A fantastic article on the Iraq´s war

Strange enough, on the Newseek. Very good indeed.

TEDTalks: Al Gore

Al Gore, in his own words, "used to be the next President of the United States of America" but has since changed professions. This talk is a follow-up to his now-famous presentation, featured in the movie, "An Inconvenient Truth." In it, he outlines what we can do to avert a global climate crisis. (Recorded February, 2006 in Monterey, CA.)

"Moro no Brasil": Brazil's Joy and Pain Through Her Music

"Moro no Brasil," (aka "The Sound of Brazil") Finnish director Mika Kaurismaki's 2500 mile journey to discover the amazing diversity of Brazilian musical culture has just been released by Milan Visual Entertainment.

Kaurismaki begins his journey at the roots of Brazilian music, in the Northeast states of Pernambuco and Bahia. "My principal idea was to start with the Indians, who were the first ones to sing and dance in Brazil, and show how the music changed and developed when foreign cultures arrived, first Portuguese and then African and to show where it is today," Kaurismaki says.

Is a new class of BB offers being lauched?

Is a new class of BB offers being lauched? Plusnet offers splits apart the usual flat fee speed / volume coupling, offering instead speed for a flat fee, and volume for a variable fee, ´on demand´

PlusNet slips out 'basic' broadband

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/05/31/plusnet_broadband/

PlusNet has slipped out a new entry level broadband product for a tenner a month. Its "Basic" product offers speeds of up to 8 meg but is aimed at people currently on a dial-up service, or those with no net access at all.

For £9.99 a month, subscribers get 50 meg of usage. Additional time online can be purchased for 0.024p per meg. According to PlusNet's figures, someone who used 1 gig a month would pay £12.12.

On globalisation and radical global utopians

From today´s FT. Very interesting ... indeed!

Save globalisation from radical global utopians

"The biggest reason for hope is the prospect of a reformed, sober US. Once the American mind is exorcised of today’s mechanistic utopianism, the most probable result will be a return to a far more realistic, practical, ethical internationalism. Rather than attempt to retreat into an equally impossible autarky, it is far more likely that America will re-embrace the responsibility of using state power to engineer markets and systems to serve its own people, while ceding to other states far more space to serve their citizens in ways of their own choosing. The next global system will be far more heterogeneous, cosmopolitan, liberal and flexible than today’s.

Utopian universalism is dead. The sooner nations gather to bury its corpse – and harness, hobble or break up the immense companies that have grown so powerful in the shadow of that myth – the more likely we will be to save globalisation. This, of course, can happen only if we define globalisation, once again, as a political process that must be managed by nation states. The result may not be perfect, and it certainly will be no utopia. But it is the best we can expect on this earth. And that may be enough."

The writer, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington DC, is author of End of the Line: The Rise and Coming Fall of the Global Corporation (Doubleday)