 a Popular Mechanics article about one of the entries, which sounds quite intriguing.
Need for Internet security for appliances
Brian Fung writes in the Washington Post:
Ten years ago, the word “smartphone” didn’t exist. By necessity, be able Tuesday. “It’s also that the people building it don’t understand it.” Hagins added, hypothetically: “Just because I know how to write PHP,..
The US has shown nations that they are free to use drones in other countries
Drones are mere technology, so that other nations can easily enough create their own drone fleets. Iran already has a Predator equivalent, as Juan Cole points out at Informed Comment::
Reach through your screen and touch things
My North Carolina friend Mr. Beetner passes along this interesting article. Video is from the article.
BornSharp: Today’s version of the Rolls Razor
The Rolls Razor was very popular in its day (the 30s, 40s, and 50s): a permanent blade that could be honed and stropped, the hone and strop being part of the case. The sharpening system required no skill: you just ran the blade back and forth. They are still in use by some, with the source now being eBay and the like. (If you prowl eBay, beware of cracked hones and rotted strops.)
But today we have a product that uses modern technology:
The razor is shown secured in the sharpening system, housed within the unit. You can find more information at the BornSharp site, and there’s an Indiegogo campaign to raise enough capital to begin production. Indeed, scroll down at the Indiegogo page and you get an excellent tour of the entire system, both the razor and the sharpening mechanism and procedure.
The price point ($370) is high for a razor, but of course that includes a lifetime supply of blades (one blade, but you can sharpen it indefinitely). And the gadget appeal is very high: this is the razor that Flash Gordon might use.
Comcast was indeed able to prevent a good broadband public utility in Seattle
Comcast contributed heavily to defeat the Seattle mayor who was going to bring inexpensive broadband to Seattle. (Comcast saw it as competition, which may have forced them to improve their broadband service (improvements cut into profits) and may even drop their prices (really cuts into profits). But Colorado is proceeding on a course similar to what Seattle was attempting, as reported in the Washington Post by Brain Fung:...
It’s perfectly clear that these companies have zero interest in the common good and are primarily interested in extracting as much money as possible while delivering as little service as they can, and that means keeping broadband at the lowest speed they can get away with. (You may recall the sudden and startling advances in phone service once the AT&T monopoly was ended.)
This country is more and more a hunting ground for predatory companies unrestrained now by government, thanks in large measure to the (well-funded) GOP.
I have seen the future, and it is drone-heavy
Tim Johnson of McClatchy reports:
U.
Soon increasingly active in the US.
The core driver: Some corporations stand to make a lot of money if they can sell a lot of drones, so the chance to make money means that these companies will lobby Congress, contribute to campaign funds, write legislation, stimulate grass-roots support where their factories are located, and basically do whatever it takes to drive up sales. And they will generally succeed in getting laws passed to promote their sales. Everyone is rewarded: the company, the Representatives and Senators, the people who have jobs as a result. This is how we got private prisons, and subsequently mandatory minimum sentences, and three-strikes laws: filling the prisons.
This is exactly why Eisenhower warned quite bluntly against the military-industrial-Congressional complex. (He was convinced to remove the last, but it was in there originally.) You see the process repeatedly, and so we know this is highly likely, just as the spread of SWAT teams.
I bet a lot of drone makers really hope to keep the War on Drugs churning along, requiring ever more equipment and manpower. Lots of money to be made in drugs: selling them or waging war on them.
UPDATE: Drone use in Latin America constitutes the out-of-town tryouts before hitting Broadway.
Gamers, take note: The next step in game hardware
Looking at the Internet in 1988
Looking for Intimacy in the Age of Facebook
The key is that habits of thought—psychological responses and triggers that are routinized (checking text messages and quickly sending replies)—shape one’s personality: behaviors (including responses) become a part of the person. This can, of course, be excellent or horrifying, depending on the habits. A habit of judicious consideration of available evidence leads to one sort of person, the habit of leaping in without a thought or care to another.
In the NY Times Andrew Reiner looks at the habits of mind and patterns of behavior that follow from some of our new communications media:
IT WAS the only time I have ever allowed college students to have their cellphones out during class, in their hands no less.
“I want you to send a text to a friend,” I told students in my course, “The Search for Intimacy in the Age of Facebook.” “It has to be a text that shares your true feelings about something this friend has done or said that upset you but that you never said anything about. And you can’t spend a lot of time agonizing over the wording. Say what you mean and hit ‘send.’ ”
Their eyes bugged wider than when we had talked about hookups. “I’m really hating you right now,” one student murmured, half-jokingly, her eyes locked in the oncoming headlights.
This dilating of my students’ apertures, I’ve come to believe, is exactly what they need both in and outside the classroom if they are going to have the kind of success and fulfillment they desire. That’s because the parts of their lives that truly matter to many of them during college — high marks and solid “A” social lives — are undermined by a widespread, constricting social anxiety that comes, paradoxically, from two of their greatest pleasures: texting and social media..
I got my first glimpse of this at Towson University, where I teach. When I entered the classroom for the first time, I was baffled by glaring contradictions. Students arrived to class early yet they sat still, avoided eye contact and rarely took part in discussions. (If and when they finally spoke up, it usually came on the heels of another student’s comment, and they invariably prefaced their remarks by saying, “First of all, I agree with what you just said,” even if they contradicted their classmate in the next breath.) They handed in assignments (on time) that were formatted with the kind of attention to detail and design you might find in a shareholders prospectus. Yet the ideas darted in so many directions like dragonflies, never penetrating the surface.
I implored students to dig deeper, to mine the complexity and creativity of their ideas; they responded with fancy fonts and grammar check. Frustrated and looking for answers, I took the direct approach and asked students to journal about their risk-taking reticence. A few brave souls confessed to fearing classmates’ judgment for saying or writing something “stupid” or, worse, something that “set them apart.”
I remembered quiet classrooms from my college days, but this was different. Their avoidant silence ultimately hurt their grades and was part of the reason I developed the intimacy course.
More than another literature or creative writing course, these students needed a guide to the twisted subterranean landscape beneath their plugged-in social lives. Texting seemed like the logical place to drop our first pin...
HealthCare.gov: How political fear was pitted against technical needs
Very interesting after-action report, looking at contributing factors to HealthCare.gov’s abortive launch. Amy Goldstein and Julian Eisperin report in the Washington Post:...
This topic interests me because I’ve worked on quite a few software projects, some of which did have launch problems, though no so severe as HealthCare.gov (which is probably more complex than the systems on which I worked).
Oxford University Press at work in the early 20th century
3 guys have developed a HealthCare.gov equivalent, only theirs works
It’s actually operational—not sign-up, I think, but health-plan comparisons. Read about it here.
Seattle Mayor: I have Comcast, and I would like better service
As would we all. Andrea Peterson has a good interview with the mayor in The Switch at the Washington Post. The mayor wants good and affordable broadband in his city, and Comcast is determined to see defeated, however much it costs. The reason is simple: Comcast is motivated by increasing their profits and the role of government is primarily to maintain and improve the general welfare with the idea that this benefits us all.
Looking back: The first big Internet worm and Rober Morris
Twenty-five years ago — Nov 3, 1988 — the Internet suddenly discovered why security is important. Tim Lee has an excellent article looking back at that first big crash and what happened afterwards. A good read.,...
Comcast is donating heavily to defeat the mayor who is bringing gigabit fiber to Seattle
This is high-handed and heavy-handed to boot. I suppose we have Citizens United and the Roberts Supreme Court to thank for this.I have simulated bearing pressure with fluid 218 element.