Being "always on" is being always off, to something.
UFO Project
Topic: Arts
6:51 am EDT, Jul 11, 2008
“Untitled (UFO)” is an art project conceived by and created for established New York artist Peter Coffin. Coffin had for a while been wanting to create a public UFO flight performance, but it was not until he met Cinimod that he had the confidence to proceed with making his vision a reality. After an intense period of structural and electrical design, and fabrication, the UFO made its inaugural public appearance on 4th July 2008 as a part of the Gdansk Festival of Stars.
There's been a lot of attention paid recently to the issue of laptop searches at borders, including a congressional hearing and a New York Times editorial. I've seen articles with advice on how to protect your data under such circumstances; generally speaking, the advice boils down to "delete what you can, encrypt the rest, hope that Customs officials don't compel production of your key, and securely clean up the deleted files". If you need sensitive information while you're traveling, the usual suggestion is to download it over a secure connection, per the EFF:
Another option is to bring a clean laptop and get the information you need over the internet once you arrive at your destination, send your work product back, and then delete the data before returning to the United States. Historically, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) generally prohibited warrantless interception of this information exchange. However, the Protect America Act amended FISA so that surveillance of people reasonably believed to be located outside the United States no longer requires a warrant. Your email or telnet session can now be intercepted without a warrant. If all you are concerned about is keeping border agents from rummaging through your revealing vacation photos, you may not care. If you are dealing with trade secrets or confidential client data, an encrypted VPN is a better solution.
* On 1/8/2004 the property was purchased for $465,000 with a $372,000 first mortgage, a $46,500 second mortgage and a $46,500 downpayment. * On 3/11/2004 the owners opened a HELOC for $92,000 and withdrew all their downpayment plus another $45,500. * On 9/20/2004 they refinanced with a $552,000 first mortgage. * On 8/16/2005 they opened a HELOC for $38,000. * On 12/8/2005 they opened a HELOC for $150,000. * On 6/8/2006 they refinanced with an Option ARM for $650,000 and a second mortgage of $115,000. * Total property debt of $765,000. * Total mortgage equity withdrawal of $393,000 over a 2 1/2 year period.
“We can see how you can get to $100,” he says. “At $140, I just don’t know how to explain it. We’re surprised.”
For the rest of the country, the feeling is more like shock. As gasoline prices climb beyond $4 a gallon, Americans are rethinking what they drive and how and where they live. Entire industries are reeling — airlines and automakers most prominent among them — and gas prices have emerged as an important issue in the presidential campaign.
Even as politicians heatedly debate opening new regions to drilling, corralling energy speculators, or starting an Apollo-like effort to find renewable energy supplies, analysts say the real source of the problem is closer to home. In fact, it’s parked in our driveways.
From the archive:
Every now and then I meet someone in Manhattan who has never driven a car. Some confess it sheepishly, and some announce it proudly. For some it is just a practical matter of fact, the equivalent of not keeping a horse on West 87th Street or Avenue A. Still, I used to wonder at such people, but more and more I wonder at myself.
Driving is the cultural anomaly of our moment. Someone from the past, I think, would marvel at how much time we spend in cars and how our geographic consciousness is defined by how far we can get in a few hours’ drive and still feel as if we’re close to home. Someone from the future, I’m sure, will marvel at our blindness and at the hole we have driven ourselves into, for we are completely committed to an unsustainable technology.
Also:
In 1947, when Kerouac began his travels, there were three million miles of intercity roads in the United States and thirty-eight million registered vehicles. When “On the Road” came out, there was roughly the same amount of highway, but there were thirty million more cars and trucks. And the construction of the federal highway system, which had been planned since 1944, was under way. The interstates changed the phenomenology of driving. Kerouac’s original plan, in 1947, was to hitchhike across the country on Route 6, which begins at the tip of Cape Cod. Today, although there is a sign in Provincetown that reads “Bishop, CA., 3205 miles,” few people would dream of taking that road even as far as Rhode Island. They would get on the inter-state. And they wouldn’t think of getting there fast, either. For although there are about a million more miles of road in the United States today than there were in 1947 (there are also two more states), two hundred million more vehicles are registered to drive on them.
In 1969, a 14-year-old Beatle fanatic named Jerry Levitan, armed with a reel-to-reel tape deck, snuck into John Lennon's hotel room in Toronto and convinced John to do an interview about peace. 38 years later, Jerry has produced a film about it. Using the original interview recording as the soundtrack, director Josh Raskin has woven a visual narrative which tenderly romances Lennon's every word in a cascading flood of multipronged animation. Raskin marries the terrifyingly genius pen work of James Braithwaite with masterful digital illustration by Alex Kurina, resulting in a spell-binding vessel for Lennon's boundless wit, and timeless message.
Malcolm Gladwell on the challenge of hiring in the modern world
His new book comes out in November.
From the archive:
The evidence suggests that from an executive perspective, the most desirable employees may no longer necessarily be those with proven ability and judgment, but those who can be counted on to follow orders and be good "team players."
Here the purpose of the personality tests administered by career coaches becomes clear. They are useless as measures of ability and experience, but they may be reliable indicators of those who are "cheerful, enthusiastic, and obedient." The dismal experiences of many middle-aged job seekers suggest that corporations would rather find conformists among younger workers who haven't been discarded by employers and aren't skeptical about their work.
In just the past 20 years, knowing how to program in cobol, fortran and assembly language went from desirable by every major employer and a "great major" in school, to a worthy job, but with a chain to a desk and some really really old code to stare at every day. Database programming was the key to development riches. Its still valuable, but nothing like the opportunities of the 80s. Same can be said of C and Basic.
If you know everything there was to know about Novell networks and Lotus Notes, you could easily earn a living. Today, you better have expanded your skill set.
From Dbase to Clipper to ASP to PHP, scripting languages have built worthy applications on top of the network of choice of their day. The nature of scripting languages is that they always will be replaced by something better at some point. What happens to all those PHP apps in place today ?
No matter what the technology, language or platform, it has a limited shelf life and will use its position as "the Hammer" until it loses it.
For the past 15 years, everyone who "gets it" has tried to use the Internet to fix or create whatever they think "the next big thing " is. How much longer until there is something new that comes along and makes Web X.0 on the net look old and tired ?
I did this video for a Russian Metal Band called ANJ. It is pretty crazy. When I saw the lyrics it seemed to be an earnest tribute to Mikael Gorbachov (that's how the Russians spell it), so I was a bit confounded about what the video concept should be, but then I had a brainstorm to take it way over the top and I think it was just the thing. Suffice to say it's half Russian History allegory as told through an old zombie movie made in the Soviet Union, and half animated Soviet Propaganda posters. It's in HD, so let it load a bit before you play it and then click the little "four arrows" symbol on the lower right part of the viewer to see it in true HD.
