The battle for internet freedom continues on many fronts. The fight over ACTA in Europe has entered a new stage. (From Techdirt.com) “In other words, De Gucht won’t accept the idea that the European electorate, through their representatives in the European Parliament, might possibly want to reject something they were not allowed to know about [...]
Archive for Month June, 2012
Cat Videos, Google, and the Brain
HAL may have just been born at Google Labs, and he likes cats. (From Mashable.) “The “brain” was then sent to complete a task familiar to most humans: Find cat videos on YouTube. The 16,000-processor-strong neural network performed very well; it taught itself to recognize cats from some 10 million digital images found in YouTube [...]
Water Bottle Keeps Cool by “Sweating”
(From Treehugger.com) It’s a design that’s so simple, it’s just begging to be made into a DIY project. Since ideas that appear on Yanko Design and Behance don’t often make the jump from concept to on the market, you might as well try wrapping your water bottle in some cloth, and see if you can [...]
I love Twitter, but geez, get a life folks. It went down for what 2 hours?
I’m not sure it was even down that long, yet I was just greated by this headline. “Twitter sets off jitters as site goes down” I do like the alliteration however. Click here for the story.
Can a decentralized electronic currency save the world’s economy? Maybe.
Bitcoin is one of the most important innovations of the past 5 years. It is open source banking and can be used as an alternative currency to the world’s traditional (and increasingly suspect) currencies. As the world economy grows increasingly unstable, bitcoin, in a small way may provide a pocket of resilience. Many people are [...]
8 gigs, then and now
Not so long ago…
Ethiopia Criminalizes Skype
Only 1% of the population is served by the state owned phone company but governments are afraid of information, and apparently in this case, loss of revenue. Better think twice about firing up Skype in Addis Ababa, it could get you 15 years in prison. Click here for the story.
Is that a bikini you’re wearing? Google/Apple use “spy planes” to see everywhere.
Privacy is disappearing at an ever more rapid pace and we’d be wise to take a moment and think about where we are going with all of this. Though Google and Apple are private companies this seems a clear violation of one’s expectation of privacy. Our rights end where those of others begin, and vice [...]
Amazing Photos from SpaceX
Photos from private enterprise’s entre into space. Richard Branson has had an easier time getting into the spaceflight business than into the soft drink business. What does that tell you? Click here for the photos.
What software programming languages were used by the Soviet Union’s space program?
I have never thought about this before, but what an interesting question. The attached discussion is illuminating- if just a little nerdy. Click here for the article.
