Bush engages in multilateral diplomacy with the Axis of Evil

We've seen the recent success of multilateral talks with North Korea, apparently building on Clinton's legacy. From February 14:

The accord struck by the U.S. and its partners to limit and eventually dismantle North Korea's nuclear program resembles one signed in 1994 by President Bill Clinton, a deal President George W. Bush denounced...
The deal has created some strange bedfellows for Bush. Bill Richardson, a Democratic presidential candidate and former United Nations ambassador under Clinton, was among the first to praise the new accord, while Bush's most recent UN envoy, John Bolton, was one of the first to attack it.

No apparent direct talks with the remaining two countries in the Axis, but the US could meet with Syria and Iran at an Iraqi regional conference.

The head of Iran's National Security Council, Ali Larijani, says senior officials and ministers are reviewing the situation and will decide on whether to go to the meeting, which has been called by the Iraqi administration as a way of coaxing more money and support from Iraq's neighbours and international partners...
U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Tuesday that American delegates would be at the gathering, even if Syria and Iran were represented.

There's still some brinkmanship in play over Iran's nuclear program, but it would seem that the corollary of "all options being on the table" is that diplomatic channels must remain open.

Fear and loathing and global warming

Why did Exxon pay millions to fund global warming skeptics? And via a think tank offer $10,000 to scientists and economists who would publish anything critical of a recent UN climate report? A likely reason is that demand destruction is real.

While demand is still rising in countries such as China, though at a lower rate than recent years, demand in developed countries is actually down. The International Energy Agency, whose members include countries such as the United States, Germany, Japan and Canada, said in January that oil consumption in the group fell 0.6 per cent in 2006, the first significant slip since the 1980s.

If this trend were to continue, we'd hit Peak Demand in the West before Peak Oil.

A slow start to Panopticon 2.0

I'd posted earlier about harvesting Web 2.0 for facial recognition. The first steps have been confirmed.

Shah, who is also chief executive of Riya (riya.com), the first photo sharing site to use facial recognition technology, thinks faces are still beyond computers' reach. "We tried the same algorithims that are used on Like.com for faces on Riya. We downloaded 50m faces from MySpace, and we brought in 100 users to test both the shopping and the faces. The face stuff got 2.5 out of 5 on average, the shopping stuff got 4.2 and up.

Fifty million faces. Perhaps their algorithm was thrown off by all the false pictures of celebrities and porn stars, as well as stolen images from other users.