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50 years ago, you would have been chased out of the pub had you painted these scenarios: the US can’t wait to open off-shored manufacturing centers, Gaga as a mermaid on wheelchair, and 90% of the population will shop at Wal-Mart, stocked with 99% Made-in-China merchandise. Dude, in the 60’s, we were living the American…
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For young people, it’s a time for recreation, renewal and reviewing school materials. For politicians, it’s time to pay the bills from Cold Wars, Star Wars, and Gulf Wars …. For us, consumers, it’s a time to conserve fuel and energy, or just to stay cool. One quote sticks, uttered by a friend of those…
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That’s what we need. Late 70’s, we also got gas price hike. We got “a crisis of confidence”. And we got Middle East hostage situation that drove Nightline ratings over the top. But we also got disco. It helped. Distraction did not solve any problem. It just got our minds off the situation at hand. For however…
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The news of Premier Nguyen Cao Ky passed away brought back a long time passing. In my youth, the sound of hovering helicopters was as common as street vendors’ chants. On the war’s last day, ambassador, flag, ground-keepers, pilots and anything that moved, tried to get out to International Waters . Buses, barges and yes, choppers. Lone…
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“We are ‘creatures of information’”, “in the library of Babel, seeking information past and future”, says James Gleick in the Information. We might look in hardback and paperback, print books and e-books, newspaper and news broadcast, but we are still after the information. It reminds me of a line by St Paul “though now we see…
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Albertson is your store. No wonder you just walked in, took the items, and walked out (after paying the machines). http://www.spokesman.com/blogs/officehours/2011/jul/12/albertsons-will-take-self-checkout-lanes-out-stores-doesnt-affect-area-albertsons-stores/ I still remember having lunch at Woolworth, or stopping at full-serve stations back East. “coffee refill?” ” oil check?” We are heading toward a self-serve nation (or as in a recent feature in the WSJ,…
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The paper announced “a A student committed suicide for not passing Vietnam‘s first IBM-graded SAT“. So, my classmates showed up at my house the next morning for condolences. True story. Not having seen the column the day before, I was completely taken aback. Hence, my first exposure to bad journalism, and Vietnam’s first trial run…
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Load balancing, redundancy, follow-the-sun operation centers etc.. to be topped up by cloud. We did that with business phones (Centrex), and mainframes. More than a third of North American phones are now smart phones, with computational power not unlike earlier version of our desktops. When Turing and Shannon conceived a “thinking machine”, they were just happy if…
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What if you had a third eye in the back of your head? (one of the Creativity Test questions). Or how would it turn out if Earth goes without 0xygen for 5 seconds? If you were a car, what would that be? Gone are the days of “you can have the model T’s in any color…
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That summer in Jr High, I experienced a setback: Hapkido went wild, leaving me with a broken arm. The Kung Fu Hall already had my parents’ release, so even if it had been the fault of the visiting Red-Belt Master (who held up the brick, but moved it unexpectedly when it’s my turn to kick),…
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Thang Nguyen 555 