Because John McCain was expected to be in attendance, NRA members weren’t allowed to bring guns into the organization’s annual meeting on Friday May 16th.
Also forbidden: pocketknives, scissors, and nail-clippers. Mind you, possession of those items those were never protected by the American Constitution’s Second Amendment.
The interminable problems Microsoft seems to be having with Vista made me think of the argument Joseph Tainter made in The Collapse of Complex Societies.
I should probably disclose that I’m a relatively contented XP user who plans to soon take cyber-refuge in OS X.* And that I haven’t actually read Tainter’s book! 
I’ve read a fair bit on it though. That is, if Wikipedia counts as “a fair bit”.
OK, enough joking around… after all, this blog is “chatter from a fallen monkey” not “dissertations from a risen paramecium”.
Tainter argued that the ultimate cause for societal collapse is diminishing returns on investments in social complexity. In the “house of cards” model, eventually, adding complexity to a society makes it only little more productive — but a lot less resilient.
Using a biological context, single-cultivar agricultural monoculture might be a good example: crop yields might be a little higher (diminished return)…
…but if there’s a blight or pest, you could lose the entire crop (less resilient).
See here for a current example.
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In the context of Windows Vista, I wonder if the OS has become so huge and so complex (so bloated?) that there are meagre returns on its increasing complexity, relative to the alternative (say, Windows XP).
If that’s what happens to a society before it collapses, I wonder what Microsoft will do for post-Vista Windows OS’s, such as Vienna. Will there be a point where Microsoft says “there’s no business case in building the Windows OS further” and instead try to ‘reboot’ by launching a simpler, stripped-down Windows — e.g. building everything around Windows CE? More trivially, will Apple still be running those Mac-vs-PC ads?
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* given that all the OS X names seem to come from big cats (cheetah, leopard, jaguar…) I assume the person in charge isn’t a “dog person”. Wonder what’s next — Leo? (”Lion” sounds too much like “lying” so it probably isn’t appropriate.) Lynx would be cool, if only for the consumer confusion caused by having Linux, Lynx and Unix OS’s in the marketplace…
From The Independent, a report on how — by necessity — the city of Juneau, Alaska (pop 30,000) reduced its energy consumption 30% within a month.
The article also references the fact that in 2001, Brazil (population 180,000,000) cut its electric consumption 20% within two months.
This is why I part opinions with some peak oil pessimists about how society will revert to anarchic barbarism* in the (imminent) post-peak years. I think communities are a lot more adaptable to hardship than pessimists give them credit for.
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*incidentally, the term barbarian has a cool etymology; I learned it — wow, fifteen years ago — from a Classical Studies professor. In James Robinson’s latest book, he notes that the naming system of the Middle East could have played a role as well: bar is a patronym in Aramaic, and is sometimes used in Jewish names (though “ben” is more frequent). Thus in the Christian New Testament, one finds characters such as Bartimaeus or Barabbas. (More about Barabbas, another time…)
Robinson suggested that Greeks dealing with Aramaic peoples would’ve remarked at how often they said bar-this and bar-that during introductions and decided to call them “bar-bar-ians”. No word whether Aramaics called the Greeks “son-of-son-of-ians”. Regrettably, like a number of Robinson’s arguments in this particular volume, it seemed a bit weak. From this reasonably widely-read unaffiliated non-expert’s perspective, Goulder’s lectionary theory seems stronger, by virtue of its elegant simplicity.
There probably isn’t much crossover between 9/11 conspiracy theorists and “intelligent design” proponents — they probably come from opposite ends of the traditional political/cultural spectrum (progressive + secular vs. conservative + religious).
But their central premise is similar: that events were too complicated to have occurred without “extra help”.
Project Better Place has the noble goal of introducing electric auto fleets. They seem to have some momentum behind them: Israel has signed on to be the first market, and Renault-Nissan will manufacture the fleet. The plan is to deploy half a million battery recharging / replacing stations in the country.
At the turn of the millenium, the Think electric automobile company (or technically, the “Th!nk” electric auto company) gained Ford as a major shareholder.
After Ford exited the space in 2003, it was picked up by Norwegian investors. As such, its web domain is… “think.no“.
More (awkwardly) unfortunate domain names here, including semi-legendary office writing suppliers “pen island“.