Month: July 2007

US entry denied

nice case study why the xenophobic, protectionist policies at the INS are complete nonsense, and harmful for business everywhere.

This time, I had printed the materials for the trainings class in Germany and put them into my suitcase. Upon arrival in the US, I passed immigration, but was stopped in customs. My suitcase was searched, and I was asked about the trainings materials. After answering that these are for the trainings I am conducting, an immigration officer was called, and I was put in an interview room. For the next 4.5 hours I was interviewed about who exactly I am, why I am coming to the US, what the nature of my contract with Blackhat is, and why my trainings class is not performed by an American citizen. After 4 hours, it became clear that a decision had been reached that I was to be denied entry to the US, on the grounds that since I am a private person conducting the trainings for Blackhat, I was essentially a Blackhat employee and would require an H1B visa to perform 2 days of trainings in the US.

OSM Army

I’m not convinced that the state of the art in GIS databases has appropriate answers. The OSM community, as ever, creates new cart-tracks across well-paved spaces. The debate is too heated for any but the really committed to follow, the tracks become effaced in debate, but perhaps they’re leading somewhere new. Or as the New Data Model paper puts it, Complexity does not mean that it has to be more complicated.

jo thinks the new OSM data model is more RDF-like, which of course she approves of

Virtual Credit Cards

Virtual credit cards, also known as substitute credit card numbers or controlled payment numbers, have already been around 7 years but have never caught on despite being a free and effective layer of protection.

of course, sensible solutions like this to “identity theft” are never propagated. instead, we get all the headless chicken nonsense.

Collaborative Mapping business models

Let’s start by fast forwarding to a future where we have economically successful collaborative maps. Then from there we can look back and see how we might get there, what tipping points would be involved. it is possible to decouple the function of ‘ownership’ of a set of geospatial data from the functions that are needed for its upkeep. Indeed such a decoupling could easily lead to a more efficient market around the upkeep of the data. One thing we neglected to mention as well is that a collaborative map opens up the potential for non ‘expert’ contributors to do valuable work, as long as the structure is set up to minimize vandalism and the like.