The Global War of the 21st Century

Global Guerrillas
"Networked organizations, infrastructure disruption, and the emerging marketplace of violence. An open notebook on the epochal war of the 21st Century."
Link
Source: Global Guerrillas

The Advent of Netwar
"The information revolution is leading to the rise of network forms of organization, with unusual implications for how societies are organized and conflicts are conducted. 'Netwar' is an emerging consequence. The term refers to societal conflict and crime, short of war, in which the antagonists are organized more as sprawling 'leaderless' networks than as tight-knit hierarchies. Many terrorists, criminals, fundamentalists, and ethno-nationalists are developing netwar capabilities. A new generation of revolutionaries and militant radicals is also emerging, with new doctrines, strategies, and technologies that support their reliance on network forms of organization."
Link
Source: RAND

Wikipedia
Terrorism
War on Terrorism

Counterinsurgency Operations - TerrorWiki
Link

Spetsnaz's First World War
Link

How can we describe this new kind of war? Let's connect the dots...

Features:
- law vs. corruption
- order vs. disorder
- civil society vs. organized crime
- accelerating change vs. static decline
- hierarchy vs. networks
- units vs. swarms
- power vs. weakness
- post-industrial tecnology vs. industrial tecnology
- globalization vs. traditional values
- creativity vs. diligence

Storyboard:
The Pentagon's New Map
Warfighting in the 21st Century – The Remote, Robotic, Robust, Size-Reduced, Virtual Reality Paradigm

Gallery:
PM Soldier
Objective Force Warrior
Future Combat Systems - Institute for Creative Technologies

Scenarios:
Scenarios - Innovation Watch
The Chinese Century - Moore's Lore
The Anglosphere Challenge
Timeline of Future Technology and Social Change
Robotic Nation - Marshall Brain
Future War Technologies of the 2030s
Future War Technologies of the 2060s

Audio:
Intelligent Defense - IT Conversations
Thomas Barnett - IT Conversations
Bruce Schneier - IT Conversations
Supernova 2004 - IT Conversations
Pop!Tech 2004 - IT Conversations
O'Reilly Emerging Tech - IT Conversations
Nanotechnology - IT Conversations
Massive Change - Radio

See also:
Terrorism - Google News
Terrorism News - Topix.net
Defense Tech
John Robb's Weblog
"If We Run Out of Batteries, This War is Screwed." - Wired
What It Takes to Win the 40-Year War - Fast Company
Schneier on Security
Singularity Watch
Belmont Club
Bruce Sterling
William Gibson
KurzweilAI.net
DARPA
Moore's Lore - Corante
Brain Waves
Responsible Nanotechnology
Army Wages War on Modern Menaces - Wired
Project for the New American Century
The Digital Pearl Harbour
The Nuclear 9/11
Human Being 2.0
Inside soviet military intelligence - Viktor Suvorov
The Future of Intelligence
Special Operations Technology

Accelerating Change 2004

"The Accelerating Change conference is a production of the nonprofit Institute for the Study of Accelerating Change (ISAC)."

"AC2004 emphasizes three main themes (Physical Space, Virtual Space, and Interface) with selections from twenty subtheme categories. We approach these themes using four concurrent dialogs (Science, Technology, Business, and Humanism) and three fundamental processes (data-guided Analysis, informed Forecasting, and agendas for Action) that lend insight and foresight to today's most relevant and powerful examples of accelerating technological change."

Topics:

• Physical Space (Tangible Things and Networks)

• Virtual Space (Simulations and Virtual Life)

• Interface (Data, Management Systems, and Convergence)

Link

People:
Shai Agassi
Executive Board Member, SAP

Jaron Lanier
Founder, VPL Research; Advisor, National Tele-Immersion Initiative; Computer Scientist, Composer, Artist

David Brin
Physicist, Science Fiction and Nonfiction Writer

Doug Engelbart
Inventor of the Mouse; Digital Interface Legend; Founder, Bootstrap Institute

Dan Gillmor
Business and Technology Columnist, San Jose Mercury News

Helen Greiner
Co-founder and Chairman of the Board, iRobot

Steve Jurvetson
Managing Director, Draper Fisher Jurvetson

Peter Kaminski
CTO and Founder, Socialtext

Peter Norvig
Director of Search Quality, Google

Christine Peterson
Founder and Vice President, Foresight Institute

John Smart
President, ISAC

Rich Skrenta
Co-Founder and CEO, Topix.net

Gordon Bell
Project Director, MyLifeBits, Microsoft BARC

Brad Templeton
Chairman, Electronic Frontier Foundation

Will Wright
Founder, Maxis; Creator, Sim City, The Sims

Dana Blankenhorn
Technology Business Journalist and Consultant

Link

Audio:
IT Conversations

See also:
Accelerating Change 2004 - Technorati
Pop!Tech
TransVision 2004

How George Bush won the election

Jason Kottke has a great point of view:

"I don't think America is that divided. I think most of us are ill-informed in two major ways, 'conveniently' split along the lines of the two major political parties available to us. We're told we have two different choices -- you're rooting for this team or that team and the other team is the enemy -- and we believe that and organize our beliefs accordingly. There's a lot of fear and emotion involved on both sides. I can't count how many times in the last two days I've heard self-righteous 'liberals' call the entire middle of the country 'stupid'. Kerry voters, we need to get over ourselves...we're not special. We're not informed by some superior intelligence that gives us a unique insight into how the world should work. We buy into the Democratic Party/liberal/anti-conservative/fear the church crap in the same way that our 'red state' brethren buy into the Rebublican Party/conservative/anti-liberal/fear the gays bullshit.

Half the country is not stupid. We're all stupid. We're convinced several times a day to do things that aren't in our best interests. We work too hard. We're drinking, eating, medicating, and smoking ourselves into early graves. We overextend ourselves on credit. We knowingly stay in emotionally or physically abusive relationships. We let television raise our children. We're deliberately mean and nasty to people we don't like or agree with. We learn science from the Bible. We stay silent when speaking out would help someone. We fear the future. We fear death. And we're lazy about our beliefs and convictions and we let the Democratic and Republican Parties dictate the political agenda in America by pushing our emotional buttons. Red, blue, black, white, brown, yellow, purple, and retina-burning yellow-green...we all share the blame.

Speaking of, I'll tell you who's smart. Karl Rove is smart. Karl Rove knows all of the above and used it perfectly to his advantage. It's not necessarily that America as a whole validated the actions of George Bush over the past four years...it's that the Republican Party got more of their people to the polls than the Democrats did. Looking out across America, what's one of the largest groups of people with a single strongly-held set of beliefs? The evangelical Christians. They comprise a large portion of the US population and believe in God more strongly than most other groups believe in anything. The Bush camp used a coordinated campaign to speak directly to those people and put their strong belief in God in direct opposition to what the other side stood for: liberals want to kill innocent babies, allow gays to marry, and let non-Christians run the country/world. To an evangelical Christian, the fear that those things will happen is almost overwhelmingly unbearable. Based on that emotional appeal, they turned out in droves, voting for Bush in greater numbers than in 2000 and overwhelming the increased turnout on the other side of the aisle.

The Democrats, with ill-defined fears of a mishandled Iraq war, America's place in the world, personal freedoms, anti-science agenda, the economy, and Bush's general stupidity, couldn't muster the same kind of turnout. They and their supporters ran a more decentralized campaign, with blogs, 527 groups, and assorted other groups all having their own agendas. Liberals had a million slogans, initiatives, and platforms, each tailored for a different group of people. In theory, this was lauded as a fantastic idea...you could reach more people with less organization and target small groups of people with exactly the message that would appeal to each group. But it didn't work out that way. The top-down campaign with the one focused message targeted at a large group of people won out."
Link

"New America" Vs. "Old America"
"Most Europeans never took kindly to the Bush Administration's way of dividing the continent into 'Old Europe' and 'New Europe.' As luck would have it, we got our hands on a memo one of Europe's top prime ministers received from his foreign minister to help him understand what's at stake in today's U.S. presidential election."
Link
Source: The Globalist

Maps:
Election Map - New York Times
Election Map - USA Today
Election result maps - University of Michigan
Purple Haze - Boing Boing
We've gone Map Crazy! - The Big Picture
We've gone Map Crazy, part II! - The Big Picture
Research - PatrickRuffini.com
Young Americans - collision detection
Kerry in 2004 - Meetup.com
Bush in 2004 - Meetup.com

Photos:
Photos tagged with election2004 - Flickr
Photos tagged with election - Flickr
Photos tagged with electionday - Flickr
Photos tagged with vote - Flickr

Charts:
Google Zeitgeist - Election 2004
Election Watch 2004 - Technorati
Campaign Radar 2004 Summary - BlogPulse

See also:
US Election 2004 - Google News
2004 Presidential Election News - Topix.net
Back to basics - Economist
Vote USA 2004 - BBC News
Ultimately It Comes Down To Taste - Adam Rifkin
Spooks and Goblins - The J Curve
Still Missing the Big Picture About This Election - Daily Kos
The Failure of the American Experiment - kuro5hin.org
Magnanimous Defeat - BarlowFriendz
Rise of the Religious Right in the Republican Party

Where is the Robot-Valley?

"Will Silicon Valley, the unquestioned center of the computer tech boom, also become the 'Silicon Valley' of robotics? According to Pete Markiewicz, the Valley mindset, along with the other factors that created the virtual worlds of the PC and Internet, might not be well suited to the development of devices that must operate in the rough-and-tumble of the real world."
Link
Source: Robotics Trends

Osaka Emerging as Robot City
"A new Straits Times article says there are 154 firms in Osaka, Japan with robotics-related patents and many more working on robotics technology. The city has become the center of robot technology in Japan and possibly the world. Japan expects to be the world leader in the production of next-generations robots, a market projected to be $46 billion by 2010. Osaka is also hosting a RoboCup competition this month."
Link
Source: Robots.net

World's greatest android projects
"There are 73 major android projects around the world - 34 are in Japan, 10 in the US, 7 in Germany, 5 in Korea, 3 in China, 3 in the UK, 2 in Sweden, 1 in Australia, 1 in Thailand, 1 in Singapore, 1 in Bulgaria, 1 in Iran, 1 in Italy, 1 in Austria, 1 in Russia, & 1 in Scotland."
Link
Source: Android World

World Robotics 2004
"How many robots are now working out there in industry?
Worldwide at least 800,000 units (possibly the real stock could be well over one million units), of which 350,000 in Japan, close to 250,000 in the European Union and about 112,000 in North America. In Europe, Germany is in the lead with 112,700 units, followed by Italy with 50,000, France with 26,000, Spain with 20,000 and the United Kingdom with 14,000."

"Are we seeing any service robots in our homes?
At the end of 2003, about 610,000 autonomous vacuum cleaners and lawn-mowing robots were in operation. In 2004- 2007, more than 4 million new units are forecasted to be added."
Link
Source: UNECE

Maps:
Robotics - Meetup.com
Artificial Intelligence - Meetup.com

See also:
RoboNexus
Robots - Google News
Artificial Intelligence - Google News
Robots - Topix.net
Robotics news - Moreover
Robots - Engadget
AI in the news
Artificial intelligence - Wikipedia
AI and A-Life - New Scientist
Everyday Robots
Generation5
Robotic Nation - Marshall Brain
Anime and Robotics: A Symbiotic Relationship
The Great Robot Race - Wired
KurzweilAI.net
Mechanical Spirit
Human Being 2.0
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science - MIT OpenCourseWare

Audio:
Robots - IT Conversations
The DARPA Grand Challenge - IT Conversations

Discuss:
Robots - Tribe.net

Brazil in Space

"Brazil’s first successful rocket launch is being touted as the South American country’s initial foray into the commercial satellite industry.

However, the VSB-30 prototype tested on Saturday at the Alcantara Launch Center, located in the northeastern Amazon jungle, has a payload capacity of 870 pounds and maximum altitude of 155 miles, leading some to question its commercial applications.

'Most of satellite radio and satellite TV is in a higher orbit level. At a lower orbit, there’s really no [commercial] market there,' said Camille Osborne, communications director at the U.S. Satellite Broadcasting and Communications Association (SBCA)."

Link
Source: Red Herring

See also:
Brazilian Space Agency - Google News
Brazilian Space Agency - Topix.net
Brazil Successfully Launches Its First Rocket To Space - Slashdot
Brazil - Wikipedia
SpaceShipOne wins X Prize
The Final Frontier

Discuss:
Space Travel - Tribe.net

Mini-Microsoft

"Let's slim down Microsoft into a lean, mean, efficient customer pleasing profit making machine! Mini-Microsoft, Mini-Microsoft, lean-and-mean!"

Highlights:

• Microsoft needs to reduce employee size. It’s too big. It doesn’t need a quicky Atkins-equivalent. No, it needs to get itself on a corporate exercise program that will shed itself of unwanted groups and employees. And stay on that.
• Microsoft needs to stop hiring. It’s hard enough finding the scarcest of treasured corporate resources: the talented individual suitable for working at Microsoft. Stop hiring, trim down, and rebalance those precious scare employees inside to where they can be more productive and make products that delight our customers.
• Re-interviewing: all employees below a certain life-time review average need to re-interview. Those that don’t make the cut the second time around get to look for new opportunities elsewhere.
• Unleash employee driven innovation with a Microsoft Labs community area.
• Less research, more application.
• Continue the community effort and make it so if you’re not leading cool innovation, your butt is dedicated to some time per week helping out in the community, sharing all that wonderful knowledge between your ears. Reward that!
• Back to Basics. Win32 and C++. Bread and butter. Not everything can run in the freaking CLR.
• Re-energize the home market. The home market is pretty tepid with-respect-to Microsoft-branded software. It can’t take that much effort to invigorate Microsoft for the home user and make it cool.
• Start working vigorously on Internet Explorer again. Winning the browser wars, dusting off our hands, and running away screaming from IE to the Next Cool Thing represents the very worst in less-than-competitive behavior.

Link

See also:
Robert Scoble
Microsoft Watch

IPod vs. Mobile Phones

"The cell phone is the 800 pound gorilla of portable devices; dedicated digital music players are going to be fads.
... The cell phone has already defeated the standalone PDA (who has those anymore?)
... will defeat the standalone digital camera
... will defeat the standalone MP3 player (iPods included)
... will defeat the USB Flash Drives

... and will eventually largely defeat a large segment of the desktop/notebook computer market.

Add a significant amount of storage to cellphones and not only will standalone MP3 players and USB memory sticks take a major hit, but everyone will jack their cellphones into a workstation via USB or FireWire and have a portable computer sans monitor/keyboard with them at all times (and those that have laptops merely for address books, documents and email will no longer have much need for lugging around a notebook computer).

(--UNLESS-- cellphone size decreases to the point where it becomes earpiece sized in the coming 5 to 10 years where the decreased size disallows increased on-board storage capacity. But in this case, the cellphone is likely to displace music players via virtual internet accessible storage.)"

Link
Source: Forums - PC Magazine

See also:
156.4 mobile phones shipped in Q2 2004 - IT Facts
Apple's global market share is 1.7%, drops out of top 10 vendors - IT Facts
Google Broadband?
The New Moore's Law