[commercial communism and the status quo…]

Back in the USSR: Soviet domain resists death
Registrations of ‘.su’ domain name have
jumped 45 percent this year alone
By Mansur Mirovalev — (via digg…)

“They are selling tickets to a drowning ship,” said Anton Nosik, a veteran Web journalist and founder of several successful online projects. “Their message is to losers and latecomers.”

What’s next? Domain names for the Roman Empire or Ancient Greece?

Country-code domains, derived from a list kept by the International Organization for Standardization, typically disappear when a country ceases to exist or changes its name. Both Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia lost their domain names after they broke up into smaller nations. So did Zaire after it became the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The Internet’s key oversight agency, the Marina del Rey, Calif.-based Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, and its predecessors have made several efforts since the 1990s to eliminate the “.su” address.

All have failed.

In late 2006, ICANN even sought advice from the community on how best to revoke outdated suffixes. Yet the resistance continued, and the phase-out seems to be in a stalemate. The domain continues to work normally, but listed in records as “being phased out.”

“There are no technical issues,” said John Crain, ICANN’s chief technical officer. “It all comes down to politics.”

[sounds like a basic decision-making strategy for managing information systems, in general…]

New anti-terror weapon: Hand-held lie detector –
U.S. troops in Afghanistan first to get new device; ‘red’ means you’re lying — (via drudge…)

“Ask the question, what’s new here?” Fienberg said of the PCASS. “They went to a group that developed a computer-based algorithm that produces green, yellow and red lights. That’s the new technology. It’s still based on the same noisy psycho-physiological channels for detecting deception. So we have no new way to detect deception. What we’ve got is a streamlined version of the polygraph. Therefore you would expect this not to be as accurate as the polygraph.”

[read: person = particle, or: cosmic ray-don…]

Intel plans to tackle cosmic ray threat
BBC News, 8 April 2008

Because the operation of computers is through charged particles, the unpredicatable hits from the rays are problematic, potentially causing the system to crash.

“What happens is if a cosmic ray causes a collision inside the silicon chip, that releases lots of charged particles,” Intel’s senior scientist Eric Hannah told BBC World Service’s Digital Planet programme.

“All our logic is based on charge, so it gets interference.” […]

…Mr Hannah explained that on a supercomputer with 10,000 chips, there was the potential for 10 or 20 faults a week.

And the risk of cosmic ray interference will only increase as chips get smaller. This is because circuits will require less charge per switch to operate.

Since the amount of charge from cosmic rays will remain the same, there will be a “bigger disturb,” Mr Hannah explained.

[cont.]

[of special note to mp3 junkies and ‘consumers’ of mass media and its advertising, with delivery platforms potentially ranging from powerlines and appliances to cellphones, radio, television, computers, if not wi-fi routers, etc…]

No Bait! Fish May Respond to Sound

Previous experiments have used sound to train a fish to feed - similar to what Russian scientist Ivan Pavlov did in his famous dogs that salivated at the sound of a bell, expecting food.

In Japan, scientists have used sound to keep newly released farmed fish in certain areas, where they could be caught in traditional ways.

But no one has ever tried to get fish to leave and return to an enclosure where they can be scooped up.

The project began last summer using 6,500 black sea bass, a stout, bottom-dwelling fish that lives between Florida and Cape Cod and in the winter is generally not found north of New Jersey. The species grows up to 3 pounds and 20 inches long and has a thick, white flesh that can be filleted for broiling or cut into nuggets for frying.

Miner said the first objective was to see if the fish could truly be trained. He got his answer after keeping the fish in a circular tank, then sounding a tone before he dropped food in an enclosed “feeding zone” within the tank that the fish could enter only through a small opening.

Researchers played the tone for 20 seconds, three times a day, for about two weeks. Afterward, whenever the tone sounded, “you have remote-control fish,” Miner said.

“You hit that button, and they go into that area, and they wait patiently,” he said.

Miner is now trying to figure out how long the fish remember to associate the tone with food. He feeds the fish outside the feeding zone without a tone for a few days and then tests if they will still head for the feeding area when the tone sounds again.

Some fish forgot after five days. Others remembered as long as 10. Miner said the strength of memory seems tied to how long the fish are trained.