Ran into this quote from Whitehead:
It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilisation advances by extending the number of operations we can perform without [...]

Almost a year ago, at the beginning of the presidential campaign, I put forward an argument against the conventional wisdom that states “that the internet has not yet reached its peak of influence and probably won’t reach that peak before Nov. 2008, but maybe the during the cycle after that we will start to [...]

link thx dc

by Cory Doctorow
“Tell me about your hobbies. Are you into model rocketry?”
“What?”
“Model rocketry.”
“No,” Greg said, “No, I’m not.” He sensed where this was going.
The man made a note, did some clicking. “You see, I ask because I see a heavy spike in ads for rocketry supplies showing up alongside your search results and Google mail.”
Greg [...]

I posted a doomsday picture of what the end of net neutrality would look like several months ago. Here’s that image:

This image caused some panic in a recent D&D thread. I have felt somewhat guilty about posting such a sensationalist photoshop since it has no real basis in reality, and so I felt obliged [...]

In a precedent-setting case, administrative trial judge Tynia Richard recommended the firing of John Halpin, a veteran supervisor of carpenters, for cutting out before the end of his shift on as many as 83 occasions between March 2 and Aug. 9, 2006.
The evidence against Halpin, whose base pay is $300 a day, included time [...]

Back in January, Vermont Governor Jim Douglas proposed turning Vermont into the first ‘e-state’ in his inaugural address.
Wireless communications and broadband internet access are near the point of convergence – meaning the technologies that support each will be the same. More specifically, modern telecommunications will be based on Internet Protocol, or IP, a digital language [...]

Contrast:
California county tags gang members with GPS
San Bernardino county wants to start tagging gangbangers with GPS transponders. County commissioners have applied to the state to be part of a pilot program that would monitor all offenders who are released from jail after serving time for gang-related activities.
The program, which the county has started implementing on [...]

Court blocks access to YouTube in Turkey
A court in Turkey on Wednesday ordered blockage of all access to YouTube, the popular video-sharing Web site, over a video deemed insulting to Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey.
The ban followed a week of what the media in Turkey dubbed a “virtual war” of videos between [...]

New thread in D&D about a recent Forbes article on Network Neutrality. During the discussion, various analogies were thrown around: highways, telephone networks, classified ads, etc. Forum Superstar LaFarga issued the following challenge:
All analogies for computer technology suck and people need to stop using them. If you can’t explain the situation without an analogy then [...]