurricane. But above all, they meet there because the building is "carrier-neutral." It's a Switzerland of the Internet, an unallied territory where competing networks can connect to each other... Verizon insists there's nothing to worry about. Terremark will be set up as a wholly owned subsidiary. Its carrier-neutral status will remain. "We're not going to try to cramp their style at all," said Lowell McAdam, President and COO of Verizon. "There will be no moves to take certain customers out of play." I can't help but think of it in the context of another recent purchase. Earlier this month, Google bought its New York office building, 111 8th Avenue, for a reported $1.9 billion.
January 2011 Archives
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It may sound like I am being impatient. Has Apple spoiled us with product launches that include actual, functional products to show off? Call me crazy, but that's what I expect: an actual product.... if Google wants the Android platform to compete with the iPad and other iOS devices, Google and its manufacturing partners are going to have to start delivering products on time and with the same air of excitement that Apple manages to build consistently at least three times a year.
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They chose Drupal because it met their requirements to: 1. Accommodate hundreds of independent websites, each with different sets of features.2. Provide the ability to deploy new sites quickly and efficiently.3. Enable House Members to use the web designer or developer of their choice by leveraging the Drupal community.
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There certainly seems to be some logic to the argument Wikileaks is making. Meaningful prohibition of public figures advocating extra-judicial killings of their political opponents might represent an even bigger disruption of the realpolitik status quo than the dissolution of diplomatic secrecy, however. Thanks to the ease of rapid publishing online, it's now easy for anyone to call for anyone else's assassination or arrest and find a global audience, but that new capability for any kind of messages, good or bad, to fly far and free, clearly requires a discussion of how to relate to it responsibly
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Tools for finding better answers online.
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The high-capacity magazine of the semiautomatic pistol used in the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and more than a dozen other people on Saturday would have been illegal to manufacture and difficult to purchase under the Clinton-era assault weapons ban, which expired in 2004.
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[M]any liberal scholars believe that if the court took seriously the text and history of the entire Constitution — including the 16th Amendment, authorizing the income tax, and the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote — then originalism should just as often lead to liberal as conservative results. On issues like campaign finance, health care, financial reform and gender discrimination, these scholars say, taking the 20th-century amendments as seriously as those passed in the 18th and 19th centuries would guarantee a constitutional originalism that upheld modern visions of liberty and equality. “I hope Scalia and Thomas succeed in making their colleagues care more about text and history,” said Douglas Kendall, the president of the Constitutional Accountability Center, which argues that originalism can favor progressive causes. “But if they’re honest in reading and considering these sources, it won’t always yield the results the Tea Party wants.”
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Severe mental illness, on its own, is not an explanation for violence, but don't expect to hear that from the media in the coming weeks... [P]sychiatric diagnoses tell us next to nothing about someone's propensity or motive for violence.A 2009 analysis of nearly 20,000 individuals concluded that increased risk of violence was associated with drug and alcohol problems, regardless of whether the person had schizophrenia. Two similar analyses on bipolar patients showed, along similar lines, that the risk of violent crime is fractionally increased by the illness, while it goes up substantially among those who are dependent on intoxicating substances. In other words, it's likely that some of the people in your local bar are at greater risk of committing murder than your average person with mental illness.
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Since the inauguration of Barack Obama there have been nine murders by men and women who have intersected with ideologies of White Supremacy, xenophobia, and antisemitism. Across America there is a rising crescendo of diverse voices clamoring for a public discussion of the connection between demonizing rhetoric by high profile pundits and politicians and the rash of violent attacks by individuals enmeshed in bigotry and conspiracy theories. During the election campaign in 2008 it was clear some people on the political Right were becoming agitated about the potential for a Black man backed by liberals to become the next President of the United States....
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On June 26, 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court embraced the National Rifle Association's contention that the Second Amendment provides individuals with the right to take violent action against our government should it become "tyrannical." The following timeline catalogues incidents of insurrectionist violence (or the promotion of such violence) that have occurred since that decision was issued...
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Throughout the past decade of massive media disruption, the only people who have played a bigger role in democratizing publishing technology than Winer may be Mark Zuckerberg and Evan Williams. Winer's work, though, has been technical enough, embedded enough in larger technical communities, so focused on the distributed Web instead of on building up one corporate brand, and so wide-ranging that he's gained far less public recognition than other major players. His near-absolute disinterest in visual design, his chronically caustic personality and his apparently principle-driven burning of bridges haven't helped either. None the less, Winer has stepped into the breach of profit-driven companies failing to serve the interests of users time and time again to create platforms that have touched an incalculable number of lives. Can he do it again?
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Eee Slate starts at $999... It's not only more expensive than Android, but also requires better hardware.And it's not even designed for tablets. The user interface is designed for a cursor and a mouse, not fingers. There are few touch-enabled applications for it. Android is cheaper, built for touch, and has more than 200,000 available apps.
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The main thing to remember here is that Zuckerberg is the CEO, he’s always wanted to be the CEO, and he has zero intention of relinquishing that job. He’s not like Larry Page and Sergei Brin, who are happy being founders and letting Eric Schmidt do the less pleasant things associated with being CEO: this is Zuckerberg’s company, and he’s going to run it. The problem is it’s been hard enough for Zuckerberg to grow into being CEO of a private company: he’s certainly gone through quite a few executives along the way. The job of being CEO of a public company is very different, and much more outward-facing. For one thing, it involves lots of interaction with journalists and analysts. More invidiously, it involves being judged by share-price performance to the exclusion of almost everything else. Public shareholders have the right to demand that the CEO ... increase the value of their holdings from quarter to quarter and from year to year; it’s easy to see why Zuckerberg has no interest...
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FROM OCT 2009: When Wikileaks releases material without writing its own story or finding people who will, it gains little attention. "It's counterintuitive," he said. "You'd think the bigger and more important the document is, the more likely it will be reported on but that's absolutely not true. It's about supply and demand. Zero supply equals high demand, it has value. As soon as we release the material, the supply goes to infinity, so the perceived value goes to zero." The final act will be for Wikileaks to publish the material on its Web site after the story has been written and the embargo period lapsed.
ALSO MENTIONED - The 5GB Bank of America hard drive: "Now how do we present that? It's a difficult problem. We could just dump it all into one giant Zip file, but we know for a fact that has limited impact. To have impact, it needs to be easy for people to dive in and search it and get something out of it."
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Do you know about this? Couldn’t be simpler, and really, it’s not even that much of an a-ha. There are two kinds of quantities in the world. Stock is a static value: money in the bank, or trees in the forest. Flow is a rate of change: fifteen dollars an hour, or three-thousand toothpicks a day. Easy. Too easy. But I actually think stock and flow is the master metaphor for media today. Here’s what I mean: Flow is the feed. It’s the posts and the tweets. It’s the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that remind people that you exist.Stock is the durable stuff. It’s the content you produce that’s as interesting in two months (or two years) as it is today. It’s what people discover via search. It’s what spreads slowly but surely, building fans over time.
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It started to dawn on Bell that her high hopes of informing herself about the complexities of the global-warming debate would not be realized on this trip. She was also put off by Phillips's sarcastic tone. She looked around the relaxation room. "I like this place," she said to Nita Thomas, her friend and fellow Cincinnati activist. "I would love to have a party here." Bell's pique grew when Phillips shot another video belittling an exhibit that showed what an energy-efficient home might look like in the future: a small refrigerator, a low-flow shower heads and a clothes-washing basin that directed used water into a garden. Phillips made fun of the model home's five-gallon water heater. "Good luck with that - I've got three teenagers!" he said to the camera. "I'm not on board with this," Bell told Thomas. "Ed and I looked into that when we were looking at moving to Colorado."
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We talk a lot about fragmentation in the online world — the unbundling of the news product, the scattering of audiences, the unraveling of publics, etc. And when we do, we tend to focus on the entropic implications of that shift: “Fragmentation,” of course, carries a whiff of nostalgia not just for the thing being fragmented, but for wholeness itself — for completeness, for community, for all that’s been solid. What that framing forgets, though, is that the other side of fragmentation can be focus: the kind of deep-dive, myopic-in-a-good-way, almost Zen-like concentration that sparks to life when intellectual engagement couples with emotional affinity.
ABBA:
No more champagne
And the fireworks are through
Here we are, me and you
Feeling lost and feeling blue
It's the end of the party
And the morning seems so grey
So unlike yesterday
Now's the time for us to say...Happy new year
Happy new year
May we all have a vision now and then
Of a world where every neighbor is a friend
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Love them...
