News links

Nepal moves to get rid of its monarchy.

Cuba expanding private farms. Reinventing the wheel, again and again. I have an apropos quote, by me, from my childhood:

Wisdom is learning from your mistakes. Real wisdom is learning from other people's mistakes.

Porn makes men take bigger financial risks.

Host of soil bacteria found which can live on antibiotics. Cattle get fed antibiotics. Cattle poop. Soil bacteria get exposed to poop. *evolution* Profit! Or not, from out point of view.

China allows access to English wikipedia (Tibet and Tianenmen still restricted) but not Chinese wikipedia.

ISPs tapping your traffic for ad revenue

WaPo

For all its promise, however, the service providers exploring and testing such services have largely kept quiet -- "for fear of customer revolt," according to one executive involved.

Reminds me of my later days at Cogit. Including the claimed privacy measures, like hashing data, shedding identifying data, and tracking their own numbers, not IP addresses.

Modern Larry Niven

I'm reading a collection of Draco Tavern stories and Fleet of Worlds. Some of the stories are recent -- 2000, 2006. They still seem to have the old touch, apart from snarky comments about Iraqis, a "we try to prevent those" from a character in response to a list of sexual perversions, including male-male attraction, and Rich Schumann thinking there are 1e20 cells in the human brain.

Fleet of Worlds seems nice so far. There was a nice touch of modern AI/data mining applied to translation of tapped video. One might wonder why the puppeteers wouldn't think of that. One is then answered, as Nessus connects language to intelligence, and then one is invited to imagine what the puppeteers make of AI. Yeah. Pierson's puppeteers are like the epitome of "Safe-Tech".