Posts Tagged ‘10’

When Terrorists Win

Friday, September 2nd, 2011

(These sirens are damned annoying. How does one opt out?)

Bin Laden sought to destroy America by bankrupting it. With a wavering economy and foreign debt broaching $15 Trillion, it seems the United States may have succumb to the deceased Face of Terror’s devious plan.

This is precisely how the terrorists win – by provoking a response from society that ultimately does far greater harm than the initial attack.

Unfortunately, as the decade long failure known as the War on Terror can attest, there is little we can do to directly prevent terrorism. For as long as humans are free, some might choose to hurt other people for whatever stupid reason.

But that doesn’t mean we should give up our liberties. Especially not for a predominantly trivial threat, like terrorism, which kills about the same number of people as bathtubs.

Instead of running for the hills every time some bad guy says boo, we can just accept that getting-exploded-by-some-ideological-douchebag is just one more item in a long list of things that can kill us.

This way, we’ll have more energy to focus towards a broader approach to terrorism, attacking the underlying social issues, like poverty, which foster violent extremism.

Google’s Project 10 to the 100th

Sunday, September 6th, 2009

Google’s Project 10 to the 100th is a philanthropic project put forth by the Internet powerhouse Google. This project is a “call for ideas to change the world by helping as many people as possible”. Watch the video below for more info or click here to read about it.

In October of last year, they opened up for submissions for ideas, and they received over 150,000 entries! The deadline for submissions has now passed.

Now, they are faced with the task of sorting through all of these submissions to pick the top 100. From these top 100, they will open up voting to the public, letting us pick the top 25. From these top 25 ideas, they will then pick the top 5. The top 5 will be splitting the prize of $10,000,000, which will be used to jumpstart the projects.

While it has taken them way longer than they initially hoped to pick their finalists, this project is still a great endeavour. What kind of projects have they received… what kind of great ideas and world changing events will arise because of this project… only time will tell.

Here at u4Ya.ca, the idea we put forth is the Global Voting System, which is a protocol for a world wide voting network, that runs off of existing infrastructure to promote global democracy.  It would be awesome if we were picked as one of the finalists, to really help jumpstart this ambitious project and truly get the ball rolling.