Religion

I've met a few priests in my life who were genuinely great people and I've seen a lot of good that some religious organizations do in communities and all over the world. At the same time, it makes me sad to hear things like about how this pregnant teacher was fired at a Catholic school because she wasn't married. I'm pretty sure if Jesus was around, he wouldn't be too impressed either. Given how many stupidities in recent history have been executed on religious grounds, I find it amazing that there isn't a larger backlash.

UB40 once said:

We will no longer hear your command We will sieze the control from your hand We will fan the flame Of our anger and pain And you`ll feel the shame For what you do in gods name

Some More Conspiracies

This Cringley guy at PBS is onto the same thing that I am, he's claiming that Google's figured out how to pack 5000 CPUs and petabytes of storage into an industrial container that can be dropped into and plugged into Internet core peering points of which there are only around 300 in the world.

This is entirely feasible - nobody quite figured out what Google did with all that unused fiber that they scooped up a few years ago.

So the conspiracy goes that Googlites pack up these "datacenter in a box" containers, drop them into all 300 peering spots and wire them up using a private network and then essentially they have their own private shadow Internet connected everywhere and facing the general public at the peering points.

Kinda like Walmart does with cheap products but better .

Cringley theorizes about it here.

Scary Decade

So in the last decade, everybody was busy bashing Microsoft and Microsoft was busy squishing the competition. Now MS has been defanged, the competition is moving fast and furious on all fronts.

This is really no different than what happened with IBM in the 80s after they tried to recover from anti-trust litigation and Microsoft clipped their grass.

So what's next?

Well today Cisco acquired Scientific Atlanta. Why is that so important? Well Cisco used to be only in the datacenter and eventually they pretty much powered the majority of the Internet and have now leaped forward into your living room. Yep, that PVR or set top box is probably SA/Cisco. And the the DSLam behind your next generation box it will likely be Cisco.

So what's next?

Cisco needs to buy Grass Valley and/or Omneon for broadcast equipment and make it into datacenter equipment and then they'll own the whole chain.

Google needs to license TV programming and deliver it to Cisco enabled fabrics through ISPs, bypassing the cable companies.

Cisco, Google and Apple need to merge functionality to redefine everything as we know it.

Mom and Pop ISPs need to buy a couple of wireless WiMax towers and pump ubiquitous connections for cheap everywhere all the time. If not, Google will do this for them and Cisco will help them.

So maybe Nortel, Alcatel, Microsoft, Motorola and Yahoo will get a piece of the pie but mark my words, the pie is going to be radically different from the stale one I'm chewing on now.

The showstopper is going to be (as usual) the content owners (record companies, MPAA) who are going to get owned one more time.

Five Questions

This syndicated radio fellow by the name of Dennis Prager in the LA Times, wrote an interesting article asking 5 questions that he asks Muslims to answer. Although I don't necessarily agree with everything in his article, it is pretty interesting. He seems to be an articulate and reasonable fellow so it doesn't have the pinnings of a shock tactic.

Here are the five questions:

(1) Why are you so quiet?
(2) Why are none of the Palestinian terrorists Christian?
(3) Why is only one of the 47 Muslim-majority countries a free country?
(4) Why are so many atrocities committed and threatened by Muslims in the name of Islam?
(5) Why do countries governed by religious Muslims persecute other religions?

The elaborations are found in his article here.

I am sure that most Muslims have five questions for Christian countries as well going back to the crusades and similar vile behaviour originating from the vatican but regardless, I would like to hear the opinion of Muslims on the above questions.

I've heard these types of questions asked before and usually the answer is just that Christians/Jews etc did worse things. This tactic really doesn't answer any questions, just deflects the blame for taking questionable actions.

Gotta love bubba

Here's a picture of the family of Judge Samuel Alito, US supreme court nominee.

Notice Billy is trying to unhook the daughters brastrap.