…is our very own Paul Jones. He’s asked what he wishes would happen, and what he thinks will really happen, in tech in 2004. He’s in the same article as Tim O’Reilly, Howard Rheingold, and Nuala O’Connor Kelly (chief privacy officer for the Office of Homeland Security)….color me impressed!
Congrats, Paul!
Originally seen on Lessig’s Blog, here’s a useful utility that will be overwhelmed with illegal stuff in about 2 days:
Dropload
A place that you can drop a file, and the site sends an email to the recipient of the file and he/she can then pick it up. 50 Meg limit, no child porn or copyright violations, please.
So this morning at 6am, I threw Bets on a plane to San Diego. Come back to town, run around like crazy for a day, then throw my wife on a plane.
Sounds like just the time to start thinking about school again. 🙂
So in that vein, I’ve decided to start trying to work out aspects of my Master’s Paper on this blog.
My first idea: to try to tie the economics of Open Information (Creative Commons and such) to Communications Theory and the idea that when you increase the node count (or the number of open information sources) the overall usability of the system increases. It may even be possible to use that theory to determine the “magic number” of sources that will be the critical mass for Open Information to be as useful as traditional copyright. All very theoretical, all very nebulous, and all very much like the stuff I did for years in Philosophy. But interesting (at least to me).
older than sin, and his beard could grow no whiter. He wanted to die.
the dwarfish natives of the arctic caverns did not speak his language, but conversed in their own, twittering tongue, conducted incomprehensible rituals, when they were not actually working in the factories.
Once every year they forced him, sobbing and protesting, into Endless Night. During the journey he would stand near every child in the world, leave one of the dwarves’ invisible gifts by its bedside. The children slept, frozen in time.
He envied Prometheus and Loki, Sisyphus and Judas. His punishment was harsher.
Ho.
Ho.
Ho.
–Neil Gaiman, from his collection Angels and Visitations
Just a little happy christmas note from one of my favorite authors!
Or whatever the appropriate Winter Solstice celebration is for your particular religion/belief.
🙂
Hope to see everyone safe and back in Chapel Hill soon!
We’re reasonably close to Roanoke here in the Triangle, so those of you that read this and are gamers…keep your eyes out!
Star City Games offers $10,000 reward for thief
On Saturday morning, December 20th, sometime between 1 – 6 a.m., someone (or several people) broke into the back of StarCityGames.com’s Roanoke, VA warehouse, not an easy thing to do. Once they finally got in, they quickly, but methodically, stole significant quantities (exact numbers are still being compiled) of older, collectable, Type One singles. This included numerous Black Loti, Moxes, Ancestral Recalls, Time Walks, Timetwisters, Juzam Djinns, Library of Alexandrias, etc.
Our insurance will pay to replace the cards, and our already heavy security measures are being increased by tenfold. At this point, most people would probably chalk this up to “experience” and simply leave it at that. However, I am not “most people”, as whoever did this is about to find out.
Today, I am publicly offering a $10,000 “no questions asked” bounty on the individual(s) who broke into our warehouse.
…Jackson!
It’s a back massager, more accurately a Thera-Cane. It’s the most oddly designed massager EVER, and seems nearly useless in my experimenting with it, but served itself well as a white elephant gift!
..via email. In doing some basic bibliographic work for my upcoming Master’s Paper, I discoverd that Larry Lessig has a new book coming out in late March that is concerned with my topic. Deciding that I had little to lose, I dropped him an email outlining what I’m working on, and asking if it were possible to see any of the work before publication.
I just got an email back from him asking for my address so that he could send me a pre-press of it. 🙂 It’s geeky, but I’m thrilled!
Here is a brilliant analysis of the top 5 geek social fallacies. The author (Michael Suileabhain-Wilson) shows a certain amount of deep understanding of geek mental activities and cause-effect relations vis a vis social interactions. Very astute stuff.
So…who thinks they are a carrier of some of these characteristics? I am definitely a GSF3, and have been guilty of GSF1 at times.
I sent this out last semester in an email to the SILS community, but here it is for anyone who forgot. Starting in January, Zipcar will be available on campus.
——-
UNC faculty, staff, students (over 21 years old), and Departments can join Zipcar for only $20/year. Even better, we’ll give you $20 in driving credit for your first month of membership.