NotesThe best memorial to the victims of 9/11, in Schneierās view, would be to forget most of the ālessonsā of 9/11. āItās infuriating,ā he said, waving my fraudulent boarding pass to indicate the mass of waiting passengers, the humming X-ray machines, the piles of unloaded computers and cell phones on the conveyor belts, the uniformed T.S.A. officers instructing people to remove their shoes and take loose change from their pockets. āWeāre spending billions upon billions of dollars doing thisāand it is almost entirely pointless. Not only is it not done right, but even if it was done right it would be the wrong thing to do.ā
Heaps of federal money, endless bureaucracy, and constant travel delays are the most visible by-products of the Transportation Security Administration. Too bad āincreased safetyā doesnāt fit on that list.FeedUnfurl
NotesPoe's Law is an axiom suggesting that it's difficult to distinguish between parodies of religious fundamentalism and its genuine proponents, since they both seem equally insane. For example, some conservatives consider noted homophobe Fred Phelps to be so over-the-top that they argue he's a "deep cover liberal" trying to discredit more mainstream homophobes.
Poe's Law states:[1]Unfurl
NotesI learned a lot about fandom couple of years ago in conversations with my friend Britta, who was working at the time as community manager for Delicious. She taught me that fans were among the heaviest users of the bookmarking site, and had constructed an edifice of incredibly elaborate tagging conventions, plugins, and scripts to organize their output along a bewildering number of dimensions. If you wanted to read a 3000 word fic where Picard forces Gandalf into sexual bondage, and it seems unconsensual but secretly both want it, and it's R-explicit but not NC-17 explicit, all you had to do was search along the appropriate combination of tags (and if you couldn't find it, someone would probably write it for you). By 2008 a whole suite of theoretical ideas about folksonomy, crowdsourcing, faceted infomation retrieval, collaborative editing and emergent ontology had been implemented by a bunch of friendly people so that they could read about Kirk drilling Spock.Unfurl
NotesThis is an utterly content-free rant in which I express my anger at recent Internet Explorer preview releases requiring installation of what is effectively an entirely new operating system. I wouldā¦FeedEmbedUnfurl
NotesStarting from June, Mozilla runs a monthly competition to showcase newest web technologies. In an international competition individuals can submit demos that show the world just how much is possible ...FeedEmbedUnfurl
NotesSo here is a gigantic list of everything I would buy right now to replace my entire workshop if mine were to disappear. I'm going to try and separate it into some sort of reasonable order as far as importance, but the point is that you see all of this, and use it as inspiration to put together your own collection.
The equipment you need to get started in building electronics. If you look back through the last two years ofĀ posts on this blog, you'll s...Unfurl
NotesWhat is a public library for? First, how we got here: Before Gutenberg, a book cost about as much as a small house. As a result, only kings and bishops could afford to own a book of their own. Thisā¦Unfurl
NotesPerhaps you won't believe me since it's my job to spread the gospel of curation as the Chief Evangelist of Pearltrees, but I think curation is here to stay. These are the reasons why I believe this is the case. This year there has been a tremendous amount of buzz in Silicon Valley about curation. Magnify.net CEO Steven Rosenbaum recentlyā¦Unfurl
NotesMiami University's Augmented Reality Research Group developed an Android app that helps librarians find mis-shelved books and determine where they should go. It's a simple idea, and one that could save librarians hours of drudgery (or cost many temps their jobs, but that's another story). Sounds a lot more useful than virtual mirrors for tryingā¦Unfurl
NotesGeremi Adam, the movie cammer for the Scene release group āmaVenā, will go down in history as a grand master of his art. Despite difficulties in pinning a crime on him, eventually Adam was arrested. According to a cable released by Wikileaks, that arrest was carried out as "a personal favor" to a movie industry official, setting off a tragic chain of events which would ultimately lead to Adams' death.Unfurl
NotesLet's stop and appreciate these mind-blowing scenes that were done the old-fashioned way -- with stunts, models and borderline insanity.FeedUnfurl
NotesThis is part of what makes me think the past 10-15 years' worth of games will not be playable in another 10-15 years. Total lost generation of games.
Players of Bioware's popular Dragon Age game are well into day four of a ā¦Unfurl
NotesAnd this is, in part, why I don't yet own a Kindle and never buy ebooks that are infected with DRM
Amazon allows customers to lend certain Kindle books for 14 days at a time, ā¦Unfurl