There are great benefits to connectedness, but we haven't wrapped our minds around the costs.
Balance Out of Life
Topic: Society
1:11 am EST, Feb 12, 2012
Wyatt Hodgson:
Koyaanisqatsi (1982) at 1552% speed.
Decius:
There are certain basic pleasures of the ancient world that one has to work very hard to come by today. We've cut ourselves off from things that even our grandfathers took for granted.
Jamie Hogan:
If one genius bear can do it, sooner or later there might be two genius bears.
You can't push history off its course. You can, however, accelerate it.
Pico Iyer:
It's only by having some distance from the world that you can see it whole, and understand what you should be doing with it.
Kate Allen:
Two weeks ago, Matthew Ho and Asad Muhammad launched a homemade balloon carrying a Lego passenger and four cameras. It fell back down to Earth 97 minutes later with astonishing footage from an estimated 24 kilometres above sea level, three times the typical cruising altitude of a commercial aircraft.
Their jerry-rigged contraption recorded the Lego man's journey from a soccer pitch in Newmarket to the stratosphere -- high enough to see their two-inch astronaut floating above curvature of our planet, clutching a Canadian flag with the blackness of space behind him.
The project cost $400 and took four months of free Saturdays. It wasn't a school assignment. They just thought it would be cool.
W.J. Hennigan:
Officially known as the Congressional Unmanned Systems Caucus, the panel was formed in 2009 to inform members of Congress on the far-reaching applications of drone technology.
Vivek Kundra:
The ability of 5 billion people to instrument the world and share their experiences in a low-cost manner has forever shifted power away from the hands of the few to the network.
Andrew Blankstein:
The Los Angeles Police Department is warning real estate agents not to use images of properties taken from unmanned aircraft. "We are just trying to inform the public to ensure that before hiring these companies to operate these aircraft in federal airspace, that they are abiding by the federal regulations to ensure safety," said police Sgt. George Gonzalez.
Bruce Schneier:
Even if it was done right it would be the wrong thing to do.
Tilda Swinton:
People perpetrate atrocities and other people say, 'We didn't see it coming.' The idea that people actually wear themselves on their faces seems to me to be less real than what life actually is, which is a series of concealments and containments.
From solstice to solstice, this six month long exposure compresses time from the 21st of June till the 21st of December, 2011, into a single point of view. Dubbed a solargraph, the unconventional picture was recorded with a pinhole camera made from a drink can lined with a piece of photographic paper. Fixed to a single spot for the entire exposure, the simple camera continuously records the Sun's path each day as a glowing trail burned into the photosensitive paper.
It may seem like SOPA is the end game in a long fight over copyright, and the Internet, and it may seem like if we defeat SOPA, we'll be well on our way to securing the freedom of PCs and networks. But this isn't about copyright, because the copyright wars are just the 0.9 beta version of the long coming war on computation. The entertainment industry were just the first belligerents in this coming century-long conflict.
The grievances that arose from unauthorized copying are trivial, when compared to the calls for action that our new computer-embroidered reality will create.
We have been fighting the mini-boss, and that means that great challenges are yet to come, but like all good level designers, fate has sent us a soft target to train ourselves on ... we may yet win the battle, and secure the ammunition we'll need for the war.
Bruce Sterling:
This is gonna get worse before it gets better, and it's gonna get worse for a long time.
Rebecca Brock:
People say to me, "Whatever it takes." I tell them, It's going to take everything.
The challenge of information technology is facilitating the search for truth. Building an infrastructure for truth. Building a process that truly seeks the truth and a system for engaging in that process.
I worry that our inability to match the achievements of the 1960s space program might be symptomatic of a general failure of our society to get big things done.
Marco Arment:
Attention to detail, like most facets of truly good design, can't be (and never is) added later. It's an entire development philosophy, methodology, and culture.
The fundamental fact about all of us is that we're alive for a while but will die before long. This fact is the real root cause of all our anger and pain and despair. And you can either run from this fact or, by way of love, you can embrace it.
Michael Chabon:
To attempt to live up to your children's expectations -- to hew to the ideals you espouse and the morals that you lay down for them -- is to guarantee a life of constant failure, a failure equivalent with parenthood itself.
Roger Scruton:
The decline of religion has deprived us of sacred things. But it has not deprived us of the need for them.
I believe that slowness is an act of resistance, not because slowness is a good in itself but because of all that it makes room for, the things that don't get measured and can't be bought.
Finding a way to articulate a critical stance ... before technology giants like Facebook usurp public imagination with their talk of "frictionless sharing" should be top priority for anyone concerned with the future of democracy.
With our partners around the world, we will work to create a future for cyberspace that builds prosperity, enhances security, and safeguards openness in our networked world. This is the future we seek, and we invite all nations, and peoples, to join us in that effort.
Are people actually liberated by all this freedom? Living a decent life just isn't good enough anymore. Why would you settle for decent when anything is possible?
Few of us have the self-knowledge and emotional discipline to say one thing while meaning another. If we say something often enough, we come to believe it. We don't usually delude others until after we have first deluded ourselves.
Harold Bloom:
Obsessed by a freedom we identify with money, we tolerate plutocracy as if it could someday be our own ecstatic solitude. I wonder though which is more dangerous, a knowledge-hungry religious zealotry or a proudly stupid one? Either way we are condemned to remain a plutocracy and oligarchy.
Clarence W. Dupnik, the Pima County sheriff:
Pretty soon we're not going to be able to find reasonable, decent people willing to subject themselves to serve in public office.
The Miami-Dade Police Department recently finalized a deal to buy a drone.
W.J. Hennigan:
The Federal Aviation Administration plans to propose new rules for the use of small drones in January, a first step toward clearing the way for police departments, farmers and others to employ the technology.
David Remnick:
Ten years after the attacks, we are still faced with questions about ourselves -- questions about the balance of liberty and security, about the urge to make common cause with liberation movements abroad, and about the countervailing limits. Only absolutists answer these questions absolutely.
David K. Shipler:
If we cannot mobilize sufficient concern about what we cannot see, then the invisible surveillance will continue undermining the Fourth Amendment without the resistance required to preserve our rights.
The absence of liberty will tend to guarantee an absence of security, and conversely, one cannot talk meaningfully about an individual's having liberty in the absence of certain basic conditions of security. While either in excess can threaten the other, neither can meaningfully exist without the other.
Our investigation has led us to believe that the attack is in the category of an Advanced Persistent Threat (APT).
A Secret Service analyst:
The experienced ones take their time and slowly bleed the data out.
David Sanger and John Markoff:
The International Monetary Fund was hit recently by what computer experts describe as a large and sophisticated cyberattack whose dimensions are still unknown.
David Chavern, Chief Operating Officer at the US Chamber of Commerce:
It's nearly impossible to keep people out. The best thing you can do is have something that tells you when they get in.
Christopher Drew and John Markoff:
Lockheed sells cybersecurity services to military and intelligence agencies, and some experts said its failure to take greater precautions with its own systems could be embarrassing.
David Chavern, Chief Operating Officer at the US Chamber of Commerce:
It's nearly impossible to keep people out. The best thing you can do is have something that tells you when they get in.
It's the new normal. I expect this to continue for the foreseeable future. I expect to be surprised again.
Robert Reich:
Fully two-thirds of Americans recently polled by the Wall Street Journal say they aren't confident life for their children's generation will be better than it's been for them. The last time our hopes for a better life were dashed so profoundly was during the Great Depression.
