The miners’ ordeal may have just begun: Rescuers say it could take four months – until around Christmas – to get them out.

but it could take up to 4 months to actually get them out. yikes.

by constantly micro-broadcasting everything, we’ve ended up macro-remembering almost nothing.

but not so much because of microblogging itself, but because of the lack of a way to aggregate and express the context stuffed into the twitteresque 140 limit magic. I think something like posterous can do a better job of preserving the context (when the context is important – and there are times when the context simply isn’t important).

Germant To Grant Privacy At the Workplace

and

Germany To Roll Out ID Cards With Embedded RFID

so privacy protected even at the workplace (which incidentally I don’t agree with, at least to the level that is proposed) but basically no privacy from the government (dunno, maybe I can agree more with this?). I guess the government one isn’t an invasion of privacy persay, but the 1984 concept puts technology in place that can potentially breech that privacy to a degree unseen before. Is this then *really* in the best interest of the person or the government?

It’s easier to throw away bad code and start over than to change it.

ugh, I think I’ve done that bad code trashing bit before… to my own code…

The experiment #1 is over now. Thanks for participating. Renewed and updated version of the website will be launched tomorrow.

should be interesting to see if chatroulette shoots itself in the foot or manages to become a viable player.

But today, as an ever more wired and interconnected public visits the parks in rising numbers – July was a record month for visitors at Yellowstone – rangers say that technology often figures into such mishaps.

People with cellphones call rangers from mountaintops to request refreshments or a guide; in Jackson Hole, Wyo., one lost hiker even asked for hot chocolate.

it’s not the advance in technology that’s at fault, it’s the decline in social etiquette…

people prefer to believe what they prefer to be true

people often say the truth is what you make of it. whether people believe what is the truth or what they think is the truth in the end doesnt seem to matter. the belief of it trumps it all and it becomes the truth and reality, whether that is actually the case or not.

good to see games making the list of alternate media to help teach curriculum in colleges (or at least one college).

the landing zone seems remarkable small. the height is just amazing to watch.

Why does C use null-terminated strings? Because ASCII NUL is a single byte, and a pointer needs to be at least two bytes (16 bits) to be any use. (Unless you want short strings, limited to 256 bytes.) Each string in C was thus a byte shorter than a pointer-delimited string, saving, ooh, hundreds or thousands of bytes of memory on those early 1970s UNIX machines.

an interesting read covering some of the holes in todays computing paradigms and the reasons they exist.

Myers, who apparently based his second-hand comments on erroneous press reports (he wasn’t at my talk), [claims] that my thesis is that we will reverse-engineer the brain from the genome. This is not at all what I said in my presentation to the Singularity Summit. I explicitly said that our quest to understand the principles of operation of the brain is based on many types of studies — from detailed molecular studies of individual neurons, to scans of neural connection patterns, to studies of the function of neural clusters, and many other approaches. I did not present studying the genome as even part of the strategy for reverse-engineering the brain.

I have no comment on the content since it’s just out of my league. just interesting to see both sides. Or rather, the more interesting part is seeing the misinformation corrections needed in this supposed age of digital information freedom and flow. we still get it horribly wrong.

these are rather amazing photos from 100 years ago. *100*. they still exhibit a certain freshness and quality that can almost make them contemporary. certainly not a century old.

it’s interesting to note the color shifts seen in some of the photographs. details for why are in the description of the page.

I guess the usual nsfw type warnings. I love seeing the creativity of media folks when it comes to *having* to adapt to new media to do advertising for more *traditional* things. there’s always plenty of things you can do without resorting to crying about the current state of things or imposing archane rules on users… or worse yet suing them…

A New York imam and his proposed mosque near ground zero are being demonized by political candidates — mostly Republicans — despite the fact that Islam is already very much a part of the World Trade Center neighborhood. And that Muslims pray inside the Pentagon, too, less than 80 feet from where terrorists attacked.

but the level of hate and bigotry that gets brought up by this mosque issue is amazing. I guess you’re only supposed to give equal freedom and rights so long as it doesn’t offend you and abides by your rules.

just a reminder that the well has been capped, but the damage is still ongoing.