At Hope I had a conversation with some folks about having a real time location based image server so that people who where near newsy events could take camera phone pictures and you could quickly find relevant pics based on their location and timeframe. This website is a very close approximation of what I was considering. Nice.

I would prefer if they did the whole planet though.

Mappr! Where It's At.

noteworthy wrote:
] Of course, a SHA1 hash of two octets is completely reversible
] by brute force, so this doesn't really offer any strong form
] of protection, does it? It seems to be little more than
] obfuscation.

Well, I suppose so. How do they tabulate unique visitors without saving full IP information?

RE: Scraping and ad-stripping Google's results

] Researchers at the University of Toronto have invented an
] infrared-sensitive material that's five times more
] efficient at turning the sun's power into electrical
] energy than current methods

[ Rad. They say something like 30% efficiency, so maybe something like 300 W/m^2 if I'm remembering right. Not bad. -k]

CTV.ca | New plastic can better convert solar energy

The author makes a fiscal case for government funded preschool
programs. The book's introduction says,"...this study illustrates the potential benefit to the solvency of the U.S. Social Security system from ECD investment." That's right, the solution to the government's Social Security woes is to send kids to preschool. Government funded preschool programs will be an exercise in social engineering to make sure we have human resources -- a guaranteed work force -- that will assure future generations get their Social Security checks! If ever there was evidence that universal preschooling "is all about the money" -- this is it, folks!

Mandatory Preschool solves Social Security Problems

] This step that we have taken has implications for all
] search engines. These engines crawl the public web
] without asking permission, and cache and reproduce the
] content without asking permission, and then use this
] information as a carrier for ads that generate private
] profit. We are convinced that if citizens scrape Google
] and strip the ads, and make the scraped results available
] as a nonprofit public service, that this is legal. This
] is especially the case if there are public policy
] concerns behind the scraping.
]
] Google Watch has been the most prominent critic of
] Google's outrageous privacy policies for more than two
] years. This is why we started the proxy, and it's why we
] continue the proxy. We invite Google to serve us with a
] cease and desist letter as a first step toward resolving
] this issue. So far, we have yet to hear from Google's
] lawyers. By releasing the source code for our proxy,
] we're trying to escalate the issue.

Google should not save all 4 octets of your IP address. There is no "good" use of that data. Of course, MemeStreams does this too, so yes I'm being hyprocritical, but I didn't just make a fortune in a public offering either. They should store a SHA1 hash of the last 2 octets so they can identify unique visitors without storing identifying data. And the cookie could use some end user control.

Scraping and ad-stripping Google's results

Code Con's content for 2005, which includes many projects of interest to folks here, including a reputation system, a web site recommender service, and an identity management framework.

CodeCon 2005

] Closer to Truth brings together leading scientists,
] scholars and artists to debate the fundamental issues of
] our times.

A websearch for fukuyama turned up this website. Looks interesting.

Closer To Truth

Well, this is fucked up. I'm not sure if I'm more afraid of the lawyer speaking or the people calling in. In any event, the boundry question here is lets say I make rock music thats really angsty and for some people it incites them to violence. How do you define intent? If I know that a minority of the people who hear me are going to react in a certain way do I need to stop talking about it even though I think it has other, useful purposes? Seem so, and it seems like the speak would say thats fine because we can do without my speech.

This speaker claims there is no value in Return to Castle Wolfenstein because Germany is able to have a functional democracy even though that video game is illegal there. I think he is missing an important element of what the first amendment really means.

I hope this thing doesn't become a political football because no one is going to vote for hate speech.

Bruce Fein and Hate Speech

] Login to a website in seconds versus minutes
]
] Create multiple identities ("personas")
]
] Control both the security and type of personal data (your
] "attributes") when logging into a website
]
] You decide a safe location ("Homesite") to store your
] personal data

When I have sat down and thought about how online identity should work I've imagined solutions that sound a lot like this. It will be interesting to see how this develops.

Sxip Networks - personal digital identity

] The economy is going to be good, so I don't think we see
] the start (yet) of the next major bear leg, although this
] year will mark the high for what I think will be many
] years. This will be a frustrating year for stock market
] investors. You can always do well if you are a good
] individual stock picker, but broad indexes and mutual
] funds are not the place to be. The market is a sideways
] to down market, with the risk to the downside as we get
] toward the end of the year and a possible recession on
] the horizon in 2006.
]
] And not to put too fine a point on it, I still think we
] are in a long term secular bear market. In a few years,
] we will look back and realize this was a bear trap -
] another sucker rally.

John Mauldin's 2005 Forecast