A geo-locator for wireless, a streaming video program and a memory card recovery tool

This product has been tested on the following operating systems: Linux other,Ark Linux,Fedora Core,Freespire and has a average rating of 5

The last rating (5) has been submitted on 2008-09-12 12:18:56 by Anonymous running Linux other:
Netodragon works under Fedora Core 2 & kernel 2.6.5 compiled from me (AMD K6-II 400MHz, Soyo 5EH5). Download driver from http://www.netodragon.com (actually 2.9.10). This modem/driver consumes 40-50% of CPU.

Stateline.org: "A week after President Bush signed a $700 billion bailout plan for Wall Street, the financial crisis has deepened...

Farmers in Alberta are part of the growing rural resistance standing up to development

FOX News: "The World Bank Group's computer network ? one of the largest repositories of sensitive data about the economies...

I was on CJSF radio this evening on the show HiSciFi (Audio archive available this week online). The host Irma Arkus called me for the latter half of the show to discuss C-61, its origins, and what the various parties are thinking about Copyright during this election.

Major oops on my part not to mention the Green Party who is more of a factor in BC, and who also have a very modern view of technology law and copyright. I spoke about how I am excited to see what happens in Vancouver Center, with my rooting for Michael Byers who has a modern view of tech/copyright and against incumbent Hedy Fry who has been a bit of an old-economy wild-card. I also spoke about the CRIA candidate Dan McTeague in Pickering - Scarborough East (Ontario), and my hope that he won't be in the committee that studies copyright (either not elected, or not put in by Liberals).

Irma was already very well aware of the statements that the Conservatives have made, actually dedicating part of their platform to reintroducing the "made worse in Canada" C-61. Threat made, threat kept!

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New York Times: "The United States is failing to develop the math skills of both girls and boys, especially among...

We've pointed out in the past, that the internet has always been a communications platform, not a broadcast platform, and that distinction is actually the key to understanding many of the "conflicts" you see online these days. The internet was built with core principles based on being a communication platform, and it was only much later, when the big broadcast content providers realized what was going on, that they started acting as if the internet must be a broadcast platform. That's why they freak out about file sharing -- because while it fits perfectly with the "communication" aspect, it violates their sense of what a broadcast platform should be.

The problem, though, is that the big media companies have simply decided that rather than change to reflect the nature of the platform, the platform should change to reflect the nature of that ONE industry's business. Unfortunately, at times they're somehow able to convince politicians that the platform should change to adapt to them, rather than the other way around. That's evident from this story submitted by SteveD about comments made by the UK's "culture secretary" about "tightening up" online regulations to make them match TV regulations. This is really code for saying that we're going to hobble the internet to make it act more like a broadcast medium, to keep those media companies happy. The column at the link above, by Bill Thompson, does a pretty good job destroying this argument, but it's still worth noting that it's even being made.

It's amazing how clear the strategies are of the various companies when you view it through this lens. As a communications platform, there's little reason to change most of the way the internet works. It does a great job. The only issue is how other companies should change to work with it. But too many politicians and industry insiders seem to think that they should totally inhibit this communications platform because they're not able to simply wedge their existing business model onto that platform.

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Transparency is key to a functioning democracy. No, we don't always have it, but we absolutely should be striving for it, or you can almost guarantee corruption will take over. That's why we've been so focused on the problems with e-voting machines for so many years, and pushing for increased transparency. Now, some of the researchers who wrote a recent suppressed report, about potential security problems with the Sequoia e-voting machines used in New Jersey, followed the procedures in place to be allowed to view the process by which votes are counted. This is a perfectly legal request. The Elections Board is allowed to offer "Challenger Badges" to those who would like to observe the election process. You would think that some Princeton-associated folks, with knowledge of e-voting, would be exactly the type of people that an Elections Board would want to observe the election, in order to make sure that it was done properly, and to make citizens more comfortable that their votes would be counted.

But, of course, that's not what happened.

Andrew Appel and Grayson Barber had their request rejected as the Elections Board claimed it was "too important" an election to allow in any outside observers. You would think that if the election is so important, having some experts on hand to make sure the process is done in an acceptable manner would be more important. You can understand why they don't want too many people in the room, or don't want anyone who is clearly a partisan activist -- but these are e-voting experts. There's simply no reason not to have them in the room, and rejecting them raises many more questions about New Jersey's process for counting votes.

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Week 5 of the Connectivism MOOC is about the distinction between groups and networks. One of the key readings for the week was written by my friend Stephen Downes when he was obviously high on something (possibly New Zealand, which will do that to you).

The point of the lesson is to distinguish groups, which are apparently inherently homogeneous and hierarchical, from networks, which are apparently neither. Members of both are connected to each other. George Siemens asserts that most organized collective activity (like education) fails to recognize the identity of the selves within the collective. Rather than groups vs networks, he distinguishes collectives (in which the self is subsumed) from connectives (in which autonomy of self is retained).  "As we integrate our ideas and concepts with others'" he says, "and we extend them into some kind of collective activity, there is an important protection of self in which we retain our identity and our contributions."

I thought this dichotomy rather interesting in the context of the diagram above (which Chris Corrigan and I collectively, or perhaps connectively, created) of the dynamic of decision making which moves from individual engagement and cognition through collective conversation and consensus and thence to individual action, following a Scharmer "U" pattern.

Are we not, I thought, iteratively and simultaneously collective and connective, producing some "work product" that is collective, that of the integrated group, and some that is connective, the individual acceptance of responsibility and resultant actions, whether they be done alone or with others?

George goes on to warn that groups will coerce individuals with deviant ideas to conform to the group norm, with the result that groups stifle innovation. Networks are positioned as the compromise in the continuum from highly diverse independent individuals and conforming, structured groups.

This model doesn't jibe with what I've observed in workplaces throughout my life. Using the terminology of the Wisdom of Crowds, my experience has been that:

• "crowds" that are diverse have particular talents (decision-making and prediction among them) that are better than that of either "expert" individuals or non-diverse groups;
• innovation works best when there is a balance between creative thinkers and critical thinkers; and
• groups and networks that do not share a common understanding of an issue spend most of their time and energy trying to find a common context, and often never get around to applying their abilities to finding solutions to the issue.

Can groups be dangerous? Of course. Groupthink has ruined many once-great companies. Cults are one of the scourges of civilization. Mobs, of organized criminals, religious zealots or drunken college students, can cause havoc and heartache and ruin lives.

But groups of people with a shared purpose and shared set of values and principles have also, as Margaret Mead has said, achieved important changes that would not have been possible any other way. They are what we call communities.

Networks are useful for the reasons explained in Granovetter's "Strength of Weak Ties". They are 'farm teams' for the communities that you do your most important work with, the 'trade routes' between communities. They are often delightful, stimulating, and helpful when you need something in a hurry. But to me, networks are too loose, too fragmented to be communities or to accomplish any of the important things that communities can do.

Communities are connective and collective and only they can fully enable the powerful activities depicted in the graphic above. As I've said before, love, conversation and community are the essence of what it means to be human, alive, connected, part of all-life-on-Earth. 

Bessen and Meurer have a brief, but interesting post noting at least some similarities between the "mortgage bubble" that resulted in the current financial crisis with the ongoing "patent bubble." In both cases, as they note, you're dealing with products where its not clear at all what the "rights" actually cover: What happens when you give out lots of property rights, but nobody exactly knows what those rights cover? Yes, that might describe software/business-method patents and the result is costly litigation, disputes and a net disincentive for innovation.

But that also describes recent markets in collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps. And with these markets, as anyone who has read a newspaper (some people still do that) during the last month knows, the result is a bit more ominous. I'm not convinced the analogy holds, but it's something to think about in terms of recognizing how we've been seeing an ongoing patent bubble inflating pretty rapidly over the past few years. It's certainly nowhere near as big as the mortgage bubble, but it's still a pretty decent sized bubble, at this point.

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From CBS: Some of the questioners said they were scared of an Obama presidency, and one woman said she couldn’t trust Obama because “he’s an Arab.”

McCain shook his head. “No ma’am, he’s a decent family man, a citizen, that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues, and that’s what this campaign is all about.”

Telco monopolists really are amazing sometimes. For years, we've been seeing them abuse their monopolies, offer poor (and expensive) service thanks to a lack of competition -- and then freak out, when they're actually challenged in the marketplace. And, of course, nothing gets them more worked up than the threat of some sort of "municipal" competitor. Time and time again, they go to court to block any muni-fiber offering, and time and time again they lose. The latest is TDS Telecom having its case dismissed in Monticello, Minnesota, where voters have approved a bond issue to set up a municipal fiber network. Such networks have been tremendously successful elsewhere.

TDS, of course, claims that it should be illegal for the government to compete with them, but they leave out many of the details. First, they have no real competition, because the government granted them a monopoly. So they're already in many ways the beneficiary of a gov't program. To claim that no one else can benefit from the gov't is simply anti-competitive and ignores the monopoly they themselves received. Second, since this is a bond issue, there's no taxpayer money at issue -- and the citizens of the town approved it. Finally, perhaps if TDS didn't rest on its monopoly laurels, it wouldn't now be facing competition. All this has made clear was that TDS failed to deliver what the town wanted, so the town got together and came up with a solution. Good for them.

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Office of Foreign Assets Control, U.S. Department of the Treasury, Terrorist Assets Report 2007: "The Department of the Treasury?s Office...

New York Times: "A legislative committee investigating Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, the Republican vice presidential candidate, issued a report...

It's no surprise that some things may be getting more expensive these days, especially as companies start dealing with the fallout from the financial crisis -- but it appears that some are going a bit overboard. There's a bit of an uproar among some, as Verizon Wireless is slapping a surprising 3-cents-per-text-message fee on top of every mobile terminated text message. That basically affects any company that provides some sort of SMS notification system or content service, massively increasing prices. As some have noted, most of those services bought text messages in bulk, where it cost around 1 cent per message. That means the cost of sending text messages just quadrupled. If you're already worried about the economy and working on tight margins, that could certainly put some companies out of business entirely.

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EPA Children's Environmental Health: 2008 Highlights "In the field of environmental protection, even experts did not always recognize that children...

News release: "The FDIC Board of Directors today adopted an interim final rule, effective immediately, to simplify the deposit insurance...

Statutory Structure and Legislative Drafting Conventions: A Primer for Judges, M. Douglass Bellis, Deputy Legislative Counsel, United States House of...