Day: 4 July 2006

Kuwaiti Election: Mixed Results

Kuwait just had its first election that women could run and vote in, which is more than a little late. Better late than never I guess. Not only did women get the vote (and were 57% of the electorate), the people of Kuwait has send a clear message to their government by electing reformists. There has been some corruption in the government and the reformists want to change that.

“By electing reformist candidates, the voters have sent a clear message to the government that they want change in Kuwaiti society, our correspondent says.”

So Long Sonar

A judge has ruled that the navy of the United States can no longer use sonar because it harms those creatures of the wet. The judge agreed with environmentalists that the use of SONAR during military procedures can “kill, injure, and disturb many marine species, including marine mammals, in waters surrounding the Hawaiian Islands.”

Sonar is a kind of radar for water that use sound to ping off of objects to figure out where the objects are. Sonar can wreak havoc on echolocation used by sea animals, which is why it is good to see the navy forced to not use sonar.

UK Readies for Biggest Wetland

The United Kingdom is going to make their largest human-made wetland to help endangered birds. Biodiversity is a fantastic thing and needs to be protected, so it is great to see such a large investment in helping birds live. It is also hoped that the wetland will help fish.

“Almost 115 hectares will be flooded at Wallasea Island, Essex, creating wetland, mudflats, saline lagoons and seven artificial islands.

The £7.5m government-funded project aims to replace bird habitats lost to development, improve flood defences, and create leisure opportunities.”

Nativetext Translates RSS Feeds

Nativetext is a great idea for spreading information across languages. THey have a novel “hight-tech” solution to all this needed translating. “Using a new kind of distributed supercomputing, foreign language translation is performed by a network of humans around the world, not machines.”

It’s not fully operational yet, but I can’t until it is.

Students Breach Great Firewall of China!

The great firewall of China is an internet firewall which blocks people living in China from viewing certain websites and content on the internet. For example, if you type in Falun Gong in a search engine (a religious group banned in China) it will not show any content. This is very obviously censorship and completely unfair to peoples human rights and freedom of education and lifestyle. So this is what led students from Caimbridge University to try and crack it. And they have! Not only that but they have managed to then use the firewall to launch denial-of-service attacks against specific IP adresses in China. This means that they can even deny access to sites by the Chinese government!

This furthers my own belief that rules of any kind are essentially made to be broken. Especially ones that inhibit people from living free thinking, and fulfilling lives. And on that note, this day being the 4th of July “freedom and independance” celebration in the United States, it seems suiting to end with a quote.

“Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves.” ~Abraham Lincoln