At last, a week late, my notes.
Bruce Sterling does not worry about a Vingean Singularity that renders humankind a powerless annoyance to transcendent artificial intelligences. Instead he worries about plain old human-driven technological change and nasty WMDs.
Cynthia and I drove up to the City to hear Bruce Sterling’s lecture for the Long Now Foundation at [...]
More like this: bay-area, disasters, economics, emergent-behavior, evolutionary-biology, int-property, monopolies, philosophy, politics, religion
|
Posted under books, science-fiction, technology
|
December 26, 2003 – 12:00 am
[ via Ward Willats ] Suppose the NIST let Clear Channel run WWV, the nation’s Time and Frequency radio broadcast. They’d feel compelled to re-brand it.
And given that Clear Channel’s given plenty to the Bushies, it’s not a stretch to see the GOP actually give them the station.
December 17, 2002 – 12:00 am
Over at KQED, Krasny and company were talking about media ownership on Forum, so after listening to the suits talk about how concentration of ownership is good for you and the public interest being so 1930’s, it’s good to read Aaron Swartz talking about Open Spectrum. Technology has made broadcast spectrum frequency scarcity a thing [...]
December 6, 2002 – 12:00 am
Professor Kiesling discusses how new markets created by the Internet ran afoul of existing institutions (wholesale liquor distributors) that had their niche by law.
New York, Michigan and other states prohibited shipments to individual buyers from out of state wineries.
The liquor wholesalers arrangements grew out of the post-Prohibition environment. Laws which were enacted out of a [...]
September 25, 2002 – 12:00 am
[ via the alert Rick Keir ] Remember that free Elvis Costello CD I was so excited about last week? Turns out it’s primarily a way to goad you into installing a version of Windows Media Player (WMP) which turns on DRM. Of course, you’re free to run WMP, just don’t reformat your hard drive [...]
[ via Scripting News ] Glenn Reynolds puts words to a fear I’ve had for quite a while:
These legislative initiatives aren’t just about copyright. They’re about building a regime that’s hostile to content that comes from anyone other than Big Media suppliers. That’s because their real fear isn’t copied Britney Spears CDs — it’s [...]
Jon Udell [I just discovered that I gave him an 'h' and left out an 'l'] thinks Digital IDs will reduce spam. I doubt it. We’ll just receive digitally signed spam from ‘legitimate’ senders. And there are worse things than spam which coercing people to acquire digital IDs will make worse:
Microsoft and Palladium (sorry, you [...]
jenett.radio set up a tracking topic on MS’s Palladium proposal.
Here’s a lession in microeconomics: Microsoft’s Palladium. It strikes me as Redmond’s next attempt to do an AT&T on computing — “Please regulate me, for I am a monopoly, I propagate viruses, and I encourage teenagers to copy Britney without paying for the privilege, but, *hem* you must forbid in law any competition.”
Gordon Mohr suggests that we plug the ‘analog hole’ with Digital Rights Management helmets, so if you see or hear something which you don’t have the rights for, you go blind and deaf!
This will especially teach people not to listen to unauthorized copies of music while driving.
Gordon’s joke is explored in Karl Schroeder’s novel Permanence.
Eugen [...]
April 21, 2002 – 12:00 am
Bruce Sterling gave the closing keynote at Computers, Freedom and Privacy in San Francisco last Friday. It’s another great Sterling piece. This time he talks about going computerless at a technical conference (he wrote this talk out in longhand); Steven, the annoying Dell kid; corruption in Bollywood; desperation in Hollywood; why John Ashcroft doesn’t care [...]
April 14, 2002 – 12:00 am
Doc links to a report that MS and IBM claim key patents over Web Services protocols. I guess HTTP isn’t dead after all.
[ via Doc Serles ] Over at Limited Pie, the editors propose a plan to beat the Entertainment Industrial Complex at their own game. This hinges on the fact that are a finite number of ways you can string together bits in a 3.5 MB file. So, let’s put the power of distributed processing to [...]
March 30, 2002 – 12:00 am
[ via Doc ] Cintra Wilson watched the Academy Awards, and found that el Ron Hubbard’s pet robot boy was well on his way to becoming an evil god:
People in the audience started laughing, until they realized that Tom was Not Being Funny At All. He was chosen to frankly address the post-Sept. 11 whither-the-Oscars [...]
March 27, 2002 – 12:00 am
I thought Dave had a good summation of Disney Chieftain Michael Eisner’s bleatings in the press over the Hollings Bill:
We remember the days, not long ago, when our users were stupid. They thought they were giving money to the artists. We want them to be stupid again.
