d Blog

Welcome to d blog, also known as Dan's rant. The content herein is essentially comprised of miscellaneous ramblings and random thoughts on the nature of contemporary existence.

"Villains"

Why blame Big Oil? For that matter why hold the health care industry responsible, in particular the big insurance companies? Why look askance at the auto industry? The real responsibility lies with the people that prop up these outfits. The real seat of responsibility lies with Wall street and the American Financial System. The real culprits are the people that make money win, lose or draw. The real Villains have offices headquartered at 85 Broad Street in NYC. These are the Villains from Goldman Sachs!

I had hoped that goodwill and beneficence would have taken a stronger hold on this planet by now. I know that I have done my best to Earth positivity. Although I and many others have indeed spread a bit 'O happiness and goodness around it seems to be as effective as a lost fart in a bilzzard. Much work needs to be done, particularly in geographic hotspots of note such as the dens if iniquity that are the Mideast and Washington D.C. ! Not a day passes that we don't read headlines such as, "Cheney Is Linked to Concealment of C.I.A. Project" and "Market Finally Ready to Tank?" We are dealing with assaults on all fronts simultaneously. It ain't easy out here.

I've previously ranted about the evil of the Bush/Cheney administration and haven't relinquished my desire to see someone go to jail. They broke the law. Need I go on ad infinitum? Perhaps but not at this moment. Instead I ask that we turn our attention to the GREAT AMERICAN FINANCIAL CONSPIRACY for which no one is being prosecuted.

Right NOW I'm continuing the rant about the evil of the American financial system and haven't relinquished my desire to see someone go to jail. After all they broke the law. Are we not a nation of Laws?

I had great hopes for the Obama Administration that I haven't abandoned yet, but it doesn't look good. It appears that the fox is guarding the governments henhouse! Is there any Director, Regulator or Adviser that hasn't worked for Goldman Sachs?

It's not a conspiracy if it's not illegal and especially if it's not a secret. If you're aggravated by the recent prices of gas at the pump, you should be enraged. It looks to me as if the price fluctuations emanate from 85 Broad Street in New York City. It appears that the American Government exists as a tool that Goldman Sachs employs to enable their engorgement on global resources. It is their plan or scheme if you will to consistently and continuously feed at the trough of public ignorance and apathy. It continues even now with;

Cap and Trade (Crap and Evade = Gloom and Doom)
I know that inscrutable government regulations are as imponderable as the way Wall Street functions but you have to make an effort to understand what is going on here.
The Al Gore partnership with (Guess who?) Goldman Sachs to allow polluters to purchase carbon credits is nothing more than a method to increase the cost of all manufacturing and pass it on to consumers with the (Goldman Sachs) trading desk making a profit on every trade. As a practical reality this legislation
does nothing save enriching our friends at 85 Broad Street.

Please examine recent reports on the theft of proprietary software from Goldman Sachs, commodities-trading software that Prosecutors say the thief, a Russian programmer, employed by Goldman Sachs, uploaded to an unidentified server in Germany.

Goldman indicated that it faced imminent harm. The prosecutor also dropped this bombshell: “The bank (Goldman) has raised the possibility that there is a danger that somebody who knew how to use this program could use it to manipulate markets in unfair ways.” How could this be true? The answer is not obvious. You're talking about a black-box trading system here. No one has chosen to elaborate. You don’t need a Goldman Sachs doomsday machine to manipulate markets, of course. A false rumor expertly planted using an ordinary telephone often will do just fine. This leaves us to ponder: Did Goldman really tell the government its high-speed, high-volume, algorithmic-trading can be used to manipulate markets in unfair ways? Shouldn’t Goldman’s bosses be worried this revelation may cause lots of people to start hypothesizing aloud about whether Goldman itself might have already found ways to misuse this program?

If you have any doubts about the role of Goldman Sachs,
If you have any doubts as to the veracity of my invective just follow the links below. Do some research and share your conclusions, tell me where I'm in error. Please.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emissions_trading

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124588837560750781.html

http://www.dhunplugged.com/

"The chances that the Fed, or any other systemic risk regulator, will be able to rein in this powerful organization (Goldman Sachs) are probably slim. The best we can hope for, I think, is that Goldman will unilaterally decide to be a force for good in the world, rather than an inflator of bubbles and profiteer in busts."- Felix Salmon in Reuters Blogs
http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2009/06/24/matt-taibbi-vs-goldman-sachs/

"The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. " From: The Great American Bubble Machine by MATT TAIBBI
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/28816321/the_great_american_bubble_machine#

See: The Video
http://watch.bnn.ca/the-close/july-2009/the-close-july-2-2009/#clip189690

Goldman Sachs Software Stolen

"A U.S. Attorney is quoted in Bloomberg News as saying that there is a danger that somebody who knew how to use this program could use it to manipulate markets in unfair ways and it could harm Goldman Sachs if the stolen software that is worth millions is disseminated. As noted by Ars Technica, when U.S. government prosecutors claim that the release of Goldman's program could potentially expose markets to manipulation, what they're really saying is that some unknown party could use it to out-manipulate Goldman Sachs, and possibly even do something more ambitious like frustrate Goldman's platform so that it fails while at the same time finding some way to short it. In other words, someone could potentially outswindle the swindlers." - Bill Linder in American Chronicle
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=axYw_ykTBokE

Goldman Sachs Loses Grip on Its Doomsday Machine: Jonathan Weil

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601039&sid=aFeyqdzYcizc

http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/view/109475
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On another note:

Perhaps you're among those that realize that the iphone, pre and other devices of their ilk and yes even the expanding category of netbooks are a new type of computer platform. 5 years from now your computer may be in your pocket and plug into your keyboard, mouse and LCD display when at home/office. Counted among the Web 2.0 success stories are many reiterations of Dotcom Bubble failures. This is simply because the reality of available technology has caught up with the dream. NOW these cloud based applications actually work as promised. A Critical mass of enabled users finally exists in the market place. New developments will arrive at exponentally faster rates than previous releases. Because as technology doubles in capability, it also halves in cost at twice the speed of the previous iterations. As if Google and bing themselves don't hammer niche portals into the ground, new applications such as Mobilizy, Layar and Wikitude.me spell the death knell for most aggregation organizations such as directories and portals. It is a sad truth that while certain outfits finally develop a GREAT web presence it is already obsolete as the new (mobile) protocols hit the street. Maybe not today, Certainly NOT tomorrow, but sooner than we think. -db

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/12/business/12proto.html?_r=1&hpw=&pagewanted=print

July 12, 2009
Prototype
Kicking Reality Up a Notch
By LESLIE BERLIN

THAT yellow first-down line shown on televised football games isn’t really on the field. But to viewers, it appears to be there, just like the turf and the players.

The technology, developed by Sportvision and called 1st and Ten, is an early commercial example of a field of computer science called augmented reality, in which the real world is overlaid with virtual information. Once the stuff of science fiction, augmented reality is now also making its way to smartphones, thanks to advances in both hardware and software.

People in Amsterdam who download a free application called Layar on their cellphones can look through the camera and see information about nearby restaurants, A.T.M.’s, and available jobs displayed in front of buildings that house them. This information is provided by companies like Hyves, the Dutch social networking site, and ING, the financial services company. The businesses pay a fee to SPRXmobile, the privately held company based in Amsterdam that developed Layar.

Layar is available in the Netherlands for phones running on the Android operating system developed by Google. Maarten Lens-FitzGerald, a co-founder of SPRXmobile, says it will be marketed later this year in the United States, Germany and Britain.

A similar product for Android phones, called Wikitude.me, provides information on 800,000 points of interest around the world, according to Philipp Breuss-Schneeweis, founder of Mobilizy, the Austrian company that developed Wikitude.me. Much of this content comes from Wikipedia, he said.

At Wimbledon this year, Mobilizy worked with I.B.M. to develop an application for the T-Mobile G1 phone that displayed real-time information about matches in progress, as well as dining and transportation options for fans.

Applications like Layar and Wikitude.me, as well as projects in the research stage at Nokia, use a phone’s global positioning technology to determine a person’s location and use the phone’s compass to discern the direction the device is pointed. In this way, the phone can guess what the user is seeing. The augmented-reality application then pulls in information about points of interest in that sight line and displays it on top of the camera view.

For such location-based applications to become mainstream, they need access to vast amounts of data tagged with location information, said Blair MacIntyre, director of the Augmented Environments Lab at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “Ideally they’d want to hook in with the same database that Google Maps, or Garmin, or TomTom uses,” he said. (Nokia, it should be noted, owns Navteq, which provides map data and content.)

This tagged information could also come from users. Last week, for example, Mobilizy introduced a feature that enables people to add their own content to Wikitude.me.

In the future, researchers will need to come up with a way to compensate for the shortcomings of GPS-and-compass systems, which are not perfectly precise, Mr. MacIntyre said. He expects that this can be achieved through image-recognition technology. And people may want their augmented-reality view of the world to come to them not through devices they pull out of their pockets, but through some sort of wearable technology, like special glasses or contact lenses. Such devices are still in prototype stages.

“What we are seeing today in this area are baby steps,” agreed Ori Inbar, who writes the Games Alfresco blog about augmented reality and is a co-founder of two young augmented-reality companies: Arballoon, in Tel Aviv, and Ogmento, with offices in New York and Los Angeles. “People are really excited, though, because they are seeing the next steps beyond these.”

Augmented reality will “reinvent” many industries, including health care and training, Mr. Inbar predicted. Already, researchers at the Technical University of Munich are looking at ways to display X-ray and ultrasound readings directly on a patient’s body. A research project at BMW is exploring how an augmented-reality view under the hood might help auto mechanics with diagnostic and repair work.

In the short term, the industry that may have the most to gain from augmented reality is gaming. Although video games have traditionally pulled players out of the real world and into a virtual one, augmented-reality games have the potential to “engage people in the real world in a different way,” said Daniel Sánchez-Crespo, a project leader at Novarama, a game developer based in Barcelona. “It finds a new meaning for space. Your kitchen counter is not just where you prepare dinner; it can be a virtual racetrack for a car game.”

Novarama has developed a game called Invizimals that makes it appear as if the world is populated by formerly invisible creatures that can interact with one another. Sony plans to release Invizimals for the PSP handheld device this holiday season in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia and Australia.

“The real world is way too boring for many people,” Mr. Sánchez-Crespo said with a laugh. “By making the real world a playground for the virtual world, we can make the real world much more interesting.”

Leslie Berlin is project historian for the Silicon Valley Archives at Stanford. E-mail: prototype@nytimes.com.

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