News items for tag worldnews - Koos van den Hout

Awesome snowboarding footage: Supernatural Snowboarders Showcase Super Skills - Wired playbook.

And this time with real and huge amounts of snow. Some "snowboarding movies" annoy me because there are just some small heaps of snow in the picture for the correct jump spot and the correct landing spot. This is however all on a real mountain with loads of fresh powder snow.

Interesting article from the Harvard Law and Policy Review volume 5-2: The Communications Crisis in America - Susan P. Crawford (pdf) about the current state of high-speed data transport to American consumers.

One quote:

The industry is poised to reap the central reward for geographical clustering, upgrades, and de facto monopoly presence - unconstrained pricing ability and an unmatched high-speed communications service in a marketplace where consumers are agitating for higherspeed communications and the cable companies are making north of 90% margins on their data services.

Found via Telecom Digest.

A very interesting read, making a valid point about the move towards IP based services and at the same time very little competition in high-speed last-mile access in the US with interesting connections between access providers and entertainment producers / distributors.

The Dutch market is somewhat better for as far as I know: most places with cable will have competition for 10 mbit downstream and faster Internet access, and regulators in this country are keeping a close eye on things.

Big transmission news in the Netherlands today: the transmission tower/mast collapsed in Hoogersmilde after a fire and the transmission tower/mast in Lopik was shutdown after a small fire because the fire department wanted to be really sure about the situation after the collapse in Hoogersmilde.

Collected links to pictures / videos :

• Picture of the fire #tvtoren #hoogersmilde #brand. on Twitpic
• Detail picture of the tower, showing heat damage to the metal construction zie het rode kader waar #tvtoren van #hoogersmilde is geknapt. bovenste deel recht neer, tweede deel naar rechts
• Good images of the collapse: TV-toren Hoogersmilde bovenste 180 meter ingezakt - 112nederland.nl click on images for large versions.
• One video of the collapse, a police PR person explains and reacts quite calmly to the collapse, one of the possible outcomes: Zendmast Hoogersmilde stort in - nos.nl video
• Another video of the collapse, with someone cursing very loudly in Dutch: Mast tv-toren Hoogersmilde stort in - RTV Drenthe (15 juli 2011) this video was later used in news items with audio partly muted.
• Collapse from a bit further away: Mast Tv toren Smilde
• Another collapse video, showing the first break happening and the sequence of the collapse, starting at 0:53 in the video : instorten televisietoren hoogersmilde
• Newsarticle, pictures and video: Deel zendmast Hoogersmilde ingestort - nos.nl
• The remains, still smoking: Brand in TV mast Hoogersmilde - HvNieuws.nl
• Closer views of the remains: TV Toren Hoogersmilde and TV Toren Hoogersmilde Westkant and Zendmast Hoogersmilde afgebroken door brand 15-7-2011 (4) with smoke still coming from the remains
• Good overview pictures of fire, collapse and remains: Vrijdag 15 juli 2011 Hoogersmilde: Zendmast Alticom-toren stort in na brand look at the first picture of the collapse: the first break happened at one of the spots where heat-damage was showing.
• Radio en TV zenders in Nederland is maintaining an archive of images, news, movies, plans at Brand in de TV-toren in Hoogersmilde

A bit of history:

• Zendmast Smilde 50 jaar geleden gebouwd

Quite an interesting article this weekend When Secret Sats Spy on Us, Monsieur Legault Spies Back - Wired danger room. Thierry Legault, famous for a number of very great images of space phenomena is also busy tracking things in space which you're not supposed to know are there. Wired did a great article on the satellite-tracking community a few years ago: I Spy: Amateur satellite spotters can track everything government spymasters blast into orbit. Except the stealth bird codenamed Misty. Wired issue 14.02. The persistence of the spy satellite-tracking community combined with the telescope photography skills of Thierry Legault make for some very nice videos. I guess the owners of the spy satellites aren't too happy about these videos. They would be even more unhappy when the videos would be combined with the latest orbital data.

The NTP pool project is participating in World IPv6 day. Well, not participating in the 'switching off after 24 hours' bit: 2.pool.ntp.org now has AAAA records and will keep them. In the current default configuration this means a system with broken IPv6 connectivity will still work, it will just decide one of the servers is unreachable and tick on happily.

koos@greenblatt:~$ host 2.pool.ntp.org
2.pool.ntp.org has address 213.249.66.35
2.pool.ntp.org has address 91.148.192.49
2.pool.ntp.org has address 72.26.217.210
2.pool.ntp.org has IPv6 address 2001:4f8:fff7:1::17
2.pool.ntp.org has IPv6 address 2607:f128:42:63::2
2.pool.ntp.org has IPv6 address 2600:3c00::2:b401

Source: Experimentally enabling IPv6 - NTP Pool News.

It's not possible to add ntp.cs.uu.nl to the ipv6 pool at the moment, but ntp.idefix.net is reachable via IPv6 and is ok as a server. So it is in the pool.

With all the recent news about Osama Bin Laden I had to dig up this bit of comedy: The Taliban telemarketeer attack. Copied all over the Internet in mp3 and flash and I can't find a real original source for it. The best source is here: Taliban Takes on Telemarketers (Taliban Telephone) by Sector 8 Animation.

This must be why the building had no phone lines or Internet, to avoid this weapon.

Wise words from The Register in Fukushima is a triumph for nuke power: Build more reactors now!. The conclusion:

all plants are now well on their way to a cold shutdown. At no time have their operators come even close to running out of options. No core has melted down and come up against the final defensive barriers: the safety systems did not come even close to failing, despite being tested far beyond what they had been designed to take. One person has sustained a small dose of radiation which need cause him no concern.

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised .. oh yes it will:

Great work being done by AlJazeera

In what I think is a brilliant move a number of British artists are doing a cover version of John Cage's experimental 4'33" piece to compete for the Christmas number one record. Having the number one position in the UK charts on Christmas is a really big deal (the movie Love Actually uses this fact which got a bit lost in translation for me when I first saw that movie). It competes with the winner of the UK X factor contest which got the number one position in recent years.

John Cage's 4'33" is exactly 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence. Any number of instruments can not play in a performance of the composition.

• John Cage cover aims for Christmas No 1 with the sound of silence - The Guardian
• Stille kerstplaat moet Britse hitlijsten gaan veroveren - volkskrant.nl

Oh and one more thing:

I became a father on 3 december 2010 of a healthy son.

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Ik ben vader geworden op 3 december 2010 van een gezonde zoon.