.| UrbanNerd |.

Today Pakistan blocked off YouTube. They also blocked facebook recently (see excerpts from article below).

This is very good news. At current count Pakistan has blocked 450 websites on the Internet.

I enjoy the logic the used. Originally just the offending page was blocked, but then lawyers pushed to block the whole website because the website allowed that page to exist.

I would implore the government to block ALL of the Internet, because the Internet brought you the website that brought you the webpage. In turn you might also want to take away all of the computers as well, because they brought you the Internet that brought you the website that brought you the webpage.

You can see where I am going with this. Soon, Pakistan will be reduced to basic rock tools. Hopefully all other Islamic cultures will follow suit as well. This will make the world a safer place.

from MSNBC:

“The Facebook page “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day!” encourages users to post images of the prophet on May 20 to protest threats made by a radical Muslim group against the creators of the animated American television series “South Park” for depicting Muhammad in a bear suit during an episode earlier this year.

“Public sentiment has been growing,” said Siraj, the Nayatel CEO. “The government was monitoring it and there seemed to be public unrest, so it had to take a decision.”

In an attempt to respond to public anger over the Facebook dispute, the Pakistani government ordered Internet service providers in the country to block the controversial page Tuesday.

But members of the Islamic Lawyers Forum asked the Lahore High Court on Wednesday to order the government to fully block Facebook because it allowed the page to be posted in the first place.

The regulatory body said it has blocked more than 450 Internet links containing offensive material, but it is unclear how many of the links were blocked in the last two days.”

This is just such a great article on nerd culture and how it influences science and technology, while at the same time science and technology influences us nerds as we grow excited about what can be for the future. For the purposes of this article it seems to me that geek & nerd are fairly interchangeable.

If you have ever played the game Half-Life then you are aware of the storyline of the bespectacled  scientist with a goatee battling aliens and creatures not of this earth. You know the nerdiness & sheer fun of not using a gun in the game, but rather a crow bar as a weapon against the aliens.

If you are a nerd or science buff then you are aware of the Large Hadron Collider. You may have read more than one alarmist comment on how the LHC will cause the end of the world, open up a rift in time, and/or a great many other evil things.

Read on, laugh and admire how awesome this is:

These people are geeks. And they are the Internet’s unofficial hall monitors.

This is not an insult; it’s a badge of honor. Geeks can help give context to the scientific community. Thanks to the Internet, scientists find themselves and their work increasingly scrutinized, absorbed and distributed by legions of geeks worldwide.

Scientists have this incredible, laser-vision approach to specific disciplines, but it takes a geek to make the less-obvious connections. Just as geeks spotted an unassuming electrical engineer in the background of a publicity photo and made a connection to the “Half-Life” character, their cultural depth is different from that of the scientists. And the geeks comfortably straddle both worlds.

It was the geeks who grasped the importance of the LHC, who knew the questions to ask about the project, and who made winking connections to all manner of science fiction, from creation of out-of-control black holes to time travel jokes to science fiction references and other video game references.

“the 500 TeraFLOPS Heterogeneous Cluster powered by PS3s but connected to subcluster heads of dual-quad Xeons with multiple GPGPUs.”

Just as the Air Force was completing their project:

“The Air Force team ordered the hardware, spent days unboxing it and imaging each unit to run Linux, and then… Sony removed the Linux install option a couple months later. (One can only imagine what happened to those 2,000 PS3 controllers and other unneeded accessories.)”

Very interesting article.

I left facebook a few months back. I haven’t missed it. I am not the only one. As more privacy concerns arise every day, I came across this article from the NY Times, here are some highlights:

How angry is the world at Facebook for devouring every morsel of personal information we are willing to feed it?

A few months back, four geeky college students… decided to build a social network that wouldn’t force people to surrender their privacy to a big business. It would take three or four months to write the code, and they would need a few thousand dollars each to live on.

They gave themselves 39 days to raise $10,000, using an online site, Kickstarter, that helps creative people find support.

They announced their project on April 24. They reached their $10,000 goal in 12 days

From Slashdot, “The oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico could be stopped with an underground nuclear blast” according to Russian newspaper Komsomoloskaya Pravda.

“‘The underground explosion moves the rock, presses on it, and, in essence, squeezes the well’s channel.’ It’s so simple, in fact, that the Soviet Union used this method five times to deal with petrocalamities, and it only didn’t work once.”

What the NRO is really saying: net neutrality is evil

I am no all encompassing Obama supporter, but I hate the extreme views taken by the left and right, to the exclusion of sane sensible moderate thought.

So let me dismantle the NRO idea that Obama “dislikes” the free movement of information if he can’t control it (thereby hating technology) and get to the heart of this NRO article: net neutrality.

NRO: “President Obama’s disdain for new media has become so consistent that it is hard to dismiss as mere posturing.”

COUNTER: Dis-proven by the writer himself who says in the next sentence “This is all the more ironic because Obama’s political movement supposedly mastered the new art of communication.” Obama used a number of new technologies in the campaign as did and do the right as well. But perhaps he means that he has been consistent only since taking office, okay, lets go on then. Read the rest of this entry »