When Congress agreed this spring to tighten the bankruptcy laws and crack down on consumers who took on debt irresponsibly, no one had the victims of Hurricane Katrina in mind.

Oh whatever, those people are totally responsible for the fact that their city flooded. They shouldn't have taken on debt knowing that hurricanes sometimes blast cities. How can we imbue a sense of personal responsibility in our society if people don't have to pay back debts they incurred before totally unpredictable, collosal disasters!

Strict bankruptcy law new blow for victims | IndyStar.com

New Orleans Flooding Again

Levee's are breaching again.. already.

[ Terrible. Still, though I kind of hesitate to say it, because it sounds like it diminishes the efforts put forth to date, I feel like it's better that this happen now. I mean, if it was gonna happen, at least it's at a time when things are already demolished and many people are still away, rather than halfway through the rebuilding process. -k]

FOXNews.com - U.S. & World - Texas Braces for Catastrophe; New Orleans Flooding Again

Three authors filed suit against Google yesterday contending that the company's program to create searchable digital copies of the contents of several university libraries constituted "massive copyright infringement."

The lawsuit, filed in United States District Court in Manhattan, is the first to arise from the Google Print Library program, the fledgling effort aimed at a searchable library of all the world's printed books.

Another front in the ongoing IP Wars. Interesting things to consider here.

Writers Sue Google, Accusing It of Copyright Violation - New York Times

janelane wrote:
In my "Engineering Design" class, we have to figure out what the world of 2020 will be like. Specifically, we are figuring out design processes for globally distributed design and marketing environments. I am curious what you all think of how 2020 will turn out, and the professor encourages us to ask people with opinions varying from our own. I can think of no greater variety than the Memestreams readership. What do you think? What issues (either same or different) are we likely to face? What will drive the above environments?

Some of the ones I have so far include:
communication
information availability
geographic location
government structure
language
outsourcing

I am interested to know what you have to say.

-janelane, obliged

Excellent... no wonder I feel like i've been getting dumber since i left college. Being presented with interesting problems to solve makes a big difference.

Strangely, my first inclination when I read this is was that 15 years isn't really a very long time, which I guess is mostly just indicitive of the orientation of my mind (either immediate or *very* long term). Then I thought back 15 years. In 1990, I was 12. No one I knew owned a cell phone... We had just swapped our emergency phone call quarters from our Roos into our backpacks. i had seen a cell phone once and thought it was a nice idea but impractical without a car to haul it around in. There wasn't an internet, a few kids were rocking the BBS scene. I was not hardcore, because I owned a Mac. Especially in the realm of technology, the world was a hell of a lot different.

I'll try not to repeat Tom too much, but I think we share some opinions, and he's the only other poster to speak of.

I think in 15 years the "cell phone" will have been replaced again with a much richer appliance. We see the forerunners now, but it'll take time to get there. Personally, I forsee something a little bit bigger, with a useful screen and maybe a keyboard. Possibly a tablet, though people currently aren't moved by the concept. The phone portion will likely just be a headset, or a dumb device with screen and buttons like we have now, but with everything VOIP over the tablet or whatever. Things like PANs (either wireless or over smart cloth or skin) will spring up, though the level of use is debateable.

I think everything will be wireless, though the bandwidth needed for a lot of the rich content will likely still require wires to homes and offices. I agree that POTS will be mostly dead and VOIP will have eclipsed it for almost everyone. You'll have a phone number that can follow you in smart ways.

I think personal knowledge management will become indispensable. As the volume of available information continues to expand, people will become less and less capable of handling it effectively. Reputation systems will form a piece of th... [ Read More (0.5k in body) ]

RE: The Year 2020

peekay wrote:
Caption: "Question: How geeky is a sword stand made of Lego? Answer: Very."

I can't believe he did this. I want one for my Conan sword now. -Pk

Christmas has come early for Kerry, too, I'm sure.

-janelane, lego-master

[ What's incredible is that it doesn't look too bad... hmmm.... -k]

RE: Lego Katanakake (Sword Stand).

The University of Bath and the London College of Fashion are jointly researching biomimetic clothing (an idea whose virtues we've extolled before) that would function similarly to the system used by pine cones to open up and emit seeds. The clothing will use the latest in what the partnership calls "micro technology" to produce material which will let in air to cool a wearer when it is hot and shut out air when it is cold. The smart garments will consist of a top layer of tiny spikes of water-absorbent material, possibly wool, each only 1/200th of a millimeter wide.

Smartclothes are f'ing cool.

Treehugger: Smart Clothing Mimics Pine Cones

This week, some TiVo owners reported receiving a message telling them that they couldn't store their recordings of Family Guy and The Simpsons because the copyright holder had set a flag preventing this.
...

TiVo says that the two programs that got this flag received it as the result of a transmission error -- noise that was "misinterpreted as a copy protection signal."
...

Charitably, an operating system vendor's rep suggested that TiVo might not be lying: rather, he said that perhaps they've just done an "incredibly bad" implementation of Macrovision.

Boing Boing: Could noise cause a TiVo to block recording? Experts say no

In a sign of growing lawlessness, Tenet HealthCare Corp. asked authorities late Wednesday to help evacuate a fully functioning hospital in Gretna after a supply truck carrying food, water and medical supplies was held up at gunpoint.

"There are physical threats to safety from roving bands of armed individuals with weapons who are threatening the safety of the hospital," said spokesman Steven Campanini. He estimated there were 350 employees in the hospital and between 125 to 150 patients.

Tempers flared elsewhere across the devastated region. Police said a man in Hattiesburg, Miss., fatally shot his sister in the head over a bag of ice. Dozens of carjackings were reported, including a nursing home bus. One officer was shot in the head and a looter was wounded in a shootout. Both were expected to survive.

We've reached postapocalyptic.

Superdome evacuation suspended because of fires and gunshots

You get your own online music profile that you can fill up with the music you like. This information is used to create a personal radio station and to find users who are similar to you. Last.fm can even play you new artists and songs you might like. It's addictive, it's growing, it's free, it's music.

[ Memestreamer (and roommate) ophten sent me this link a few days ago and I've already found it to be quite rad. The more people use it, the better it's recomendations will get, but already I've got a list of artists to take a look at based on proposed similarity to things i like.

Best of all, it's trivial to use... you install the audioscrobbler (worst. name. ever.) utility, and just play music via iTunes, Audion or if you're not yet a mac user, XMMS, winamp, etc. The utility pays attention and just uploads the data to build your profile. I haven't gotten into the "personalized radio" bit yet, but i'm looking forward to giving that a shot this (long! w00t!) weekend. -k]

Last.fm

Religious broadcaster Pat Robertson has suggested that American agents assassinate Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to stop his country from becoming "a launching pad for communist infiltration and Muslim extremism."

An official of a theological watchdog group on Tuesday criticized Robertson's statement as "chilling."

"We have the ability to take him out, and I think the time has come that we exercise that ability," Robertson said Monday on the Christian Broadcast Network's "The 700 Club."

"We don't need another $200 billion war to get rid of one, you know, strong-arm dictator," he continued. "It's a whole lot easier to have some of the covert operatives do the job and then get it over with."

[ Wow. I want to see a debate between Pat Robertson and Jesus. And Jesus can be all "Seriously, dude... Where do you get this shit?" -k]

Robertson Calls for Chavez Assassination | ajc.com