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Have you ever made a list of pet peeves? I’m not referring to the behavioral quirks that couples develop over years of cohabitation. That’s part of every relationship and it is only addressed through give and take and a lot of patience. Rather, I refer to the little things that have become institutionalized all around us—and yet, we know that they are just plain idiotic. The problem is that they are too small to be picked up by the national news and too common to believe that they can be avoided.

Let’s say that you are driving along a road that comes to an end by forming a ‘T’ at the side of a much busier road. The cross street is busy, but it’s not divided. You plan to make a left turn after clearing a string of high-speed cars approaching from the right.

Conditions are good and there are no obstructions. There is no one coming from the left. Looking to the right, you can see a mile down the road. There are 4 cars speeding toward you, a long space and then a major throng of cars that will tie up the intersection for minutes. You get ready to drop the hammer as soon as that 4th car passes the intersection. You are patient, in a good mood and your car is well tuned.

Traffic Intersection

What’s the dumbest thing that the driver in car #4 could do? Does he have the power to ruin your day and raise your blood pressure while trying to be a nice guy? He sure does!

He can hesitate—slowing just enough to get honked by the parade behind him and just enough to close your window of opportunity. If you are in a hurry to get somewhere, he will ruin your morning faster than you can mime “Move your friggin’ tailpipe!!”. He is oblivious to the fact that his gesture of good will has backfired.

Cross street drivers who let up on the gas are one of my three pet peeves. But today, I was reminded of another minor irritation. From now on, I will call it “Pet Peeve #4”.

I have a good friend in Germany. He is a high tech entrepreneur and tends to move about the globe. His businesses are in Australia and New Zealand, and he spent a long part of the past year in Shanghai. I never know where he will be. But he is currently in Germany and he knows that I am in America.

Realizing that we need to discuss an important matter, he asks me if I will be available during my weekday mornings, between 9 and 11 AM my time. Noting that he has already contemplated the time difference, I check my calendar. “Sure. That works for me,” I tell him… “Why don’t you set the schedule? Any morning this week is good.” He commits to have a colleague figure out the final date.

Taj Mahal_1Minutes later, I receive a Google Calendar link for my approval. It asks that our meeting be scheduled for next Wed from 21:30 to 22:00, India Standard Time. I was unprepared for the involuntary groan that arose from the pit of my stomach. Here, is an open letter to my buddy and the colleague who scheduled our conference to be held on India Time…

C’mon guys / gals… The Internet works on “Internet Time”, also known as UTC or GMT. It is effectively Earth time. It never changes with seasons, war, edict, accidents or daylight savings. It just moves forward as the universal heartbeat of the Internet.

clocksPlease don’t make me translate your Indian Standard Time. I will get it wrong. I always do.

And please don’t figure it out in “USA-Eastern Standard Time”. Here in the US, politicians shift Daylight Savings dates, sometimes splitting it by local counties. In some areas, they change it by only 30 minutes for border towns. (Yes! We are that nuts).

So please: Just tell me the time in UTC. It is the only time that should ever be cited when dealing with anyone that you can’t reach with a personal handshake.

P.S. Don’t take insult when I post your suggested meeting time (and this sarcastic response) to Lifeboat. Sure, you helped me to discover a new peeve—But you have also hit upon my funny bone!

Faithfully yours, ~Phil

Philip Raymond is Co-Chair of The Cryptocurrency Standards Association. He sits on the New Money Systems Board at Lifeboat and advises banks & brokers on new age currencies. Raymond was master of ceremonies and speaker at The Bitcoin Event in New York.

gooooogle

After Spencer Kimball left Google, he found himself missing some of the custom-built software the company uses internally. So he and a bunch of fellow ex-Googlers started building their own. And now they want to make it available to everyone to power the next Google or Facebook.

Specifically, Kimball wanted something like Google’s database system Spanner. Spanner is designed to juggle data between potentially millions of database servers, a tool that keeps Google’s services online even if several servers, or an entire datacenter, go offline. While few companies need to operate at quite the scale Google does, the ability to stay online even if many systems fail, and to automatically balance resources between servers, would be useful to many other companies. Read more

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So it was great to get back to New York and be able to report on what is called the“New NY Broadband Program.” It involves a $500 million expenditure to help ensure that New Yorkers across the state have access to current-generation Internet capacity. There’s lots of potential in the plan, targeted at providing every New Yorker with access to 100 megabit per second (Mbps) service (10 Mbps uploads) by the end of 2018. Because New York expects a 1:1 match from the private sector for each grant or loan it makes, that means the state hopes to be deploying at least $1 billion on high-speed Internet access infrastructure.

Read more

David Auerbach | Slate

Illustration by Natalie Matthews-Ramo.
“Twitter’s strength is being the pulse of the Internet, the place where news gets broken in 140-character messages, where important topics start trending the second they enter the collective hivemind, and where politicians and celebrities and thinkers of all stripes can make announcements without the bother of a press release or the filter of the media. Yet this has always made Twitter Janus-faced: Is it a real-time news aggregator or a social network? More importantly, how will it make money?” Read more

Quoted: “I recall reading somewhere that “Ethereum is to Bitcoin as an iPhone is to a calculator”, which is a pretty good analogy. Bitcoin proved to us that it was possible to keep a tamper-proof system synchronised across the globe. There really is no reason the same system can’t be applied to other problems in the same way we apply normal computers to them.

Ethereum is a single computer spread out over the internet, processing the information we all feed it together. I guess you could call it a ‘shared consciousness’ if you wanted to.

In this computer, information cannot be suppressed. In this computer, ideas and trust rule. Work and reputation are visible and independently verifiable. Anyone can contribute and everyone is automatically safe. Collaboration will overcome privatisation as people work together to build an open network of ideas contributing to the betterment of us all. They are calling it internet 3.0. And though web 2.0 was a thing in some ways, I think we’ll look back at everything up until this point as the first internet. The internet we built by adapting old communication lines into new ways of communicating. The internet we built when we were still used to centralising responsibility for things.”

Read the article here > http://pospi.spadgos.com/2014/11/30/injustice-ethereum-and-t…naissance/

Article: Harnessing “Black Holes”: The Large Hadron Collider – Ultimate Weapon of Mass Destruction

Posted in astronomy, big data, computing, cosmology, energy, engineering, environmental, ethics, existential risks, futurism, general relativity, governance, government, gravity, information science, innovation, internet, journalism, law, life extension, media & arts, military, nuclear energy, nuclear weapons, open source, particle physics, philosophy, physics, policy, posthumanism, quantum physics, science, security, singularity, space, space travel, supercomputing, sustainability, time travel, transhumanism, transparency, treatiesTagged , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Harnessing “Black Holes”: The Large Hadron Collider – Ultimate Weapon of Mass Destruction

Why the LHC must be shut down

CERN-Critics: LHC restart is a sad day for science and humanity!

Posted in astronomy, big data, complex systems, computing, cosmology, energy, engineering, ethics, existential risks, futurism, general relativity, governance, government, gravity, hardware, information science, innovation, internet, journalism, law, life extension, media & arts, military, nuclear energy, nuclear weapons, particle physics, philosophy, physics, policy, quantum physics, science, security, singularity, space, space travel, supercomputing, sustainability, time travel, transhumanism, transparency, treatiesTagged , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment on CERN-Critics: LHC restart is a sad day for science and humanity!

PRESS RELEASE “LHC-KRITIK”/”LHC-CRITIQUE” www.lhc-concern.info
CERN-Critics: LHC restart is a sad day for science and humanity!
These days, CERN has restarted the world’s biggest particle collider, the so-called “Big Bang Machine” LHC at CERN. After a hundreds of Million Euros upgrade of the world’s biggest machine, CERN plans to smash particles at double the energies of before. This poses, one would hope, certain eventually small (?), but fundamentally unpredictable catastrophic risks to planet Earth.
Basically the same group of critics, including Professors and Doctors, that had previously filed a law suit against CERN in the US and Europe, still opposes the restart for basically the same reasons. Dangers of: (“Micro”-)Black Holes, Strangelets, Vacuum Bubbles, etc., etc. are of course and maybe will forever be — still in discussion. No specific improvements concerning the safety assessment of the LHC have been conducted by CERN or anybody meanwhile. There is still no proper and really independent risk assessment (the ‘LSAG-report’ has been done by CERN itself) — and the science of risk research is still not really involved in the issue. This is a scientific and political scandal and that’s why the restart is a sad day for science and humanity.
The scientific network “LHC-Critique” speaks for a stop of any public sponsorship of gigantomanic particle colliders.
Just to demonstrate how speculative this research is: Even CERN has to admit, that the so called “Higgs Boson” was discovered — only “probably”. Very probably, mankind will never find any use for the “Higgs Boson”. Here we are not talking about the use of collider technology in medical concerns. It could be a minor, but very improbable advantage for mankind to comprehend the Big Bang one day. But it would surely be fatal – how the Atomic Age has already demonstrated — to know how to handle this or other extreme phenomena in the universe.
Within the next Billions of years, mankind would have enough problems without CERN.
Sources:
- A new paper by our partner “Heavy Ion Alert” will be published soon: http://www.heavyionalert.org/
- Background documents provided by our partner “LHC Safety Review”: http://www.lhcsafetyreview.org/

- Press release by our partner ”Risk Evaluation Forum” emphasizing on renewed particle collider risk: http://www.risk-evaluation-forum.org/newsbg.pdf

- Study concluding that “Mini Black Holes” could be created at planned LHC energies: http://phys.org/news/2015-03-mini-black-holes-lhc-parallel.html

- New paper by Dr. Thomas B. Kerwick on lacking safety argument by CERN: http://vixra.org/abs/1503.0066

- More info at the LHC-Kritik/LHC-Critique website: www.LHC-concern.info
Best regards:
LHC-Kritik/LHC-Critique

Tyler Hayes | Fast Company


“The inherently robotic system begs to be humanized and explained. The first question Taylor had to ask himself was if what Tocchini was attempting was even possible. Could he translate design intention into an algorithm that was always producing new and relevant results—something that satisfied a broad range of needs and desires?” Read more