This is how I will always remember the Summer of 2010… Sharing the Akihabara Majokko Princess with Maxine, My Lonesome Cowboy, and beautiful Hiropon… This is the Summer of 2010 from my eyes.

“Information wants to be free”– a platitude that echoes true within the hearts of any genuine democratists, but does it hold universally?  In the quest to do what is right, and to preserve a way of life, the American Military has withheld information from the public– an act that has surely been measured against the many alternative scenarios available.  So now that this information is common knowledge, what should the American Military do?  It’s important to view the ethical actions behind the debate, and the reasons why these events took place– I believe this will help provide a course of action for the future.

The first conflict worth observing is the one which takes place in the minds of American citizenry– between the inherent freedom of information, and the government’s necessity for withholding it.  One example often recited is the capture of Osama Bin Laden… an act that, by its very nature, requires secrecy.  It would be nearly impossible to catch Bin Laden if all military movements were in the public domain– ultimately this state of affairs requires an examination of the ethics underlying it.  It is clear that capturing Bin Laden is the morally correct thing to do, it is not necessarily the ethically correct thing to do.  There are a great number of tactics the American government could have undertaken when dealing with Bin Laden… they could have just as easily funded and bolstered his position in order to infiltrate and identify his cadre, or they could have simply chosen to ignore him, and continued on a course of action that produced the maximal amount of stability and security, at the minimal cost.

The reality is, the American Government chose to purse the capture of Osama Bin Laden, and to destroy his harbingers– which, I would argue, is the ethically incorrect strategy– creating a further uncertainty: should an unethical strategy, such as capturing Bin Laden, be buttressed by an ethical one, such as freeing information?  The answer: it’s not logically possible to support an unethical situation with an ethical one.  An unethical strategy can only be supported by another unethical position, with the distinct possibility that the conclusion of this seemingly maligned strategy is an outcome that is morally correct.  Keeping information free is clearly the most ethically correct way of conducting a democracy, but it conflicts with the moral thing… capturing Bin Laden– so, the morally right thing, consequently, requires an unethical strategy.

Given that the loss of sensitive military information took place through the use of CD-RWs and social engineering…  the solution seems obvious to me: the military needs to proprietarize it’s information and technology systems.  If they wish to keep secrets in the future, they will need an IT infrastructure that is both hierarchical, and mirrors the systems of organisation the officers and commanders are already established in.

The American Military technology infrastructure should be redesigned from the ground up– its officers should be working on a proprietary operating system, on systems with proprietary hardware.  The access and use of all sensitive information should be centrally controlled, by a central computer system that manages and approves the requests to access confidential information… a centralized system that enables use on whatever device necessary, on an ad-hoc basis.  All information contained in this system should be encrypted, and the transportation of it should be regulated and tracked through the use of proprietary hardware vectors.  Ultimately, any piece of data should be traceable at any given moment, and its access approvable or revokable through a chain of command.

The approach of the government, and military, should not be to react to wikileaks, or to find and punish its founder Julian Assange… it should be to let this leaking organisation flounder, while strengthening and proprietarizing the ways in which the military works with information.  Furthermore, political and bureaucratic influences on the military need to be eliminated, especially if the military is ever to be expected to do its job properly.  Politicians should work to publicize military commanders in order to diffuse the blame that gravitates towards their careers, and bureaucrats should exclude themselves from involvement in the creation of military policy.

The solution above is perhaps not one that the most vocal citizenry desire… unfortunately, the platitudinal approach the vocal few espouse is simply an impossibility.  It is possible that a moral outcome can be arrived at through unethical means, and if the public wishes to attack military policy– it should do so based on the moral core of the situation, and not the ethics that the military strategy has henceforwardly required.

I would argue there are a great deal of other ways to deal with this situation, but I think the most trying and challenging approach involves working within the current system… not rewriting it from scratch.  The future holds a great deal of possibility, but this future will need to be mitigated by the efforts of ethicists, especially as the system in question becomes long in the tooth.

Genki Sudo is back shifting minds at a staid pace. Remember: We Are One!

Tonight I plan to watch “Spirited-Away”… a motivating movie about the ideologies that lay behind the working world.

As we get closer to the launch of Curiosity, the more excited and interested I become.  I think I first saw the video above in 2008, and was quite impressed- but on July 9th, 2010, engineers have installed and rotated Curiosity’s wheels for the first time! It’s hard to even fathom those wheels will travel the 4.16ish light minutes through the vacuum of space to eventually tear up untouched Martian soil.  It gives me hope that one day we will be able to reach our potential as human beings.

Mario is My Lonesome Cowboy...

Mario is “My Lonesome Cowboy”… if you have recently visited the excellent “Pop Life” exhibit at the National Gallery… you’ll know exactly what I mean.

The curators did a superb job choosing and exhibiting from a variety of collections and artists– centred around a multiplicity of themes.  Leaving the gallery, I had a new appreciation for pop-art (except for perhaps Jeff Koons).

The exhibit had some great stuff: from Takashi Murakami, Damien Hirst, Andy Warhol, Maurizio Cattelan, and others.  Despite this fantastic exhibit, one of the disconcerting elements of the gallery is its mismanagement.  The overseers of the gallery, in their magnanimity, have decided to secure funding from both the government, through a redistribution of taxes, and through the collection of admissions from Canadian citizens and sojournists.  The money is seemingly wasted on guards, which are situated in nearly every room.

I know the guards are simply doing their jobs and I want to avoid critiquing them, but frankly they ruin the experience.  They do not blend in– from their black fascismo uniforms to their oafish surveillance techniques.  They furtively follow you around, watching you as you watch the art… until, of course, you are deemed to be yet another boring patron, whereafter they return to their perch… awaiting the next group of recently debited aesthetes.  Beyond the guards you will also find nearly every room has a closed circuit surveillance system–  both seem grossly unnecessary.

My appreciation for the management of the gallery may be attenuated from my experience, and I sincerely apologize if guards were foisted upon the gallery by the government as an impotent attempt at pork-barrelling.  The fact remains that this is both wasteful, and counter to the concept of a public gallery…  you may as well handcuff patrons, and put all the art behind bars… or redesign the gallery so that it becomes a disney-style ride on rails… whoever is to blame, turning a gallery in to a panopticon serves no-one.   Finally, the gallery minus special exhibitions should be free to Canadian citizens– this could probably be accomplished through the reduction of spending on wages.  The upshot is that patrons would be able to enjoy the exhibits without the feeling of being on exhibit themselves.

Connect your iPhone to your computer for syncing and open iTunes.

If syncing has automatically begun, let it finish.

Now, click on your iPhone in the left hand frame it will be listed under ‘Devices’.

You should now see the information regarding your phone, next click on ‘Info’, scroll to the bottom and you should see a few buttons under ‘Advanced’.

Under the heading: ‘Replace Information on this iPhone’, choose ‘Contacts’, ‘Calendars’, ‘Bookmarks’, and ‘Notes’.  Then click ‘Sync’ in the bottom right hand corner.

Afterwards I restarted my iPhone and let it sync again.  It seemed as good as new!  I choose not to replace the mail accounts, my suspicion is the actual culprit causing the slowdown is the contact list.

If you are experiencing a slow down, give this a try– it doesn’t hurt and only takes a minute to accomplish.