…is going to scope the requirements of UK institutional and subject repositories for a service that will reliably and uniquely identify names of individuals and institutions.
The trick is that a name is not usually unique - names are always context sensitive and when their context expands they can become ambiguous. My name, Sean Reilly, was unique within my immediate family but is far from unique on the internet or even in my city.Identifiers on the other hand, are always unique. You might say that identifiers are names in a certain context that ensures that a name can’t refer to two different things.My guess is that the Names project is actually looking for a system of identifiers to use in place of names.There is no shortage of identifier systems on the net, such as Handles, DOI, OpenID, XRI and, of course URI.I’d suggest they use Handles for the Names project, but I’m biased. I’d at least recommend changing the name or stated purpose of the project to something with more of a focus on identifiers instead of names.
When the USA first came into existence, the bill of rights and constitution were an attempt to guarantee that the government could never take away the basic rights of individuals. The problem is that there’s nothing preventing corporations from gaining and abusing power over individuals. Any hope for the government to keep a check on corporate power was lost when Reagan was elected, if not earlier.Take the health care system in the US. It is run by private corporations, is inefficient, expensive and doesn’t provide the best care available. The cost of simply being insured in the US has skyrocketed in the last 6 or so years. The UK has a national health care system in which:
Everybody is covered
Per person, it costs less than half what people pay in the US
Private health care is available if you want it.
I’ve recently lived in both systems. I had a high quality employer-provided health care plan in the US until April 2006. Since then I’ve lived in Scotland and take part in the National Health Service (NHS). Due to living a daring and dangerous lifestyle, and recently having had baby daughter, both my wife and I have had our fair share of visits to medical professionals in both countries. We couldn’t be more pleased with the level of care we’ve gotten and dread the day that we have to go back into the US system.The UK health system is so much better than the US system that I am shocked when I hear people in the US rant that they don’t want the government in charge of their health care. Would you rather your health care be run by corporations whose sole purpose is to make money and whose only way of making money is to prevent you from getting health care?What is it that makes people think government run services are so inefficient? Maybe it has something to do with the fact that 95% of broadcast news is filtered through the same corporations that are raking in big bucks doing things that the government would otherwise be doing (usually more efficiently).Is it efficient for the US military to outsource things like truck driving and mess hall operations in Iraq? Hell no - it is wildly more expensive. Yet the taxpayers are shelling out a (starting) salary of $125k for KBR truck drivers when it used to pay $17k for US military drivers. Which option do you think is more efficient? Makes it easy to understand how the US is blowing $30 BILLION dollars a week in Iraq. It also makes it obvious that this war is nothing but a transparent profiteering opportunity for companies like KBR (Halliburton), Blackwater, etc.Health care in the US is currently run by the domestic equivalents of KBR, Blackwater, etc. I don’t think there’s much hope that more politicians can or will stand up to the corporate media whose favor they need in order to get elected. My greatest hope is that change can come from the bottom up. If one US state can provide a real health care system then there might be a chance at sanity.[random note: MarsEdit makes it way too easy to put your personal rants onto a public weblog]
Please excuse the redundant title.How stupid would we have to be to allow Bush/Cheney to repeat the Iraq war in Iran given that:
The financial health of the USA has been decimated by vastly increased spending (trillions of dollars being spent in Iraq)
The US military is already stretched thin dealing with the mess in Iraq
The national health care/insurance crisis is leaving more people without health care
I don’t see how we can afford another war either financially or logistically. Not to mention the cost in human life which is conveniently ignored by most of those who are not at risk.Of course, it does seem that every action made by this administration has benefited either Cheney’s former employer (KBR/Halliburton) or large donors to their campaign. Another, larger war would certainly be a boon to the likes of KBR, Blackwater and gang. Have they done anything to make life better for the average US citizen?I also don’t understand why the President of Iran was denied permission to pay his respects at the site of the world trade center, so maybe I’m just out of touch.
Here’s an interesting bit of US history that it seems like I should have learned in school. Until now I was also under the impression that the focus of the protest at Boston Harbor was a tax increase.
Hewes, who was a teenager at the time of the Tea Party (which he named in 1834), tells that the whole point of this million-dollar (in today’s terms) act of vandalism was to protest a tax cut — a corporate tax break — that the British had given to the East India Company, which would allow it to unfairly compete with and wipe out the thousands of small entrepreneurial tea importers and tea shops that dotted the colonies.
I’d thought I remembered from school that the Tea Act of 1773 was a tax increase, so I had to check the Encyclopedia Britannica, which, sure enough, said that the Tea Act was a tax cut. So what the colonists were protesting was the principle of taxation without representation, but what they meant was what today would be termed “tax breaks for multinational corporations while the average person gets screwed.”
An entity known as Pastabagel posted an interesting theory:
When taken together, the desire for and generation of audio and visual noise, what you have is the psychological antithesis of a zen garden. It is the Noise Garden.
It explains a lot about me and some of the people I know. Now to turn off the music, clean my desk, disable twitter updates and get back to work.
via a.wholelottanothing.org
Security Theater from GovernmentExecutive.com:
Muellers book is filled with statistics meant to put terrorism in context. For example, international terrorism annually causes the same number of deaths as drowning in bathtubs or bee stings. It would take a repeat of Sept. 11 every month of the year to make flying as dangerous as driving. Over a lifetime, the chance of being killed by a terrorist is about the same as being struck by a meteor. Muellers conclusions: An Americans risk of dying at the hands of a terrorist is microscopic. The likelihood of another Sept. 11-style attack is nearly nil because it would lack the element of surprise. America can easily absorb the damage from most conceivable attacks. And the suggestion that al Qaeda poses an existential threat to the United States is ridiculous. Muellers statistics and conclusions are jarring only because they so starkly contradict the widely disseminated and broadly accepted image of terrorism as an urgent and all-encompassing threat.
Read this for a well written example of how telcos and their lobbyists (aka the FCC) are looting the public treasury in the United States.
It is just one more example of the brazen profiteering of US corporations at the expense of the public. The scariest example seems to be the huge number of private contractors that are doing the jobs that the military used to do in Iraq. There are almost as many private individuals representing the US in Iraq as there are military personnel. Some claim that these private firms are doing the grunt work so that the military can focus on what they do best, but that doesn’t explain why they are paid many times more than the soldiers who are taking higher risks. Is it a coincidence that the corporation that profits the most from the Iraq war is the one that was led by the current vice president? The man should be in prison. Not just any prison, but the deepest, darkest, hellish nightmare hole of a prison.
