Pada tahun 2004, saya mengingatkan bahwa Blackberry adalah teknologi yang bermasalah, karena sedang diadili terkait dengan tuduhan pelanggaran paten.

Kini, ternyata memang Blackberry terancam dihentikan operasinya oleh pengadilan.
Para penggunanya terancam kehilangan layanan yang telah menjadi bagian dari kegiatan mereka sehari-hari.

Tapi, coba tebak apa yang kemudian terjadi ?

Pemerintah Amerika kemudian menyatakan bahwa Blackberry adalah vital bagi keamanan nasional.

The U.S. government has even joined the dispute, arguing that BlackBerry’s are vital to national security.

Ha ha ha bilang saja sudah “kecanduan” Blackberry, ini malah pakai alasan keamanan nasional segala.
Gila juga, segala macam dikaitkan ke masalah “homeland security”, sampai blackberry pun juga. Negara yang aneh – di lain berita, Amerika telah mempersiapkan diri untuk memerangi Internet.

Speechless deh saya….

A few days ago I stumbled upon a Digg news on Bill Gates : Bill gives big. It was about Bill Gates (again) donating serious amount of money.
On the page’s commentaries, a lot of people praises Bill for what he’s done. The usual stuff – when you see a shiny package, you think that it contains something very nice too.

But, the comment by shazeubaa caught my eye.
Shazeubaa gave a few pointers, which can be used to see what’s under the “skin”.

Here’s what I’ve found so far :

1. Sure, Bill gives big. But, do you realize that most of those are related to drugs / vaccinations? Here’s one of it. And, do you realize that he has invested quite a lot in medical companies ?
Can we draw a line connecting these ?

• Bill sells MSFT, takes Prozac
• Bill and Big Pharma companies : Bill now own shares on many drug companies.

2. An investigative journalism into Bill’s donations and agendas. Basically, the donations will bring him even more money from drugs, by blocking cheap drugs, therefore potentially killing more than he saved.

3. Just as with Microsoft, Bill staunch support of strict intellectual-property protections for drugs in poor countries. They argued that this is necessary, so they can recoup the R&D costs. However, turned out that Big Pharma’s marketing cost are 2.5 over their R&D cost.

Also, when you read something like this paragraph below, you can’t help but to start question the real intentions of Gates’ Foundation:

A report issued last year by the Commission on Macroeconomics and Health, chaired by economist Jeffrey Sachs, made a strong defense of intellectual-property protection as critical to continued investment in drug research and development. The Gates foundation was a major sponsor of the commission.

4. With vaccinations becoming mandatory in many countries, he could get very good returns on his “donations” (read: investment) to vaccine researches. But, vaccines are not without problems:

• [ Politicians messing with vaccinations ]
• [ A Salon/Rolling Stone joint investigation on vaccines ] – they could do this to US citizens, imagine what they’d do to the aliens ? (read: non-US citizens)
• [ Tetanus vaccination for Philippines, or sterilization scheme ? ] – This one is quite scary because my wife here (Indonesia) was advised not to take her pre-marital vaccination. A bit of background – here in Indonesia, a girl who’s going to get married was suggested to be vaccinated, “in case her husband is not clean“. However, people have observed that girls that took this vaccination tend to become sterile / have problems getting pregnant. Could this be the same problem with the Philippines ? Anyway, my wife avoided the vaccination, and now have 4 kids.
  note: apparently, this case is pretty widespread; here’s a report from BBC on polio vaccine outrage in Nigeria.
• [ Bill Gates and Tetanus vaccination] – History going to repeat itself ? (see point above)
• And when I was in UK, there was an uproar over a combined vaccination. Before that, 11 people died after getting a meningitis vaccine, and tens thousands complained.
• [ vaccination - a scheme to make drug companies richer ? ] – quoted: ” If it is true, that “Polio usually infects children under the age of 5 through contaminated drinking water and attacks the central nervous system, causing paralysis, muscular atrophy, deformation and, in some cases, death”, then should we not help these countries to supply healthy, uncontaminated drinking water to their population?” — Good point.
• Vaccines can be used to even wipe out certain race; example: Israel has been developing an “ethnic bullet”, a chemical / disease which target only certain race. Slip this into one of the vaccination programme, and there you go.

This list is by no means comprehensive. I already use up too much time, and need to stop at the moment. I’ll try to continue later, but do feel free to inform me if you know similar investigative research into Bill’s donations.

Note that I don’t judge that indeed Bill have hidden agenda in his donations. It requires much more exhaustive investigation, which I simply don’t have time/resource for.
I’m just simply against looking on the shiny skin / package, and decided that it’s good – straight away. With no effort whatsoever to look further / underneath all of it. This is why we can be fooled by many parties (gov’t, corporations, celebs, etc) so easily, for their own benefit.

We need to stop taking things so literally, and start to be smarter in regard to a lot of things. As Kakashi said; we need to start to “look underneath the underneath“.

Hopefully many will be inspired by this article to start doing this.

UPDATE: Rumah Sains Ilma kini sudah pindah ke :

Rumah Sains Ilma Pusat
Jl TPU Parakan, Pamulang 2, Tanggerang
021-32042545

Hari Minggu kemarin (30 Januari 2006) saya mengantar anak-anak ikut lomba melukis di BTC (Bintaro Trade Centre). Nggak ada target menang, yang penting mereka senang. Terutama anak saya yang kedua, kelihatannya dia agak lebih cenderung ke bidang kreatif. Alhamdulillah, itu yang terjadi; mereka gembira bertemu dengan kawan-kawannya, menggambar sampai puas (dan pegal), dihibur juga oleh para badut dan beberapa acara atraksi untuk anak-anak.

Selagi menunggu mereka menggambar, saya berkeliling kompleks BTC dengan anak saya yang paling kecil. Walaupun namanya BTC (mirip ITC), namun desain kompleksnya lebih mirip dengan Citos (Cilandak Town Square).
Di salah satu barisan tokonya, saya menemukan sebuah ruko dengan merk “Rumah Sains Ilma” (RSI).

Saya baca beberapa brosur yang ditempel di depannya. Ternyata, RSI adalah semacam klub yang aktivitasnya di seputar sains aplikatif, dan khusus untuk anak-anak umur 5 – 12 tahun. Wow. Menarik sekali.

Biayanya per grade (1 grade = 3 bulan) adalah Rp 350.000, berarti per bulannya sekitar Rp 120.000. Rasanya ini cukup murah dibandingkan kursus-kursus lainnya, dan ini di bidang sains pula.

Jika Anda tertarik, informasi lebih lanjut bisa didapatkan dengan menelpon 021 – 7453307.

I don’t know why, but this morning I suddenly remembered an anime I watched when I was a kid, titled “Machine Hayabusa“.

It was quite unique in many ways. Example; is there any other F1-themed anime that was as popular as that ? But it’s just not that, the reason it was very interesting was because of the imaginations put into the series. Like how the tracks were different, and each poses different challenges. Due to that, Ken’s car can be fitted with different engines, so to adapt to the current track. Two of the engines can even make the car to fly.
And, the racing/driving techniques were, let’s say, a bit …. unusual 2-wheels technique on a F1 race ? Not in my lifetime, he he.

Also, the race was not the usual F1, it was more like a deathrace especially since team Black Shadow joined it. It might be a bit scary to watch for little children.

So I already said that Ken’s car can fly, but his car’s not the only one with extra capabilities. Other cars can also do different things, some even have weapons I think.
But Ken’s the most intriguing one, especially the V3 engine, simply awesome. It was the first time I saw a car with a jet engine whenever the V3 was turned on, others can only watch his dust. Total overkill. This anime may got its idea from Spirit of America, the first known car with an attached jet engine. (taken from a F-86 Sabre)

What really stood up though was the kind of ordeal Ken’s team has to go through. And how they pulled each of those.
Each episode was simply an awesome display of persistence and mental/physical struggle. This is why I’d really love to be able to watch it once more time.

Links:
[ Hayabusa 3D - amazing pictures ]
[ Machine Hayabusa V3 - from HotWheels (!!) ]
[ Summary from Animenfo.com ]
[ Summary from AnimeNewsNetwork.com ]
[ Machine Hayabusa - DVD ]