Mindblown: culture, urbanism, leadership, technology.
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Monsters and those who fight them
“He who fights against monsters should see to it that he does not become a monster in the process. And when you stare persistently into an abyss, the abyss also stares into you.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
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Is Edward Snowden a traitor?
Probably not, and here’s why I say that. No matter the value you place on the two things that he undeniably has done – violate the various rules for the handling of classified information and in so doing expose the vast array of things being done by the United States in the domain of surveillance…
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No, the X-Men continuity is not broken
This Io9 article makes a claim that the X-Men franchise is still continuity bound by the movies that have come before X-Men: Days of Future Past. I disagree.
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Centralized Doesn’t Scale
If there is one lesson I’ve learned from eight years selling Application Delivery Controllers, it it that centralized never scales, is a single point of vulnerability and failure, and promotes an authoritarian posture. Centralization is an anti-pattern. Don’t do it. Ever.
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Strategic versus Tactical
With increasing frequency I’m encountering misunderstandings about the difference between strategic and tactical. This is bothersome, tiresome, and frustrating. In many ways those are all my problem, since it is unfair to expect civilians to understand military concepts, but the corporate world is filled with military-isms that just evoke an awful lot of face palm…
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How to make a DC universe movie franchise
Marvel has always been my favorite of the two major comic book producers, and I think part of the reason for it’s success at the theaters has been related to why I liked them best – their characters and stories had more gray areas than DC’s “lawful good” pantheon – post Frank Miller Batman not…
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An unsolicted rant about solution selling
begin rant Solution selling is garbage… the entire premise that links the occasionally true assertion that “people don’t buy products, they buy solutions to business problems” with the notion that you can pre-package solutions to those business problems and build a marketing campaign around them is absurd. People are the cause of the aforementioned business…
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Godelian origins of Google’s strategy?
Cheat to win. That is the message I got from frequent readings of Kurt Godel’s essay “On Formerly Undecidable Propositions of Principia Mathmatica and Related Systems” over the four years spanning from my junior year in college until the end of my first post-graduate job. Cheat to win, or more accurately, transcend the system to…
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identity, privacy, and technology
Let us agree up front that we (society) suck at all three. Now, what do we do about it? Identity is mostly about accountability and a little bit about trust and non-repudiation. Accountability for what you do is a foundation of a civil society, and without it we don’t really function very well. Knowing who…
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Cookies, certificates, namespaces, and data
I’d like an operating system that lets me control cookies the way it lets me control certificates. What this means is that I want a little hacker window open on the side of my browser that shows me every cookie being requested by a site, every cookie being given to me by a site, and…