Good Design is Sustainable Design

Sun's new 'datacentre in a box' product is fabulously sexy:


an all-weather, indoor/outdoor, instant-on, datacentre inside a shipping container.



It's a simply briliant design - it uses less power, much less space and it's fully recycable and refurbishable, with a commitment from Sun for responsible disposal.

Now they should publish the design as an open standard of some sort, to encourage everyone to make these things so you don't have to be a Sun shop to reap the benefits.

• Project Blackbox will give customers the flexibility to move applications to optimal locations to take advantage of lower energy rates, avoid power outages, and tap cheaper, greener energy.
• Customers who select a configuration with the Sun Fire CoolThreads technology-based servers will save about $1,000 a year per Sun Fire T2000 or Sun Fire T1000 server in energy costs, in addition to cost savings provided by the container's cooling advantage over existing datacenter implementations.
• Sun will extend its electronic waste and hazardous material leadership by taking back Project Blackbox containers and their systems for upgrading, reuse, recycling, or responsible disposal.

Isn't it Ironic?

Guess who?
Originally uploaded by daz.

(Originally from http://www.iranian.com/Pictory/2006/May/guess.html and posted to flickr for posterity)

Crazy Protestant End of the Worlders

Talk2Action has the straight dope on the the upcoming video game based on the best-selling Left Behind series of crazy fundamentalist prophecy books.

"Imagine: you are a foot soldier in a paramilitary group whose purpose is to remake America... You are issued high-tech military weaponry, and instructed to engage the infidel on the streets of New York City. You are on a mission - both a religious mission and a military mission -- to convert or kill Catholics, Jews... Buddhists, gays, and anyone who advocates the separation of church and state - especially moderate, mainstream Christians. Your mission is "to conduct physical and spiritual warfare"; all who resist must be taken out with extreme prejudice. You have never felt so powerful, so driven by a purpose: you are 13 years old. You are playing a real-time strategy video game...

"This game immerses children in present-day New York City -- 500 square blocks, stretching from Wall Street to Chinatown, Greenwich Village, the United Nations headquarters, and Harlem. The game rewards children for how effectively they role play the killing of those who resist becoming a born again Christian."

Unfortunately, because the last phrase is "born again christians" and not, say, "Wahabbist Muslims" this story is unlikely to get much play in the media.
It has been discussed a bit over at LP, but I think most of the commenters miss the point slightly, perhaps because they don't understand the dynamics within American Christian subcultures.

JPZ says "As far as I know, there aren’t thousands of armed militant underground Christian cells all over the planet, stocking up on weapons, conducting terrorism training, and spreading an ideology of mass murder that is, in any event, a contradiction of Christianity to begin with. But maybe there are such groups, and I’m just not on their email list."

I suggest to JPZ that there are such groups. In the US, they're called the Militia movement and it's a sickening mix of End-times/book-of-revelation-prophecy, white supremacy, and religious fundamentalism.

Have a look at Combat4Christ for instance. Or this excerpt from a Daily Kos diary describing a "Battle Cry" rally attended by 25 000 people.

But BattleCry Philadelphia was more than just a vulgar carnival designed to suck donations into the coffers of Ron Luce's corporation "Teen Mania". Indeed, it had a point, to recruit the future elite "warriors" in the coming battle against the separation of church and state. It turned dark and frightening on Saturday afternoon. After Franklin "Islam is a Wicked Religion" Graham came out to thunder against the evils of homosexuality and the Iraqi people (whom he considers to be exactly the same people as the ancient Babylonians who enslaved the tribes of Israel and deserving, one would assume, the exact same fate) we heard an explosion. Flames shot out on stage and a team of Navy Seals was shown on the big TV monitors in full camouflage creeping forward down the hallway from the locker room with their M16s. They were hunting us, the future Christian leaders of America. Two teenage girls next to me burst into tears and even I, a jaded middle-aged male, almost jumped out of my skin. I imagined for that moment what it must have felt like to have been a teacher at Columbine high school. 10 seconds later they rushed out onstage and pointed their guns in our direction firing blanks spitting flames. About 1000 shots and bang, we were all dead.

And this is at a mainstream event, featuring Franklin Graham and a message of support from George W Bush.

Look slightly further afield and you find movements like "Christian Identity" with its strong ties to the Aryan Nations Church, and "Christian Reconstructionism". Keep looking and you'll also see that they're getting better organized politically.

Subcultures are almost invisible to outsiders. I can't tell techno from electro, dub, trance, happy hardcore or what-have-you. I like a lot of electronic music, but I'm not in the culture and I can't see the subcultural divisions.

Protestantism is the same - if you've never been part of the Protestant culture, they all look pretty much the same (except for the Salvos with their snappy uniforms). And in truth, some of them are pretty much the same and many of them are, to borrow Douglas Adam's immortal phrase "mostly harmless". But some of them are sinister and dangerous.

Do not make the mistake of dismissing them out of hand as merely religious nutters. When Muslims do these sorts of things, we get all bent out of shape and start huffing and puffing about the threat to civilisation. Why do white people who call themselves Christian get a free pass?

Gillard, Abbot and Grubs

There are two very good blog posts that lay out an instance of media bias very clearly. Rob Corr at Larvartus Prodeo has a wonderfully clear and concise timeline of the events. It's short, you should follow that link and read it now. I'll wait for you, really, go read it.

Now look at how the ABC presented the story. Tim Dunlop lays the problems out very neatly.

Tony Abbott is a thoroughly dislikable bully boy and prone to bursts of bad judgement. He's also a Cabinet Minister and Manager of Governement Business in the House, he holds high office of State and is by definition is one of he most respected figures in civil society.

If he calls an opposition nobody a 'sniveling grub' then that's hunky-dory. All part of the cut-and-thrust of parliamentary debate.

But if the Manager of Opposition Business in the House calls Tony a 'sniveling grub' then she's expelled for the chamber and suspended.

Why does anyone like Tony Abbott?

(fixed formatting error 1/6/06)

Al Gore

There's been a bit a speculation about whether or not Al Gore is shaping up for another tilt at the Presidency in 2008. I'm not going to speculate on that, but let's have a look at his 2000 campaign and what he's done since.

In 2000, Gore was absolutely hammered by the media for things that weren't actually true. The 'I invented the internet' beat-up. Naomi Wolf advising him to 'dress in earth tones to appeal to women'. The list goes on. Whatever inadequacies his campaign may have had, the media ran right over the top of it, creating stories and 'conventional wisdom' as it went.

What's Gore done since 2000. He was a visiting professor in Journalism at Columbia University. He's the President of Current TV, he sits on the Board of Apple Computers, one of the most brand conscious companies around. He's a senior advisor to Google, who's business, when push comes to shove, is advertising.

And now he's made a critically acclaimed fillum and is spruking it 'round the traps.

Put it together and you see that Al is up to his eyeballs in the media and image business and if he were to run again, the media might find it a lot harder to control the narrative about him.

Tesla Coil!

OK - here's a picture for y'all. A picture of a honking big Tesla Coil! I want one....

My favorite Tesla Coil 15000 watts.

Originally uploaded by tesla1000.

Google Maps of Rising Sea Levels

A nifty google maps hack that shows where the coastline is after a raise in ocean levels.

Technorati Tags: maps, climate change

Broadband internet in Australia

Labor's proposed a Government rollout of broadband internet, which I think is a pretty lame idea, but not for same reason Andrew Leigh does. Better network services are available to almost every Australian right now, Telstra's network reaches everyone but they doesn't see ubiquitous cheap access as a good business plan.

And when I talk about cheap, ubiquitous access I'm not necessarily talking about superwizzyfast Multi-megabit 'fibre-to-the-node' connections, although that'd be nice. 'Old-fashioned' services like ISDN are available almost everywhere and would provide reliable, always on, medium capacity links to almost every house and office in the country. This is a fantastic platform for service delivery and that's where the big positive externalities are, not in any particular service but delivering many services.

So if Telstra won't do it and it's in the national interest to provide this platform, why shouldn't the government nationalise the network? It was built with public money and the Government still has substantial equity. Telstra could continue as a private service provider and be free of most of regulation that currently binds them. You might also look at other layer one (physical) providers - like Optus and their HFC cable network. Aarnet and Grangenet shouldn't be off limits either.

By consolidating the national network(s) we can provide a stable foundation for all those new and exciting things we hear so much about, and encourage innovation.