Sometimes we need to stop analysing the past, stop planning the future, stop figuring out precisely how we feel, stop deciding exactly what we want, and just see what happens.
The US-based International Intellectual Property Alliance has asked the US Trade Rep to add Indonesia to its list of rogue nations that don’t respect copyright. What did Indonesia do to warrant inclusion on this “301 list”? Its government had the temerity to advise its ministries to give preference to free/open source software because it will cost less and reduce the use of pirated proprietary software in government. According to the IPA, this movement to reduce copyright infringement is actually bad for copyright, because “it fails to build respect for intellectual property rights and also limits the ability of government or public-sector customers (e.g., State-owned enterprise) to choose the best solutions.”
So autumn and winter spent in Sheffield and all my tools in London so JE James servicing bikes. Chain and brakes ‘consumed’ of course as Sheffield so hilly. My verdict on disc brakes, great, but when they go it’s almost instant! In homage to the E8 Hai Ha awarded myself a Viet lunch after sweaty session at Ponds Forge! Tiptop!
Still not showing up on the iPhone for London. I suppose my impatience is showing. There won’t be a party going on over at Garmin and Tom Tom as this gets rolled out..
The entire family of devices built on the iPhone OS (iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad) have been designed to run only software that is approved by Apple—a major shift from the norms of the personal computer market. Software developers who want Apple’s approval must first agree to the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement.
So today we’re posting the “iPhone Developer Program License Agreement“—the contract that every developer who writes software for the iTunes App Store must “sign.” Though more than 100,000 app developers have clicked “I agree,” public copies of the agreement are scarce, perhaps thanks to the prohibition on making any “public statements regarding this Agreement, its terms and conditions, or the relationship of the parties without Apple’s express prior written approval.” But when we saw the NASA App for iPhone, we used the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to ask NASA for a copy, so that the general public could see what rules conrolled the technology they could use with their phones. NASA responded with the Rev. 3-17-09 version of the agreement (it has reportedly been revised somewhat since—please send us the current version if you are able).
King’s College London president Rick Trainor announced recently that the university would be closing the chair of paleography, the UK’s only one. Held by Professor David Ganz, the chair of paleography is the position that overseas a discipline many consider to be a vital component of historical research. Paleography is the study of ancient manuscripts and has pieced together and deciphered many of the texts that have provided the basis for our knowledge of history.
Budget cuts are the precipitating factor, or rather “strategic disinvestment” as the official announcement goes, but they’re being met with some resistance.
“Palaeography is not simply an arcane auxiliary science,” says Professor Jeffrey Hamburger, chair of medieval studies at Harvard University. “It is as basic to the training and practice of historians as mastery of Dos or Unix might be to a computer scientist.”
Face it, you’ve got to be some kind of green saint to use only permanent tableware all the time. Every once in a while, at a small art opening or knitting circle you’ve got to have disposable dishes. For those times, when you still want your table to look great, there are some perfectly beautiful options available. But in that rare case when you’re having a get together for your entire family tree, or Christmas party at work, and you need hundreds of disposable dishes, sexy can be just a little too expensive. Luckily, going cheap doesn’t mean letting mamma earth down…
If you have to wear something for a long time then you might as well make it interesting. Casttoos are decorative prints that can be applied to casts. The coolest option by far though has to be the x-ray film copying service. You send them a copy of your x-ray film and they turn it into a casttoo.
“Mining phosphorus for food fertilizer is consuming the mineral faster than geologic cycles can replenish it. Urine is a potential source of the mineral. So far, there is no indication that Bill Gates wants to monopolise world supplies of urine: this may be because it’s complicated to do so. To capture, value, and reuse urine requires a multi-dimensional transformation in how we think about and treat sewage. Technologies, regulations, business models – and especially attitudes and behaviour – all have to change.”
Big pharma claims to hold the chemical key to a vigorous female libido. It’s called Flibanserin and you pop it to get randy. Inkling writer Tania Rabesandratana investigates to find out whether it’s indeed that simple.
Serendipitous drug development makes for a good story. It makes science sound surprising while making the pharmaceutical industry look spontaneous and candid. Remember how Pfizer was originally looking for a compound against hypertension, and ended up marketing Viagra?
Loopt continues to ramp up its focus on location-based deals. The pioneer of the mobile social network is launching a new app called LooptCard, which lets mobile consumers tap into offers, coupons and discounts by checking-in to spots. Today, Loopt is partnering with deals site Mobile Spinach to offer users deals and coupons for local merchants via the Loopt App.
A decade ago most of us were using AltaVista or something similar for search. No one was really complaining very much about the huge amount of spam and other noise that cluttered the results because we didn’t know there was a better way. Then Google came along with Page Rank, and had a profound effect on the quality of Internet search. Suddenly (and it really was that sudden), we couldn’t imagine going back to AltaVista and searching pages of results for the thing that Google gave us immediately.
For a good history of search, get John Battelle’s book The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture.
The online social landscape today sort of feels to me like search did in 1999. It’s a mess, but we don’t complain much about it because we don’t know there’s a better way.
Everything is decentralized, and no one is working to centralize stuff. I’ve got photos on Flickr, Posterous and Facebook (and even a few on MySpace), reviews on Yelp (but movie reviews on Flixster), location on Foursquare, Loopt and Gowalla, status updates on Facebook and Twitter, and videos on YouTube. Etc. I’ve got dozens of social graphs on dozens of sites, and trying to remember which friends puts his or her pictures on which site is a huge challenge.
And the amount of spam and just general nonsense that is flooding all of these services is crippling. As a user, I spend far too much time weeding it all out to find the few gems of real content from people I care about.
And I end up missing a lot of important content that I want to know about.
Someone will eventually help us make sense of all these various types of services, and help us separate the noise and spam from the real signal. I don’t know who’s going to do it, and I certainly don’t know how (if I did, I’d be doing it, not writing about it). But at some point soon, one of the Internet giants, or some new startup we’ve never heard of, is going to fix this mess for us.
I hope it comes sooner rather than later. Because social today looks a lot like search a decade ago. It’s broken, and just waiting for someone to fix it.
Logging into Twitter over the last few days, users are being prompted to update their profiles. According to the AP, Twitter is encouraging people to allow their e-mail addresses and mobile phone numbers to be included in the service’s search index.
Let’s be honest, this is more of a Twitter acquisition strategy than a Twitter service improvement. The more information Twitter has about its users, the more it can charge advertisers.
Twitter may push out 50 million tweets every day, but after four years in business the blue birdie needs to make some bank.
DIY drones and terrorism. PW Singer channels global guerrilla warfare over at Newsweek: "Such technologies have the potential to strengthen the hand not only of Al Qaeda 2.0, but also of homegrown terror cells and disaffected loners like Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. As one robotics expert told me, for less than $50,000 'a few amateurs could shut down Manhattan…'Smaller UAVs' cool, battery-powered engines make them difficult to hit with conventional heat-seeking missiles; Patriot missiles can take out UAVs, but at $3 million apiece such protection comes at a very steep price. Even seemingly unsophisticated drones can have a tactical advantage: Hizbullah's primitive planes flew so slowly that Israeli F-16s stalled out trying to decelerate enough to shoot them down.”
This is the closest I've come to finding an example of how financial parasitism through cognitive capture works in the natural world. "Through a not yet understood chemical process, the wasps are able to, quite literally, enslave the unsuspecting spiders to build a nest for their larva, and after all that hard work, become their first meal. Sure, it seems pretty dastardly, but researchers say it's evolution."
Enforced Financial Transparency. A group going by the name of the People's Army of the Fourth Awakening downloaded millions of documents from Latvia's tax office. It is in the process of publishing the salary information of government officials to expose corruption and self-dealing.
Cramming is making a comeback. It's a method of bleeding the middle class via both "legal" and illegal fees/charges/microtaxes that are slipped into telecom bills unnoticed.
Niall Ferguson embraces complex adaptive systems, black swans, and rapid collapse (particularly in how it applies to the rapid failure of the United States). He's sounding like me, LOL.
The "state of emergency" in the US (in a process that is similar to what is going on with copyrights) is becoming perpetual. Attempts to provide greater oversight were quashed.
Biden laments the popular perception that the US is kaput: "So many people have bet on our demise that it absolutely drives me crazy." Some observations: If modern governance is more brand than substance, perception of that brand drives everything. In a hyper financial world, a loss of confidence drives demise. The 4GW premise that modern nation-states are bleeding legitimacy may be spot on.
The Economist: According to one estimate, mankind created 150 exabytes (billion gigabytes) of data in 2005. This year, it will create 1,200 exabytes. The information overhead required to operate the status quo system is exploding. In comparison, think about the STEMI compression compression (without a loss of computational complexity) afforded by networked resilient communities.
A new study of 19,567 Chinese subjects found that daily naps increased the risk of developing Type 2 diabetes from 13.5% (without naps) to 15.1% (with naps). In addition, there was some evidence that longer siestas raised the risk more than shorter snoozes.
According to the authors, napping in China is a social norm, which is practiced by all ages primarily as a habit started in childhood. In Western countries, napping is less common and is often unplanned and prompted by sleepiness likely caused by aging, deteriorating health status or nighttime complaints….The authors noted that the association between napping and diabetes was observed despite the fact that nappers had higher levels of physical activity, which has been shown to reduce the risk of diabetes.
Lead author Neil Thomas, PhD, reader in epidemiology at the University of Birmingham, U.K., said that additional research is needed to determine if napping itself plays a causative role in the development of type 2 diabetes, or if other factors are involved.
Google will roll out a number of security enhancements to Gmail this week, and perhaps as early as Tuesday, says a source with knowledge of the new features. The changes are specifically designed to cut down on phishing and hacking attacks on Gmail accounts.
There are two specific changes that we’ve heard Google is implementing. The first is a secondary line of defense when a user has lost his or her password. If a Gmail account is accessed from a new computer, the user will have the option of receiving a text message with a new one time use pass key. They then enter that pass key into Gmail to authenticate themselves and lock out any bad users with access to the account.
A doctor pushing for the City of Austin, Texas to adopt a law making the wearing of cycling helmets compulsory for adults is the lead author of an academic study that found that there was no significant difference in risk of head injury between cyclists wearing helmets and those without.
The study, published last month in The American Journal of Emergency Medicine, and reported on the website The Vehicular Cyclist, was led by Dr Pat Crocker, which analysed 200 cyclists involved in Central Texas, instead found that alcohol use was the leading significant contributory factor to head injuries.
Forget Paypal. Virtual currency and online payment systems are proliferating like weeds. These systems provide an alternative to the limitations of official banking systems (although at greater risk). Most of them integrate with credit cards and cell phones. In many cases it is possible to exchange cash between different systems. Here's a taste of some of the offerings (some of these do a huge volume of business). Moving money has never been this easy or anonymous.
"There is no such thing as adventure. There's no such thing as romance. There's only trouble and desire." (Yeah right. Who believes that? Ed). "Let's face the music and dance."
Whenever you commend, add your reasons for doing so; it is this which distinguishes the approbation of a man of sense from the flattery of sycophants and admiration of fools
