Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.
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Microsoft halted in phonetic domain crusade
Good news for haters of the Beast of Redmond. Domain arbitrator WIPO, meeting in Spain, has decided that Microsoft is not entitled to the domain “mocosoft.com” despite the fact that some of the same letters appear in both companies’ names. The site hosts a long list of downloadable applications. The decision comes on the back…
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Don't use Google desktop search in your business, warns Gartner
You have been warned.
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NASA throws Deep Impact spacecraft at comet
I’m looking forward to the results from this mission. It should be quite a unique event.
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Embraceable E.U.
Robert Kagan has this interesting article in the WP last week. He is worth quoting at length here: But the crisis in Ukraine shows what an enormous and vital role Europe can play, and is playing, in shaping the politics and economies of nations and peoples along its ever-expanding border. This is no small matter.…
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Fusion: Stepping closer to reality
Fusion is getting closer and closer, and will be achieved perhaps within my natural lifetime. “There have been dramatic advancements in our scientific understanding” over the past five to 10 years, Goldston notes. The basic conclusion: The “fire” in the type of reactor planned for ITER may not be as finicky to control as many…
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Military hardware wearing faster than expected
That question by the US soldier directed to Don Rumsfeld spawned a flurry of interest by US media in the state of the campagin. MSNBC take this look at the current state of US military hardware. The number of tanks requiring major repairs is up 600 percent. Before the war, some 300 Humvees a year…
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Warding off the Oil Curse – Chad
Number 8 in the top ten things from Foreign Policy (see below) is this little gem: Although the Boston Red Sox undid their curse in dramatic fashion, the West African country of Chad is quietly trying to undo the oil curse that plagues many developing countries. Chad became an oil exporter and in July received…
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A Wounded Military
Foreign Policy(sub. only) have a web only piece on “The Top Ten Stories You Missed in 2004”, coming in at number 10: Around 800,000 U.S. military troops have served in either Iraq or Afghanistan since Sept. 11, 2001. On top of being overstretched, the general health of the military may be deteriorating. More than 9,300…
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Bomb blast strikes Iraq holy city
Looks like the election campaign in Iraq has started in earnest – and to start it all off : At least seven people have been killed and 30 injured in a bomb explosion in Iraq’s holy city of Karbala. The blast at the gate to a major Shia shrine, the Imam Hussein mausoleum, was the…
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Aftermath Of Failed Electronic Voting
Slashdot are pointing to a story in the CS Monitor and NPR concerning electronic voting: A combination of human error (setting the machine to record a maximum of three thousand votes when eight thousand people voted) and a software malfunction (the machine kept accepting ballots after its memory was overloaded) resulted in the loss of…
Got any book recommendations?