A couple of weeks ago I posted this: Bush in Space. Now I come back with a few nice articles that show what the future of space is likely to be. Or not to be.

First of all, a news article from May 2006 US seeks laser to shoot down satellites talks about a "secret" U.S. project that uses lasers to shoot down "enemy" satellites. Considering the ability of most nations to put satellites in orbit, I can only conclude that they mean Chinese, Indian, Japanese, Russian or European satellites. Probably, the Chinese thought the same thing, and here is where this article: China Attempted To Blind U.S. Satellites With Laser comes in. It talks about the Chinese trying to shoot down (or at least blind them considerably) U.S. satellites spying on them. This story was "dug" here. You can see in the article that the US already plan for a "constellation" of satellites to replace the vulnerable spy satallites they already have in place.

Now, most comments on this are usually either moronically nationalistic, either uselessly anti-American. However, there are people that have actually put thought into this. How come the US is augmenting this "Cold War" with China, when they have such a lucrative economic bond. Is it because they see a more business oriented (read democratic) China as a more maleable one? A good consumer market just ripe for the US culture? Or is it because they actually fear a democratic China, as a very serious competitor. Most analysts observe that placing and defending stuff in space is way harder than destroying stuff in space. Even lasers work in space, but low tech solutions like plain old rubble would work just as well. This is described as asymmetric warfare. When even the little guy can fight back.

But what does all this mean? The US have all but openly dismissed the ISS. The only science projects that they do on the station are related to the human habitation of space, which leads me to believe they either plan on colonising the Moon or even Mars (a man can hope) or they just don't care about space any more than their precious spy satellites. How does the entire "teritory" concept work in space? How can you attack in space and not get into a ground war at the same time? These are questions about things one might think do not affect us, but they do. From weather to global positioning, from TV to the Internetand the telephone, they all come through space. You have to imagine a world where space wars are common and plan ahead against it. We cannot color the sky, we can't afford to.

I've just finished reading this book, in Romanian translation, and I found it nicely written, but not exactly my type of book. For me, art needs to draw you into atmosphere and conclusions, not to be understood only if you make the effort to draw the conclusions yourself. Yes, I am lazy, but don't get me wrong, I like art. It's just that art is supposed to communicate. I may recite a beautiful poem in Romanian, but if my audience is English, it wouldn't do any good.
So my review on this book is as follows: it is well written, freely written (I can sense throughout the book that Murakami has an open mind, not clogged by clichees and prejudice), it draws you into the atmosphere. But there is where it stops. I know there are deeper meanings in the things that happen throughout the book, but they are not properly explained. I can draw beautiful conclusions and see very deep things, but it would be my merit for making the effort and looking deep, not the writer's. And I wouldn't be sure that it's what the writer intended telling in the first place.
Read it if you are into atmospheric books :D and if you like dark, philosophical discussions.

According to Wikipedia, dink, can mean a lot of things, ranging from small boats to small penises. A dink is also a creature in the SpaceBalls parody of Star Wars. But is seems that the main use of this word right now is for "Double Income No Kids". That's me! Well, I have a cat, but he doesn't generate any income. You can also find this particular demographic group called DINKY, which is a more dynamic acronym that takes into the consideration the future possibility of offspring(Y=yet). The Americans seem to prefer Dink, while the UK and their former colonies Dinky.

Apparently being a dink means that one is part of a high-earning couple who choose not to have children and are therefore able to afford a more expensive consumer lifestyle. A dink is considered a lot of times as being also a yuppie, or Young Urban Professional, with pejorative connotations of selfishness, materialism, and superficiality.

So, apparently, I should :

• generate an income (checked)


• have a mate (checked)


• the mate should also generate income (checked)


• both generated incomes should be high (yeah, right)


• selfish (checked)


• materialist (not really)


• superficial (yes!)

So, I have demonstrated creating by oneself a Cosmopolitan test by using Wikipedia. Are you a dink? How dinky are you? Take the test! :D

In 2001, July, a strange phenomenon in the form of red rain occured in southern India. While the official explanation of this is that desert dust has been brought by winds and brought down by rain, Dr. Godfrey Louis, a proffesor of physics for the Cochin University of Science and Technology thinks otherwise: it's all about alien microbes that arrived here by riding a comet.

The story might seem a bit far fetched, but even BBC News wrote about it. And this guy released a science paper about it after what appears to be five years of study. Take a minute to read it, it's only 18 pages long. What seems odd to me is that, even if he maintains that the red rain particles are biological in nature, he doesn't mention anything about reproduction, nor of any attempt to revive them.

Anyway, it seemed interesting enough to blog about it. There is a more down to Earth and detailed article about it in Wikipedia. You can also find here is the transcript of a news report together with animations that talks about Cardiff University scientists confirming the presence of some sort of DNA in the seemlessly devoid of nucleus cells.

Check out the newly released Coma video, to celebrate the release of the new album on the 30 of november in Club Fire, Bucharest, Romania!

The whole meeting took place at the Titulescu room at RomExpo. They had 4 desks that spanned the alphabetical ordering of software firms participating, so the entry was really comfortable. They gave us a pen and a little notebook to take notes, too. The whole meeting lasted from 9:00-16:30, then there was an hour of free talks.
My general impression of the briefing was good. The presenters were enthusiastic and talked about: application development on Windows Vista with NET 3.0 and Sharepoint and Office 2007. The new Microsoft XML office format was presented, programatic methods of accessing and creating them, how to mix Sharepoint and Office in order to create quick Excel based web sites, etc. The most interesting part, though, was of course the last. It presented the advances in programming technology like the C# 3.0 features and ADO.Net vNext. Too bad I've already read about those technologies, but the enthusiastic presentation mode (alas, SPOKEN TOO LOUD) was refreshing.
The information was as compacted as possible, but there was too little code for me, even if most presenters seemed to have the same hatred for marketing slides as I did.
There were also 30 minutes of coffee break and 1 hour of lunch. The lunch food was very good and varied, from chinese apetizers like sesame meatballs and Shanghai chicken to sandwiches, salads and sweets. Taking into account that I've been to a similar Microsoft thing in Milano, where they barely gave us some sandwiches in plastic bags, this was truly great.

It just had to come. It was inevitable. Bush has signed a "tough space policy" which basically says the US will hold space itself hostage as they do water, air and economy on Earth.
Just read the BBC article and draw your own conclusions. Before they even explore it, the Americans seize space as their own, all in the name of "protecting" their space sattelites or whatever.
So next time you god damned university students want to launch your geek science projects into space, you'd better clear it with Bush. Or Rumsfeld.

This is an image from the BBC web site and the title of the BBC article is Rice launches Korea crisis tour and the caption is Japan and the US pledge to work on implementing sanctions on North Korea, the US Secretary of State says.
I knew politicians are assholes, but how can you smile like that while deciding pledging to impose sanctions on some other nation? Look at her! You'd say she's hugging her daughter while petting the cutest cat ever. And she's imposing sanctions! And the title sounds like she has just opened a tourist resort. That whole picture is wrong. Geez!

I've recently changed my email address, added spam filters both on the server and on the client and moved all known addresses into a special folder, leaving any unknown source (thus mostly spam) emails alone in the inbox folder. This resulted in me not receiving spam email for at least a week. Now I kind of miss it. I mean, I feel something is wrong, like some essential part of my life is gone. How weird is that?
And apparently, I am not alone. 231 pages in Google have "I miss spam" in them.

I've just finished The Runes of the Earth, the first in the last series of the Thomas Covenant saga. I must say that the style and content changed significantly from the first books, therefore I felt the need to review the whole saga as I see it now.
I liked that in each book new ideas were introduced, they weren't just reprints of the same story. The moral basically stays the same, but everything else, sometimes even the lead character, changes.
From the second series, a new model of writing was used, thus all the books in one series make out a story rather than one book per story. I didn't like that, especially now, when I have to wait for the next books to be published in order to see what is going on. What I also minded was the need of the characters to shed tears over all kind of stuff. I think the author overdid the misty eyes scenes. A lot of the creatures and the culture from the first series was completely obliterated in the second, but it seems to be making a come back now.
The good thing about it, though, is that the writing gets better with each book. In hindsight, the first book seems amateurish compared with the rest. No more singing, more story, less descriptions. It is interesting that the last series of the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever was published 20 years from the end of the second. Donaldson justified this as taking time to become a better writer before ending the story.
Let's see how it goes.

For as long as I can remember, the MSN messenger changed my picture in a random fashion. I was setting it, then at the next restart, another was there. The last version I am using is 7.5.
Today, I finally found out what caused it: Tools → Options → Security → "This is a shared computer, so don't store my address book, display picture or background on it".
It is nice to know that if I want to keep the same picture on the messenger I have to also store my address book on the computer. Microsoft seems to think they are of similar importance :-/

Do you want to update the updater?

Already annoyed by the Adobe Flash Player 9.0 which practically breaks my favourite online game Robostrike and forces me to run it in Mozilla, I found this article hilarious enough to sustain my "Adobe sucks!" statement.

Update: (yet, pun intended) After five years I was working for Adobe Romania and it was awesome! Best development environment I've seen yet. I am pretty sure this is owed more to the people there than the Adobe corporation as a whole and it was still 2011 after all, but I felt I had to rectify the statement above.

Spurred by two TV shows about two famous people, I came to the conclusion that Osama bin Laden's history has a lot in common with the one of Hannibal Barca, the Carthaginian general, just as the history and technological development of the US has a lot in common with the Roman Empire.
Think about it!
Hannibal was born in Carthage, but he left it when he was nine years old. He hated the Romans with all his being and when he attacked their empire (which then span the Italian peninsula) he did it by hitting targets deep within their teritory. Using innovative strategy, he defeated the strong Roman army by using its flaws: size, but no coordination; force, but not precision. With a small mercenary army that also used elephants, he surrounded the huge Roman army and destroyed it. He then demanded support from Carthage, in order to siege and capture Rome, but the politicians of that state decided that it would be safer to not antagonize the Roman Empire and didn't sent support. Powerless to set siege to Rome, Hannibal could do nothing but watch how the Romans build another army which will then defeat him. In order to avoid capture, after years of exile, he commited suicide.
Osama didn't leave Saudi Arabia from childhood, but he was exposed to the teachings of returned exiled teachers, who brought different ideas. He came to hate the Americans and when he attacked them, he struck deep within their teritory. Using innovative strategy he defeated the US antiterrorism machine by using their flaws: size, but no coordination; force, but bureaucracy. With the smallest of terrorist groups that also used air elephants (heh, I stretched it out a bit, but it holds), he struck a major blow to the confidence of the US. He then demanded support from the Arabic nations, which decided to not antagonize the American Empire. We all know what happened to the ones that did. Powerless to continue his campaign, Osama watched as the US machine learned from its mistakes, rebuilt it's antiterror army and then defeated him. After years of exile, he dies, avoiding capture through death.
Now, what it even more interesting is that Hannibal's actions led to the expansion of the Roman Empire into Iberia and Carthage and the refining of their army and war strategy. This eventually led to the Roman Empire conquering so much and becomnig the most famous and technologically advanced civilisation of its time. Carthage was completely raised from the surface of earth, destroyed by Romans and plowed clean. If we were to continue these parallels, the American Empire should now have a more powerful and precise war machine, it should conquer or at least neutralize any threat from the Arab nations, then proceed on conquering the world. Some poor country should take the blame, as Carthage did for Hannibal, and be completely ravaged by war. Does it sound familiar? Brrrr...

Other related links from people that had similar ideas:

• comment at http://www.dailykos.com


• article at www.911helpamerica.com


• search for the "Re: And ye shall know them by their acts." comment by wrestler

There are even more links, in total Google showed 573 links that contained Osama bin Laden, Hannibal and not L*ecter. But since people spell Osama differently, others make it clear that it's not the guy from the movie, thus causing false positives and there are a lot of sites that just enumerate famous people, the count cound be completely different.
Happy thinking!

It was one of those moments when you think of nothing and suddenly something distillates into conscience. It sounded too good and too important not to find it on the net so I googled for "God is a brand" and I found 17 entries out of 98.200 (yes, Google is getting weirder and weirder).
Now, when it hit me, it seemed like something really smart, but now I understand it is just obvious; I was the dumb one for not getting it sooner. People don't have holly wars on Linux vs Microsoft, they are having brand wars on Jesus vs Mohamed.

What started me is looking for furniture for my new rented apartment (expect a huge blog in a few days) and I found the same models in two different places, but with two different prices. My wife said that it was because the more expensive ones were better made, but they really weren't.
Then I realised that most commerce is run on brands, it's nothing new, it goes on from the beginning of trade. You buy from where you know it's good, or from where stuff makes you look or feel good. People are attached to the spirit of the thing, not the thing itself (well, most people). The Stradivarius violin can be made better and cheaper using modern computer modelling and automated manufacturing, but people care about the original Stradivarius, made by a human, a human that represents something. The enormous price of Stradivarius violins is not due to their utility, but the faith of the people in the original builder, the artist. Ring a bell? Original artist? The Creator? Yes! God!
The epiphany came when I explored the idea in my mind. People doing idiotic things because of their faith, the experiment where people were given to wear a t-shirt for 10$ and refused to do it when they heard it belonged to a serial killer or the one with the children that were given a "perfect replica" of an object that they loved and they prefered the original or the simple superstitions like avoiding number 13. Movies, as well, usually portray clones as imprefect, evil, empty of true purpose or life. People remain married for decades, respecting and even loving the other person, when all rational motives to stay together have withered in time. Of course, this is also linked to the way human instincts work, but nevertheless, there are people who do it and people who don't.
Somehow, the intricate mechanism of the brain puts values on associations rather that on the objects. I think this is important. It is obvious that people have inner representations of different things and people, but I've always assumed that the inner value is put on the thing not on the associations. I now believe to have been wrong. It makes sense: there is no absolute value, only when you put something into context it reveals its value.

Therefore, returning to the God is a brand issue, it seems to me that the branding is made on oneself. You don't buy the product, you become the product. You brand yourself with a god, then act in accordance with its meaning. Then losing one's faith would be like becoming an clone of yourself, empty of meaning. It could explain the feeling of loss of a person, when "there are other fish in the sea". It makes old people be grumpy, since no one truly understand the different deep meanings that they've attached to objects and people and behaviours.

I can't even ask myself "Do brands suck?". It would attack a defining feature of humans AND animals alike. This warrants a look into the idea of religious feeling in animals. It is not possible for everything to suck. Religion sucks, though.

I am used to commenting on the things I see in life. I do the comments on movies on IMDb, but I haven't made an account on iblist, since I read so ridiculously few books that are not technical and IbList doesn't seem to be so complete and organised as IMDb.
So I will blog about books until the time when I see myself worthy of an iblist account.

Spurred on by a need for fantasy I've just finished Lord Foul's Bane, by Stephen R. Donaldson. Remarcably well written, it is obviously inspired by Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. There are lords, there are rings and there are brave and honorable quests. At times this becomes annoying, when characters feel compelled to sing songs (and the author actually wrote the lyrics in the book) or sacrifice themselves in rather ridiculous ways. I didn't like the way Lord of the Rings was written because of all the useless details in it. Lord Foul's Bane, the first in the Covenant series, is a bit like that, but not as bad. The main character, Thomas Covenant, is also most interesting than Frodo, having come from our world and being full of pain. Unfortunately, in the most important parts of the book, Covenant does things as moved by a puppeteer rather than by his own logic and good sense. This makes the plot seem a bit too unreal. The fantasy world, though, is pretty well done, with sensible magic and purposely made to look like a mirror image of our own, with all the bad things in our world not present and (I would say) all the good things being bad there. Like stopping from your journey and starting singing songs that are sometimes labeled as gay in the book.

I've also finished the first two volumes of The Spook series (The Spook's Apprentice and The Spook's Curse), by Joseph Delaney, which is interesting and well written. In this one, a feudal world is plagued by evil witches, ghosts and banes. The man that takes care of this, like a Dark Ages ghostbuster, is a spook. He does the job that no one wants to do, everyone needs him, yet everyone hates and fears him, including and especially the Church, which in this series are portrayed as a bunch of corrupt and amateurish incompetents. The main character is a young child who, under the guidance of his more than ordinary mother, becomes a spook's aprentice. There are twists in the plot and the magical domain is well conceived. Unfortunately, the plot is rather straightforward, with young useless brat finding out he has unsuspected power. But they don't call it heroic fantasy for nothing, so , there it goes. I liked the series and I expect to read the third book (The Spook's Secret), released this year, as soon as I find it.

I've also read the first two Eragon books. While the fantasy world is very complex and well written (especially taking into account the age of the writer) the magic "technology" is a bit hard to wield. I hope the author refines the way it works in ways that don't turn ridiculous. Christopher Paolini is a young American writer of Italian origins, born from a wealthy family of book editors. He started writing Eragon at 15 and finished it at 19. It should come to no surprise that the book became a huge hit; it is well written, but the marketing of the book was intense and privately funded by the author's family. There is an Eragon movie due to be released in 15 of december this year.

A quick mention of Christopher Stasheff, a rather prolific fantasy writer, who tries a combination of magic and space science-fiction. Unfortunately I couldn't finish his first book (Escape Velocity), the first of the Warlock of Gramarye series, as I found the writing style rather annoying. I've read good reviews about his latest books, though, and I plan on starting a bit further up, maybe with the Rogue Wizard series.

The end. :)