From Kevin Kelly, Natural History of a New Idea:
1) Outright wacko.
“This is worthless nonsense”2) Odd but unproven.
“This is an interesting, but perverse, point of view.”3) True but trivial.
“This may be correct, but it is quite unimportant.”4) Obvious.
“What’s new? This is what we’ve said all along.”
Today the last “normal ” IANA allocation of IPv4 addresses was made to APNIC. (See the announcement at http://www.apnic.net/publications/news/2011/delegation.) APNIC received the following two /8 network blocks:
By a quick view of the IANA registry at http://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv4-address-space/ipv4-address-space.xml, I can see that there are now five blocks remaining. Per the rules agreed upon by IANA and the five RIRs, these will soon be distributed so that each of the RIRs will receive one more /8. The remaining blocks are:
In other words, IPv4 exhaustion is here – the IANA supply is gone, the RIR supply is limited, and soon organizations will be unable to acquire more network space. This is going to be an interesting year (and decade).
I just read an article called “The Whole-Body Scanners – Are They Safe?” that concludes:
We should understand that claims of safety made by FDA and TSA are not based on any kind of empirical evidence – we will not have this evidence without clinical trials taking decades; the basis for their assurances is opinions of their “experts.” We have shown above that these opinions are not grounded in science, and are merely the result of mechanical and scientifically invalid application of safety data from other frequency ranges – despite the obvious differences in biological effects.
We should demand removal of these machines before the actual trials establishing their safety empirically are done, and before the details of construction of the specific models are made public and available for independent review. There are sufficient grounds to challenge the validity of the theoretical numbers used as a basis of claims that these machines are safe. The valid trials cannot be completed in less than 10 years – simply because it takes that long for cancers to appear following the exposure.
Meanwhile, travelers would be well advised to stay clear of the whole-body scanners.
It does feel odd, sometimes. I mean, what would somebody from the past think about the way we computer-oriented info-workers spend our days?
Regardless, I love xkcd.
It’s reported that NYU professor Sam Roweis jumped to his death last night.
From an outsider’s perspective, I don’t think anybody saw this coming. I don’t wish to be insensitive, but I’m struck that even his death makes a point about machine learning…
Sam leaves behind a wife and newborn twins, and my heart goes out to them.
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