Reference:
A solid round up of technologies the military is using.

"Warfare is less and less about pushing men and machines around the battlefield and more and more about pushing electrons and photons," Loren Thompson, a defense analyst...

Meanwhile, the military is hoping a new generation of high-tech bombs will lead to fewer casualties...
WashPost Filter

Notes:
The immediate parallel is the few, powerful Panzer tanks vs. the many tincan Sherman tanks in WWII. Is there a problem that terrorists/guerillas/3rd worlds will literally fly below the radar of our technology? Or is our technology now on the other side of an emergent divide where such models are no longer germaine? How pervasive and robust are the electrical systems compared to the biologic (human) and mechanical systems?

Reference:
E-mail is the Internet killer app. Don't let anyone tell you any different. Web surfing is nice and downloading music and video files is great, but e-mail has more effect on the world than those other things will ever have. But spam is killing e-mail. It is killing our killer app. And through knee-jerk anti-spam technologies, we are helping to kill e-mail. This is not good.

If spam is the future of Internet advertising -- and I think it is -- and if spam and anti-spam alike are killing the Internet, then there is only one logical response. It's not what you'd expect and certainly not what I am hearing suggested anywhere else. Spam can't be stopped without crippling the Internet or destroying the Constitution, so we just have to make it better. We have to find a way of making spam an even more effective sales tool.

Huh?

It is a simple idea. Right now spammers waste 99.9 percent of their effort contacting the wrong people. They don't particularly want to do that, but at this point they simply don't care since the cost of such inefficiency is so low. But they also want to remain in business. Here is the key: If they were contacting only the right people, it wouldn't be called spam. So we -- spammers and the spammed alike -- have a common interest in finding a way to efficiently target only the people who really want to buy Viagra. I believe it can be done.
Cringley

Notes:
Got me thinking also about blogging. Weblogs have a similarlity to email in the kinds of content, sort of. Loose thought.

Reference:
Amendment: The Internet is not Microsoft. The Internet's destiny is not to be dominated by personal computers.

You see, in 5-10 years, we are going to look back at 2003 and say "We thought that was the Internet? How could we have been so stupid?"

Because in 5-10 years, most of what we do with the Internet will not involve Windows (or Apple or Linux). It will involve devices that we now don't think of as computers. The action today is in cell phones, but my guess is that over the next decade we will see other form factors emerge.
Kling

Notes:
Kling infuriates me more often than not, but then he comes up with nice little pieces like this.

Reference:
Further complicating all of this are the feedback loops created when a group changes its behavior in response to changes in software. Because of these effects, designers of social software have more in common with economists or political scientists than they do with designers of single-user software, and operators of communal resources have more in common with politicians or landlords than with operators of ordinary web sites.
Shirky

Notes:

Reference:
Jerome Dobson, a University of Kansas research professor and president of the American Geographical Society:

Another company makes implanted chips to keep track of livestock or pets ...

Dobson knows the good these devices do, but he also worries that they may be abused. ... Already the technologies are sparking debates regarding privacy. Add a transponder to a locked device, he said, and the punitive possibilities are endless.

"What we are suggesting," Dobson said, "is that we are only one technological step from placing a transponder in there that burns or stings a person if they step off a prescribed path by a meter. Or if they stay too long in one place. Or cross the path of another person they are prohibited from seeing, or if they congregate with other people. I can confine you to a place. You can't go there. Or you must go there. And I can control it."
CNN

Notes:
Just like the suburban fenceless enclosure for dogs.

Embed the transponder in a visible part of the body, and you have a visual marker, the scar, if the device has been illegally removed.

Reference:
WASHINGTON — Richard Perle, the influential foreign policy hawk, is suing journalist Seymour Hersh over an article he wrote implying that Mr. Perle is using his position as a Pentagon adviser to benefit financially from a war to liberate Iraq.

"I intend to launch legal action in the United Kingdom. I’m talking to Queen’s Counsel right now," Mr. Perle, who chairs the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board, a non-paying position, told The New York Sun last night.

He said he is suing in Britain because it is easier to win such cases there, where the burden on plaintiffs is much less.
NY Sun

Notes:
Let's see: he's an American, Hersh is an American, the New Yorker is ostensibly an American publication, it's about American politics and the involvement of an American corporate office in an American advisory panel, and Perle is running to the UK.

If this story is true, all I've got to say is: What a chickenshit. Just one more indication of the lack of integrity and backbone of this administration.

Reference:
The Syrian government has barred travel agencies from working with 50 Jordanian hotels and tourism agencies on the grounds that they were "normalizers" with Israel. Jordan protests that many of the "black listed" agents only hosted Arab-Israelis, who began to swarm into Jordan to visit family and friends after the 1994 Jordan-Israel peace treaty. Jordan says they could not turn their back to the Arab population inside Israel, particularly that the only Arab countries they were allowed to visit were Jordan and Egypt.
UPI

Notes:
Two points. First, seems like really bad timing to come out so blatantly anti-Isreal. Why? Second, seems awfully petty. Gives credence to the pro-Isreal factions that Arab nations don't abide by UN resolutions, either.

Reference:
Too often, the U.S. presents the "American way" as the only way, insisting on its kind of free-market Darwinism as the only acceptable "model of human progress." But isn't civilization what happens when people stop behaving as if they're trapped in a ruthless Darwinian struggle and start thinking about communities and shared futures?
Time / Europe

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Reference:
But even if there's nothing exactly new about making money from war, this particular conflict, a preemptive war of choice, presents the somewhat novel prospect of the U.S. government deciding how war profits will be distributed even before the first sorties are launched.
Salon

Notes:
Haliburton's already been tapped for fire suppression. This issue, combined with war of oil, combined with having an excuse to extinguish existing contracts, really makes one question sincerity.

Reference:
On Thursday, when Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told reporters that the coalition behind Operation Iraqi Freedom is even bigger than the one behind Operation Desert Storm, even some military leaders and veterans of Republican administrations disagreed and were dismayed at the disingenuousness.
....
"I think it's a little disingenuous to compare the number of countries willing to send soldiers into battle in 1991 with the number of countries who are willing to put their names on a list in 2003," a retired senior military officer who served in Operation Desert Storm told Salon, declining to be named. Some 32 countries provided troops in 1991, compared with three this time around.
Salon

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