Archive for the 'possibilities' Category

Is Your Car Spying on You? Is Your Car Spying on Me?

Monday, September 18th, 2006

Another nail in the coffin of Doctorow’s “metacrap” arguments.  I never want to see anyone citing that inanity again.  Doctorow said that metadata would fail because “people are lazy”, and “people lie”.  The fact is, privacy is dead, because people are too lazy to STOP their metadata from leaking, and too lazy to lie/cover their tracks.  And […]

IdeaWars

Wednesday, September 13th, 2006

Tantek asks how we can kill bad ideas before we end up killing people.
While it’s useful to look at ideas through the lens of biology (”memes”), epidemiology, or systems theory; this is also the biggest error. 
Human “ideas” are unique in all of nature.  Humans (like apes or dogs) are capable of making a choice between […]

Talking Signs Seattle!

Wednesday, August 23rd, 2006

Congratulations to Seattle for winning the Federal DOT Grant for Remote Infrared Audio Signage!  This means that various real-world places around Seattle are going to be annotated with identifiers which can be directionally detected.
This should be interesting to Virtual Earth people, Wikimapia, and anyone interested in tacking metadata to real-world locations.
Talking signs address some scenarios […]

When Privacy is Bad: In Defense of Google

Monday, August 21st, 2006

As much as I love to see people questioning Google’s stewardship of ”all the world’s information”, I have to defend Google on this one.  An anonymous poster claiming to be from MSFT is over on a Google blog –using the AOL data leak as a way to smear Google.  That’s just plain wrong; and in the context of […]

Jealous Scientists (Argument is a Whore and a Cuckold)

Monday, August 14th, 2006

Every now and then on this blog, I poke fun at oversensitive “scientists” who are so wrapped up in the theology of science that they would greet Francis Bacon with Cartman-esqe screams of “RESPECT maaah authori-TAY!!!“
So I just love that “Nature’s Fundamental Laws May be Changing“.  To me, it is common sense.  Francis Bacon would […]