- National concentration: A national television network may now acquire dozens of local broadcaster stations and control up to 90 percent of the national television market;

- Local concentration: A single corporation may now acquire, in one city, up to three television stations, eight radio stations, the cable TV system, numerous cable TV stations, and the only daily newspaper.

An hour is the time it takes for a liter of boiling water to move one kilometer

"The history of democracies is usually told as a rebellion against an overweening King - George III for America, Louis XVI for France. In England it is King John, in 1215, and the rebellion gave rise to the Magna Carta which constrained the powers of a king, and providing for a separate body (of barons) to enforce it.

Cromwell's rebellion against Charles I is not often portrayed as democratic, though the accession of William & Mary in 1688 after James's restoration was notable for the English Bill of Rights which further constrained the King's power and in effect made Parliament sovereign.

The history of democracy can be seen as successive (and expanding) answers to the questions:
Who gets to vote?
Who gets to speak?
Who gets to set the topic?

With a single sovereign, or a single parliament, control of the latter two is still tricky; legislative agendas, though longer than historically, are still constrained, and the introduction of legislation is more often reserved to government or elected legislators, and more rarely allowed by referendum.

In a deliberative body, elaborate rules are adopted to ensure only one person speaks at a time.

There is an inherent funneling of debate because of these procedures.

Conversely, online there are millions of conversations happening in parallel, topics are introduced daily, and votes are largely spurious.

The challenge is help these conversations to focus, converge and produce action."

...to create the world's premier electronic system for individuals and organizations to interact commercially, socially and personally, while providing every entity with control of its information, identity, and relationships consistent with healty communities.

We must collectively recognize what western science is only now discovering: that humanity and the rest of our living world are embedded within a far greater and fundamentally different reality than is encompassed by our current scientific worldview or paradigm. We are replacing the view of a non-living material/ electromagnetic universe with a greater non-physical reality of conscious intelligence as the never-ending source of scientifically known energy and matter—a cosmic source that has been known in many human cultures from ancient times. It is fundamentally conscious and creative, transforming or transmuting into material universes and other creative ventures. As Nobel laureate biologist George Wald of Harvard put it, "The stuff of the universe is mind stuff." Once this greater, consciously intelligent reality is acknowledged as existing both within and around us, we will recognize that we collectively co-create our experienced daily reality from our individual consciousness fields, from our collective beliefs about reality, including the belief that what we see or measure with instruments is all there is.

The methods of manufacturing and compressing hydrogen gas require great amounts of energy. To overcome these challenges, scientists have been tinkering with the biological powers of everything from common yeast to mysterious bacteria living on the ocean floor. At the University of California at Berkeley, mechanical engineering professor Liwei Lin is busy developing a microbial fuel cell that runs off the digestive activity of baker's yeast. The yeast feed on glucose, a simple sugar, and digest it in a process called aerobic metabolism. "We extract electrons from the yeast cells where the aerobic metabolism process happens," Lin explains. Controlling the movement of electrons to harness a renewable source of fuel remains the target for scientists designing fuel cells, which extract power from electrochemical reactions. The advantage of Lin's mechanism is that it runs on glucose, a naturally abundant resource produced by plants.

The day after I returned to New York, reunited with my cable modem, I checked out a friend's blog that linked to an Austrian interview with Salam Pax. I clicked to it. Salam Pax mentioned an NGO he had worked for, CIVIC, and this caught my attention. I knew the woman who was in charge of CIVIC; she stayed at my Baghdad hotel, the Hamra. Salam Pax mentioned that he had done some work for foreign journalists. We traveled in the same circles, apparently. He also mentioned that he had studied in Vienna. This really caught my attention, because I knew an Iraqi who had worked for CIVIC, hung out with foreign journalists, and studied in Vienna. I clicked over to his blog.

His latest post mentioned an afternoon he spent at the Hamra Hotel pool, reading a borrowed copy of The New Yorker. I laughed out loud. He then mentioned an escapade in which he helped deliver 24 pizzas to American soldiers. I howled. Salam Pax, the most famous and most mysterious blogger in the world, was my interpreter. The New Yorker he had been reading—mine. Poolside at the Hamra—with me. The 24 pizzas—we had taken them to a unit of 82nd Airborne soldiers I was writing about.

"Ya Allah have mercy on our souls. The old state owned Internet center in Adil district has been taken over by anarchists and they are offering internet access for FREE. You just need to dial up a number, no password, no special settings. Whoever heard of anyone doing that?

About week ago a rumor spread that the Adil center has put up a sat dish and will be using the setup the Iraqi government used to have to provide the service. [Uruklink.net] is back. The people who used to work there opened the center 4 days ago; you can have an hour of internet for as little as 2000dinars. Take that you greedy sharks. The center is very well equipped, they put together 30 of their best computers and have a very good connection (ok so 30 computers in a city of 5 million is nothing, but it is a start). They even got military protection. The people who work there got a couple of soldiers from the nearest army checkpoint to take a look, the officer asked if it was OK for his men to check on their emails and stuff. The reaction the first couple of guys who came in was a very amazed “Wow!”.

Yesterday they put up a piece of paper that said: “we are happy to announce that you can get free internet access by dialing up this number”. A small little paper on the notice board. The telephone network is not fully operational, certain districts don’t have phones at all, but as I wrote earlier many of the exchanges that have not been destroyed or looted have been linked together. You will need to keep dialing for an hour to get thru but it works, I tried it.

Not a million bad things could have wiped the grin off my face when I read that little note."

COPENHAGEN, Jan 27 (AFP) - Monkeys at Copenhagen Zoo are going ape over organic bananas and other fruits, rejecting traditional foods left in their cages, zookeepers said Monday.

"For one reason or another, the tapirs and chimpanzees are choosing organically grown bananas over the others," keeper Niels Melchiorsen told the magazine Oekologisk Jordbrug (Ecological Agriculture).

"Maybe they are able to instinctively tell the difference, and their choice is not at all random," he suggested.

"The chimpanzees are able to tell the difference between the organic and the regular fruit," Melchiorsen reported: "If we give them organic and traditional bananas, they systematically choose the organic bananas, which they eat with the skin on."

"But they peel the traditional bananas before eating them," he added.

Copenhagen Zoo, which hopes to be awarded a "green label" as an environmental zoo, began last year feeding its animals at least 10 percent organic products.