Mindblown: culture, urbanism, leadership, technology.
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To the cloud and beyond
Connectivity providers are aging behemoth’s kept alive by the life support of monopoly. These monopolies, whether local franchise operations in the case of cable TV, or spectrum licenses in the case of wireless providers, assure premium prices for a commodity product, namely the connection from person to Internet. Yet even artificial scarcity isn’t enough to…
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The grid, the box, and the meter
Information utility is all about ubiquitous access to data, which is all about the network, which is all about the balance of what is in the network versus what is on the network, and more explicitly, how that balance is managed – or operationalized, in the lingo of those who deal with such things. Network…
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The consequences of infrastructure on creators
Creators need infrastructure and I don’t mean just running water and electricity, I mean resources to create (synthesize) with. For me that means network devices, the output of the IEEE and IETF and W3C, the entire ecosystem of network users, and the economic market of e-commerce among other things. I’m not going to be very…
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Some thoughts
some thoughts on “burning pain” opportunities in arenas I know about: consumer networking gear – we’re getting more networked and Best Buy isn’t sufficient in expertise or selection to solve our problems getting connected, staying connected, and managing all our digital junk. This is more than just zeroconf because I want to be able to…
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Computers are not making my life better in ways that I care about
There is this notion in my head that a computer should be part of that “Jetson Future” where we get to seriously contemplate what economics looks like when there isn’t any actual labor to perform, beyond the creation of machines which create machines to do work for us. I know that prospect scares people, and…
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A Cloudy Future
I am woken at the peak of my sleep cycle nearest to the hour I need to get up, my alarm using a fuzzy logic algorithm flashed to the internal circuits, which blends my typical snooze-cycle (stored on-line in the home NAS) and the bio-metric sensor placed under my mattress with today’s calendar appointments and…
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deconstructing the Fourth Amendment
Since the USAToday story about the NSA warrant-less-wiretaps broke, we’ve been entertained by numerous inflamed public figures and hyperbolic claims to this or that, many of them centered on privacy, and the legality of searching vast stores of “generic” information. Most of these claims of legal violation come back to Amendment IV of the U.…
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Bush Endorses the Creation of a New National Security Service
via: Voice of America One would hope that years from now we aren’t looking back on this day with a sense of failure. Domestic spying has traditionally been a benchmark of a government with too much power over the people who empower it. The creation of the National Security service certainly has the potential to…
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threats…
The single greatest threat to liberty in an ostensibly free nation-state is that increases in the efficiency of the bureaucratic system for those who execute the system outpace increases in the transparency of the bureaucratic system for those who are subject to the system.
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Fear itself
Someone named Graham Allison has written a book titled, “Nuclear Terrorism, the ultimate preventable tragedy.” There is a web page [archive.org] and the bio indicates that Mr. Allison is the founding dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, which means, I suppose, that he is an old white man, a parent of…