ha! i had no idea that the KLF was a front to burn 1.8M$ in cash
Month: August 2007
Funding the X-Prize
To figure out how to price the contract the insurance company called “the experts” at Boeing. The conditions for the X-Prize to be won were so unrealistic as to be basically impossible within any reasonable time frame.
Terrorist Screening Center
“The information walls are down to the extent they can be. We have moved from a need-to-know mindset to an obligation-to-share mindset.”
Nokia copies Apple
nokia copies the iphone, but with much better hardware and no lock-in
Torture school
The Judge Rotenberg Education Center, a private radical behavior-modification school is run by a rogue behaviorist who uses discredited “punishment” techniques — electroshock — on children as young as 9 to change their personalities.
from dr. mengele, with love.
Cease Hulu
Congratulations are in order to YouTube-competitor Hulu, which took just 5 months to come up with a name after announcing itself in March. CEO Jason Kilar says the name “captures the spirit of the service we’re building” in an open letter published today. Just don’t translate that name to certain languages, because the name may capture significantly more of the spirit of the service than NBC and News Corp., the media giants behind Hulu, intended. Hulu means “butt” in both Indonesian and Malay. But that’s nothing compared to Swahili, which 80m or so people speak in sub-Saharan Africa. In Swahili, Hulu means, among other things, both “cease” and “desist.”
clown co. continues to deliver on their real name
Begging Google
Hi. Boston here. You know, the city across the river from some of your offices. We were poking around the internet yesterday and found out that you’re planning to offer an online trip planning guide for New York City. We’d like to take some time to beg you to do the same for Boston, because we can’t handle the MBTA’s trip planner anymore.
US Road Trip
The great American road trip is an adventure everyone dreams about. The Frugal Traveler kicks off his 12-week journey from New York City to Seattle.
Job Automation
By 2030, what kinds of capabilities will computers have; how well will those capabilities prepare them to do jobs currently done by humans; and what proportion of the workforce might be displaced or rendered unemployable? The results are rather scary. After looking at trends in machine vision, speech, reasoning, and movement, and estimating how important these are for doing various kinds of work, the author estimates that displacement rates could be over 80% in some fields– sales, administrative support, food preparation, and personal care. These are also the sectors that employ the largest number of people. The safest fields for humans? Law (6%), medicine (10%), science (10%), and engineering (11%)– fields which currently employ the smallest number of people.
ha! the sectors of the economy that are just adding transaction cost but not creating anything will be replaced by computers by > 80%. invest in warm bodies at your own peril.
Korea robot complex
shrug. reminds me a bit of the huge japanese investments in 5h gen computers. nothing ever came of that.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 