Month: May 2007

Explosive Ad

In a scene reminiscent of the Cartoon Network bomb scare that paralyzed the Boston area in January, police shut down a strip mall yesterday in this small western suburb after employees at a Bank of America branch mistook a botched fax for a bomb threat. The branch overreacted to the strange fax, which turned out to be an in-house marketing document sent by the bank’s corporate office.

what is BoA doing sending stupid faxes like that? the solution: radically cut down the number of branches and switch people to online banking

Street View Paranoia

The Drudge Report, that early-warning system for democracy, is now using a screencap of someone peering out of a living room window as his top image. If that didn’t scare you, the banner headline might: SMILE, YOU’RE ON GOOGLE EARTH!

wow, the retards have discovered street view.
2008-04-10:

Google Australia is expected within months to launch an application that will publish highly detailed, street-level photos of much of Australia, in a move that has drawn strong criticism from privacy advocates.

While Google has defended the project, the internet company baulked when The Weekend Australian requested the personal details and addresses of the group’s key figures to allow the paper’s photographers to take pictures of their homes.

it’s luddite season again!
2008-07-30:

The report also includes the distance from the street to the executive’s front door, the most likely driving route the executive would take to Google’s Mountain View headquarters and photos of the stop signs, stoplights and intersections the executive would pass along the way. The Center is publicly releasing the document today to highlight the invasiveness of these Google technologies to individual privacy.

who are these assclowns?

What is it about Europeans that makes them so susceptible to populist arguments in favor of expectations of privacy in a public space? In Europe, Street View is getting a steady onslaught of negative publicity, mainly instigated by populist newspapers, about the evils of taking photography in a public place and publishing it. What a strange concept: Government officials complaining that a company is observing the law, but that they don’t like it anyway.

2010-08-23:

Geht es allerdings um Googles fotografierenden Fuhrpark, klingt Konstantin von Notz plötzlich so, als sei er frisch einer kommunistischen Kaderschmiede entsprungen: Google stelle “monopolartig” den “kompletten öffentlichen Raum” dauerhaft und “aus kommerziellen Interessen” ins Netz, schimpft er dann und fordert “eine Beteiligung der Öffentlichkeit an den Gewinnen”. Hui! Da kommt einfach dieser Internet-Konzern aus einem fernen Land und verdient Geld mit Abbildern des öffentlichen Raums? Ohne zu fragen? Also in etwa so, wie Postkarten- oder Reiseführer-Verlage? Das geht natürlich nicht! Enteignen! Notz ist in bester Gesellschaft, beim Wettbewerb um die höchste Punktzahl auf der nach oben offenen Streetview-Hysterie-Skala.

the real reason germany is so nuts about street view: it exposes the widespread technological illiteracy in europe.

Music OCR

Zenph is creating building blocks for the musical equivalent of software you know from text and graphics. Our first offering is a service that’s something like “OCR (optical character recognition) for piano recordings.” We take piano recordings and convert them back into the precise, nuanced keystrokes and pedal motions that would have been used to create them. This is done in a new format which can be played back with phenomenal reality on corresponding computer-controlled grand pianos. Horowitz, Glenn Gould, and Art Tatum can literally play “live” again. Consider the potential for extracting “artistic DNA.” What distinctive things did Horowitz do that made him unique as a performer?