Sapere Aude
Tag: internet
Leave it to 60 Minutes to pass off Facebook’s utterly meaningless redesign of the site’s profile pages as some kind of “exclusive” worth leading a segment on the company’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg. It’s not just that correspondent Lesley Stahl didn’t understand what’s meaningful about his story; it’s that Zuckerberg essentially reduced the venerable newsmagazine to an unwitting shill.
a great example of the disconnect between the old guard and what is really going on in the world.
very detailed and troubling discussion about the scalability problems of the internet.
You see various behavior going on as TCP tries to find out how much bandwidth is available, and (maybe) different kinds of packet drop (e.g. head drop, or tail drop; you can choose which end of the queue to drop from when it fills). Note that any packet drop, whether due to congestion or random packet loss (e.g. to wireless interference) is interpreted as possible congestion, and TCP will then back off how fast to will transmit data.
Cyber weapons beg to be used, so limits on stockpiles, and restrictions on tactics, are a logical endpoint. International banking, for instance, could be declared off-limits.
“I think all of us know that politicians would have to confront the Facebook skeletons in their closet, but that it would be in 20 years, not in 2 years. By the time the next generation comes into power, they’ll just assume this is how it’s always been.”
the “politician embarrassed by social networking” trope gains steam.
Without radical innovation in our physical network infrastructure—that is, improvements in the key physical properties of transmission fibers and the optical amplifiers that we rely on to transmit data over long distances—we face what has been widely referred to as a “capacity crunch” that could severely constrain future Internet growth, as well as having social and political ramifications.
and this older version from 2007:
Their more recent image of Botticelli’s La Primavera consists of 28B pixels, 3000x the resolution of a consumer digital camera. The pixel density has also increased, from 580 to 1500ppi (magazine and book printing are typically 300ppi).
A Japanese journalist freed over the weekend by captors in Afghanistan managed to send 2 Twitter messages before his release while teaching a captor how to access the Internet on a new cell phone.
money quote: “The soldier had heard of the Internet, but he didn’t know what it was.”
Consider, Poole explains, how the fixed identities in other online communities can stifle creativity: where usernames are required (whether real or pseudonymous), a new user who posts a few failed attempts at humor will soon find other users associating that name with failure. “Even if you’re posting gold by day 8, they’ll be like, ‘Oh, this guy sucks.’ ” Names, in other words, make failure costly, thus discouraging even the attempt to succeed.
that article is totally linkbait for me: replacing physical stuff with digital things, and singularity talk. me like!
Many have begun trading in CD, DVD, and book collections for digital music, movies, and e-books. But this trend in digital technology is now influencing some to get rid of nearly all of their physical possessions – from photographs to furniture to homes altogether.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 