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Category Archives: The Global Picture

Two observations about the reality of public key cryptography and digital signatures

1> Unaided, a digital signature only proves that you uttered a statement, not that you originated it. 2> The mapping of keys to individuals, and individuals to keys, is many to many. To get any more than this out of cryptography, you need to start adding things. 1> A timestamping service which records the first [...]

20% of US troops in Afghanistan are on Prozac

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1811858,00.html I just… I mean… yes, it makes perfect sense. If they’d had prozac in WW2, it might well have been compulsory for all combatants. But still. Just seems like a warning sign, an indicator of really serious problems at other levels of the structure.

Global Swadeshi is beginning to cook!

Keyhole Gardening gets a solid thread going. I’m particularly interested in the way that five or six people put in a few minutes each and we wound up, at the end of the day, with a decent amount of information on something that otherwise most of us wouldn’t have known about. I think there’s a [...]

The word on satphones is in: Thuraya

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thuraya http://www.humanedgetech.com/news.php?id=16244 Basically, calls as cheap as $0.20 or $0.40 a minute, although $1 a minute is more typical. Thuraya 3 is going to cover South America in 2009. The irony – goddamnit – is that Thuraya 2 misses South Africa and Reykjavik. Anyway, interesting to note – it’s a consortium of African and Middle [...]

Open Source Ecology – Factor E Live

Just great stuff. Well done!

US and USSR – closing the collapse gap

One area in which I cannot discern any Collapse Gap is national politics. The ideologies may be different, but the blind adherence to them couldn’t be more similar. It is certainly more fun to watch two Capitalist parties go at each other than just having the one Communist party to vote for. The things they [...]

Seed balling, also called seed bombing

http://www.pathtofreedom.com/pathproject/gardening/seedballs.shtml Powerful tech for planting fast. Perennial food plants? Just what’s the most useful thing to do this way?

What’s going to happen in the future.

There are four basic trends which are going to own the future over the next 20 years. 1> Power is about to become as cheap as information. Nanosolar, Konarka, and the dozens of other solar power outfits who are pushing the price of solar down, down, down below the price of coal power, and towards [...]

This… plus solar and internet

The South Pacific country of Vanuatu has been voted the happiest place in the world so what makes its inhabitants such a happy lot? Not having to worry about money – the secret of Jean Pierre’s happiness (photo: James Mair) Jean Pierre John is living the dream. That popular fantasy of owning one’s own island, [...]

On famine and farming

http://www.heise.de/tp/r4/artikel/27/27992/1.html Discussing globalization and the food supply. Wrong on many, but not all, points. I’m still thinking this through.