EDINBURGH — The web should remain neutral and resist attempts to fragment it into different services, web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee has said. Recent attempts in the US to try to charge for different levels of online access web were not ‘part of the internet model,’ he said in Edinburgh. He warned that if the US decided to go ahead with a two-tier internet, the network would enter ‘a dark period’. Sir Tim was speaking at the start of a conference on the future of the web. ‘What’s very important from my point of view is that there is one web,’ he said. ‘Anyone that tries to chop it into two will find that their piece looks very boring.’ An equal net The British scientist developed the web in 1989 as an academic tool to allow scientists to share data. Since then it has exploded into every area of life. You get this tremendous serendipity where I can search the internet and come across a site that I did not set out to look for Tim Berners-Lee. However, as it has grown, there have been increasingly diverse opinions on how it should […]
All those flowers and designs,’ said Christina Hoff Sommers, a resident scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute in Washington. It’s no wonder men aren’t comfortable at home, with the overdesigned, ‘feminized spaces that are being imposed on them’ by the women in their lives, she said. ‘They’re going to want to push back.’ It may be an unpopular opinion, but Ms. Sommers, who is well known for her critiques of feminism, may have a point. According to James B. Twitchell, professor of English and advertising at the University of Florida in Gainesville, men are increasingly creating small private domains in and around their houses - in sheds, basements, attics and closets - as a way of retreating from everyday life. Professor Twitchell, author of ‘Where Men Hide,’ published this month by Columbia University Press, does not agree that women are to blame for this phenomenon, or that it’s a matter of blame at all. He sees it as a positive development, and has built a shed of his own. He uses it as an office and calls it his hidey-hole. It sits on a site near his summer house in Vermont once dedicated to an above-ground septic […]
House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) told President Bush yesterday that he is concerned the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) raid on Rep. William Jefferson’s (D-La.) congressional office over the weekend was a direct violation of the Constitution. Hastert raised concerns that the FBI’s unannounced seizure of congressional documents during a raid of Jefferson’s Rayburn office Saturday night violated the separation of powers between the two branches of government as they are defined by the Constitution. ‘The Speaker spoke candidly with the president about the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s raid over the weekend,’ Hastert spokesman Ron Bonjean said yesterday in confirming his boss’s remarks. Hastert told reporters yesterday that he understands the reasons for the investigation but objected to the manner in which the raid was conducted. ‘My opinion is they took the wrong path,’ Hastert said. ‘They need to back up, and we need to go from there.’ Republican objections are independent of any facts in the corruption probe against Jefferson. Their complaints pertain solely to constitutional questions about the raid itself. The issue is not clear-cut for both parties. Republicans have repeatedly cited the Jefferson probe as an example of Democratic malfeasance in […]
All seven people infected with bird flu in a cluster of Indonesian cases can be linked to other patients, according to disease trackers investigating possible human-to-human transmission of the H5N1 virus. A team of international experts has been unable to find animals that might have infected the people, the World Health Organization said in a statement today. In one case, a 10-year- old boy who caught the virus from his aunt may have passed it to his father, the first time officials have seen evidence of a three-person chain of infection, an agency spokeswoman said. Six of the seven people have died. Almost all of the 218 cases of H5N1 infections confirmed by the WHO since late 2003 can be traced to direct contact with sick or dead birds. Strong evidence of human-to-human transmission may prompt the global health agency to convene a panel of experts and consider raising the pandemic alert level, said Maria Cheng, an agency spokeswoman. “Considering the evidence and the size of the cluster, it’s a possibility,” Cheng said in a telephone interview. “It depends on what we’re dealing with in Indonesia. It’s an evolving situation.” The 32-year-old father in the cluster […]
In a pool of cold water in west Cumbria sit hundreds of metal flasks, silently oozing heat. Each contains enriched uranium removed from the reactors of nuclear power stations after use. It remains highly radioactive. Exposure to the contents of one flask would be followed quickly by death. There are 2,000 cubic metres of high-radiation nuclear waste in Britain, some kept in cooling pools near reactors but most stored at Sellafield. A terrorist attack here would be a disaster to dwarf the meltdown at Chernobyl two decades ago, says the campaign group Greenpeace. Two million people could die. Some people say this deadly waste should be fired into space. Others say bury it deep underground and wait tens of thousands of years for its radioactive strength to decay. But the people who matter, the ones who stop it from leaking and killing people, are waiting for the Government to tell them what to do. Or they were, before the rules changed. The Prime Minister surprised the nuclear industry last week by saying that its form of energy – underfunded for years, feared by many – was ‘back on the agenda with a vengeance’. Suddenly it is assumed […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
