BBC NEWS | Business | Senate reverses Bush tax cuts “Moderate Republican Senator George Voinovich said that ‘we are at the edge of a fiscal precipice if we keep going the way we are, particularly with this war hanging over us’” With the full tax cut plan having benn approved by the House of Representatives the differences between the two branches of Congress will have to be resolved when the bill goes to the conference stage.
an article on US initiatives for network-centric warfare Network warfare making progress “The tenets of network-centric warfare are as follows: * A robustly networked force improves information sharing. * Information sharing enhances quality of information and shared situational awareness. * Shared situational awareness enables collaboration and self-synchronization, and enhances sustainability and speed of command. * These, in turn, dramatically increase mission effectiveness. “
We live in an increasingly networked world where advances in technology are having profound effects in many diverse areas. Just as the the coverage of war is becoming decentralized, so too is warfare itself and this is very disturbing. Global profile reports on a guerilla leader: “we confront this occupation by a war of small cells. This type of war spreads and scatters. Every cell can work by itself as a base, a leader and a decision-maker, deciding the right time and place to attack. This type of organisation is a complex system which is very difficult to destroy. It can reproduce itself and grow on a daily basis” The Colonel’s Network Warfare
Gadget deciphers dogspeak “A Japanese toymaker claims to have developed a gadget that translates dog barks into human language.” The version that transalates human speech into something that dogs can understand will take 30 years.
The Gulf War made CNN, it was the cable news covered war. Since that war, the web has emerged: this is the web covered war, from moblogged war protests to webloggers in Iraq, the channels of choice are weblogs. The independant reports: “The internet has democratised everything – including being a war correspondent.” Independant: News agencies lose battle on the internet
I said that I would say when I disagreed with the normally hyper-rational Dawkins. Dawkins writes: “Saddam Hussein has been a catastrophe for Iraq, but he never posed a threat outside his immediate neighbourhood. George Bush is a catastrophe for the world. And a dream for Bin Laden.” Oh cummon – Hussein has been trying to get his hands on nuclear weapons for 30 years since he wooed a very naive Chirac into giving him Uranium. Saddam walked around with a copy of Mein Kampf in his pocket and modelled his regime on Stalin’s with the express notion of extending the Ba’athist rule to a pan-Arab nation. The Bush administration may not have gone about diplomacy very well, to say the least, but it is false to say that Hussein’s ambitions don’t extend beyond Iraq’s boundaries. via Jeff Jarvis
“So confident is he that God is all in the mind, or the brain at least, that Dr Persinger claims he can induce mystical feelings in a majority of those willing to don his Transcranial Magnetic Stimulator. So the BBC Science series Horizon took up the challenge by putting his hat to the ultimate test: could he get arch-sceptic and militant atheist Prof Richard Dawkins to start believing in God by electrically massaging his temporal lobes?” Telegraph | Connected | Holy visions elude scientists
Wired reports on a new device to allow the miltary to speak in tongues, ‘send three and fourpence we’re going to a dance’: “Interact lets someone talk into the device in one language — then it spits out an audio translation with just a two-second delay and no need for the speaker to pause.” Wired News: Device: Arabic In, English Out
Technorati just gets better and better. Relating news events to comments being written about them by Bloggers was one of the aims of Newsblogger the joint project between Moreover and Blogger. The interesting thing about this is that aggregated comments are useful to categorize news and add valuable metadata. The end goal is that comments about a story enrich that story and that the process is recursive i.e. comments can be about comments, eventually providing an ecology of news. Technorati: Current Events, with context
Linksys is the Cisco of wireless – and now quite literally. Cisco has acquired Linksys for $500M, a great move. Archives: Linksys the Cisco of wireless
Apply Occam’s Razor to the Saddam has been killed rumor. Which is simpler? That this is a deliberate rumor to destabilize and seed doubt in the minds of the Iraqi’s (a clever tactic) or that after 12 years of trying to get Saddam, this objective is successful within 90 minutes of hostilities. On the other hand, Saddam’s lookalikes are notoriously good, they fooled the odious Haider on his visit to Iraq, when he posed for photos with an imposter. People are easily fooled. Charlie Chaplin famously lost a lookalike competition against an impersonator and as Christopher Hitchens discovered, some of Churchill’s most famous wartime speeches were delivered by a children’s radio presenter with a gift for mimicry. Saddam lookalikes It would be very good news, however, if this rumor were true. VOANews.com