Hasta La Gadget!

When carriers announce that they are planning to merge with one another, one of the reasons for the merger would be to combine the spectrum of both carriers, thus giving the merged company a lot more spectrum to work with, which in turn would allow them to reach out to more customers.

However regulators aren’t thrilled by the idea because it would serve to promote a duopoly or even a monopoly, which is why AT&T and T-Mobile’s deal was rejected, and why Sprint and T-Mobile could face similar hurdles as well. So what if regulators instead opened up more spectrum to be shared, would that help alleviate the concerns that carriers have?

Perhaps, which is why it has been revealed that the US government is looking to create an experimental town in which they will be able to simulate spectrum sharing to see how it works out and what kind of challenges that they might face.

According to the NTIA, “To bridge the gap from today’s spectrum use model to a new regime, the PCAST report said that real-world testing of dynamic sharing principles and technologies is necessary. Therefore, one of the PCAST’s recommendations was to create an urban test city environment. Through the Joint Public Notice, NTIA and OET seek to promote this Model City concept.”

As it stands, the US government is still trying to figure out some of the details in their plan, such as whether the model city would be run by the FCC and the NTIA, or by the city itself, or by private companies who have local government connections. If you’d like to learn more or submit a comment, you can do so here.

US Government To Test Spectrum Sharing Via Experimental Cities

, original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

The existential threat posed by political, anti-Israel Arabist and Islamist rhetoric — toothless, ineffectual and empty as it is and always has been — serves only to justify the extreme actions of the state of Israel against the Palestinian people.

However, there is absolutely no justification for making that threat in either the Qur’an or the Sunnah, and in fact the opposite is true:

Israel’s strongest claim to Holy Land hegemony lies in the words of the Qur’an, just as the strongest scriptural support for Palestinian peace and justice can be found in the words of the Bible.

Palestinians — both Muslim and Christian — have lived oppressed, stunted and often shortened lives for decades, and will continue to do so for as long as the state of Israel can use the threat of annihilation against them, allowing security to trump human rights and freedoms, in order to deny their internationally legal and Covenant-based responsibilities.

Without question, according to both international law and the Torah, the well-being of all those living in Israel/Palestine — known to so many as God’s Holy Land — is the central responsibility of Israel, Jews and Judaism.

And also without question, according to the Qur’an, responsibility for governing that land and belongs to Judaism, and God’s people Israel.

Any Muslim familiar with the revelation God gave to Muhammad should know that.

In Al-Maeda 5:20-21 the Qur’an declares:

Remember Moses said to his people; “O my People! Call in remembrance the favor of Allah unto you, when he produced prophets among you, made you kings, and gave you what he had not given to any other among the peoples. O my people, enter the Holy Land which Allah hath assigned unto you, and turn not back ignominiously, for then will ye be overthrown to your own ruin.”

In fact, those words make it clear that their very survival as a people depends on their residency. What many Muslims may not know, however, is that KatabAllahu, the word so often translated as “assigned,” actually means something much stronger that that, something much closer to “ordained” or “destined.” According to the words of the Qur’an, living in and governing God’s Holy Land is the Jewish people’s destiny.

Muslims, Jews and Christians together acknowledge that Jews are God’s chosen people, but what were they actually chosen for? It’s not a secret. In fact, the answer lies in the 18th chapter of the first book of the Torah, known as Genesis to Christians. There God explains in verses 17-19:

Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do? Abraham will surely become a great and powerful nation, and all nations on earth will be blessed through him. For I have chosen him so that he will direct his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing what is right and just, so that the Lord will about for Abraham what he has promised him.

Here again, though, translation leaves much to be desired. The word translated as “what is right and just” is Tzedakah and means “righteousness,” “benevolent justice” and “charity,” but the character of the virtues it describes is so profoundly archetypal that some Hebrew scholars even say that real Tzedakah is something more akin to brotherly love.

And the “so that” clause makes living in accordance to Tzedakah a necessary pre-condition to God keeping his promises.

There’s a reason that Muhammad always made sure to use Jewish law and precedent to judge the Jewish people: It’s that Islam was revealed to confirm and build upon Judaism and to call Jews back to their Covenant, not to replace it. Time and time again he confirmed that the laws of Moses persisted for the Children of Israel, and about non-Jews living in the Holy Land, the words of the Jewish books of revelation and prophecy are clear.

Exodus 22:21: “Do not mistreat an alien or oppress him, for you were aliens in Egypt.”

Deuteronomy 29: 10-11:

All of you are standing today in the presence of the LORD your God — your leaders and chief men, your elders and officials, and all the other men of Israel, together with your children and your wives, and the aliens living in your camps who chop your wood and carry your water. You are standing here in order to enter into a covenant with the LORD your God, a covenant the LORD is making with you this day and sealing with an oath, to confirm you this day as his people, that he may be your God as he promised you and as he swore to your fathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

Leviticus 19:33-34:

When an alien lives with you in your land, do not mistreat him. The alien living with you must be treated as one of your native-born. Love him as yourself, for you were in Egypt. I am the Lord your God.

Leviticus 24:22: “You are to have the same law for the alien and the native born. I am the Lord your God.”

Ezekiel 47:21-23:

“You are to distribute this land among yourselves according to the tribes of Israel. You are to allot it as an inheritance for yourselves and for the aliens who have settled among you and who have children. You are to consider them as native-born Israelites; along with you they are to be allotted an inheritance among the tribes of Israel. In whatever tribe the alien settles, there you are to give him his inheritance,” declares the Sovereign Lord.

Together these passages proclaim peace and justice for Palestinian and Israeli together, Jew and non-Jew alike.

For Middle east peace to come to pass, our world needs nothing more than Israel as God wants it to be.

As I write this on Sunday evening — sitting safe in my hospital call-room in Canada — the last few days’ death toll in Gaza approaches 200 innocent lives lost, over 10 times that severely injured, on top of the tens of thousands of Christian and Muslim Palestinians killed for the sake of “security” since the state of Israel’s inception, a fact that in no way justifies the Jewish blood that has been shed, since Muslims and Christians both are supposed to do better than “an eye for an eye.”

However, given all that, I thought long about the title for this piece, because there is no possible way that I can rhetorically support or defend Israel today, despite the fact I truly believe that Israel’s claim on the Holy Land is unquestionable and secure, a necessary pre-condition to the revelation of God’s Holy vision: “sustain” — a word that means “maintain,” “nourish” and “suffer,” all together — is as far as I think any Muslim could possibly go.

But I know that proclaiming both justice and peace for Israel will inevitably bring about the same for my Palestinian brothers and sisters, in both Christianity and Islam.

Justice looks the same no matter from which side you look at it, and peace — if it’s real peace — is always shared.

Shalom Aleichum/Assalamu-Alaikum Israel/Palestine, may God Grant You Peace, Amen.

Driving back to Paris on a recent afternoon, I received an email from a friend asking me if I would walk in fashion show that he was styling. I agreed, and so, found myself a couple of days later on the sixth floor of a former factory building in the cramped atelier of fashion label known as the Y/Project.

It was the day before the show-time to fit models to their outfits. As I came in, the studio was a frenzy of activity; sewing machines whirring, last-minute stitching being carefully sewn, steaming, pressing, cutting, and trimming. It was approaching 10 p.m. as I was waiting for my own dress to be finished. Only hours before the show the following day, and dresses were still being cut, shaped, and altered.

Through he haze of cigarette smoke, amidst countless empty coffee cups, I watched the equipe begin their nuit blanche. To see people sewing buttons and cutting fabric seemed practically antiquated in our modern world of far-flung clothing factories. How reassuring, I thought, that this craft has not yet been completely wiped out!

Since beginning my career as a model, I have wanted to find out more about the process of actually making clothes. Where do fabrics come from? Who puts them together? Clothing is such a fundamental human necessity, yet its production seems to have developed into an abstract, often murky mysterious process.

After the show, the following week, I sat down over a drink with the brand’s designer Glenn Martens. I wanted to find out more at least about his role in the fabrication of his clothes. The label, which is called the Y/Project after its founder Yohan Serfaty, was started some four years ago in Paris. Glenn, who previously worked as a junior designer at the fashion house Gaultier, took over the label just last summer. This handsome, young Belgian was full of energy as he tried to give me a brief glimpse of his world as a fashion designer.

Their factories, he explained to me, are spread out in several European countries as well as Tunisia and Turkey. Each country has its specialty; Italy for knitwear, leathers in Istanbul, silks in France… The process of fabrication begins by an idea, an inspiration drawn from fashion history, combined with modern street style. This idea then becomes a drawing, a sketch, a kind of architectural outline. The next step is then to select the fabric. Most fabrics have been carefully chosen from thousands of different varieties at the biannual fabric fair in Paris known as Premiere Vision. Now begins the tryouts, les essaies; trying to bring the two-dimensional into three dimensions. After many of these tryouts, many failures, a final product emerges; a dress, a shirt, a jacket something that I or any other model will wear to walk down the runway. The final presentation.

This intense, laborious process seems somewhat comparable to a painter testing, and countlessly retesting the construction of his painting. Dare I say that clothes can be considered as artwork? I would say yes, in so much as they can be beautiful and give the wearer a sense of elegance and composure. Reversely I would place clothes in a similar world as art in the sense that there is also an overwhelming quantity of knock-offs, copies, reproductions of the original such that we often no longer really know what we are wearing, let alone where it comes from! Indeed, who really has the time or energy to meticulously research the exact origins of their clothes? Especially when options may vary from $10 vs. $100 the former is certainly more appealing. Easiest to turn a bind eye on the backstory. I asked Glenn what it was like to try and turn a profit using such precious methods (such as fairly paid labor); he paused, and smiled discreetly. We moved on. I realized that this was a labor of love, a purely creative project. How beautiful I thought, how wonderfully human in such a seemingly inhumane industry — that is clothing manufacturing. A project, I think, that has its own answer.

http://www.yproject.fr/

The American government and the public had very limited understanding of Islamist extremist groups and their global jihadist ambitions before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Afterwards, Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama strictly limited the war on terror to extremist groups like al-Qaeda that had openly waged a war against the United States and attempted to carry out terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. The post-9/11 academic work and media research followed this trend, focusing on this particular network of terrorists while ignoring other groups with similar ambitions that worked at a slower pace or on a smaller scale.

Now, Washington has finalized its departure from Afghanistan after a decade-long war against Islamist extremist groups, and many analysts believe al-Qaeda has been incapacitated to attack the United States. But the recent dramatic rise of al-Qaeda affiliates in Iraq and Syria echoes as a reminder that the threat of Islamist extremism has not been completely defeated — it has gained new strengths in the past decade.

Meanwhile, America’s engagement with al-Qaeda provided an extraordinary opportunity to other global jihadist groups to consistently regroup and prepare for future battles. One such group that has gained remarkable strength from mainland Pakistan is the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), which is determined to push India and Pakistan into a nuclear war. The LeT, despite being designated by Washington as a terrorist organization, has continued to thrive in the recent years under the patronage of the Pakistani military.

Senior Pakistani journalist and former New York Times contributor Arif Jamal’s latest book, Call for Transnational Jihad: Lashkar-e-Taiba (1985-2014), is an extraordinary account of the LeT’s evolution and its expanding network of trusted allies across the world. Although the LeT had been carrying out Pakistan’s proxy war in the Indian-administered Kashmir since 1980s, the group came into the limelight after it killed more than 160 people, including some American nationals, in a terrorist strike in the Indian city of Mumbai in 2008.

The LeT works differently from groups like al-Qaeda. Its public face is Jamatud Dawa (JuD), formerly known as Markaz Dawat wal Irshad (MDI). The JuD poses as an Islamist charity group and actively operates across Pakistan and several other countries. According to Jamal, Pakistan does not take action against the LeT because it fights Islamabad’s jihad inside India, including Kashmir, and, unlike the Pakistani Taliban, does not attack the Pakistani state.

Jamal views JuD as more dangerous than al-Qaeda because of its broad reach to around 50 countries, arguing that it is probably the first jihadist outfit with a global network. In 1995, the LeT led the formation of the world’s first global alliance of jihadists, called League of Islamic Jihad, that brought the jihadist groups from Kashmir, Bosnia, the Philippines, and Eritrea together. In total, these groups number 200,000 jihadists on one platform.

“JuD’s jihad against the United States or any other western country is different from al-Qaeda’s jihad,” Jamal explains. “Instead of carrying out terrorist attacks on the United States like the al-Qaeda, the JuD seems to be planning to convert a section of society to Salafism before it launches full fledged jihadist attacks on it.” He also notes, “For the JuD, the missionary work and fundraising in the western world are more important at this time.”

In April 2012, the United States announced a $10-million bounty on information that would lead to the conviction of the LeT chief. On the contrary, Saeed continues to roam freely across Pakistan, where he appears on almost every news channel and speaks at public events to call for jihad against the West. Last month, he even addressed the lawyers at the Lahore High Court Bar Association. Saeed started his jihad to liberate Kahsmir from India, but now he says the jihadist mission is not going to stop even if Kashmir gains freedom. His jihadist fantasies include converting India, Israel, and the United States, among other countries, into Muslim states.

The Call for Transnational Jihad is the first book ever by a Pakistani journalist that not only reveals deep-rooted connections between the Inter-Services Intelligence (I.S.I.), Pakistan’s powerful spy agency, and the LeT but also exposes LeT’s relentless use of violence against innocent civilians, including fellow Muslims, whom it punishes for allegedly spying for the Indian government or transgressing the Islamist lifestyle. Pakistani readers are generally exposed to the state-sponsored narrative about the brutalities of the Indian forces against the people of Kashmir — rarely do they read about how the so-called freedom fighters engage in criminal activities to finance their armed movement and force local populations to support them.

Jamal’s book provides invaluable information about the I.S.I.’s increasing jihadist projects and local networks in Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Maldives, Bosnia, Tajikistan and Chechnya.

The chapters dealing with the LeT connections in the United States and the United Kingdom are alarming, as they indicate that the war on terror has not fully deterred the jihadist groups, nor have Western countries fully achieved the capability to counter the threat of radical Islam. The LeT smartly uses digital technology and social media to recruit Western-educated, Western-looking young men to enhance their terrorist projects. The case of David Headley, one of the conspirators of and spies for the Mumbai attack, reflects how beneficial terrorist groups find Western-educated recruits because of their ability to travel across the world so easily. Faisal Shahzad, the would-be Time Square bomber, who was hired by the Pakistani Taliban, not the LeT, also reflects the consistent pattern used by the jihadists to recruit Western-educated citizens for their terrorist plots.

The ability of groups to recruit new members from the United States, send them for training in Pakistan and Afghanistan, collect donations and spread jihadist literature inside American jails (as noted by Jamal in his book) provides ample reason to worry about future terrorist strikes within the United States.

The Call for Transnational Jihad foresees a pessimistic future for many countries that simply do not have the military and intelligence resources and training to guard their borders from jihadists. Pakistan’s intentional inaction against the LeT and uninterrupted support for it endangers regional peace in South Asia, in addition to putting American and European cities and citizens at the risk of future terrorist attacks. The United States, as a regular supporter (especially financially) of the Pakistani military, must play a proactive role in conditioning American assistance to Islamabad with action against Islamist terrorist groups. Washington has failed to persuade Pakistan from permanently abandoning the LeT and other Islamist radical groups because punitive measures, including the suspension of foreign aid, did not follow such previous demands. With the LeT on rise, the defeat of al-Qaeda, if true, does not promise an extremism-free stable South Asia.

Jamal is a great addition to the rare club of articulate Pakistani writers, such as Hussain Haqqani, the author of Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military, and Ahmed Rashid, the author of Pakistan on the Brink. All these writers have taken personal risks to expose their country’s connections with Islamist extremist groups and the questionable commitment to the war on terrorism.

Razer – one of the most widely-known manufacturers of gaming peripherals in the world – had a very exciting announcement to make at this year’s Evolution Championship Series: it’s released the next iteration of the Atrox Arcade Stick. It looks awesome.