Monday, January 30, 2012
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
Detroit Re-Photography (designobserver)
Dave Jordano’s photographs of Detroit help provide an antidote to this process of mystification. Jordano was a student of photography at the College for Creative Studies in his native Detroit in the early 1970s. Following the example of his photography heroes — Walker Evans, Robert Frank and others who also stretched, but did not break, the bounds of the documentary tradition — he set out back then to photograph his city. More recently, Jordano, who now works as a commercial photographer in Chicago, has been revising his student photographs and rephotographing the sites of the originals
Stephen Hawking: "Philosophy is dead."
Philosophy: "Excuse me?"
The Atlantic: What Happened before the Big Bang. The new Philosophy of Cosmology
Philosophy: "Excuse me?"
The Atlantic: What Happened before the Big Bang. The new Philosophy of Cosmology
Wednesday, January 18, 2012
Today is PROTEST SOPA day. Several sites have joined the blackout effort to raise awareness over just how horrendous and technically inept this bill is.
Please take a moment to write Congress through instructions at AmericanCensorship.org, or the EFF to voice your concerns about the legitimacy of this lobbyist-authored legislation designed to deliver unconstitutional power to law enforcement on behalf of special interests. Or sign directly through google
Metafilter, google, BoingBoing, Wordpress, Reddit, Mozilla, MoveOn have all gone dark today.
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
Wednesday, January 04, 2012
The Coming War on General Purpose Computation (Cory Doctorow) (slyt)
From the description:
The upshot: a world of ubiquitous malware, where everything we do to make things better only makes it worse, where the tools of liberation become tools of oppression.
Our duty and challenge is to devise systems for mitigating the harm of general purpose computing without recourse to spyware, first to keep ourselves safe, and second to keep computers safe from the regulatory impulse.
From the description:
The upshot: a world of ubiquitous malware, where everything we do to make things better only makes it worse, where the tools of liberation become tools of oppression.
Our duty and challenge is to devise systems for mitigating the harm of general purpose computing without recourse to spyware, first to keep ourselves safe, and second to keep computers safe from the regulatory impulse.
Tuesday, January 03, 2012
Richard Stallman Was Right All Along (osnews, via slashdot)
"But here we are, at the start of 2012. Obama signed the NDAA for 2012, making it possible for American citizens to be detained indefinitely without any form of trial or due process, only because they are terrorist suspects. At the same time, we have SOPA, which, if passed, would enact a system in which websites can be taken off the web, again without any form of trial or due process, while also enabling the monitoring of internet traffic. Combine this with how the authorities labelled the Occupy movements - namely, as terrorists - and you can see where this is going."
"But here we are, at the start of 2012. Obama signed the NDAA for 2012, making it possible for American citizens to be detained indefinitely without any form of trial or due process, only because they are terrorist suspects. At the same time, we have SOPA, which, if passed, would enact a system in which websites can be taken off the web, again without any form of trial or due process, while also enabling the monitoring of internet traffic. Combine this with how the authorities labelled the Occupy movements - namely, as terrorists - and you can see where this is going."
Happy 2012! With the new year, you may be firming up your dictatorial resolutions to guarantee absolute dominion over your subjects. To this end, the Economist has published a handy guide: "How to Be a Dictator"