Mindblown: culture, urbanism, leadership, technology.
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the end times are here
It is 10pm Pacific, Saturday July 2nd, and NBC is showing NASCAR in Primetime.
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Google’s War on Hierarchy, and the Death of Hierarchical Folders
This article – Google’s War on Hierarchy, and the Death of Hierarchical Folders – talks about the issue of organizing filesystems for human interfaces, specifically it talks about the difference between Microsoft’s desktop and Google’s search paradigms. It seems to me that the search paradigm, especially when used in this context to replace hierarchy, is…
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a glimpse of the future?
Since the Supreme Court ruled ambiguously on Monday in the MGM v Grokster case the motives of software designers and programmers are now probative in pursuing civil and criminal actions involving copyright law. This story – Wired News: BitTorrent Whiz Extolled Piracy? [ archive.org ] – is about a manifesto once published on the web…
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O’Connor’s retirement inopportune for moderates
The LA Times is reporting that Justice O’Connor, Supreme Court’s First Woman, Is Retiring. At a time when most eyes were on the Chief Justice, this is a bit of a surprise. It is also a blow to moderates as O’Connor has been a swing vote on many divisive issues during her term. She was…
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Nationalism in Cyberspace
In a story titled “Bush administration annexes internet,” The Register talks about how the U. S. Department of Commerce intends to “retain control over the Internet’s root servers indefinitely.” This is a reversal of previous U. S. and may in some way be a response to U. N. attempts to control the internet. What is…
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“Army recruits shortfall blamed on Iraq war critics”
This is a Yahoo story, which means it will be gone in an hour or so, but the gist of it is that the Pentagon and some Congressmen are blaming people who call the war a mistake, and media types who only show the bad side of the war for the failure of the Army…
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and so it begins…
So much for “don’t be evil” – this guy [ link dead, no archive ] got locked out of Gmail because he uses Firefox with the Greasemonkey extension that lets him add content and functionality to web pages that isn’t provided by the authors. In a world governed by contracts – like ULAs and SLAs…
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A New Film Release Paradigm
Film Movement is a DVD-of-the-month club that releases independent films on DVD to members the same date they are released in the art house circuit. It costs $20 a month or $160 for a year, the DVDs are yours to keep, and shipping is free. This is, to me, as clever as CD Baby, and…
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iTunes update redux
So as I was installing the upgrade to iTunes 4.9 this morning (with all the associated non-background actions it requires) I noticed something strange – a system restart is required after the installation. It made me reflect on how odd a system restart requirement is in the Linux / UNIX world for a userspace software…
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the Presidential address
I’m no longer resentful of the President and his embodiment of a closed-minded xenophobic, neophobic, religiously zealous, segment of the population. I just think he is pathetic. His entire message this evening was that of a shallow, simpleton defending his actions as successful and righteous in the face of overwhelming evidence of their ongoing failure…