Read moreOutside of dramatically failed experiments like the Soviet Union and East Germany, policing has never been a business of gathering data on every single person and arresting the guilty ones. This doesn’t catch guilty people, it ensnares the innocent and acts as a kind of monetary black hole, absorbing all the cash we can toss into it, growing larger and more voracious by the day.
Too much data ruins the investigation, every time.
Quotes
Read moreThere is a tendency in futurism to treat the discipline as a form of science fiction (and I don’t leave myself out of that criticism). We construct a scenario of tomorrow, with people wearing web-connected contact lenses, driving semi-autonomous electric cars to their jobs at the cultured meat factories, and imagine how cool and odd and dislocating it must be to live in such a world. But futurism isn’t science fiction, it’s history turned on its head. The folks in that scenario don’t just wake up one day to find their lives transformed; they live their lives to that point. They hear about new developments long before they encounter them, and know somebody who bought an Apple iLens or package of NuBacon before doing so themselves. The future creeps up on them, and infiltrates their lives; it becomes, for the people living there, the banal present.
Read moreThe companies also can help clients win sympathy. Metersbonwe Group, a domestic apparel retailer, faced eviction from its flagship outlet in Shanghai last year when the local government wanted to replace Chinese-owned brands with big names such as Nike and Adidas (ADDDF). Daqi seeded the Net with opinions linking the issue to a simultaneous controversy over Starbucks’ (SBUX) presence in Beijing’s Forbidden City. While Metersbonwe ended up losing the space, Daqi says the pressure helped the retailer win a lease for a larger store. “In Internet forums we said: A Chinese brand is being pushed out while a foreign brand is still located in the Forbidden City,’” says Daqi’s Zhou. “We got intense and rapid response. People were very angry.” Metersbonwe confirmed that Daqi helped with the Shanghai case but declined to comment further.
Plenty of companies are willing to pay for positive spin. PR outfits hire students to write postings that boost certain brands and criticize the competition, says a staffer at a Western PR firm in Beijing. The job description of one online help-wanted ad reads: “Publicize and popularize [products] via online forums and blogs. Send at least 50 propaganda posts per day.” Workers are offered 1.5 cents per post.
Read moreBringing it all together. That’s the theme of 2008: How to integrate multiple online accounts, activities, profiles, feeds, etc. into one comprehensive service (which is of course aside from the just as popular Web 2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0 .0 theme of having scalability issues and crashing).
Read moreGet something from Make and try it, assuming you’ll screw it up the first time. People love people who can make things. Making’s the new thinking.
Microsoft Corp. will launch a free express bus service for employees to and from its Redmond, Wash. headquarters later this month. It will also increase its presence in Seattle to nearly 1,400 people with the addition of three new work locations in the city, including the Westlake/Terry Building, 111 S. Jackson and 505 Union Station.
The Connector will run five routes in the region, in Seattle, Issaquah, Mill Creek, Sammamish and Bothell, each with several stops. The service will accommodate up to 1,000 employees daily via its Wi-Fi-enabled buses. The free shuttles are expected to begin service on Sept. 24 with most of the routes scheduling five pickup times in the morning and five in the evening.
– M$FT – trying to cool again or something? still.. good on ‘em!
Read more“Dolphins may be becoming stranded as a direct consequence of mercury contamination which damages their neurological system. They become potentially confused and disorientated, and strand themselves. Even the apparently healthy dolphins had high levels of mercury which put them at risk of future health complications,” Dr Thompson said.
Attempting to announce our presence to any intelligence that can get in front of the signal by sending them something made by a company that sells crunchy shit in bags is not the way to the maturity of the species.
Warren Ellis » Inviting Death From Space
– that, and if we spam our neighbours, they’ll just put us on some killfile and we’ll never get a chance to go play with them. EPIC FAIL!
Read moreYouTube is a shell company for entertainment production. Obviously the first thing they outsourced (or the more politically correct term “crowdsourced”) when they started was the production aspects. They coopted you into creating content for free, so they could serve it up to others. The next thing they did was outsource/crowdsource the role of program director, by creating “channels” where folks could select line-ups of quality programming. Next, of course, was the ratings system, which they tasked the users with by creating stars, comments, and reccomendations. Along the way they co-opted the users into marketing and distribution, too, when they made their videos remotely embeddable. And then of course, they tried to make money with it, by selling their own advertisements. Somewhere along the line, they realized that they were exceptionally poor at this and weren’t able to make a profit, so now they’re co-opting the users into doing that as well. Here’s the kicker. After you’ve produced, acted in, rated, programmed, marketed, distributed AND sold advertisements for your own work, they LET you keep 55% of the money.
Read moreThe International Space Station could soon be relaying messages secured using quantum entanglement, if a proposed experiment is accepted by the European Space Agency later this year. If the experiment was successful it would be a step towards unbeatably secure satellite communications between any two points on earth. One form of quantum cryptography exploits the way particles like photons can become “entangled”, into a state where any change to the properties of one affects the other, even across great distances. Einstein famously described it as “spooky action at a distance.” When entangled photons are used to communicate a secret pass-phrase, monitoring their quantum partners makes it possible to know instantly if someone has tried to intercept the message.
The Committee to Nuke Elysium 