...more recent posts
"Telecom researchers have successfully tested a solar-powered, remotely operated aircraft capable of relaying high-quality television, cell phone, and Internet signals and transmissions to the ground." Cool. That's the sort of technology I'm thinking of for the fibre optically tethered high altitutde balloon rising from the WTC site.
Another argument for this plan: NYC doesn't need millions more square feet of office space. But I do understand the feeling that whatever we build should be good for the economy (as well as providing space for a memorial.) This gives you both. An economic boost by clearly making NYC the most wired place in the world. Plus we can keep a lot of open space at the site. Just a glowing (plusing with traffic load) thread rising into the stratosphere.
Professional comics threaten to strike over unfair competition from the U.S. government. An unidentified SPC (Society of Professional Comedians) spokesman summed up the outrage at a press conference on Tuesday:
When you have Ashcroft redirecting the TIPS hotline to America's Most Wanted there just isn't much room left for the more traditional "made up" type of comedy. How the hell are we supposed to compete?
I've been coveting the Danger Hiptop (cellphone/two-way/pda/email/websurfing gizmo) for months. Looks like it is finally creeping toward availability. Danger isn't manufacturing the units, they are just selling the design to other companies who can make it and rebrand it as they wish. Danger makes money selling back end ASP services (for instance, your address book isn't stored on the device, it's stored on the servers at Danger.) The newly rebranded T-mobile (was Voicestream) now has it listed as coming soon. Yum.
Two atoms are at a bar having a drink. Suddenly one blurts out "I lost an electron!" The other replies "Are you sure?"
"Yes, I'm postive."
"A Contrarian View of Open Source". Bruce Sterling stirring the pot at the O'Reilly Open Source convention. Long, but really worth it if you can make it through to the end.
Free Love as a policy is sort of okay. I mean, people will kinda overlook it when you're young... Because they expect you to die, of VD or AIDS or something! But the Linux Girl just laughs at viruses. "HA HA HA! Only debutantes from Redmond get viruses!"
And then she starts having children. Any guy's children. She'll have your child, as long as you're not particular about giving it your name. She's got a whole brood of kids, like Sendmail, and Postfix, and Apache, and Perl. And some of 'em die young, and some are mentally retarded. But the hippie earth mother is just hitting her stride here. She's a one-woman demographic boom! She's having litters of kids, kids by the dozens.
Cops are coming around, and stuff... "Is this your trailer park, ma'am?"
"Not really, officer!"
"Could we see some ID, please?"
"I never bother much with any official papers!"
"Are you from around here, ma'am? You don't look very American."
"Actually, I'm Finnish, officer! Look at this old birth certificate!"
OK, I admit it, I can't hear a thing. Well, not quite, but my ears are not working well. They seem to be a bit clogged. Especially my left. This started after swimming in the Ocean out at Fire Island.
It is very strange to not be able to hear well. My social skills have been severly impacted - and they weren't that good to start with. There is an extra layer between me and the world. Plus, I say "huh?" a lot.
I guess I might have to see a doctor about this. I honestly can't remember the last time I went to a doctor. I think it might have been to get a physical before my freshman year in college! That would have been 1988. But I must have been since then. I can't remember though. I should probably go.
So if you thought I was ignoring you: I probably just didn't hear.
Huh?
The CIA venture capital firm In-Q-tel is backing a company which sells an enterprise weblogging tool.
According to Infoworld, Mitsubishi is moving into the mesh network space.
In a nutshell, MOTERAN will allow any client PC or handheld with an IEEE 802.11x card or Bluetooth capabilities to behave as a relay point to communicate with the next terminal down the line and to use this terminal to move packets along to their ultimate destination.
Side note: what's the deal with all the inforworld.com pop up definition links? Seems like a possibly good idea gone awry. At the very least it should be smart enough to not keep offering the same definition for the same word that is repeated in the same article.
There is a RealPlayer for OS X now. I'm not saying you want to install it, but it's there.
Here's the beginners guide to installing things on OS X (executive summary: just keep double clicking):
Download the file. Double click the file. Double click whatever new file results from double clicking the first file. Repeat this until you get to a screen saying you need administrative access (if you get a folder or drive icon along the way - and you will - just double click that to open it, and then double click again on whatever is inside that - probably a graphic that looks like an open box.) On the you need administrative access screen click the lock icon on the lower left, enter your password to the computer (the one you log on with.) Agree to whatever it asks you. Reboot if it insists, but you shouldn't need to.
Update: you don't have to do anything to install RealPlayer. Just download it, and everything should happen automatically (it did for me.) You'll end up with the application on your desktop. Double click to launch it. Nice.
Interesting (well, if you find artificial intelligence interesting) slashdot interview with Dr. Richard Wallace, creator of Alicebot. You can talk to Alice yourself here. And here is the A.L.I.C.E. (Aritificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity) website. Don't miss the cool visualizations of Alice's brain.