A rather ecclectic set of sightins around town this month:
I really need to get a phone with a camera.
Seriosity Attent: Email Management Software Solution for the Enterprise.
Attent creates an economy with a scarce new currency (Serios) that enables users to signal the importance of their outgoing email by attaching value. Recipients can use the Serios received to prioritize their attention to messages, and in return use their Serios to assign appropriate weight to their responses.
I’m fascinated by this idea. Creating an “Attention Economy” using a synthetic currency similar to multi-player online games as a way to improve the efficiency of corporate communication. I’m sure that this idea can be warped by the average MBA just as quickly as other good ideas, but there is a ton of potential if you have someone with a gamer mentality managing it.
I’ve seen the effects of the email landslide in any big company I’ve worked for. Every trivial email devalues all of the emails sent which makes it difficult to get the attention of people when you really need to.
Now if they could just come up with an economy as utterly goofy and appealing as Kingdom Of Loathing‘s meat.
Commentary: Is McCain another George W. Bush? – CNN.com.
I am sick and tired of the president of the United States embarrassing me. The world we live in is too complex to entrust it to someone else whose idea of intellectual curiosity and grasp of foreign policy issues is to tell us he can look into Vladimir Putin’s eyes and see into his soul.
Say what you will about the positions of either candidate (and I certainly have my share of opinions) but I would rather there be a leader with whom I disagree but who seems to find joy in knowledge and intellect than a wooden mouthpiece that recites exactly what I believe.
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This is all well and good but what disturbs me is the note attached to my results…
The estimates for one or both names are not absolute. There may be fewer people with this name, or none at all. Click here for more details. (emphasis added)
What does it mean, philosophically speaking, if there are none of me. Am I truly a figment of my own imagination? Can I stop paying taxes if I can prove conclusively that there aren’t any of me?
Free digital texts begin to challenge costly college textbooks in California – Los Angeles Times.
“What makes us rich as a society is what we know and what we can do,” he said. “Anything that stands in the way of the dissemination of knowledge is a real problem.”
McAfee said he wrote his open-source book because the traditional textbook market is broken. Textbook and college supply prices nearly tripled between 1986 and 2004, an audit by the federal Government Accountability Office found in 2005. With costs continuing to climb, it would be “reasonable to conclude that [individual student] expenditures can easily approach $700 to $1,000 today even after supplies are subtracted,” the congressional Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance said in a 2007 report
Simply fabulous quote from the professor. I can attest to the fact that college textbooks are a ridiculous expenditure, especially in math and science. Even if you can find them used, paying over $800 for one semester’s books wasn’t uncommon. Add to that the publishers’ zeal in closing down any kind of community book exchange program or other methods of helping students out and you have a pretty nice racket for the publishers.
As a secondary complaint, damn those things were heavy!
The push-up plan continues apace. I’ve finished week 4 on pace and I’m waiting to see what hideous torture week 5 has in store.
After my up and down relationship with the elliptical trainer last week I just couldn’t stand to get back up on the thing. So I decided to start running a bit. The key for me is to not know before hand how far I’m going to run. I guess I do best with very short term goals like “I’m going to make it to the next block before I slow to a walk.” Goals like “Let’s run 2 miles” just sound too intimidating. So between two runs this week I ended up doing 6.4 miles. Looking forward to expanding on that this week. The danger is that I’ll have to find some new places to run where I don’t know the distances involved.
After looking at the site when it first started I dismissed Hulu as just another poorly populated video site that was trying to make its way in a very tough market. Namely, convincing studios and networks to license their material for streaming.
Today I took another look at the catalog they have available and I have to say its come a very long way. I signed up for an account and immediately put roughly 1000 hours of content in my queue. Right now I am watching Lost in Translation for the first time. Its commercial-free and streaming in 480p. The full screen view is a little choppy but the regular size is very viewable.
The best find so far? My favorite episode of WKRP – Turkey’s Away.
Here is a short sample of what I’ve got on my time-wasting list:
Movies
TV Series
p2pnet news » Blog Archive » RIAA pays Tanyan Andersen $107,951.
Single mum Tanya Andersen and her daughter, Kylee, have come to epitomize the victims of the Big 4’s RIAA as the labels continue to pursue their hopeless course of trying to sue consumers around the world into buying their formulaic, cookie-cutter ‘product’.
She and her lawyers, Lory Lybeck and Ben Justus, beat the labels and their enforcer to a standstill, and a judge ordered them to pay the price.
To recap for those just joining the program. The recording industry decided that to combat a decline in sales they attributed to Internet piracy, they would begin suing individual users of the Internet to recover damages. The damages are roughly $250 per song, per instance of piracy. So a 10 track CD would cost you $2500 if you could be shown to have either downloaded it or allowed it to be downloaded just once from a computer or account under your control.
To find these villanous pirates they employed Media Sentry, a computer security company of obviously dubious ethics and began suing willy nilly.
Aside from wisdom of suing your own customers, the tactics and evidence employed and presented have a stink about them you can smell for miles. Tanya Andersen is a disabled single mother who fell afoul of this campaign. Now the courts have found that the record companies are full of cow pies and forced them to pay her back for attorney fees and expenses plus interest. To the tune of over $100,000.
Normally I am not a fan of suing those who have wronged you, but this time I am all for it. Andersen vs Atlantic is the counter suit to recover (I’m assuming) pain and suffering and punative damages. The reason I’m looking forward to this is that the music industry is still suing thousands of other individuals and a win here could effectively end this harebrained scheme.
In related news, the German Court system appears to be fed up with the Euro version of this nonsense and declares that it will only consider these cases when the piracy is on a commercial-scale.
MoWeS stands for the three letter abbreviation Webserver On Stick and makes it possible, to run a webserver based on Apache, MySQL and PHP from an USB Stick or any other writable media (harddrive, flash cards etc.) without installation under Windows (98 to Vista).
I can’t resist. I should, but I just can’t stay away. I will be setting this up over the weekend. Even though my Windows usage has been reduced greatly and I can’t think of any possible reason I would actually need a whole webserver on a USB drive, the list of applications they offer and the chance to carry my web sandbox with me are just too tempting.
Chef Julia Child, others part of WWII spy network – CNN.com.
Just too good of a headline to pass up first thing in the morning. One more area of history that I need to brush up on. Could anything like this happen today?
Other notables identified in the files include John Hemingway, son of author Ernest Hemingway; Quentin and Kermit Roosevelt, sons of President Theodore Roosevelt, and Miles Copeland, father of Stewart Copeland, drummer for the band The Police.
Imagine for a moment Steven King’s son, the Bush twins and Christina Aguilera’s dad were recruited to act as intelligence agents in the war on whatever it is we are at war with?
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