Jinn of Quality and Risk

Dave Winer: I never imagined we'd be competing with Google. 

Here comes technology for the storage of about half a terabyte (500 GB) on a credit-card sized hard drive. That's adequate to store 100,000 songs in mp3 format. Or a complete audio recording of one year of your life — many people may feel uncomfortable with this prospect. NSF: spintronics [is] a rapidly growing field that employs not only the charge but also the spin of electrons in making electrical devices. The current technology used in the heads, or sensors, that read bits from a storage disk is based on an effect called "giant" magnetoresistance (GMR). GMR refers to the change in the sensor resistance when placed in a magnetic field; the effect is typically less than 100 percent. Inside a hard drive, a GMR device senses the local magnetic field of a stored bit of data. Such sensors have enabled commercial hard drives that can store the amount of data contained in a DVD full-length movie in a space the size of a credit card. The effect created with the new nickel device is called "ballistic" magnetoresistance (BMR) and employs an electrical conductor that is only a few atoms wide and long. The BMR experiment exhibited a record change in sensor resistance of more than 3,000 percent. ...the ultimate capacity will be about a terabit per square inch. This could enable the storage of 50 or more DVDs on a hard drive the size of a credit card. 

Konfabulator is a JavaScript runtime engine for Mac OS X that lets you run little files called Widgets that can do pretty much whatever you want them to. Widgets can be alarm clocks, calculators, can tell you your AirPort signal strength, will fetch the latest stock quotes for your preferred symbols, and even give your current local weather. 

Instalawyer doesn't like John Grisham's angle: Ironically, attorney and author John Grisham hates lawyers. He's certainly made a fortune over the years eviscerating his highly fictional lawyers. One sees this enmity in "The Firm," where the naive young lawyer finds himself working for the mob, in "The Runaway Jury," where the lawyers on both sides of a tobacco case can't wait to buy a verdict from a juror, and in his latest, "The King of Torts," where the lousy lawyers du jour are those in the mass torts field. Grisham's idea of proper lawyerly behavior, based on his books, seems to be that any self-respecting lawyer (1) will never settle and always try his case, regardless of the situation and the client's best interest, (2) will find a way either to lose his fee or never collect it at all, and then (3) will find a way to flee the jurisdiction, vowing never to practice law again.

My favourite Grisham novel is The Testament mostly set in the Pantanal: In the center of the South American continent, south of the Amazon basin and east of the Andes, lies an immense landlocked river delta where annual floodwaters regularly rise several meters and then recede. For the abundant and diverse plants and animals living there, the flood pulse [is] normal and life giving. 

Some of the things you can do to prepare for the unexpected, such as assembling a supply kit and developing a family communications plan, are the same for both a natural or man-made emergency. However, as you will see throughout the pages of Ready.gov, there are important differences among potential terrorist threats that will impact the decisions you make and the actions you take. With a little planning and common sense, you can be better prepared for the unexpected. 

For all the excitement and power of the present moment, it is the future of Condoleezza Rice that is most intriguing. ... A lot of the buzz around Washington is that in 2004 ... Bush might ask her to be his running mate. Which would make Rice a formidable candidate for president in 2008. And if this stellar achiever were to notch that victory, she'd no longer be the most powerful black woman in the world. She'd be the most powerful human on the planet. [GoMemphis: Books] 

EE Times: Astronomers at the University of Arizona are putting the final touches on a ground-based telescope that's said to offer three times better resolution than the Hubble Space Telescope. ... The 40-kHz closed-loop adaptive optics (AO) system adjust[s] the position of 336 points on its 640-mm (2.1-foot) deformable mirror 550 times per second to correct not only for atmospheric interference but also for ground-based interference -- from seismic vibrations to infrared glow in the telescope and observatory.