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...[D]ivision of labor, in my mind, is one of the dangers of work-based technology. Modern IT infrastructure allows us to break projects into very small, discrete parts and assign each person to do only one of the many parts. In so doing, companies run the risk of taking away employees' sense of the big picture, purpose, and sense of completion.
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Dan Ariely (The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home)
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The application of Blockchain technology is rapidly becoming a core component of our infrastructure!
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Kevin Coleman
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Every conceivable layer of the election process is completely riddled with vulnerabilities, so yes, hacking elections is easy!
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James Scott, Senior Fellow, Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology
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Man is to technology what the bee is to the flower. It’s man’s intervention that allows technology to expand and evolve itself and in return, technology offers man convenience, wealth and the lessening burden of physical labor via its automated systems.
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James Scott, co-founder, Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology
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Your ideas are bound to forces of which you have no control due to the fact that you've voluntarily submitted your freedom of though to the perception steering censorship of Google, Facebook and other dragnet surveillance capitalists.
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James Scott, Senior Fellow, Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology
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Consider all tabulation systems infected by bad actors until a third party, not affiliated with the manufacturer or election officials, proves they are secure.
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James Scott, Senior Fellow, Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology
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Cities require connectivity rather than territory in order to drive their economic stability and growth.
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James Scott, Senior Fellow, Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology
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He (Comings) has in the past performed successful energy-converting experiments, creating a ringing resonance by injecting certain frequencies into piezo-electric crystals. When the crystal was in resonance with the plenum of space, the power output rose significantly higher than the input. He concluded that, if allowed politically, such discoveries could guide humankind in building a completely clean energy infrastructure -- resonant technologies that allow us to live in harmony with the universal energy field and the Earth.
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Jeane Manning (Breakthrough Power: How Quantum-Leap New Energy Inventions Can Transform Our World)
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In this digital age, we're experiencing the weaponization of everything.
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James Scott, Senior Fellow, Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology
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Ransomware is more about manipulating vulnerabilities in human psychology than the adversary's technological sophistication
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James Scott
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You think an Air Gap is a defense? Sofacy, Stuxnet, Uroburos, AirHopper, BitWhisperer and ProjectSauron…enough said!
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James Scott, Senior Fellow, Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology
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In this business, I find more value in working with hackers who abstract new realities from cast aside code and concepts than academics who regurgitate other people’s work and try to pawn it off as their own.
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James Scott, Senior Fellow, Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology
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Hackers find more success with organizations where employees are under appreciated, over worked and under paid. Why would anyone in an organization like that care enough to think twice before clicking on a phishing email?
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James Scott
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The security theater we are witnessing in our election system boasting the illusion of security via ‘clunky as heck’ and air gap defense will do nothing against the real and sophisticated adversarial landscape that is zeroing in on our democracy
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James Scott, Senior Fellow, Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology
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In today’s hypercompetitive environment enabled by technology, ownership of infrastructure no longer provides a defensible advantage. Instead, flexibility provides the crucial competitive edge, competition is perpetual motion, and advantage is evanescent.
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Geoffrey G. Parker (Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy and How to Make Them Work for You: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy―and How to Make Them Work for You)
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A Nation State or Cyber-Mercenary won’t hack e-voting machines one by one. This takes too long and will have minimal impact. Instead, they’ll take an easier approach like spear phishing the manufacturer with malware and poison the voting machine update pre-election and allow the manufacturer to update each individual machine with a self-deleting payload that will target the tabulation process.
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James Scott, Senior Fellow, Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology
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Hacking a national election is simple. Exploit a vulnerability in the manufacturer's network, poison the tabulation software update with self-deleting malware and let the manufacturer send to their field reps and election consultants who update the election systems.
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James Scott, Senior Fellow, Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology
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To achieve such intense strategic focus the organizations had instituted comprehensive, transformational change. They redefined their relationships with the customer, reengineered fundamental business processes, taught their workforces new skills, and deployed a new technology infrastructure.
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Robert S. Kaplan (The Strategy-Focused Organization: How Balanced Scorecard Companies Thrive in the New Business Environment)
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This next president is going to inherit the most sophisticated and persistent cyber espionage cultures the world has ever seen, He needs to surround himself with experts that can expedite the allocation of potent layers of next generation defenses around our targeted critical infrastructure silos.
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James Scott, Senior Fellow, Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology
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The health sector continuously get’s pummeled by malicious actors and hackers because their cyber-kinetic security is being managed by “Participation Trophy” winning wimps!
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James Scott, Senior Fellow, Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology
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Wannacry is the Stuxnet of Ransomware
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James Scott, Senior Fellow, Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology
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A vulnerability in an organization's IoT microcosm is a "taunt" to exploit by malicious hackers
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James Scott, Senior Fellow, Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology
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The biggest center of attention needs to be the Secretaries of State. They're the ones that manage the elections. At the end of the day, they're the ones that need to be held accountable.
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James Scott, co-founder, Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology
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As for relegated/delegated responsibility to ensure organizational software licensing compliance, management is still accountable when intellectual property rights are violated. If the safeguarding responsibility is assigned to an ineffective and/or inefficient unit within an organization, IT audit should recommend an alternative arrangement after the risks are substantiated.
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Robert E. Davis
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Even the Internet, which was supposed to deliver unprecedented cultural diversity ad democratic communication, has become an echo chamber where people see and hear what they already believe.
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Eric Klinenberg (Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life)
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invest simultaneously in the agricultural sector, in education, in productivity-enhancing technology and its dissemination, and in infrastructure that enables connectivity to the rest of the economy.
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Michael Spence (The Next Convergence: The Future of Economic Growth in a Multispeed World)
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If you don’t feel ordained by the Universe to do this job, do something else. The intelligence community has to shut down the gaping wound that is the insider threat epidemic we are experiencing right now.
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James Scott, Senior Fellow, Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology
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Epstein came up with an elaborate plan, including TV ads, and presented it to the board. The board rejected it.
“It really came down to this,” McCaffrey later said. “We have a limited budget. Do we want to put that money into the technology, into the infrastructure, into hiring really great people? Or do we want to blow it on a marketing campaign that we can’t measure?” Larry and Sergey told Epstein that his interim stint was over
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Steven Levy (In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives)
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This cyberwar will be a continuous marathon war that will only compound and hyper-evolve in stealth, sophistication and easy entry due to the accelerated evolution of “as a service” attack strategies for sale on the dark web.
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James Scott, Senior Fellow, Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology
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Dragnet surveillance capitalists such as Facebook, Comcast, AT&T and Google, unfortunately, supply these manipulating forces with an endless supply of metadata for this information war against the American and European public.
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James Scott, Senior Fellow, Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology
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Look at the stealth and sophistication of foreign nation state APTs who break through even the most sophisticated layers of security daily and tell me why they would just give our completely unprotected election systems a pass
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James Scott, Senior Fellow, Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology
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You'll have the right to be angry about Vault 7 only after you boycott dragnet surveillance data providers like Google, Microsoft, Skype, Facebook and LinkedIn. The true threat is coming from the private sector surveillance profiteers.
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James Scott, Senior Fellow, Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology
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The railroads that delivered goods to market were the same that delivered soldiers to battle — but they had no destructive potential. Nuclear technologies are often dual-use and may generate tremendous destructive capacity, but their complicated infrastructure enables relatively secure governmental control. A hunting rifle may be in widespread use and possess both military and civilian applications, but its limited capacity prevents its wielder from inflicting destruction on a strategic level.
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Henry Kissinger (The Age of A.I. and Our Human Future)
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We shall have to stop thinking of technology as something invulnerable that is merely used by humans, and view it as part of a greater cybernetic ecology all around us. The key distinction in an environment is not between ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’, but between semantic and dynamic: intention and behaviour. Biology has already drawn these lines, and through us, it will integrate the inanimate with the animate in information systems, until we no longer see a pertinent difference between the two.
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Mark Burgess (In Search of Certainty: The Science of Our Information Infrastructure)
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New media don’t succeed because they’re like the old media, only better: they succeed because they’re worse than the old media at the stuff the old media is good at, and better at the stuff the old media are bad at. Books are good at being paperwhite, high-resolution, low-infrastructure, cheap and disposable. Ebooks are good at being everywhere in the world at the same time for free in a form that is so malleable that you can just pastebomb it into your IM session or turn it into a page-a-day mailing list.
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Cory Doctorow (Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future)
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What do you mean “Should we worry about cyber adversaries getting into state voter registration databases?” They’re already in and selling exfiltrated voter registration data on the dark web! Next election cycle black hats will be selling ‘access as service’.
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James Scott, Senior Fellow, Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology
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I see the impossible work being done by of my friends at the federal agencies, the Pentagon, NATO, Five Eyes and the intelligence community. They are doing the impossible, for the ungrateful and with a fraction of the budgets required to render a viable defense.
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James Scott, Senior Fellow, Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology
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The collaboration between secretaries of state, election officials and the voting system manufacturers on the matter of enforcing this black box proprietary code secrecy with election systems, is nothing less than the commoditization and monetization of American Democracy
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James Scott, Senior Fellow, Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology
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In an advanced industrial society it becomes almost impossible to seek, even to imagine, unemployment as a condition for autonomous, useful work. The infrastructure of society is arranged so that only the job gives access to the tools of production...Housework, handicrafts, subsistence agriculture, radical technology, learning exchanges, and the like are degraded into activities for the idle, the unproductive, the very poor, or the very rich. A society that fosters intense dependence on commodities thus turns its unemployed into either its poor or its dependents.
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Ivan Illich
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A single spear-phishing email carrying a slightly altered malware can bypass multi-million dollar enterprise security solutions if an adversary deceives a cyber-hygienically apathetic employee into opening the attachment or clicking a malicious link and thereby compromising the entire network.
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James Scott, Senior Fellow, Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology
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What is the most helpful thing we can do for the earth and her people, Kuan Yin?”
“Kuan Yin is changing shape in response to your question, Hope. I’m not sure what this particular shape-shifting means, if it is an answer in itself or if she is adjusting to the question” Lena contemplates. “I’ll just watch for a moment and try to understand.”
“Loving people is the most helpful thing anyone can do,” Kuan Yin answers after a short while. “Your society has the resources, at this very moment, to fashion industries and lifestyles conducive to a non-harmful environment. There is a popular belief that over-population is the threat to the earth’s environment. However, for many places upon the earth it is also very much a question of resource availability and distribution. There is a real need for creating a holistic infrastructure that can support everyone.
A helpful mindset is simple-living and high-thinking”, continues Kuan Yin. “Science is constantly evolving. There are now recyclable batteries, ink cartridges, etc. Keep up to date on the latest technologies. Be aware, set examples and create trends that will positively influence people’s lives and the environment. As I said earlier, however, this is also a discussion about love and developing a greater capacity to love. It can help everyone.
We’re all one huge family, a great continuum. Don’t underestimate the power of the love created in your homes and families. This love has an immense potency, the power to influence others lives in a positive way.
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Hope Bradford (Oracle of Compassion: The Living Word of Kuan Yin)
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We’re talking about the fate of our economy and the questionable resiliency of our Nation’s critical infrastructure. Why are experts so polite, patient, and forgiving when talking about cybersecurity and National Security? The drama of each script kiddie botnet attack and Nation State pilfering of our IP has been turned into a soap opera through press releases, sound bites and enforced absurdity of mainstream media. It’s time for a cybersecurity zeitgeist in the West where cyber hygiene is a meme that is aggressively distributed by those who have mastered it and encouraged to be imitated by those who have experienced it.
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James Scott, Senior Fellow, Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology
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Exfiltrated metadata from internet service providers and social media platforms can be plugged into big data analytics and once the right algorithm is applied, can allow an adversary surgically precise psychographic targeting of critical infrastructure executives with elevated privileges. Why is no one talking about this?
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James Scott, Senior Fellow, Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology
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Currency is the email of blockchains. Payments are the fundamental infrastructure that will enable density of adoption. It’s very, very enticing to say, "This is about more than money!" It absolutely is, in the long term. The vision of this technology is far beyond money, but you can’t build that unless you first build the money part. That’s what creates the security. That’s what creates the velocity, the liquidity, the infrastructure. That’s what funds the entire ecosystem. In the end, when we do deliver these services to people, it won’t be so they can open a bank account. This isn’t about banking the unbanked; it’s about unbanking all of us.
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Andreas M. Antonopoulos (The Internet of Money Volume Two)
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Another salesman flew down to SpaceX to sell the company on some technology infrastructure equipment. He was doing the standard relationship-building exercise practiced by salespeople for centuries. Show up. Speak for a while. Feel each other out. Then, start doing business down the road. Musk was having none of it. “The guy comes in, and Elon asks him why they’re meeting,” Spikes said. “He said, ‘To develop a relationship.’ Elon replied, ‘Okay. Nice to meet you,’ which basically meant, ‘Get the fuck out of my office.’ This guy had spent four hours traveling for what ended up as a two-minute meeting. Elon just has no tolerance for that kind of stuff.
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Ashlee Vance (Elon Musk: How the Billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla is Shaping our Future)
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Much deeper hollowings-out have occurred in places that lack the infrastructure, educational, technological, and government advantages of the American system. Mexico, Indonesia, Brazil, India, South Africa, Romania, and the former Soviet Union—really any country that has attempted to modernize in China’s wake—have been hurt particularly badly.
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Peter Zeihan (Disunited Nations: The Scramble for Power in an Ungoverned World)
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If the West created the modern world, nevertheless they find themselves foreigners in it, because liberty and freedom just become chaos and mayhem without moral grounding. Without moral grounding, it doesn’t matter how nice your infrastructure is or how advanced your technology is. You’ll still behave like a savage. You’re a caveman at the opera.
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Shahid Bolsen
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Real cybersecurity means that your Security Operations team is consistently pen testing your network with the same stealth and sophistication as the Russian nation state, the same desperation as China’s 13th Five Year Plan, the same inexhaustible energy of the Cyber Caliphate and the same greed and ambition for monetary payoff as a seasoned cyber-criminal gang.
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James Scott, Senior Fellow, Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology
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More than developing confidence in the reliability of new energy technologies, and even more of a challenge than the admittedly complex task of designing and constructing an infrastructure that will allow consumer access to them, what stands in the way of our apparent will to wean ourselves from conventional energy sources is the reluctance to wean ourselves from old ways of thinking.
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Jane Hoffman (Green: Your Place in the New Energy Revolution)
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You are a product to dragnet surveillance capitalists like Google, Facebook, Comcast and Verizon. Your ideas are rarely your own, rather you are little more than a pawn to their perception steering initiatives to get you to read, believe and buy what they put in front of you. The first step to breaking out of this faux reality matrix is to stop using Google, Bing, Yahoo, Comcast and Facebook.
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James Scott, Senior Fellow, Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology
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Our current understanding of entrepreneurship is deeply saturated in power-hungry capitalist greed, leading to undemocratic control of the technological infrastructure that underpins our lives — not to mention massively wasteful economic inequality. Whatever merits the existing system of private entrepreneurship may have had, we’re now brushing up against its limits, and it’s time to consider something new.
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Wendy Liu (Abolish Silicon Valley: How to Liberate Technology from Capitalism)
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Another salesman flew down to SpaceX to sell the company on some technology infrastructure equipment. He was doing the standard relationship-building exercise practiced by salespeople for centuries. Show up. Speak for a while. Feel each other out. Then, start doing business down the road. Musk was having none of it. “The guy comes in, and Elon asks him why they’re meeting,” Spikes said. “He said, ‘To develop a relationship.’ Elon replied, ‘Okay. Nice to meet you,’ which basically meant, ‘Get the fuck out of my office.’ This guy had spent four hours traveling for what ended up as a two-minute meeting. Elon just has no tolerance for that kind of stuff.” Musk could be equally brisk with employees who were not hitting his standards. “He would often say, ‘The longer you wait to fire someone the longer it has been since you should have fired them,’” Spikes said.
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Ashlee Vance (Elon Musk: How the Billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla is Shaping our Future)
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they set out to acquire—steal—our industrial secrets. “Curiously our free-world media fail dismally to point out that all Soviet advances are based originally on one of our stolen inventions or techniques, that without our grain they starve, and without our vast and ever-growing financial assistance and credits to buy our grains and technology they cannot fuel and refuel their whole military-industrial infrastructure which keeps their empire and people enthralled.
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James Clavell (Noble House (Asian Saga Book 5))
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During the globalization wave, Amazon had lost the battle for e-commerce to Ebay, the battle for digital media to Apple, and the battle for technology innovation to Google. Bezos was hungry to re-invent Amazon over a decade after it was founded. The two masterstrokes of Bezos that created new revenue streams by renting out Amazon’s infrastructure – Amazon Prime and Amazon Web Services (AWS) – were at the time, shots in the dark. They would end up turning things around.
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Kashyap Deorah (The Golden Tap: The Inside Story of Hyper-Funded Indian Startups)
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The coming wave of automation will move way beyond the factory or public infrastructure and into our very biological processes such as aging and even giving birth. Used as we are to the gradual societal shifts brought about by previous change waves, often allowing decades to adjust and respond, I ask if we as a tribe are ready to abdicate our human sovereignty to the faceless forces of technology? Are you ready for the biggest loss of free will and individual human control in history?
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Gerd Leonhard (Technology vs. Humanity: The coming clash between man and machine (FutureScapes))
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Once again, infrastructure had set a limit on the pace of development of a new technology. But by the second decade of the nineteenth century, malleable-iron rails were beginning to replace brittle cast iron on the wagonways of England, and stone or wooden sleepers strengthened the roadbeds for heavy locomotives. With such improvements, Trevithick’s circular track on vacant land in London would open out into a network of fast, reliable transportation—but not before its inventors and engineers endured a final long haul of challenges and trials.
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Richard Rhodes (Energy: A Human History)
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It was the combination of EC2 and S3 - storage and compute, two primitives linked together - that transformed both AWS and the technology world. Startups no longer needed to spend their venture capital on buying servers and hiring specialized engineers to run them. Infrastructure costs were variable instead of fixed, and they could grow in direct proportion to revenues. It freed companies to experiment, to change their business models with a minimum of pain, and to keep up with the rapidly growing audiences of erupting social networks like Facebook and Twitter.
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Brad Stone (The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon)
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Many believe that the end of COVID-19 will simply arrive with the development of a vaccine. Yet a closer look at one of the central vaccine success stories of the 20th century shows that technological solutions rarely offer resolution to pandemics on their own. Contrary to our expectations, vaccines are not universal technologies. Vaccination practices and the infrastructures in place to deliver them are as diverse as the epidemic management strategies national governments follow. They are always deployed locally, with variable resources and commitments to scientific expertise.
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Hal Brands (COVID-19 and World Order: The Future of Conflict, Competition, and Cooperation)
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The grand, collectivist experiments of the earlier part of the twentieth century were discarded in favor of a narrow attentiveness to the desires and needs of the individual. The market rewarded shallow engagement with the potential of technology, as startup after startup catered to the whims of late capitalist culture without any interest in constructing the technical infrastructure that would address our most significant challenges as a nation. The age of social media platforms and food delivery apps had arrived. Medical breakthroughs, education reform, and military advances would have to
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Alexander C. Karp (The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West)
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Decisions made decades or even centuries ago—how we treat wastewater, the use of alternating current instead of direct current for electricity grids, pipelines laid for fossil fuels—all of these shape not just the technologies and systems in use today but those that haven’t yet been built. That continuity means there’s a path dependence—that the kinds of systems we have today depend on the characteristics of the systems that came before—in addition to growth and accumulation, as these systems build on each other. We now live surrounded by technological systems of nearly unimaginable scale, extent, and complexity.
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Deb Chachra (How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems That Shape Our World)
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Thomas Edison had to invent much more than the electric light. As do all innovators of new technologies, he faced the larger problem of developing and deploying the infrastructure required to support his inventions. Behind the steam engine, a network of mines and distribution systems supplied coal for its operation. Local generating plants and networks of underground pipes sustained gas lighting. When Edison planned his direct-current system of electric lighting, not wanting to run wires as thick as a man’s leg, he envisioned neighborhood-scale generating stations—steam engines turning direct-current generators—modeling his system on the gas-lighting system and even running his wiring, like gas, in pipes underground.
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Richard Rhodes (Energy: A Human History)
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RENEWABLE ENERGY REVOLUTION: SOLAR + WIND + BATTERIES In addition to AI, we are on the cusp of another important technological revolution—renewable energy. Together, solar photovoltaic, wind power, and lithium-ion battery storage technologies will create the capability of replacing most if not all of our energy infrastructure with renewable clean energy. By 2041, much of the developed world and some developing countries will be primarily powered by solar and wind. The cost of solar energy dropped 82 percent from 2010 to 2020, while the cost of wind energy dropped 46 percent. Solar and onshore wind are now the cheapest sources of electricity. In addition, lithium-ion battery storage cost has dropped 87 percent from 2010 to 2020. It will drop further thanks to the massive production of batteries for electrical vehicles. This rapid drop in the price of battery storage will make it possible to store the solar/wind energy from sunny and windy days for future use. Think tank RethinkX estimates that with a $2 trillion investment through 2030, the cost of energy in the United States will drop to 3 cents per kilowatt-hour, less than one-quarter of today’s cost. By 2041, it should be even lower, as the prices of these three components continue to descend. What happens on days when a given area’s battery energy storage is full—will any generated energy left unused be wasted? RethinkX predicts that these circumstances will create a new class of energy called “super power” at essentially zero cost, usually during the sunniest or most windy days. With intelligent scheduling, this “super power” can be used for non-time-sensitive applications such as charging batteries of idle cars, water desalination and treatment, waste recycling, metal refining, carbon removal, blockchain consensus algorithms, AI drug discovery, and manufacturing activities whose costs are energy-driven. Such a system would not only dramatically decrease energy cost, but also power new applications and inventions that were previously too expensive to pursue. As the cost of energy plummets, the cost of water, materials, manufacturing, computation, and anything that has a major energy component will drop, too. The solar + wind + batteries approach to new energy will also be 100-percent clean energy. Switching to this form of energy can eliminate more than 50 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions, which is by far the largest culprit of climate change.
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Kai-Fu Lee (AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future)
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. . . one of the lessons of a UBI is that our policy outcomes are not inevitabilities but choices. The United States would be significantly richer right now if it had passed more fiscal stimulus at the onset of the Great Recession. It would be richer if it invested in infrastructure. It would be richer if it chose to ensure that no child grew up in poverty. It would be richer if it had worked to make black and white Americans, as well as men and women, true equals. . . poverty in the United States is a choice. Stagnant middle-class incomes are a choice. Technology-fueled mass unemployment is a choice. Racism is a choice. The patriarchy is a choice. This is not to discount how deeply entrenched existing policies, interests, and tendencies are—but to recognize that while they might be entrenched, they are not immutable.
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Annie Lowrey (Give People Money: The Simple Idea to Solve Inequality and Revolutionise Our Lives)
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Although Stephenson began to manufacture steam locomotives in steady numbers after Blucher and My Lord had demonstrated their utility, railway infrastructure continued to limit development. Early-nineteenth-century cast iron was far more impure and brittle than cast iron is today and often broke under the weight of heavy steam engines. Consequently, rail sections had to be short, about three feet, which in turn introduced numerous unstable joints. Allowing for a horse path between rails—as late as 1828, Stephenson’s first major British railway still hauled 43 percent of its tonnage with horses—meant that rails had to be supported on stone blocks rather than connected with crossties, making it difficult to keep them aligned.35 Cast-iron rails, despite their limitations, met a characteristic requirement of new technology: lower cost. Haulage by rail cost less than by packhorse or horse cart.
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Richard Rhodes (Energy: A Human History)
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Bertrand Russell famously said: “It is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatsoever for supposing it is true.” [but] Russell’s maxim is the luxury of a technologically advanced society with science, history, journalism, and their infrastructure of truth-seeking, including archival records, digital datasets, high-tech instruments, and communities of editing, fact-checking, and peer review. We children of the Enlightenment embrace the radical creed of universal realism: we hold that all our beliefs should fall within the reality mindset. We care about whether our creation story, our founding legends, our theories of invisible nutrients and germs and forces, our conceptions of the powerful, our suspicions about our enemies, are true or false. That’s because we have the tools to get answers to these questions, or at least to assign them warranted degrees of credence. And we have a technocratic state that should, in theory, put these beliefs into practice.
But as desirable as that creed is, it is not the natural human way of believing. In granting an imperialistic mandate to the reality mindset to conquer the universe of belief and push mythology to the margins, we are the weird ones—or, as evolutionary social scientists like to say, the WEIRD ones: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic. At least, the highly educated among us are, in our best moments. The human mind is adapted to understanding remote spheres of existence through a mythology mindset. It’s not because we descended from Pleistocene hunter-gatherers specifically, but because we descended from people who could not or did not sign on to the Enlightenment ideal of universal realism. Submitting all of one’s beliefs to the trials of reason and evidence is an unnatural skill, like literacy and numeracy, and must be instilled and cultivated.
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Pinker Steven (Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters)
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One further complication in the link between self-sufficiency and simplicity is worth noting. Self-sufficiency may be part of the traditional notion and the Romantic ideal of simple living, but in fairly obvious ways using technology can simplify our lives considerably. Which is simpler, washing all your clothes and sheets by hand, or using a washing machine? Collecting and chopping wood to make a fire to cook over, or turning on the gas burner and pushing the electric ignition button? Walking across town and back to deliver a message, or making a phone call? The point here is that the concept of simple living contains crosscurrents. Reducing our dependence on infrastructure and technology may bring us closer to simple living in one sense—we are more self-sufficient—but takes us away from it in other ways since it makes basic tasks much more difficult, arduous, and time-consuming. And in some ways technology can even help us to be more self-sufficient, as when we use a washing machine to do our own laundry instead of using servants or sending it out.
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Emrys Westacott (The Wisdom of Frugality: Why Less Is More - More or Less)
“
Of course, culture is an oppressive structure. It’s always been that way. It’s a fundamental, universal existential reality. The tyrannical king is a symbolic truth; an archetypal constant. What we inherit from the past is willfully blind, and out of date. It’s a ghost, a machine, and a monster. It must be rescued, repaired and kept at bay by the attention and effort of the living. It crushes, as it hammers us into socially acceptable shape, and it wastes great potential. But it offers great gain, too. Every word we speak is a gift from our ancestors. Every thought we think was thought previously by someone smarter. The highly functional infrastructure that surrounds us, particularly in the West, is a gift from our ancestors: the comparatively uncorrupt political and economic systems, the technology, the wealth, the lifespan, the freedom, the luxury, and the opportunity. Culture takes with one hand, but in some fortunate places it gives more with the other. To think about culture only as oppressive is ignorant and ungrateful, as well as dangerous. This is not to say (as I am hoping the content of this book has made abundantly clear, so far) that culture should not be subject to criticism.
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Jordan B. Peterson
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Bitcoin was in theory and in practice inseparable from the process of computation run on cheap, powerful hardware: the system could not have existed without markets for digital moving images; especially video games, driving down the price of microchips that could handle the onerous business of guessing. It also had a voracious appetite for electricity, which had to come from somewhere - burning coal or natural gas, spinning turbines, decaying uranium - and which wasn't being used for something arguably more constructive than this discovery of meaningless hashes. The whole apparatus of the early twenty-first century's most complex and refined infrastructures and technologies was turned to the conquest of the useless. It resembled John Maynard Keynes's satirical response to criticisms of his capital injection proposal by proponents of the gold standard: just put banknotes in bottles, he suggested, and bury them in disused coal mines for people to dig up - a useless task to slow the dispersal of the new money and get people to work for it. 'It would, indeed, be more sensible to build houses and the like; but if there are political and practical difficulties in the way of this, the above would be better than nothing.
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Finn Brunton (Digital Cash: The Unknown History of the Anarchists, Utopians, and Technologists Who Created Cryptocurrency)
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It is a truism today, in this highly technologically-developed
culture, that students need technical computer skills. Equally
truistic (and, not incidentally, true) is that the workplace has
become highly technological. Even more truistic – and far
more disturbing – are the shifts in education over the last two
decades as public elementary schools, public and private high
schools, and colleges and universities have invested scores
of billions of dollars on “digital infrastructure,” computers,
monitors and printers, “smart classrooms,” all to “meet the
demands” of this new technological workplace.
"We won’t dwell on the fact – an inconvenient truth? –
that those technological investments have coincided with a
decline in American reading behaviors, in reading and reading
comprehension scores, in overall academic achievement, in the
phenomenon – all too familiar to us in academia – of “grade
inflation,” in an alarming collapse of our students’ understanding
of their own history (to say nothing of the history of the rest of the world), rising ignorance of world and American geography, with an abandonment of the idea of objectivity, and with an
increasingly subjective, even solipsistic, emphasis on personal
experience. Ignore all this. Or, if we find it impossible to ignore,
then let’s blame the teachers...
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Peter K Fallon (Cultural Defiance, Cultural Deviance)
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While the technosphere concept stresses that most humans lack the potential to influence the behavior of large technological systems, the ergosphere concept makes this possibility dependent on the existence of appropriate social and political structures and knowledge systems, and also on the individual perspectives of human actors. One cause for hope is that a knowledge economy produces and distributes not only the knowledge needs for its functioning (and often less) but, to varying degrees, an excess of knowledge (an 'epistemic spillover') that may trigger unexpected developments.
Humans must certainly maintain and preserve their tools, technologies, and infrastructures, but they also change them with each implementation. The material world of the ergosphere consists of borderline objects between nature and culture that may trigger innovations as well as unpredictable consequences. The ergosphere has a plasticity and porousness in which materials and functions are not so tightly interwoven as to exclude the repurposing of existing tools for new applications. In principle, each aspect of the ergosphere can be transformed from an end into a means, which is then available to emerging intentions and functions. Repurposing a given tool is, however, a double-edged sword - it may have disastrous consequences. Thus, the responsibility for using and developing technical systems must always be assumed anew.
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Jürgen Renn (The Evolution of Knowledge: Rethinking Science for the Anthropocene)
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In the beginning, there was the internet: the physical infrastructure of wires and servers that lets computers, and the people in front of them, talk to each other. The U.S. government’s Arpanet sent its first message in 1969, but the web as we know it today didn’t emerge until 1991, when HTML and URLs made it possible for users to navigate between static pages. Consider this the read-only web, or Web1.
In the early 2000s, things started to change. For one, the internet was becoming more interactive; it was an era of user-generated content, or the read/write web. Social media was a key feature of Web2 (or Web 2.0, as you may know it), and Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr came to define the experience of being online. YouTube, Wikipedia, and Google, along with the ability to comment on content, expanded our ability to watch, learn, search, and communicate.
The Web2 era has also been one of centralization. Network effects and economies of scale have led to clear winners, and those companies (many of which I mentioned above) have produced mind-boggling wealth for themselves and their shareholders by scraping users’ data and selling targeted ads against it. This has allowed services to be offered for “free,” though users initially didn’t understand the implications of that bargain. Web2 also created new ways for regular people to make money, such as through the sharing economy and the sometimes-lucrative job of being an influencer.
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Harvard Business Review (Web3: The Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review (HBR Insights Series))
“
This is not very practical,” the minister says, pointing at the ceiling, which is crowded with exposed air ducts, pipes, hanging bald light fixtures, and rough concrete. “All this infrastructure. It is surely not up to code? You know—a code violation?” The rest of the German officials nod in vigorous agreement. Some mutter “code violation” to reinforce her point. “Umm … er … it’s meant to embody the journey of Facebook. To show that we’re only one percent finished. I mean, I understand that before we rented this space, it was finished like those law and lobbyist offices you can see through the window. And then they had to strip back all that luxurious finishing. The carpets and everything.” “You dismantled the furnishing of a proper office to make it look like this? Like it is under construction?” one of the officials inquired, incredulous. “It’s symbolic,” I start to say. This all had sounded much more convincing in California when Sheryl explained it to the New Zealand prime minister. I start to realize that Facebook’s office is reinforcing the idea that Facebook is reckless and feckless and nothing good is going to come from continuing the tour. As the members of the German delegation stare at me in disbelief, with some audibly tutting, I make the executive decision to get to the meeting room as quickly as possible. Better to hurry past all the posters that say things like THINK WRONG, MOVE FAST AND BREAK THINGS, and IS THIS A TECHNOLOGY COMPANY?
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Sarah Wynn-Williams (Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism)
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Along the way to Seattle, he wrote his business plan. He identified several reasons why the book category was underserved and well suited to online commerce. He outlined how he could create a new and compelling experience for book-buying customers. To begin with, books were relatively lightweight and came in fairly uniform sizes, meaning they would be easy and inexpensive to warehouse, pack, and ship. Second, while more than 100 million books had been written and more than a million titles were in print in 1994, even a Barnes & Noble mega-bookstore could stock only tens of thousands of titles. An online bookstore, on the other hand, could offer not just the books that could fit in a brick-and-mortar store but any book in print. Third, there were two large book-distribution companies, Ingram and Baker & Taylor, that acted as intermediaries between publishers and retailers and maintained huge inventories in vast warehouses. They kept detailed electronic catalogs of books in print to make it easy for bookstores and libraries to order from them. Jeff realized that he could combine the infrastructure that Ingram and Baker & Taylor had created—warehouses full of books ready to be shipped, plus an electronic catalog of those books—with the growing infrastructure of the Web, making it possible for consumers to find and buy any book in print and get it shipped directly to their homes. Finally, the site could use technology to analyze the behavior of customers and create a unique, personalized experience for each one of them.
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Colin Bryar (Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon)
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Key Points: ● Transparency - Blockchain offers significant improvements in transparency compared to existing record keeping and ledgers for many industries. ● Removal of Intermediaries – Blockchain-based systems allow for the removal of intermediaries involved in the record keeping and transfer of assets. ● Decentralization – Blockchain-based systems can run on a decentralized network of computers, reducing the risk of hacking, server downtime and loss of data. ● Trust – Blockchain-based systems increase trust between parties involved in a transaction through improved transparency and decentralized networks along with removal of third-party intermediaries in countries where trust in the intermediaries doesn’t exist. ● Security – Data entered on the blockchain is immutable, preventing against fraud through manipulating transactions and the history of data. Transactions entered on the blockchain provide a clear trail to the very start of the blockchain allowing any transaction to be easily investigated and audited. ● Wide range of uses - Almost anything of value can be recorded on the blockchain and there are many companies and industries already developing blockchain-based systems. These examples are covered later in the book. ● Easily accessible technology – Along with the wide range of uses, blockchain technology makes it easy to create applications without significant investment in infrastructure with recent innovations like the Ethereum platform. Decentralized apps, smart contracts and the Ethereum platform are covered later in the book. ● Reduced costs – Blockchain-based ledgers allow for removal of intermediaries and layers of confirmation involved in transactions. Transactions that may take multiple individual ledgers, could be settled on one shared ledger, reducing the costs of validating, confirming and auditing each transaction across multiple organizations. ● Increased transaction speed – The removal of intermediaries and settlement on distributed ledgers, allows for dramatically increased transaction speeds compared to a wide range of existing systems.
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Mark Gates (Blockchain: Ultimate guide to understanding blockchain, bitcoin, cryptocurrencies, smart contracts and the future of money. (Ultimate Cryptocurrency Book 1))
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What is scarce? Surely time is scarce? This is true in the sense that we get only one life, but yet again there are ways in which competition and how we use our time can make us feel an artificial sense of time scarcity. Each time we are able to build on the work of others with confidence, each time we use the elements of life pulled from our commonwealth of agricultural knowledge, we bundle time, and so get the benefit of having multiple lifetimes. Each time nature uses genetic code that has been developed over millions of years, millions of years of development are collapsed into something that works in our lifetimes. Each time we add to that collection, we are putting our lifetimes' work into a useful form for the benefit of future generations. At the same time, yes, we each have only our own single lives in which to pursue happiness. The goal is to spend as much of that time in a framework of sharing abundance rather than having it squeezed into a life of scarcity and competition.
In contrast, we need not look far to find lots of frustrating examples in which our time is treated as abundant when we would rather have it be valued as scarce. It happens each time we must stand in line at the DMV, fill out redundant forms at the hospital, reproduce others' efforts by spending time searching for knowledge or data that already exists somewhere, create a report that no one reads. In those cases, we are creating and living in artificial and unnecessary time scarcity.
Time is indeed one of the most curious elements of life, especially since our lifetimes and those of plants and animals all move at different rates. We know, for example, that the urgency to address climate change is really on our human scale, not geologic scale. The Earth has been through greater upheavals and mass extinctions and will likely go through them again, but for the narrowest of narrow bands of human history on Earth, we require very specific conditions for us to continue to thrive as a species. To keep our planet within a habitable and abundant balance, we have, as Howard Buffet noted, only 'forty seasons' to learn and adjust. That is why building on one another's work is so important. One farmer can have the benefit of forty seasons and pass some of that experience down, but if 1,000 farmers do the same, there is the collective benefit of 1,000 years in a single year. If a million people participate, then a million years of collective experience are available. If we are then able to compound knowledge across generations and deepen our understanding of human and natural history, we add even greater richness. It is in this way of bundling our experiences for continual improvement, with compound interest, that time shifts from a scarce resource to being far less of a constraint, if not truly abundant. However, for time to be compounded, knowledge must be shared, and real resources, energy, and infrastructure must exist and function to support and grow our commonwealth of knowledge.
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Dorn Cox (The Great Regeneration: Ecological Agriculture, Open-Source Technology, and a Radical Vision of Hope)
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Continetti concludes:
"An intellectual, financial, technological, and social infrastructure to undermine global capitalism has been developing for more than two decades, and we are in the middle of its latest manifestation… The occupiers’ tent cities are self-governing, communal, egalitarian, and networked. They reject everyday politics. They foster bohemianism and confrontation with the civil authorities. They are the Phalanx and New Harmony, updated for postmodern times and plopped in the middle of our cities.
There may not be that many activists in the camps. They may appear silly, even grotesque. They may resist "agendas" and "policies." They may not agree on what they want or when they want it. And they may disappear as winter arrives and the liberals whose parks they are occupying lose patience with them. But the utopians and anarchists will reappear… The occupation will persist as long as individuals believe that inequalities of property are unjust and that the brotherhood of man can be established on earth."
You can see why anarchists might find this sort of thing refreshingly honest. The author makes no secret of his desire to see us all in prison, but at least he’s willing to make an honest assessment of what the stakes are.
Still, there is one screamingly dishonest theme that runs throughout the Weekly Standard piece: the intentional conflation of "democracy" with "everyday politics," that is, lobbying, fund-raising, working for electoral campaigns, and otherwise participating in the current American political system. The premise is that the author stands in favor of democracy, and that occupiers, in rejecting the existing system, are against it. In fact, the conservative tradition that produced and sustains journals like The Weekly Stand is profoundly antidemocratic. Its heroes, from Plato to Edmund Burke, are, almost uniformly, men who opposed democracy on principle, and its readers are still fond of statements like "America is not a democracy, it’s a republic." What’s more, the sort of arguments Continetti breaks out here--that anarchist-inspire movements are unstable, confused, threaten established orders of property, and must necessarily lead to violence--are precisely the arguments that have, for centuries. been leveled by conservatives against democracy itself.
In reality, OWS is anarchist-inspired, but for precisely that reason it stands squarely in the very tradition of American popular democracy that conservatives like Continetti have always staunchly opposed. Anarchism does not mean the negation of democracy--or at least, any of the aspects of democracy that most American have historically liked. Rather, anarchism is a matter of taking those core democratic principles to their logical conclusions. The reason it’s difficult to see this is because the word "democracy" has had such an endlessly contested history: so much so that most American pundits and politicians, for instance, now use the term to refer to a form of government established with the explicit purpose of ensuring what John Adams once called "the horrors of democracy" would never come about. (p. 153-154)
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David Graeber (The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement)
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Today the cloud is the central metaphor of the internet: a global system of great power and energy that nevertheless retains the aura of something noumenal and numnious, something almost impossible to grasp. We connect to the cloud; we work in it; we store and retrieve stuff from it; we think through it. We pay for it and only notice it when it breaks. It is something we experience all the time without really understanding what it is or how it works. It is something we are training ourselves to rely upon with only the haziest of notions about what is being entrusted, and what it is being entrusted to.
Downtime aside, the first criticism of this cloud is that it is a very bad metaphor. The cloud is not weightless; it is not amorphous, or even invisible, if you know where to look for it. The cloud is not some magical faraway place, made of water vapor and radio waves, where everything just works. It is a physical infrastructure consisting of phone lines, fibre optics, satellites, cables on the ocean floor, and vast warehouses filled with computers, which consume huge amounts of water and energy and reside within national and legal jurisdictions. The cloud is a new kind of industry, and a hungry one. The cloud doesn't just have a shadow; it has a footprint. Absorbed into the cloud are many of the previously weighty edifices of the civic sphere: the places where we shop, bank, socialize, borrow books, and vote. Thus obscured, they are rendered less visible and less amenable to critique, investigation, preservation and regulation.
Another criticism is that this lack of understanding is deliberate. There are good reasons, from national security to corporate secrecy to many kinds of malfeasance, for obscuring what's inside the cloud. What evaporates is agency and ownership: most of your emails, photos, status updates, business documents, library and voting data, health records, credit ratings, likes, memories, experiences, personal preferences, and unspoken desires are in the cloud, on somebody else's infrastructure. There's a reason Google and Facebook like to build data centers in Ireland (low taxes) and Scandinavia (cheap energy and cooling). There's a reason global, supposedly post-colonial empires hold onto bits of disputed territory like Diego Garcia and Cyprus, and it's because the cloud touches down in these places, and their ambiguous status can be exploited. The cloud shapes itself to geographies of power and influence, and it serves to reinforce them. The cloud is a power relationship, and most people are not on top of it.
These are valid criticisms, and one way of interrogating the cloud is to look where is shadow falls: to investigate the sites of data centers and undersea cables and see what they tell us about the real disposition of power at work today. We can seed the cloud, condense it, and force it to give up some of its stories. As it fades away, certain secrets may be revealed. By understanding the way the figure of the cloud is used to obscure the real operation of technology, we can start to understand the many ways in which technology itself hides its own agency - through opaque machines and inscrutable code, as well as physical distance and legal constructs. And in turn, we may learn something about the operation of power itself, which was doing this sort of thing long before it had clouds and black boxes in which to hide itself.
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James Bridle (New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future)
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The problem is also not, as suggested by the technosphere concept, that human beings are incapable of controlling systems that have a larger range of behaviors than they do themselves. The problem rather lies in the question of what 'control' means in the first place. The stewardship of technological systems and infrastructures always depends on their specific nature (in particular, the way they are embedded in natural and cultural environment) as well as on their representation in knowledge and belief systems. Human cognition is always embodied cognition. There are historical examples showing that humans have been able to manage and sustain extremely complex ecologies and infrastructures of their own making over the long term. The systems' potential behaviors always far exceeded those of their human components, but these were typically ecologies and infrastructures in which the relevant regulative structures of human behavior had themselves been coevolving over long periods, including in their representation by knowledge and belief systems.
As recent work on Japanese ecologies during the Tokugawa period (between 1603 and 1868) shows, age-old traditions had accumulated knowledge on how to sustainably manage a complex landscape providing humans with food, shelter, clothing, and energy. The knowledge was implemented through a complex system of governance and material practices ranging from sanitation to publishing.
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Jürgen Renn (The Evolution of Knowledge: Rethinking Science for the Anthropocene)
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there needs to be a split between the responsibility of designing the cloud infrastructure process (by the cloud team) and the actual provisioning and updates to application resources (by the product teams).
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Matthew Skelton (Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow)
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Rather than ending the dominance of platforms, we would suggest that the growth of blockchain technologies will be accompanied by the emergence of many new platform companies. Like HTTP and the Web before it, the blockchain will create a decentralized infrastructure that provides the opportunity for new markets and communities to emerge. But most of these new opportunities won’t take shape without a platform company orchestrating them and capitalizing on their potential.
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Alex Moazed (Modern Monopolies: What It Takes to Dominate the 21st Century Economy)
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By 2006, they had created an international exemplar of interconnectedness. Estonian software engineers had not only created Skype; they were helping to build a new society, where the only rituals requiring you to show up in person and present a document were marriage, divorce, and buying property. Everything else was online—government, banking, finance, insurance, communications, broadcast and print media, the balloting for elections. Wi-Fi was strong, ever present, and free. People began to call their homeland e-Estonia. They had created the first country whose political and social architectures were framed by an internet infrastructure—and perhaps the most technologically sophisticated nation on earth. In April 2007, the authorities in Tallinn decided to move the Bronze Soldier from its pedestal to a military cemetery. Estonian patriots found it offensive, Russian nationalists came to Estonia to rally around it, and the statue became a flash point of confrontation. Russia’s foreign affairs minister, Sergey Lavrov, called the decision disgusting; he warned of serious consequences for Estonia. An angry mob of Russians ran riot in the capital. In Moscow, young thugs laid siege to the Estonian embassy and forced it to shut down. And then Putin waged political warfare in a way that made Estonia’s strength its weakness.
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Tim Weiner (The Folly and the Glory: America, Russia, and Political Warfare 1945–2020)
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Human ingenuity often surfaces when it’s most needed, and now, a new technology is emerging that returns to the decentralized ethos of the original Internet with the potential to revolutionize our computational and transactional infrastructure: blockchain technology. Every second, millions of packets of information are transacted between humans and machines using the Internet, and blockchain technology is forcing us to rethink the costs, security, and ownership of these transactions.
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Chris Burniske (Cryptoassets: The Innovative Investor's Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond)
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The infrastructure that supports our continuous integration and continuous deployment processes also presents a new surface area vulnerable to attack. For instance, if someone compromises the servers running the deployment pipeline that has the credentials for our version control system, it could enable someone to steal source code. Worse, if the deployment pipeline has write access, an attacker could also inject malicious changes into our version control repository and, therefore, inject malicious changes into our application and services.
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Gene Kim (The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, & Security in Technology Organizations)
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We are Google Cloud Premier Partners who help small businesses with their IT infrastructure and digital footprint. We offer clients a better way of growing their business through technology and innovative strategies. Our proven methods help clients to build a strong digital footprint, which helps to both automate day-to-day systems and supercharge the way they do business.
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Lingows
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I joined Amazon in 2004 in the early days of Amazon Web Services (AWS). Once I joined, my boss explained the mission. Amazon was going to build enormous data centers and rent compute-power and storage capacity not as applications, but as building blocks that developers and other companies can use to build their apps. This would enable any developer and every company to leverage Amazon’s mastery of web-scale infrastructure. The service would be flexible, able to scale up and down on the fly. If your traffic surged for a few days, the “Elastic Compute Cloud” would simply throw extra computer horsepower at your website. When the surge ended, your virtual data center would shrink back down. You paid only for what you used. You paid a monthly bill, just like you do for your mobile phone and your electricity. The pay-for-what-you-use model was a huge breakthrough—maybe as significant as the technology itself.
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Jeff Lawson (Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century)
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2011, I led the Department of Energy’s Quadrennial Technology Review to develop strategies for government support of emerging clean energy technologies. In one town hall meeting, I faced advocates for four different vehicle technologies—internal combustion engines powered by biofuels, compressed natural gas, hydrogen-powered fuel cells, and battery-powered plug-ins. Each of them believed that their technology was the optimal vision for the future, and that all the government had to do was support the development of the appropriate fueling infrastructure. When I reminded them that the country could probably deploy no more than two new fueling technologies at scale, a squabble ensued. There are several reasons I believe that electricity will fuel the passenger vehicles of the future, but one of them is that the existing electrical grid is a good start on the fueling infrastructure. If a widespread transition to plug-in electric cars does come about, systems thinking will be even more important as the electrical and transportation systems would have to work together to accommodate charging millions of vehicles.
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Steven E. Koonin (Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters)
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Quantum mechanics is the established text-book theory of molecules, atoms, electrons, and photons at low energies. Much of the technological infrastructure of modern life exploits its properties, from transistors and lasers to magnetic resonance scanners and computers. QM is one of humanity’s supreme intellectual achievements, explaining a range of phenomena that cannot be understood within a classical context: light or small objects can behave like a wave or like a particle depending on the experimental setup (wave–particle duality); the position and the momentum of an object cannot both be simultaneously determined with perfect accuracy (Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle); and the quantum states of two or more objects can be highly correlated even though they are very far apart, violating our intuition about locality (quantum entanglement).
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Christof Koch (The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness Is Widespread but Can't Be Computed)
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VS Hospitals is reinforced with a legacy of medical excellence in India to provide affordable treatments. They are the leading spearheads in providing cancer treatments worldwide which are highly reliable by the people as a unified health care provider for the common people. They believe cancer patients as their top priority to provide the eminent facilities adapting the state-of-the-art technology and proper infrastructure which are highly innovative to provide individualized care.
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vs hospital
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As companies move toward distributed systems, Sybase and competing vendors—such as The ASK Group Inc., Informix Software Inc., and Oracle Corp.—are all offering products similar to System 10 . . . . Here we are in the “safe as milk” category, somewhat ironic in light of subsequent revelations about the limitations of Server 10. The innovations presented here are all continuous—performance, functionality, and capacity—and a number of other mainstream vendors are “all offering products similar” to it. Note the emphasis on company and market issues as opposed to product and technology. All of this speaks to mainstream positioning, either tornado or post-tornado. Since there is not a lot of emphasis on cutthroat competition, which one always expects with tornado products, the conclusion one would draw here is that Sybase 10 is on Main Street. Additional Indicators Beyond press coverage, a second source of clues to market status comes from the behavior of other companies in the infrastructure. Lew Platt at HP, for example, realized that their commercial Unix server business was in the tornado when software vendors were calling him rather than the other way around. Going further, when a tornado is under way, the easiest way to spot the gorilla is to look for the
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Geoffrey A. Moore (Inside the Tornado: Strategies for Developing, Leveraging, and Surviving Hypergrowth Markets (Collins Business Essentials))
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Which company is best for using construction Project work?
The Shree Siva Balaaji Steels project is a significant endeavor that encompasses the establishment and operation of a modern and advanced steel manufacturing facility. This project represents a fusion of innovation, cutting-edge technology, and industrial expertise, aimed at delivering high-quality steel products to meet the growing demands of various sectors.
Key Features:
State-of-the-Art Manufacturing Plant: The project involves the construction and operation of a state-of-the-art manufacturing plant equipped with the latest machinery, automation systems, and environmentally friendly processes. This allows for efficient production and reduced environmental impact.
Diverse Product Range: Shree Siva Balaaji Steels aims to offer a diverse range of steel products to cater to different industries such as construction, automotive, infrastructure, and manufacturing. This versatility enables the company to meet the varying needs of clients and partners.
Quality Assurance: A cornerstone of the project is its commitment to delivering high-quality steel products. The facility adheres to strict quality control measures and follows international standards to ensure that the end products are durable, reliable, and meet or exceed industry specifications.
Sustainability Focus: The project places a strong emphasis on sustainability and environmentally conscious practices. Energy-efficient processes, recycling initiatives, and waste reduction strategies are integrated into the manufacturing process to minimize the ecological footprint.
Employment Opportunities: Shree Siva Balaaji Steels contributes to local economies by creating employment opportunities across various skill levels, from skilled labor to technical experts. This helps stimulate economic growth in the region surrounding the manufacturing facility.
Collaboration and Partnerships: The project fosters collaborations with suppliers, distributors, and clients, establishing strong relationships within the steel industry. This network facilitates efficient supply chain management and enables the company to provide tailored solutions to its customers.
Innovation and Research: The project invests in research and development to constantly improve manufacturing processes, product quality, and the development of new steel products. This dedication to innovation positions the company at the forefront of the steel industry.
Community Engagement: Shree Siva Balaaji Steels is committed to engaging with local communities and implementing corporate social responsibility initiatives. These efforts include supporting education, healthcare, and other community-centric projects, fostering goodwill and positive impact.
Vision:
The Shree Siva Balaaji Steels project envisions becoming a leading name in the steel manufacturing sector, renowned for its exceptional quality, technological innovation, and sustainability practices. By adhering to its core values of integrity, excellence, and environmental responsibility, the project strives to contribute positively to the industry and the communities it operates within.
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shree sivabalaaji steels
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Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
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Gretchen Bakke (The Grid: Electrical Infrastructure for a New Era)
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The Great March of Return was both a lab and showroom. The most sophisticated new weapon used against the Palestinian protesters was the “Sea of Tears,” a drone that dropped tear gas canisters on a desired area. Despite Israeli claims of accuracy, a tent full of Palestinian women and children had tear gas dropped onto them, as did groups of reporters. Israeli police started using drones that dropped tear gas grenades on protestors in the West Bank in April 2021. One month later, Israel announced that a fleet of drones would be used to track riots and protests as well as areas damaged by rockets fired from Gaza. Israel announced in 2022 that it approved the use of armed drones for “targeted killings” in the West Bank. Reportedly tested over Gaza before the major protests began in 2018, a Chinese-made drone by Da Jiang Innovations was reconfigured by Israel’s Border Force, which was working with Israeli company Aeronautics to adapt the drone to on-the-ground service requirements. “Beyond the fact that it neutralizes all danger to our forces, it allows us to reach places that we had yet to reach,” Border Police Commander Kobi Shabtai told Israel’s Channel 2 news. The immediate effectiveness of the Sea of Tears led Maf’at, the Israeli Administration for the Development of Weapons and Technological Infrastructure, to purchase hundreds of the drones after the first night of demonstrations in Gaza. Another innovation was the “skunk water” drone, a form of liquid emitted from a water cannon that left a foul smell on clothes and body for a long time. Israeli firm Aeronautics was behind this innovation, a technique that had been already used in the West Bank and Jerusalem to deter protestors. Reports appeared in early 2020 by anti-occupation activists in the West Bank that Israeli-controlled talking drones were flying overhead and sending out a “Go Home” message to Palestinian protestors. Israeli activists were told in Hebrew not to “stand with the enemy.
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Antony Loewenstein (The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World)
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Today, our massive societal infrastructure supports more than eight billion people, an order of magnitude beyond the natural “carrying capacity” of our planet (the resource limit of what our planet can provide in the absence of human technology). The resilience of this infrastructure depends on conditions remaining the same as those that prevailed during its development.
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Michael E. Mann (Our Fragile Moment: How Lessons from Earth's Past Can Help Us Survive the Climate Crisis)
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There are abundant infrastructure facilities in Vidarbha. If investment and technology are clubbed to this infra then all round development of Vidarbha is possible for sure.
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Sharma RS
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But it’s still really clear to me that many of Rand’s ideas are prevalent in culture, especially American culture, and especially in engineering and technology: they prioritize making things over caregiving and maintenance, the new and novel over what’s sustained, ideas and artifacts that can deliver a profit over activities that need an ongoing commitment of money and other resources, and individualism over acting collectively.
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Deb Chachra (How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems That Shape Our World)
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Chinese techno-authoritarianism scares the West. The language used is dystopian, and the fear heightened. Readers or viewers are meant to take away the idea that Beijing under President Xi Jinping is destined to create a global infrastructure of control, a unique threat to the world and incomparable to any other nation. Take a September 2020 article in the Atlantic in which journalist Ross Anderson painted a petrifying image of China wanting to have worldwide domination of artificial intelligence. “In the near future,” he wrote, “every person who enters a public space could be identified, instantly, by AI matching them to an ocean of personal data, including their every text communication, and their body’s one-of-a-kind protein-construction schema.” He noted that algorithms will soon be able to gather a multitude of data points, such as reading habits, purchases, travel records, and friends, as well as predict political opposition before it occurs.
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Antony Loewenstein (The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World)
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The use of Israeli drones is only one part of the Frontex infrastructure. Weiss said that his group and the few other NGOs aiming to monitor the central Mediterranean for migrants had an incredibly difficult task because the aim of the EU was not to help those in trouble at sea. Instead, the EU left the refugees to drown or placed them in the hands of the Libyan coast guard, which then took people back to detention centers in Libya—though this is a breach of international law.
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Antony Loewenstein (The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World)
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Asoka World School is a reputed international school in Kochi affiliated with CBSE. We have a student-friendly environment and has a very interesting syllabus. The STEM enriched curriculum helps to provide an in-depth learning experience for the students. We have a wide range of extracurricular activities for nurturing and developing a child’s creativity and imagination. Asoka World School can be an ideal option for your child. Here are some key reasons why Asoka World School is the best for your kid.
Individualized attention in classes:
Our student-teacher ratio arrangement is standardised in such a way that teachers are able to give individual attention to each child. Our teachers are well educated, experienced and constantly inspires their students. We follow the golden teacher-student ratio of 1:20. This helps students to gain the concepts of each subject easily hence they become more confident. This also enriches their knowledge, and they get more quality time to interact with their teachers.
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Child Safe Environment:
At Asoka World School, you will find your child is in extremely safe hands. Our classrooms are aesthetically designed and technologically equipped to disseminate learning through very many fun ways. Asoka World School has a world-class building design, infrastructure, fully integrated wireless network, climate-controlled smart classrooms, security features and no compromise hygiene and safeguarding policy that offers everything you have been dreaming for your child.
Updated Curriculums:
We have 4 levels of programmes prepared for our children.
Foundational - KG - IInd
Preparatory - IIIrd - Vth
Middle School - VIth - VIIIth
Senior School - IXth - XIIth
These programs are framed by our school to focus on developing various vital skills in the students. Our teachers adopt a customised teaching approach that can help students of every category. Our flexible curriculum enhances the communication between the teachers and students to a great extent. Our school has result-oriented teaching methods, qualified and responsible teaching staff to help facilitate a learning environment that is both safe and nurturing. As the best CBSE school in Kochi, Asoka World School is a leader in its sector and we hope to continue rising and come out as the best school in Kochi.
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AWS Kochi
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KERI (Key Event Receipt Infrastructure) is a novel technology - a type of consensus network - that allows to move certain functions of decentralized identity-management systems off-chain to a different layer, and minimize the role of the distributed ledger.
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Shermin Voshmgir (Token Economy: How the Web3 reinvents the Internet)
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Miguel Antunes, R&D Principle Software Engineer at OutSystems, a low-code platform vendor, relayed an example of this very challenge. Their Engineering Productivity team at OutSystems was five years old. The team’s mission was to help product teams run their builds efficiently, maintain infrastructure, and improve test execution. The team kept growing and took on extra responsibilities around continuous integration (CI), continuous delivery (CD), and infrastructure automation.
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Matthew Skelton (Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow)