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Internet Mapping Project
Part of the foundation of Lumeta has been a long-term research project to collect routing data on the Internet. The project consists of frequent path probes, one to each registered Internet entity. From this, trees are built showing the paths to most of the networks on the Internet.
These paths change over time, as routes reconfigure and as the Internet grows. Lumeta has been preserving this data and intends to continue running the scans well into the future. A database of the scans should be able to show how the Internet grows, and it should be possible to make a movie of the growth depicted by these scans.
The Process
The simple layout algorithm produces some nice tree-like “maps.” It is not easy to lay out a tree with 100,000 nodes. Standard graph-viewing programs have traditionally considered 800 nodes a large task. Lumeta’s programs jostle the nodes around according to half a dozen complex rules, simulating various springs and repelling forces. A typical layout run requires 20 CPU hours on a 400 MHz Pentium PC.
The answer is blowin’ in the wind
How many roads must a man walk down
Before you call him a man?
Yes, ‘n’ how many seas must a white dove sail
Before she sleeps in the sand?
Yes, ‘n’ how many times must the cannon balls fly
Before they’re forever banned?
The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind,
The answer is blowin’ in the wind.
How many times must a man look up
Before he can see the sky?
Yes, ‘n’ how many ears must one man have
Before he can hear people cry?
Yes, ‘n’ how many deaths will it take till he knows
That too many people have died?
The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind,
The answer is blowin’ in the wind.
How many years can a mountain exist
Before it’s washed to the sea?
Yes, ‘n’ how many years can some people exist
Before they’re allowed to be free?
Yes, ‘n’ how many times can a man turn his head,
Pretending he just doesn’t see?
The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind,
The answer is blowin’ in the wind
Give us more money, or soldiers aren’t going to get paid.
[Quote:]
Give us more money, or soldiers aren’t going to get paid. That’s the cynical game the Pentagon’s leadership has been playing with the Army’s budget in recent months. And now, it’s crunch time.
Since the fall, Rumsfeld & Co. have been dipping into the Army’s day-to-day funds — like money for soldiers’ paychecks — and then daring Congress not to make up the difference with a second, “supplemental” pile of cash.
The tab comes due this Spring, Defense Daily reports. The Army needs $41 billion of that supplemental kitty by then, or else it is going to go broke, without cash left to pay G.I.s.
Already, the service has pulled forward some $11 billion in funds from the third and fourth quarters of its [fiscal year 2005] budget, a senior Army budget officer said at a briefing on Friday.
I think its early May when we run out of money, the official said. The most money is being spent on operations and maintenance. What were doing right now is taking monies from the fourth quarter and the third quarterwere already spending, you know, my September paycheck.
Weve pulled in about the last five and a half months to spend in the first six and a half.
That same official said that this sort of spending has no practical effect on soldiers, according to Defense Daily. And he’s probably right, for the moment. What politician would vote to deprive a soldier of his paycheck?< But key members of Congress, like Sen. John McCain, are getting increasingly fed up with this backdoor effort to add tens of billions to the defense budget by essentially holding G.I.'s livelihood hostage. Sooner or later, things are going to come to a head.
“I wanted to show the things that had to be corrected.”
[Quote:]
“George earns a $1 some days usually 75 cents.
Some of the others say they earn a $1 when they work all day. At times they start at 7 a.m. and work all day until midnight".
Lewis Hine (1874 -1940), a New York City schoolteacher and photographer, felt so strongly about the abuse of children as workers that he quit his teaching job and became an investigative photographer for the National Child Labor Committee. Hine traveled around the country photographing the working conditions of children in all types of industries. He photographed children in coal mines, in meatpacking houses, in textile mills, and in canneries. He took pictures of children working in the streets as shoe shiners, newsboys, and hawkers. In many instances he tricked his way into factories to take the pictures that factory managers did not want the public to see. He was careful to document every photograph with precise facts and figures. Hine‘s original photo captions are here. More inside.
By 1916, Congress passed the Keating-Owens Act that established the following child labor standards: a minimum age of 14 for workers in manufacturing and 16 for workers in mining; a maximum workday of 8 hours; prohibition of night work for workers under age 16; and a documentary proof of age. The law was later ruled unconstitutional on the ground that congressional power to regulate interstate commerce did not extend to the conditions of labor. Effective action against child labor had to await the New Deal.
Reformers, however, did succeed in forcing legislation at the state level banning child labor and setting maximum hours. By 1920 the number of child laborers was cut to nearly half of what it had been in 1910.Lewis Hine also photographed adult workers. Work was actually a favorite theme of Hine’s and he believed that the emerging modern technologies of the 1920′s and 1930′s would lift the burden of hard labor from them. He began in the 1920′s a series of photographs he called "Work Portraits" which showed man and machine at work together. Perhaps his best known series from this group is his commission to document the construction of the Empire State Building from March 1930 to May 1931. At the conclusion of the project Hine published Men at Work, a picture book which summarized his theme.
Hine died in poverty, neglected by all but a few. His reputation continued to grow, however, and he is now recognized as an American master. And, ironically, his prints are now sold for 60,000 dollars
Cartoons
Wanna be president of Microsoft?
[Quote:]
This is too good to be true, but I’m afraid it is.
I own a tiny (just me) California corporation. Every year, I have to file a form listing my address, the names of the top officers, etc. It turns out that the form can be filed online (though you have to enable Java to do so).
If you go to https://businessfilings.ss.ca.gov you can type in the name of any corporation registered in California and be presented with the corporate-info form. If you type “Microsoft”, you’ll get several with MS in the name, including one that’s located at One Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA.
Keep clicking and you can fill out the form with “corrected” information. It costs a $25 filing fee, which can be paid with a credit card. They also collect an e-mail address, though I don’t know why. So if you have a stolen credit card and a throwaway e-mail address (e.g., at mailinator.com or just good ol’ hotmail), you can change Microsoft’s information.
For MS, it would probably get caught fairly quickly. But you could cause a lot of trouble for a smaller company. For example, maybe you could change their information, then sue them. Not knowing about the suit, they’d default. Then you could change the information back and institute proceedings to collect the judgment.
Hmmm, I wonder if I could sue Bill for a couple of billion?