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To quote Andy Tanenbaum: “An quantitative increase in order of magnitude needs an qualitative increase in order of magnitude.” Here this effect works out (at least) two ways. One, a large pool of photos (increase in quantity) have to be processed (increase in quality) to become usefull again. Two, the availability of a large pool of photos enables a whole new experience (photo tourism).

But you have to be double smart to first see the possibilities and than to enable them.

(source: UW)

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The Bush administration on Thursday proposed stronger job protections for doctors and other health care workers who refuse to participate in abortions because of religious or moral objections.

So what if it’s against my religion to serve black people in my restaurant, or rent housing to them?

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In the overall medal standings at the Beijing 2008 Olympics, Old Europe has beaten the crap out of both China and the US – winning almost twice as much gold as the United States, and more than double the amount of medals of China. Despite the heated debate about exactly this subject, no one seems to notice.

Old Europe, an informal name for the European Union before its recent enlargements, managed to obtain 64 gold medals, 68 silver medals and 70 bronze medals – a total of 202 medals, solidly claiming the first place in the overall medal standings.

The 12 countries involved (Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Ireland, Great Britain, Denmark, Greece, Portugal and Spain) have a total population of 366 million people, somewhat more than the United States, but far less than China.

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A two-year-old letter by Vice President Dick Cheney that pushed a controversial Alaska natural-gas pipeline bill is getting renewed scrutiny because of recently disclosed evidence in the Justice Department’s corruption case against Sen. Ted Stevens. In a conversation secretly tape-recorded by the FBI on June 25, 2006, Stevens discussed ways to get a pipeline bill through the Alaska Legislature with Bill Allen, an oil-services executive accused of providing the senator with about $250,000 in undisclosed financial benefits. According to a Justice motion, Stevens told Allen, “I’m gonna try to see if I can get some bigwigs from back here and say, ‘Look … you gotta get this done’.” Two days later, Cheney wrote a letter to the Alaska Legislature urging members to “promptly enact” a bill to build the pipeline.

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By choosing Joe Biden as their vice presidential candidate, the Democrats have selected a politician with a mixed record on technology who has spent most of his Senate career allied with the FBI and copyright holders, who ranks toward the bottom of CNET’s Technology Voters’ Guide, and whose anti-privacy legislation was actually responsible for the creation of PGP.

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After taking over the Foreign Relations committee, Biden became been a staunch ally of Hollywood and the recording industry in their efforts to expand copyright law. He sponsored a bill in 2002 that would have make it a federal felony to trick certain types of devices into playing unauthorized music or executing unapproved computer programs. Biden’s bill was backed by content companies including News Corp. but eventually died after Verizon, Microsoft, Apple, eBay, and Yahoo lobbied against it.

A few months later, Biden signed a letter that urged the Justice Department “to prosecute individuals who intentionally allow mass copying from their computer over peer-to-peer networks.” Critics of this approach said that the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America, and not taxpayers, should pay for their own lawsuits.

Last year, Biden sponsored an RIAA-backed bill called the Perform Act aimed at restricting Americans’ ability to record and play back individual songs from satellite and Internet radio services. (The RIAA sued XM Satellite Radio over precisely this point.)

All of which meant that nobody in Washington was surprised when Biden was one of only four U.S. senators invited to a champagne reception in celebration of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act hosted by the MPAA’s Jack Valenti, the RIAA, and the Business Software Alliance.

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Local first-grader Connor Bolduc, 6, experienced the first inkling of a coming lifetime of existential dread Monday upon recognizing his cruel destiny to participate in compulsory education for the better part of the next two decades, sources reported.

“I don’t want to go to school,” Bolduc told his parents, the crushing reality of his situation having yet to fully dawn on his naïve consciousness. “I want to play outside with my friends.”

While Bolduc stood waiting for the bus to pick him up on his first day of elementary school, his parents reportedly were able to “see the wheels turning in his little brain” as the child, for the first time in his life, began to understand how dire and hopeless his situation had actually become.