Blockquoting for GreatJustice this very simple and clear explanation of the Google/Verizon Net Neutrality proposal, and just what a turnabout for Google it is:
In 2006 Google produced the following public service announcement to help sway legislative opinion leading up to the vote on the Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2007 (S.215). Senator Barack Obama was a cosponsor of this bill. The PSA aired in key districts for approximately one month leading up to the vote.
http://www.vimeo.com/14099243
Early this week Verizon and Google issued a joint statement to U.S. legislators titled “Verizon-Google Legislative Framework Proposal.” In this statement, Verizon-Google suggests exempting wireless broadband access from net neutrality. This was not an oversight. This is a departure from Google’s public stance and advocacy for net neutrality.
Increasingly, technology companies are shipping devices with access to wireless broadband networks pre-installed. It’s not just smart phones any more: laptops, tablets, gaming devices, entertainment systems, navigation tools, automobiles… And while the term “wireless broadband” has come to mean wireless phone services like 3G and 4G networks, the term also likely includes wireless city initiatives. So… what could have caused Google’s founders to abandon the principles of net neutrality just as the web begins entering its wireless era? Could it be that they have the opportunity to control and to profit from a web user’s wireless experience in a not so distant future when being “wired” will be like saying you use a rotary dial phone?
Keep reading on the Voogle Wireless site for ways to encourage Google to reconsider their proposal. Don’t be EVIL!
Haven’t seen The Yes Men Fix The World? It’s “a screwball true story about two gonzo political activists who, posing as top executives of giant corporations, lie their way into big business conferences and pull off the world’s most outrageous pranks.”
They’re being sued for impersonating the United States Chamber of Commerce. So, naturally, they made a special cut with that very footage at the start and have released it via peer-to-peer.
Set in a near future where the UK has become a complete surveillance state nightmare, The Curfew is a webgame written by Kieron Gillen (Phonogram).
The Curfew could be described as a miniature Canterbury Tales set in a not-so-distant future, where citizens must abide by government security measures and ’sub citizens’ are placed under curfew at night.
The player must navigate this complex political world and engage with the characters they meet along the way to work out who they should trust in order to gain freedom
This vid gives more background:
Nominally for children aged 14 and over, this looks great for adults too. I’ll sure be playing it.
It launches real soon, before the end of July apparently. Who do you trust?
Here’s the teaser trailer for a forthcoming documentary “exploring mankind’s journey to ‘play jazz with the universe’… it is a story of our ultimate potential, the reach of our intelligence, the scope of our scientific and engineering abilities and the transcendent quality of our heroic and noble calling.”
HERE’S YOUR FUCKING JETPACK. There, boom, a commercially available Jetpack. You strap it on, it flies and you don’t even need a license in most countries. All you need is a little bit of disposable income and wham: Jetpack. What? You can’t afford it? Well what did you expect; that when jetpacks came around that they’d be free? I live in a country where free flu shots are considered a government conspiracy and you expect someone to strap a communist subsidized rocket up your ass and tell you to go to town? I don’t fucking think so.
What are you looking for in a jetpack, anyway? I mean, sure they’re cool and all – who didn’t hide in their rooms and gently bring themselves off while watching the Rocketeer? But what do your really want – flight? Well there are other ways to fly then strapping a giant engine to your back.
Oh yeah, speaking of flight, here’s your flying car, too:
It’s called a “helicopter”. Yes, you need a special license and metric shit-tonnes of money to own and operate one making it prohibitively expensive and unrealistic for many reasons – but hey, don’t feel bad - NINETY-ODD PERCENT OF THE HUMAN SPECIES feels the same way about cars. To break that down into more manageable numbers, if the world was a colony of 1000 people, by some accounts only 70 lucky bastards would own cars. Everyone else? Hoofing it, biking it, using public transportation or being stuck in a geographic area the size of a postage stamp by environmental factors.
So does the fact you can’t afford a flying car make you sad? Congratulations! Now you’ve woken up on the same side of the bed as the rest of the human race.
Okay. Fair enough, you don’t mean flying car in a loose sort of way that could include a helicopter. You want an honest-to-God Nick Fury agent of S.H.I.E.L.D “where we’re going we don’t need roads” Delorian with rockets strapped to its ass.
What is it with you people wanting to strap rockets to everything’s ass, anyway? Remind me never to look at your porn collection. (Well, I mean… if it has tastefully done ass-rockets, send it on.)
Flying cars are neat, too. But let me direct your attention to this window. Look out there… now assuming you’re in a part of the world where car ownership is the norm, then you’re looking at a place where there need to be laws in place to stop people from doing stupid shit while operating several tonnes of dangerous machinery at high speeds. It is somehow not common sense to not down a beer, smoke a joint, text your boyfriend, pierce your nipples and skullfuck a Peruvian trout when driving a two-ton death machine.
But people who weren’t gifted with a basic survival instinct aren’t the only downer about motor vehicles. You see, the people making cars are under no pressure to make safe cars. Do you really want the same companies that have to be sued, threatened and cajoled by private citizens and governments to not make cars that blow up when hit by a stiff breeze to be the ones responsible for shooting you and your car into the sky? That bit from Fight Club, about auto companies weighing the liability for death vs defects in their vehicles? That’s a true story.
So where is your flying car? Perhaps it is waiting somewhere behind the car that is not responsible for approximately 2% of all the death in the world, annually? (For ex. 1.4 million worldwide in 2004.) How in the hell is anyone supposed to level up to super awesome flying cars when we can’t even get cars-that-don’t-kill-people-all-the-fucking-time down?
Okay, that’s enough yelling; the shouty old man routine gets old – fast.
But that said, the “where’s my fucking jetpack” meme pisses me the fuck off.
First of all, why the obsession over a future made in the 1910-1930’s? Flying cars and jetpacks were the fantasy fetish objects of a different time. Not a simpler time, because the phrase “simpler time” is like “military intelligence” – it’s a contradiction – we only think times were simpler thanks to temporal and cultural distancing. Still, is that your future? Really? Or is your grandparents’ future? The Jetpack future is a future born of the past. It is a future created by people who lived in a world that had never seen the artificial suns rise over Japan, had not seen the realities of our space program, and probably couldn’t conceive of a black man in the White House or Celebrity Big Brother.
If you’re really serious about wanting the Jetpack future – and I know some of you are…
Hell, you’re listening to a man who once blew up a poster of Thomas Edison with homemade explosives while screaming “Nikola Tesla thou art revenged” at the top of his lungs and running naked through the woods. Which is to say… I have my own hang ups about stolen futures.
If you’re serious about the Jetpack future, then don’t stop at “this is not my future” – make it your future. Claim that vision of now that circumstances and small minds have denied you and find other like minded people and build it.
When Steampunk came back, you had people who looked at the future-of-a-different-past in some works of fiction and then started to make it real. Not just with cute costumes and at conventions, but with building their own machines, starting real community and carving out a niche where that future made of cogs and springs and the rushing of superheated air has weight and takes up space and becomes real. Now you’ve got people getting into D.I.Y. and sustainability and reclaiming urban spaces thanks to a subculture that in the beginning, just really liked some sci-fi books and had an unhealthy fixation with top hats.
Here’s the thing; if you stop at “this is not my future” and go no further, then someone else will make their version of the future and I can almost guarantee you’re not going to like it. I can guarantee this because you already don’t like it. We’re living in the future of men who saw people as commodities and human lives as disposable sources of income. It’s not some grand conspiracy, it’s just people who have a vision of the future where the top 2% get richer and the rest of the world… well… you want to be in that 2%, right? And the only way that is going to happen is if you buy into their future and not into the steam-sustainability-and-goggles future, the Ayahuasca-and-shamanism future, the Russian-feminist-ninja future or the Japanese-post-gender-newtype future.
We don’t have nice things because we let other people take them away from us. We have these futures that seem alien to us because we let them happen. I’m including you, me and 99% of all the humans and mutants I have ever met in that “we”, too. We are the reason there are no jetpacks or flying cars or universal distribution of water and food. ”We have met the enemy,” as a great man once said, “and he is us”. We contribute to a future that has no place for us in so many ways: inaction, being convinced that we don’t have voices that count, being convinced that the only choices we have are the choices we can buy, despair, alienation… the list goes on and on. We let the beautiful, amazing, weird, fucked-up futures we hold next to our hearts die stillborn in the face of futures so alien to most of us that they might as well be dread Cthulhu sleeping beneath the waves.
It doesn’t have to be that way, though. If you want the jetpack future? Find the other people who want it and make it. If you see the people around you stand mute while the dreams of human accomplishment are ground into the dirt and they instead run over each other to embrace steaming mediocrity and you don’t think that’s a fair trade? Say something. Contrary to slick movie quotes, the Devil never even bothered to pretend he didn’t exist – instead he made so many of us believe the lie that our voices and actions don’t matter.
Fuck the Devil. Put on your tophat and latex gimp suit or Rocketeer jacket and carve out that future – Jetpacks and all if that’s what floats your boat – and don’t let me or anyone else get in your way.
Brilliant sign hack up in NYC. More details from the NYPost:
TrustoCorp, a group of self-proclaimed urban artists, is adorning city poles in trendy neighborhoods like the East Village and Williamsburg with absurdist messages shaped like official street signs.
“Caution. God thinks you are stupid. Notice: Ignoring God is un-American,” warns one metal missive — complete with a hand firing a lightning bolt — attached below a Department of Transportation sign on East 10th Street near First Avenue.
Check out this Flickr pool for many more fine examples of their work.
HP has just unveiled an incredibly ambitious project to create a “Central Nervous System for the Earth” (CeNSE) composed of billions of super sensitive, cheap, and tough sensors. The project involves distributing these sensors throughout the world and using them to gather data that could be used to detect everything from infrastructure collapse to environmental pollutants to climate change and impending earthquakes. From there, the “Internet of Things” and smarter cities are right around the corner.
HP is currently developing its first sensor to be deployed, which is an accelerometer 1,000 times more sensitive than those used in the Wii or the iPhone – it’s capable of detecting motion and vibrations as subtle as a heartbeat. The company also has plans to use nanomaterials to create chemical and biological sensors that are 100 million times more sensitive than current models. Their overall goal is to use advances in sensitivity and nanotech to shrink the size of these devices so that they are small enough to clip onto a mobile telephone.
Once HP has created an array of sensors, the next step is distributing them and making sense of all the data they generate. That’s no easy task, granted that a network of one million sensors running 24 hours a day would create 20 petabytes of data in just six months. HP is taking all that number crunching to task however, and will be harnessing its in-house networking expertise, consulting, and data storage technologies for the project.
In Bangladesh, people routinely stack mountainous piles of bricks onto their heads when loading and unloading the boats and Bedford trucks used to transport clay-fired bricks from the kilns where they are made to the construction sites where they are used. These feats of endurance and equilibrium look near inconceivable to blinkered Western eyes, but for the brick carriers it’s all in a day’s work.
That stack of some 20 bricks is almost as tall as the man carrying it, yet he still has room to flip a few more on top and walk the plank onto dry land. After this initial effort, workers often have to carry their precarious piles some distance, and when on site climb several flights of stairs to the rooftops where the bricks will be laid. Without wheelbarrows, single-minded stability is all that stands between a slip and tens of kilos of bricks falling – and perhaps even a snapped neck.
When a disaster strikes, it’s often difficult to get shelters up in time for displaced residents. Enter Concrete Canvas’s new Concrete Cloth, a durable waterproof building material made of cement sandwiched between fabric. The cloth, which won Material ConneXion’s Material of the Year 2009 award, can be molded into any shape when bonded with water — and it takes just two hours to set!
Great, but it has one problem that they need to change:
There’s just one drawback to Concrete Cloth: the material contains PVC, a plastic that leaches toxic chemicals
The Guards Chapel, spiritual home of the Household Division of the British Army, is host to an installation that looks at some of the present-day thoughts on heroes. Complete Hero is a projection-based artwork by Martin Firrell.
“Technology grows and mutates much like life or nature,” Dettmer has said about the connections between plastic and human bones in an interview with Time Out. “Old forms die as new forms are born. In one way, cassette tapes and other media have become outdated technology and the remaining materials have become remnants or shells that used to contain a living material.”
LA graffiti writer Tony, aka TemptOne, has a rare neuromuscular disease that has caused progressive muscle weakness and eventual paralysis. Despite not being able to move a muscle, his eyes still function normally. With the help of the Not Impossible Foundation, he was once again able to get back to work:
Design artist Mike Thompson has developed a one time use lamp that works by a flourescent reaction between human blood and an active chemical component dissolved in water.
Words and photo via medgadget.com. Interesting way to get light, emergency or otherwise.
Social Media Blogger Sarah Dopp has some things to say about how we can remove the Suck from the Internet. I tend to agree with her, vehemently.
I believe that all web-based interactions operate on the same principles as in-person interactions.
I believe in social karma. I believe that all people deserve to be respected and treated with kindness, and that whenever you choose not to do this, you set yourself up to suffer consequences, whether directly or indirectly. I don’t care how much they pissed you off. You still have the choice to be nice. (”Smile from the wrists down.” -@Gwenners)
I believe in social capital. I believe that if you have something to sell or promote, your existing relationship to a community determines your ability to get what you want when you ask for favors or put things in front of people. I believe that if you want your community to support you, you need to first support your community.
I believe that your web presence is an extension of your offline presence, and that the sum of all your parts make up you as a complex human being. I believe it’s okay to represent different personas online as long as you can face the fact that they’re allparts of you.
…..
I believe that sucking at the Internet is both voluntary and optional.
I believe the Internet is awesome, and that it is worth getting excited about.
I believe that we are awesome. And we are worth getting excited about.
