Virtual community and societies

7 billion worth of vulnerability. Aircraft carriers are weighing just as heavy on the US amerd forces, as battleships did before Pearl Harbor. In this day and age of deficits, reconsidering the role of he aircarrier fleet seems like a reasonable idea. 

"The truth is, a deployed aircraft carrier is more vulnerable to mission kill than is commonly believed, and the Department of Defense should consider efforts to prevent or mitigate such an exigency."

Subscribers of Microsoft’s Xbox Live, rejoice. Starting on Tuesday, Dec. 6, you will be able to watch television programming from the Xbox 360 console. You will also be able to search Hulu and Netflix via voice. Kinect is fully integrated in the suite of programs and application, which adds gesture control as well.

Malcolm Gladwell (of Tipping Point and Blink fame) puts the dot on the i regarding Steve Jobs' real genius: to combine things that he found in semi finished state.

"Jobs’s sensibility was editorial, not inventive. His gift lay in taking what was in front of him—the tablet with stylus—and ruthlessly refining it. After looking at the first commercials for the iPad, he tracked down the copywriter, James Vincent, and told him, “Your commercials suck.”

“Well, what do you want?” Vincent shot back. “You’ve not been able to tell me what you want.”
“I don’t know,” Jobs said. “You have to bring me something new. Nothing you’ve shown me is even close.”
Vincent argued back and suddenly Jobs went ballistic. “He just started screaming at me,” Vincent recalled. Vincent could be volatile himself, and the volleys escalated.
When Vincent shouted, “You’ve got to tell me what you want,” Jobs shot back, “You’ve got to show me some stuff, and I’ll know it when I see it.”

I’ll know it when I see it."

Does social media lead to rich, networked lives and increased social capital? Or not? A Berkman center seminar featuring Professor Charles Nesson as Provocateur and Ellen Condliffe Lagemann (Bard College), Peter Levine (Tufts University), Harry Lewis (Harvard SEAS), Elizabeth Lynn (Project on Civic Reflection) and Juan Carlos de Martin (Berkman Center) as participants.

The Book Review’s annual list.... A selection of titles..

FICTION

THE ANGEL ESMERALDA: Nine Stories. By Don DeLillo. (Scribner, $24.) 

THE ART OF FIELDING. By Chad Harbach. (Little, Brown, $25.99.) 

THE BARBARIAN NURSERIES. By Héctor Tobar. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.) 

BIG QUESTIONS. Or, Asomatognosia: Whose Hand Is It Anyway? Written and illustrated by Anders Brekhus Nilsen. (Drawn & Quarterly, cloth, $69.95; paper, $44.95.) 

THE BUDDHA IN THE ATTIC. By Julie Otsuka. (Knopf, $22.) 

CANTI. By Giacomo Leopardi. 

THE CAT’S TABLE. By Michael Ondaatje. 

CHANGÓ’S BEADS AND TWO-TONE SHOES. By William Kennedy. (Viking, $26.95.) 

COME ON ALL YOU GHOSTS. By Matthew Zapruder. (Copper Canyon, paper, $16.)

11/22/63. By Stephen King. (Scribner, $35.) What if Kennedy did not die?

THE FREE WORLD. By David Bezmozgis. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.) 

NONFICTION

\

AND SO IT GOES. Kurt Vonnegut: A Life. By Charles J. Shields. (Holt, $30.) 

THE ART OF CRUELTY: A Reckoning. By Maggie Nelson. (Norton, $24.95.)

ASSASSINS OF THE TURQUOISE PALACE. By Roya Hakakian. (Grove, $25.) 

THE BEGINNING OF INFINITY: Explanations That Transform the World. By David Deutsch. (Viking, $30.) 

BELIEVING IS SEEING: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography. By Errol Morris. (Penguin Press, $40.) 

THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE: Why Violence Has Declined. By Steven Pinker. (Viking, $40.) 

1861: The Civil War Awakening. By Adam Goodheart. (Knopf, $28.95.) In this account of the war’s first stage, Goodheart turns his lens upon fascinating figures who loomed large at the time but have now been mostly forgotten.

EXAMINED LIVES: From Socrates to Nietzsche. By James Miller. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $28.) 

GEORGE F. KENNAN: An American Life. By John Lewis Gaddis. (Penguin Press, $39.95.) 

THE INFORMATION: A History. A Theory. A Flood. By James Gleick. (Pantheon, $29.95.) 

IS THAT A FISH IN YOUR EAR? Translation and the Meaning of Everything. By David Bellos. (Faber & Faber, $27.) 

KNOCKING ON HEAVEN’S DOOR: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World. By Lisa Randall. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $29.99.) 

THE STORM OF WAR: A New History of the Second World War. By Andrew Roberts. (Harper/HarperCollins, $29.99.)

WHY THE WEST RULES — FOR NOW: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future. By Ian Morris. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $35.) 

Pakistan lies. It hosted Osama bin Laden (knowingly or not). Its government is barely functional. It hates the democracy next door. It is home to both radical jihadists and a large and growing nuclear arsenal (which it fears the U.S.

In a country that is home to the harshest variants of Muslim fundamentalism, and to the headquarters of the organizations that espouse these extremist ideologies, including al-Qaeda, the Haqqani network, and Lashkar-e-Taiba (which conducted the devastating terror attacks on Mumbai three years ago that killed nearly 200 civilians), nuclear bombs capable of destroying entire cities are transported in delivery vans on congested and dangerous roads. And Pakistani and American sources say that since the raid on Abbottabad, the Pakistanis have provoked anxiety inside the Pentagon by increasing the pace of these movements. In other words, the Pakistani government is willing to make its nuclear weapons more vulnerable to theft by jihadists simply to hide them from the United States, the country that funds much of its military budget.

The Pakistani government has willfully misled the U.S. for more than 20 years about its support for terrorist organizations, and it willfully misleads the American government when it asserts, against the evidence, that “rogue elements” within the ISI are responsible for the acts of terrorism against India and U.S. forces in Afghanistan. Most American officials are at this late stage convinced that there are no “rogue elements” of any size or importance in the ISI; there are only the ISI and the ISI assets that the ISI (with increasing implausibility) denies having. (The ISI’s S Wing, the branch of the service that runs anti-India activities, among other things, is said to have a very potent “alumni association,” in the words of Stephen P. Cohen, a leading American scholar of Pakistan based at the Brookings Institution.) A particular challenge the ISI poses is that while it funds and protects various jihadist groups, these groups often pick their own targets and the timing of their attacks. The ISI has worked for years against American interests—not only against American interests in Afghanistan, but against the American interest in defeating particular jihadist networks, even while it was also working with the Americans against other jihadist organizations.“The problem with Pakistan is that they still differentiate between ‘good’ terrorists and ‘bad’ terrorists,” Mike Rogers, the Michigan Republican who chairs the House Intelligence Committee, told The Atlantic in October.