How much Virtual Water is in your shirt?

Virtual Water is a measure of all the water it takes to make the products you use. Waterfootprint.orgcalculates that a new cotton shirt uses 2,700 liters. That’s a tally of the water evaporated in irrigating and growing the cotton, and the water needed to wash away the fertilizers and dilute the chemicals used in the manufacturing process. With worldwide water shortages set to become a major humanitarian crisis this century, water waste is a serious new sin. Read More…

http://themoment.blogs.nytimes.com/

    okAn FCC hearing schedule for Thursday at Stanford University will focus on whether ISPs can shape, filter and even block content that travels over their networks. (The public —more than 1.5 million of whom have spoken out against such violations — has a rare opportunity to testify before the commission during the hearing.)http://savetheinternet.com/=stanford 

ScienceFriday.com’s version

Chances are you’ve heard of the ‘small world’ idea of six degrees of separation. But is it correct?

The idea traces back to an experiment begun in 1967 by Stanley Milgram, in which he tried to trace how many acquaintances it would take to pass a letter between two randomly selected people. The result that entered the public consciousness was that in general it took six steps or fewer to bridge the gap between any two people. But is that result accurate? Judith Kleinfeld,

http://www.sciencefriday.com/program/archives/200801256

tags, 6 degrees, Kevin Bacon Effect, six degrees, Milgram,

–
Edward Hasbrouck
<edward@hasbrouck.org>
<http://hasbrouck.org>

The deadline for public comments on the USA Transportation Security
Administration’s proposed rules to make would-be travellers obtain
individualized prior permission for all journeys by air to, from,
overflying, or even *within* the USA is this Monday, 22 October 2007.

If you have a chance before 5 p.m. Washington time on Monday, I urge
you to go to http://www.regulations.gov and tell the TSA what you
think of their scheme. You don’t have to be a citizen of the USA to
submit comments, and you can even do so anonymously. The docket
number is TSA-2007-28572, and there are more details at:

http://hasbrouck.org/blog/archives/001286.html

The broadband company’s audacious scheme to interrupt your data proves why network neutrality rules are crucial.

By Farhad Manjoo

Oct. 19, 2007 |

Bless the Associated Press for unearthing, through careful and diligent investigation, Comcast’s shameful, hidden Internet traffic-management scheme.

Comcast, the AP determined, actively manages data on its network by using software to essentially masquerade as its subscribers’ machines. When non-Comcast Internet subscribers request files from your Comcast-connected machine — as happens in peer-to-peer file-sharing applications — Comcast’s technology steps in and tells the non-Comcast subscriber you’re not available.

This is a difficult story to explain, but it’s quite important. For years, consumer advocates have been demanding that Congress and/or the Federal Communications Commission impose “network neutrality” regulations that would force broadband providers (like Comcast) to treat all data on a network equally. Lawmakers have so far failed to do so.

Broadband providers, meanwhile, insist that they do treat all traffic equally, but they reserve the right to use certain technologies to “manage” data on their network. The Comcast plan suggests that broadband providers mean something very broad by “traffic management” — including, it appears, purposefully stepping into your network sessions to shut them down.

To understand why this whole process is so egregious, let’s look at it in FAQ format.

What is Comcast doing, and why?

ok from

Iran labels CIA ‘terrorist organization’

By ALI AKBAR DAREINI, Associated Press WriterSat Sep 29, 6:09 PM ET

Iran’s parliament voted Saturday to designate the CIA and the U.S. Army as “terrorist organizations,” a largely symbolic response to a U.S. Senate resolution seeking a similar designation for Iran’s Revolutionary Guards.

The parliament said the Army and the CIA were terrorists because of the atomic bombing of Japan; the use of depleted uranium munitions in the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq; support of the killings of Palestinians by Israel; the bombing and killing Iraqi civilians and the torture of imprisoned terror suspects.

image

x.

Joseph Nechvatal
Mid-September 2007, Marrakech
http://www.nechvatal.net

from

http://transition.turbulence.org/blog/2007/09/28/review-of-digital-contagions/trackback/

Though no J. G. Ballard or William S. Burroughs, Jussi Parikka nevertheless sucks us into a fantastic black tour-de-force narrative of virulence and the cultural history of computer viruses (*), followed by innumerable inquisitive innuendoes

We may wish to recall here that for Deleuze and Guattari, media ecologies are machinic operations (the term machinic here refers to the production of consistencies between heterogeneous elements) based in particular

To begin this caliginous expedition, Digital Contagions plunges us into a haunting, shifting and dislocating array of source material that thrills. Parikka launches his degenerate seduction by drawing from, and intertwining in a non-linear fashion, the theories of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (for whom my unending love is verging on obsession), Friedrich Kittler, Eugene Thacker, Tiziana Terranova, N. Katherine Hayles, Lynn Margulis, Manuel DeLanda, Brian Massumi, Bruno Latour, Charlie Gere, Sherry Turkle, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, Deborah Lupton, and Paul Virilio. These thinkers are then linked with ripe examples from prankster net art, stealth biopolitics, immunological incubations, the disassembly significance of noise, ribald sexual

Jussi Parikka

Jussi Parikka studied Cultural History at the University of Turku, Finland, and is currently Visiting Lecturer and Research Scholar in Media Studies, Humboldt University, Berlin. His Digital Contagions: A Media Archaeology of Computer Viruses is published by Peter Lang, New York, in the Digital Formations series (2007). In addition, two co-edited books are forthcoming: The Spam Book: On Viruses, Spam, and Other Anomalies from the Dark Side of Digital Culture and Media Archaeologies. Parikka’s homepage is <http://users.utu.fi/juspar>.

Back to article.

book on amazon

Turning Ahmadinejad into public enemy No. 1

Demonizing the Iranian president and making his visit to New York seem controversial are all part of the neoconservative push for yet another war.

By Juan Cole

Sep. 24, 2007 | Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad‘s visit to New York to address the United Nations General Assembly has become a media circus. But the controversy does not stem from the reasons usually cited.

no evidence for any US Media/govt. Lies

Washington is also unhappy with Mohammad ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency. He has been unable to find credible evidence that Iran has a weapons program, and he told Italian television this week, “Iran does not constitute a certain and immediate threat for the international community.” He stressed that no evidence had been found for underground production sites or hidden radioactive substances, and he urged a three-month waiting period before the U.N. Security Council drew negative conclusions.

The neoconservatives are even claiming that the United States has been at war with Iran since 1979. As Glenn Greenwald points out, this assertion is absurd. In the ’80s, the Reagan administration sold substantial numbers of arms to Iran. Some of those beating the war drums most loudly now, like think-tank rat Michael Ledeen, were middlemen in the Reagan administration’s unconstitutional weapons sales to Tehran. The sales would have been a form of treason if in fact the United States had been at war with Iran at that time, so Ledeen is apparently accusing himself of treason.

Seton Hall Law CONSTITUTION DAY
September 17, 2007

Constitution Day will be held in the Law School Auditorium

Press Release (September 7, 2007)
Seton Hall School of Law on Second Life: Constitution Day Program on Interrogation and Intelligence Gathering to be Featured at Virtual Guantánamo Bay Detention Center [Read Press Release here]

Seton Hall Law School is pleased to offer you an outstanding simulcast program in celebration of Constitution Day on September 17, 2007. As you may recall, the 2006 Guantánamo Teach-In was an amazing success, with three hundred colleges, universities, medical schools, divinity schools and law schools participating. A DVD of the Guantánamo Teach-In program sponsored last year by Seton Hall Law School is available.

http://law.shu.edu/constitutionday/

Constitution Day Program — Interrogation and Intelligence Gathering

	Monday, September 17, 2007 01:30 PM EDT Click Here For Your Local Time		Connect via Streaming Audio/Video
	1:30 – 1:45pm EDT Welcome & Introductions
		Professor Mark Denbeaux   Seton Hall Law School
	1:45 – 2:00pm EDT FBI Interrogation Seeking
		Mr. Jack Cloonan   Clayton Consultants and Retired FBI Counter Terrorism Expert

http://event.netbriefings.com/event/seton/Live/constitutionday/