Catching up

Solar powered parking ticket machine.

Picture phones are being used as an always available camera, not for picture messaging. This ties up exactly with my personal experience.

Fetchart, more cool iTunes only software. The amazon.com searching and scraping backend must be fairly trivial to port though.

A dictionary of Nadsat - the dialect from Clockwork Orange.

Novel visualisation of the tax burden. This is immensely more persuasive than talking about percentages.

[/misc] posted at 13:33 #

Opsound delivers

Glenn Otis Brown points to the first example of a “collaboration across space and time … with no rights-clearing needed”. Possible because the original was Attribution-ShareAlike licensed.

This happened on Opsound, which last time I checked was mostly ambience. It’s good to see it developing.

[/misc] posted at 13:29 #

The Baroque Cycle

The new Neal Stephenson isn’t due until autumn but sounds good:

Daniel, Jack, and Eliza will traverse a landscape populated by mad alchemists, Barbary pirates, and bawdy courtiers, as well as historical figures including Samuel Pepys, Ben Franklin, and other great minds of the age. Traveling from the infant American colonies to the Tower of London to the glittering courts of Louis XIV, and all manner of places in between

Feel the research:

On Sir Isaac Newton’s temperature scale, where freezing is zero and the heat of the human body is twelve, it is probably four or five. If Herr Fahrenheit were here with one of his new quicksilver-filled, sealed-tube thermometers, he would probably observe something in the fifties.

[/misc] posted at 13:07 #

Microsoft Apps on Linux

One of the most interesting spread bets around is still open.

USA TODAY: Is there a scenario by which you would at some point consider porting Microsoft applications into Linux?

BG (Bill Gates): There’s no consideration of that at this point.

[/technology] posted at 00:33 #

Watching them watching us

OK, I‘m back now. Lots to catch up on. That was very annoying.

As predicted, here’s some citizen based pushback against the governmental monopoly on collaborative information gathering. GIA (Government Information Awareness).

The premise of GIA is that individual citizens have the right to know details about government, while government has the power to know details about citizens. Our goal is develop a technology which empowers citizens to form a sort of intelligence agency; gathering, sorting, and acting on information they gather about the government.

This image is from their sidebar and sums it up well:

They’ve thought this through to the point of having anonymous identities - required for anonymous sources to become trustable.

The system will accommodate information of almost any type, allowing users to sort through volumes of information which would otherwise be unusable. More importantly, the system allows for people to submit any information, while retaining anonymity, but while also being identified as a consistent source.

The Boston Globe have a good write-up.

As hosting these databases becomes standardised and affordable, forking will become possible. The possibility of a fork will provide similar benefits to the ones it brings to the development of Open Source. Focused but consensual management.

One benefit our - now excessively retrictive - copyright regime may bring us is the early realisation of the importance of publically owned and licensed data.

[/society] posted at 00:26 #