Democracy?

The manager and the moron

But this situation of linear movement is rapidly changing in every respect. And the greatest change is one that our Rip Van Winkle economist, looking only at the figures, wouldn’t even notice: In the past 20 years we have created a brand-new form of capital, a brand-new resource, namely knowledge.

Up until 1900, any society in the world would have done just as well as it did without men of knowledge. We may have needed lawyers to defend criminals and doctors to write death certificates, but the criminals would have done almost as well without the lawyers, and the patients without the doctors. We needed teachers to teach other ornaments of society, but this too was largely decoration. The world prided itself on men of knowledge, but it didn’t need them to keep the society running.

Otis Was a Flame of Fire via foundersofamerica

Infographic by XKCD (creative commons license BY-NC)

Prosecutor as bully

Here is where we need a better sense of justice, and shame. For the outrageousness in this story is not just Aaron. It is also the absurdity of the prosecutor’s behavior. From the beginning, the government worked as hard as it could to characterize what Aaron did in the most extreme and absurd way. The “property” Aaron had “stolen,” we were told, was worth “millions of dollars” — with the hint, and then the suggestion, that his aim must have been to profit from his crime. But anyone who says that there is money to be made in a stash ofACADEMIC ARTICLES is either an idiot or a liar. It was clear what this was not, yet our government continued to push as if it had caught the 9/11 terrorists red-handed.

#privacy

Dow Jones asks court to unseal long-completed digital surveillance cases Tens of thousands of electronic surveillance orders are sealed from public view. via arstechnica

Federal court rules cops can warrantlessly track suspects via cellphone Geo-data received based on "reasonable grounds" phone was connected to a crime.  via arstechnica

Amendment 4 by Jeff DeMaria creative commons licensed (BY-NC-SA) flickr photo  

Obama panel supports warrant requirement for e-mail, cloud content Congress has punted on issue for years. E-mail, cloud data to remain exposed.  via arstechnica

No worries: NSA chief says facial recognition program is totally legal "We do not do this in some unilateral basis against US citizens," NSA chief says.  via arstechnica

LIRR Car

This is why not everything we call awesome is actually awesome

How many times did you use the word awesome today? Five, ten, fifteen times? We use the word awesome so often and, most of the time, so incorrectly that the term has lost its original sense— maybe forever. Comedian Jill Shargaa explains why in this AWESOME TED talk.

The World Wide Web, AR, VR, and MR

 “Technologies like Magic Leap’s will enable us to generate, transmit, quantify, refine, personalize, magnify, discover, share, reshare, and overshare experiences. This shift from the creation, transmission, and consumption of information to the creation, transmission, and consumption of experience defines this new platform. As Magic Leap founder Rony Abovitz puts it, “Ours is a journey of inner space. We are building the internet of presence and experience.”

We haven’t yet fully absorbed the enormous benefit that the internet of information has brought to the world. And yet we are about to recapitulate this accomplishment with the advent of synthetic realities."

The Untold Story of Magic leap, the World’s Most Secretive Startup by Kevin Kelly via Wired. This is a looooong article, but a must read.  

On a side note, Kevin Kelly (founding editor of Wired) is one of my favorite futurists.... check out some of his other stuff:

We Are the Web (Wired timeline/feature)

The Next 5,000 Days of the Internet (TED talk)  

One more must read from today’s surfing (much, much shorter!) is a piece from the NYT:  The Web’s Creator Looks to Reinvent It.  

See also The Internet Part II from my wiki for related info and articles as well as my page on Privacy.

Juno gives starship-like view of earth flyby

(Phys.org) —When NASA's Juno spacecraft flew past Earth on Oct. 9, 2013, it received a boost in speed of more than 8,800 mph (about 7.3 kilometer per second), which set it on course for a July 4, 2016, rendezvous with Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system. One of Juno's sensors, a special ...

Gotta check out the animated gif at the top of the page, #awesomeness