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Just how far can conservatives extrapolate? Well, with gay marriage, apparently they are tad more liberal with their imaginations than they are ever given credit for. Check out the Canadian Cynic for more.

Forrester's Best Practice Report, Make IT Matter For Business Innovation , quotes 2002 survey results of business and IT decision-makers to conclude that "IT organizations have lost their way." While it was recognized that IT is vital to business innovation, only 22% of respondents saw IT as a source of innovation. The usual suspects were dragged out to explain why there is a such a dim view of IT: IT is a constraint and lacks flexibility IT doesn't meet business expectations Support burden continues to increase IT wastes energy on prototyping toys with no clear business value. IT used to be innovative, and can still change. There is significant, untapped value in IT staff that are under-utilized and not called on to be innovative. IT also has to retake its place at the business table, and remind their organizations that they're more than just an expense. Forrester lists key IT assets that are untapped for business innovation as: Source: Forrester Researc...

Forrester rolled out the crystal ball for the annual forecast of what the next year might bring -- and on the enterprise application development front, they see a slight shift in focus. Here's what they see coming: Governance -- auditability, traceability and accountability. (And I love that word!) Collaboration -- to be enabled with new tools for developers. High-Fidelity Prototyping -- "Early adopters are proving the value of being able to create near-perfect simulacra of proposed systems." (I love the buzzwords!) (Renewal of) Browser as Client -- rich, interactive and zero-footprint deployment apps via architectures such as AJAX. No Formal Standards -- formal standards adoption will decline as new technologies deliver more innovation. Multilingual Developers -- development languages are not as important as frameworks. Development landscape will become more diverse. SOA Adoption on the Rise -- the theory should become practice as tools are released. So, what...

According to Forrester , application vendors charge between 17-22% of license costs for application maintenance, with Oracle leading the pack. It amounts to re-buying the software every 4-5 years. What do you as a customer, get for such hefty fees? Well, if you call the vendor for help, little to nothing, as your bugs are usually already known and either fixed or on the roadmap for a future release. For vendors with an acquisition strategy for growth, this is a lucrative revenue stream. Vendors use maintenance fees to fund future development. But what do you care? If your business processes are stable, you've had a few years under your belt with the software already -- so most bugs are known to you -- then you're getting nothing for your maintenance investment. So here's an idea -- stop paying maintenance fees, shore up in-house support and re-buy the software when you want new functionality.

"Large-scale attacks against civilians continue, women and girls are being raped by armed groups, yet more villages are being burned, and thousands more are being driven from their homes." -- UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan , in a December 23rd report released at the UN. That is a fitting description of terror, and it is what is being played out in Darfur, Sudan , as armed militia roam unchecked and a power struggle ensues between rebel groups in the region. The reasons for the conflict is complex -- but that's an excuse for more debate and inaction. It boils down to simply three reasons: race, religion and wealth. Where have we seen this before? Sudan has two peoples: Africans and Arabs. The Arabs are in power and control the wealth of the nation. The rebels of the Darfur region don't think they're being treated well in their own country. To combat the rebels, the Sudanese government armed Arab thugs and released them in Darfur. Read the quote from Anna...

Scott Adams asks the question on his blog: "Who is holier – Mother Teresa or Bill Gates?" It's a tongue and cheek question, with Adams just out for a few laughs in his post. (He goes on to ask is Santa Claus fought Jesus, who'd win?) If we take the first question a little serious for a minute, it does become an interesting one. Not the holy part -- but a little rephrasing, "Who has had a more positive impact on the world – Mother Teresa or Bill Gates?" (I happen to believe that holiness is irrelevant -- irrelevant to living a life and irrelevant to each person's personal relationship with whatever god they believe in.) Mother Teresa dedicated her life to the poor in India, and in the process, gave to many that have nothing. Bill Gates on the other had, has targeted some of his fortunes on eradicating certain diseases, etc. Along the way, they've both influenced others with their positive work. It's a question that has an answer in time....

This post is to introduce you to an idiot, a stupid person, a person in need of a lobotomy: Kathleen Parker, of the Orlando Sentinel, who did a recent piece on the blogosphere. She hates us bloggers. She's vicious. She's scared and on the defense. She holds herself above us, proclaiming journalists as the ideal models of integrity ... OK ... I'll stop there, cause you're laughing now. [This post was brought to you via the Canadian Cynic and Think Progress .]

Paul Graham has written an interesting article on procrastination. Graham postulates that there are three variants of procrastination, depending on what you do instead of working on something: you could work on (a) nothing, (b) something less important, or (c) something more important. He contends that the last variant is actually good procrastination. Type-C is the procrastinator that puts off the "small stuff to work on big stuff." The small is the stuff that you will never be remembered for when you die -- it's the work that is nothing more than errands in your life. Of course, putting off some of the small stuff could have a material and emotional cost, and could lead to you paying a hefty price later on. However, Graham suggests that even putting off some of that small stuff and paying the price in order to work on the big stuff will put you further ahead at the end. You simply can't do it all. If you're working on the small stuff, it invariably m...

Researchers at Rice University have managed to achieve superfluidity with supercooled fermions in the lab. Fermions are the fundamental particles that constitute matter, coming as leptons and quarks, and having half-integer spins. (While Bosons are the particles that mediate the forces, such as photons, W vector, gluons and gravitons, and have integer spins.) There are of course, the composite particles that come as fermions or bosons -- without getting into a long explanation that I would probably screw up, let's just say it's all about the total spin of the particles and leave it as that. Full integer spin means a particle is a boson -- half integer spin means it's a fermion. In this case, the researchers used lithium-6 atoms -- fermions. Source: The Particle Adventure When cooled to near absolute zero, it has been predicted that fermions with equal but opposite spins would attract each other, forming pairs and behaving like a single particle. This change of pha...

Japan is a country in some serious population trouble. Since the end of WWII , there was been a decline in the birth rate, and an increase in the aging population. The total population is expected to peak in 2006, and then enter a period of depopulation for the next 50-years. This period will be a live experiment for the social scientists, as they observe a dwindling youth population cope with an ever increasing aging population. Will Japan's society survive? Japan is a very insular country -- hardly open to foreigners. (The only country that's more closed to foreigners is probably Korea.) It is a cultural thing, and it goes way back. The culture frowns on interracial marriages for instance, as there still a stigma attached to non-Japanese. Basically, the darker your skin, the more contempt you're viewed with. It's nothing short of racism. (Related reading: The Minority Interracial Couples -- a report reviewing the marriage patterns of ethnic minorities in ...

The Economist is carrying a nice short essay on the story of humans . It serves as a short introduction to where Darwinism is today. The great lesson of Darwinism is that the strongest, fittest, will always survive. It's a great lesson for capitalist societies, where success is measured by how competitive one can be. But how to explain collaboration? According to social Darwinism, collaboration and competition coexist, pushing and pulling against each other -- neither one truly gaining total control. Human societies evolved collaboration through social interaction, and have worked out ways of ensuring its success. More collaboration occurs between individuals or groups that work together for shared success -- those that cheat, receive less collaboration, or are punished. Humans may have evolved to be humans in the savannah or jungle, but humanity most likely evolved in society.

There's been a great amount of noise made recently about Bush's authorization for the NSA to eavesdrop on telecommunications without court approval. The authorization was given after 9/11, to allow spy agency to quickly narrow the scope on suspected terrorists. The Bush administration has steadfastly held that such ability to gather and analyze information is required for rapid response to suspected terrorism action. Critics have charged that the measures the spy agencies have taken violate civil liberties and privacy of Americans. Now, the New York Times that those early reports of the Bush administration enthusiasm, were only skimming the surface. What the NSA has been doing is nothing short of data mining the telecommunications flowing across the network backbone. The NSA has gained the cooperation of the major network carriers in gathering, analyzing and applying pattern recognition algorithms to data on just about every bit of electronic communications. Now, did an...

Northern Kenya has been living with a three-month drought that has already taken the lives of people and livestock. Northern Kenya is an arid and hard place to live in, bordering with Ethiopia and Somalia -- it's also the poorest part of a nation that has one of the strongest economy in East Africa. With the arrival of the Christmas season, the attention of the nation has been turned to north, and criticism has been thrown at a government that has shown little compassion for the poor and dying -- until now that is. In a speech on Christmas eve, the Kenyan president has promised $40M in aid to the north, and has made an appeal to the international community to provide what aid they can. Meanwhile, the world is set to wish Zambia a bad new year , as the UN has received no donations to fund food-aid for Zambian refugees in 2006. The refugees, fleeing from war torn neighbours of Zambia, have no where to go, and there is no long term hope for them unless the civil wars that rage ...

Science magazine has published their top 10 science breakthroughs of 2005. Here it is as stolen from BBC News : Winner: Evolution in action [PDF]. Genome sequencing and painstaking field observations shed light on the intricacies of how evolution works. (Related: Is the "Big Bang" in Animal Evolution Real? [PDF]) Runner up [PDF]: Planetary blitz. Europe's Huygens probe touched down on Saturn's moon Titan in January. It was joined by a fleet of other explorers, including Nasa's Deep Impact, which smashed a hole in a comet. In bloom. Molecular biologists pinned down several of the molecular cues responsible for spring's vibrant burst of colour. Neutron stars. Satellites and ground telescopes shed light on the violent behaviour of neutron stars; city-sized corpses of stars that pack matter into an extreme state. Miswiring the brain. Researchers gained clues about the mechanisms of disorders such as schizophrenia, dyslexia and Tourrete's syndrome. C...

fosfor gadgets has a year end list of the top weirdest case mods out there. Just when your old beige PC isn't good enough for you -- and you've got a bit of spare time on your hands .... The top 10 in reverse order: 10) The Microwave PC, 9) The Wallcrawler, 8) The WMD (my fave, pictured below), 7) The R2D2 PC, 6) The Lego Mac, 5) The Cyberpumpkin, 4) The Y2K Bug, 3) The Gingerbread PC, 2) The Toilet PC, and ... drum roll please, 1) The Miss Kanna PC (a PC built into a lifesized manga doll. Definitely some weird stuff!

... and scares the shit out of the rest of the world that actually have eyeballs connected to their brains. I'm not sure if the poopy-one was actually trying to pull off the Santa look by donning the camauro -- but I'm sure the similarities must have dawned on at least one of the sparks at the Vatican. The only problem is, the poopy-one stunk as Santa. Santa is a jolly fellow. Poop Benny looks like the Grinch. Hats off to Eric over at The Panic Blog for bringing this one to my attention.

NASA's Stardust spacecraft is set to return to Earth on January 15, 2006. Stardust has travelled 2.88 billion miles on its trip to Comet Wild. Along the way, it not only took samples of Comet Wild, but also of interstellar dust. Stardust itself won't land on Earth, but will instead drop its sample return capsule, which will brake its descent using parachutes and land in Utah, at the US Army's Dugway Proving Ground.

What do you do when anonymous users on the internet bad mouth you? Well, if you're a company like Juniper, you do the very, very stupid thing of suing . Yes, in the old world, defamation meant you sue. You could get away with silencing your critics because critical thought and their publication did not exist in a democracy. Forget it, there was no fair and unbiased media. Oh, but how the world change. Of all the companies in the world, you'd think Juniper would have this figured out. They, after all, help move the internet traffic around the world. You'd think they'd know all about the new world we now find ourselves in. In this new world, gagging your critics is the response of the guilty -- regardless of what the truth is. Trying to silence critics on a democratic medium like the internet just means handing more ammunition to your critics. Even if you win, you lose. Before you know it, there will be a groundswell of supporters for your critics. No matter ...

Google has beaten Microsoft to the punch in tieing a small knot with AOL. Both Google and Microsoft have been sniffing around AOL for sometime, eyeing it's lucrative user base and advertisement business. Google has been a long time AOL partner -- quite a percentage of their revenue from AOL. Google acknowledged AOL's value to them this week by sinking $1B into AOL and agreeing to take a 5% stake in the company. Part of the new relationship calls for a lot of integration between AOL and Google's offerings.

I was out with the crew from work tonight to add my few cents to Peter Jackson's coffers for his latest offering, King Kong . This outing of Kong was an amazing adventure film. It had monsters -- big monsters -- just about everything was big, except the people running from them. It had action -- more than just the big monsters chasing people -- there were monster fights. There was also the requisite humour, pulled off by Jackson, even in the scenes where you were at the edge of your seat. The first 30-minutes of the movie moved slowly -- but when it started moving, Jackson didn't give you excuses to blink. It was a heart-thumping 3-hour ride. Best of all however, it was a love story. King Kong has always been a love story, although it has been reduced many times to a monster flick by those without the storytelling talent. In the versions of King Kong I've seen, I don't think any filmmaker came as close to Jackson's version, in getting Kong to express so mu...