Tech

Go over and read this recent post on Boing Boing about how DRM is affecting attempts to advance mobile music. It is good stuff. You don’t want to make bunny cry do you?

I found this link through Boing Boing about a man whose cat lost the use of his rear legs in a traffic accident. The owner's solution: build a robotic platform and teach the cat to drive it around the house.

I just found an article through Slashdot about some software being developed that can monitor phone conversations and provide you a score to display how much of a jerk you are being.

The following is a Public Service Announcement. For the love of God, please write the IDv3 tags for your files consistently! It is driving me absolutely nuts going through and correcting your tags by hand every time I download one of your files.

Well, maybe not a superhero, but an article I found on Wired.com describes how researchers may be able to turn our cell phones into a huge distributed network for detecting pollution levels.

This morning, I found myself thinking of how technology can alter communication, particularly in the way it alters our way of storytelling. At its base, conversation is a means of exchanging information and can be used to make collaborative decisions.

I highly recommend you go read Cory Doctorow’s article on Apple embedding Trusted Computing technology into their OS kernel in an attempt to prevent circumvention of DRM. By extension, this technology can also have the result that if you are using proprietary applications, you will not be able to open files created on those programs in another piece of software even if the file format is supported.

I recently learned about the online service Second Life. This must be one of the most bizarre things I have encountered online. For those of you unfamiliar with this service, Second Life is essentially a complex 3D digital environment where you can create your own completely customizable avatar, and by avatar I don’t mean an icon, but a fully realized 3D digital body.

“Can’t you see? He has the mind of a child!” Or rather, the RIAA does. Seriously, this is just getting ridiculous. The RIAA has done it again, and yes, they made bunny cry.

I found this article on Wired.com all about research into human lifestyles using customized life styles to store data on social networking, sleep patterns and other activities. The author suggests in the near future we will be data mining, archiving and distributing all aspects of our lives.

Every time that you support the RIAA or MPAA in their misguided DRM crusade, whether it is to restrict innovations in technology or to sue their fanbase, it is also true that:

I know many fine folks on the net have expressed their disappointment regarding the next version of Windows codenamed Longhorn. At first I was very excited. The proposed WinFS which would track files using a relational database was an ambitious and worthwhile project, as are the Avalon and Indigo projects.

Well, it looks like the military will soon have the energy weapons us geeks have always envisioned, although we a far cry away from the future we hoped for. This article from Wired.

I found this link on Robot Wisdom, about a different way of looking at evolution. (I even used a variation on Jorn Barger’s entry title for this entry.) Scientists are attempting to map evolution as a virtual tree.

Finally, people in the movie industry are starting to think about combatting piracy in an effective way. Morgan Freeman (yes, that Morgan Freeman) is teaming up with Intel to form a company that will make it easier to buy movies than to pirate them, even while they are still in the theatre.

One of the fathers of blogging is actually homeless. You can read a good article about him here, and you can visit his site here.

This may not sound very hip in these days of iTunes, iPod and the Mac Mini, but I really dislike Apple. I have always thought that Apple products as a whole were ridiculously over-hyped, and that their performance was not nearly outstanding enough to merit the rabid fan base they had developed.

I survived my weekend at work and I am totally burned out. I plan on having a beer and crashing until tomorrow, but in the meantime you should read about the research that I am sure will someday evolve into our cybernetic overlords.

It’s true. I see an open source application and I get all excited. Hey, baby! You want to come play with me for a while??? Oh, it gets me hot!

It is nice to see a lawmaker with the consumers of digital media forefront in his mind, rather than the entertainment industry’s lawyers and lobbyists. Read about it in Wired here.