"The future masters of technology will have to be lighthearted and intelligent. The machine easily masters the grim and the dumb." -- Marshall McLuhan, 1969
YouTube - Letter to Ann Coulter
Topic: Politics and Law
3:07 am EST, Mar 5, 2007
If you like Henry Rollins, you'll enjoy this, er, marriage proposal?
Create a funny, original, intelligent, and accurate joke that begins with:
Alice and Bob walk into a bar...
All entries will be judged by a panel of elite IMI personnel at an upcoming conference. Reply to this post with your entries. Be prepared to back up your joke with examples, proofs, and academic papers.
Oh, the comedy of errors. Thank you Boston for the string of laughs your fair city's bomb squad has provided me in these desperate times. In the face of actual real threats, I'm so glad that someone can lighten things up with a unending string of absurdity.
For those who have not caught the latest over reaction of the Boston bomb squad, you can find details over at BongBoing and video from Fox. In short, they blew up a traffic counter thinking it was a bomb. No, it didn't have flashing LEDs on it.
Front Line Assembly's hit track 'Mindphaser' from their 1992 release 'Tactical Neural Implant'
This is one of the great hacker anthems from this period of time. I must agree with Decius, this brings back memories for me too. This album got heavy rotation from me during the BBS days of old, as well as during the wild west years of the Internet. Amid the fast paced edits in this video, my brain is filling in snapshots of irc clients on efnet, dial-up bbs systems, and unix command line prompts..
What is the science behind trust? How does trust build, and how does it break down? While it is much easier to measure transactions than trust, Stephenson models the threshold size for networks which contain key nodal elements such as hubs, gatekeepers and pulse-takers. Through numerous examples and business case studies, these analyses begin to give a good grasp on models for healthy networks. Stephenson closes her talk by looking ahead to the challenges of heterachy, the networking of institutions, which now demands an even greater capacity for trust and understanding.
The Department of Homeland Security is paying Rutgers $3 million to oversee development of computing methods that could monitor suspicious social networks and opinions found in news stories, Web blogs and other Web information to identify indicators of potential terrorist activity.
The software and algorithms could rapidly detect social networks among groups by identifying who is talking to whom on public blogs and message boards, researchers said. Computers could ideally pick out entities trying to conceal themselves under different aliases.
The Unified Cryptologic Architecture Office (UCAO) is developing a secure information sharing architecture, called HatWizard, to support intelligence information dissemination within the cryptologic community.
I'm with Acidus on this one.. This is more of a gift to people looking to do evil things to people, than it is to creating interesting websites. There are way better ways to handle shared storage between websites.
In this post I'll walk through some of the ways web application developers take advantage of local storage to speed up applications, persist user preferences, and enable features for "occasionally connected" users.
A web application can rely on local storage options when disconnected from the Internet, saving changes locally and synchronizing results whenever an active Internet connection is available.
Imagine a personal finance site storing your stock portfolio and historical prices locally, creating quick access to charting and planning tools powered by pre-loaded data.
I swear on all that is holy Niall Kennedy, for even suggesting this, I am going to punch you in the face if I ever meet you.
Current versions of Firefox 2 allow unlimited storage through the DOM Storage feature but future Firefox releases (post-2.0.0.1) will restrict usage to 5 MB per-domain. A website can access not only data within its own subdomain or domain, but within a given top-level domain (.gov, .com, etc.) or any requesting page, creating some interesting opportunities for shared data namespaces.
Why is it every time I turn my back the web developers of this world decide to collectively binge drink on stupid?
I got word from one of the producers that my website will be mentioned on this show, sometime in February. I don't have an exact date yet, but will post here when I find out. Elonka :)
This just in, Elonka's Kryptoswork is going to be featured on CourtTV Saturday night. Details below...
Update: The (very brief) Kryptos segment will be on tomorrow:
Date: Saturday, February 24, 2007 Channel: CourtTV Show: Saturday Night Solution (during/between Forensic Files / Body of Evidence)
As a heads-up, "Saturday Night Solution" isn't really a "show" so much, as a theme on Saturdays. Or in other words, you can't specifically TiVo it. ;) The way it seems to work, is that there are two hosts throughout the evening, who chatter during commercial breaks and offer other tidbits of information about private detectives or spy equipment or, in this case, on secret codes.
I don't know exactly in which break that they'll be talking about Kryptos, but my best guess is that it will be in the break between the two shows "Forensic Files" and "Body of Evidence" on Saturday evening.
There will also be a longer segment on Kryptos coming up this summer, on the PBS program "Nova." (Specifically, NovaScienceNow) I'll post more info on the exact date, as soon as I hear anything.
And for anyone who misses the CourtTV segment, I'll have a mirror up on my personal site later, probably at http://www.elonka.com/elonkanews.html .
Social Networks and Social Information Filtering on Digg
Topic: MemeStreams
1:59 am EST, Feb 23, 2007
Rather than being a liability, however, social networks can be used to personalize and tailor information to individual users, and drive the development of new social search algorithms.... Digg can create personalized front pages for every user that are based on his or her friends’ readings. This will finally free individuals from “tyranny of the majority” which results from viewing a common global front page.
Maybe the reason why apparently empty messages like these resonate with my generation is that we don't have any icons of our own.
When someone recently asked me why people my age (I'm 21) listen to bands from our parents' generation, I had to explain that, with a few exceptions, we don't have any real musicians any more. Without massive advertising campaigns, a lot of the "music" you can buy today, like Beyonce, wouldn't exist.
We're a voiceless generation. We have nothing we can point to and say: "This is us, this is where we stand." We're lost and silent and we don't know what to do about it. We're sold a parody of culture that we buy because, well, what choice do we have?
This is a Gold Star article. There is some real insight in here. This is in line with how I feel about where we are right not culturally.
