"An industry that once told hard truths to corporate and government clients now mostly just tells them what they want to hear, making it harder for us all to adapt to a changing world -- and that's why I'm leaving it."

"The Rewilding is a vision of radical removal of agency from the world: the flowers bedew themselves, nobody ordered the motion of the planets, not even the mysterious agency known as Scientific Law; evolution is design without a designer, computing is thought without a thinker, and there is no mathematical reality separate from the physical world. In the Rewilding, civilization advances by systematically blurring or even erasing the border between the artificial and the natural; the more efficient an artificial system is, the more it resembles (or even is) a natural one. That is, our surroundings becomes increasingly wild (self-willed) rather than having to be willed by us. Agency, so long marching forward, begins to retreat."

"All of which is to say that fearing that a new grand unified theory of intelligence will let one machine suddenly take over the world isn’t that different from fearing that a grand unified theory of betterness will let one better person suddenly take over the world. This isn’t to say that such an thing is impossible, but rather that we’d sure want some clearer indications that such a theory even exists before taking such a fear especially seriously."

The Javascript age is about event streams. Modern web pages are not pages, they are event-driven applications through which information moves. The core content vessel of the web — the document object model — still exists, but not as HTML markup. The DOM is an in-memory, efficiently-encoded data structure generated by Javascript.

The secondary role of the server is to listen in on a stream for events (a new edit, a message, or ticker change) and efficiently push responses back to clients.

With or without WikiLeaks, the personel, technical know-how, and ideological will exists to enable anonymous leaking and to make this information available to the public.

Yet the debate over WikiLeaks has proceeded as if the matter might conclude with the eradication of these kinds of data dumps—as if this is a temporary glitch in the system that can be fixed; as if this is a nuisance that [will] go away with the application of sufficient government gusto. But I don't think the matter can end this way. Just as technology has made it easier for governments and corporations to snoop ever more invasively into the private lives of individuals, it has also made it easier for individuals, working alone or together, to root through and make off with the secret files of governments and corporations. WikiLeaks is simply an early manifestation of what I predict will be a more-or-less permanent feature of contemporary life, and a more-or-less permanent constraint on strategies of secret-keeping.

It's tempting to call a stop to deployment of such emerging technologies. But that approach promises to be as successful as "Just Say No" was in the war on drugs, or as the original Luddites were at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. The United States will develop these strange and alarming new technologies, but not, perhaps, for the reasons that many suspect.

"I've got a theory, and it's this: Steve Jobs believes he's gambling Apple's future — the future of a corporation with a market cap well over US $200Bn — on an all-or-nothing push into a new market. HP have woken up and smelled the forest fire, two or three years late; Microsoft are mired in a tar pit, unable to grasp that the inferno heading towards them is going to burn down the entire ecosystem in which they exist. There is the smell of panic in the air, and here's why ..."

"Capital can flow freely, but labour is in shackles world-wide.

If you don't see a very specific political subtext here (being sold to the voting masses on the back of crude xenophobia and racism), let me be more explicit: labour wants to migrate where working conditions and pay are best. Capital wants to invest for growth where working conditions and pay are worst.

By penning us (the labour) in, capital can maintain, for a while, the wage imbalances that maximize profit. (Take raw material. Process as cheaply as possible. Sell for as much as possible.) In the long term, it's unsustainable — labour in the high-cost developed world is taking a hammering due to being uncompetitive, and wages will be forced down until it is competitive, while labour costs in the developing world are skyrocketing."

Apparently Apple's attitude is that developers should be more careful when they submit a new version to the App Store. They would say that. But powerful as they are, they're not powerful enough to turn back the evolution of technology. Programmers don't use launch-fast-and-iterate out of laziness. They use it because it yields the best results. By obstructing that process, Apple is making them do bad work, and programmers hate that as much as Apple would.

How would Apple like it if when they discovered a serious bug in OS X, instead of releasing a software update immediately, they had to submit their code to an intermediary who sat on it for a month and then rejected it because it contained an icon they didn't like?

By breaking software development, Apple gets the opposite of what they intended: the version of an app currently available in the App Store tends to be an old and buggy one.

I’ve come to the conclusion that there are four key parts to news stories, and we typically only get one of them, even though journalists possess all four, and the other three are arguably more important.
- WHAT WE GET: What just happened
- WHAT WE MISS (1): The longstanding facts
- WHAT WE MISS (2): How journalists know what they know
- WHAT WE MISS (3): The things we don’t know

With a latest-news-only approach, we stoke demand for journalism by trying to snag people’s attention with each new development.

Suggestions:
- Enlarging the market for journalism by making it easier for more people to understand the longstanding facts behind each story.
- Increasing the appeal of journalism by letting folks in on the details of our quest to uncover the truth.
- Expanding the appetite for journalism by explaining what we don’t know, and what we’re working to find out.

Google Wave introduces a new platform built around hosted conversations called waves--this model enables people to communicate and work together in new and more effective ways. On top of that, with the Google Wave APIs, developers can take advantage of this collaborative system by building on the Google Wave platform. We want to expand upon that platform, which is why we've put together the initial draft of the Google Wave Federation Protocol, the underlying network protocol for sharing waves between wave providers.

The nifty-keen thing here is that Web 2.0 is a web. It's a web of bubbles and squares. A glorious thing -- but that is not a verbal argument. That's like a Chinese restaurant menu. You can take one bubble from sector A, and two from sector B, and three from sector C, and you are Web 2.0. Feed yourself and your family!

Web 2.0 theory is a web. It's not philosophy, it's not ideology like a political platform, it's not even a set of esthetic tenets like an art movement. The diagram for Web 2.0 is a little model network. You can mash up all the bubbles to the other bubbles. They carry out subroutines on one another. You can flowchart it if you want. There's a native genius here. I truly admire it.

This chart is five years old now, which is 35 years old in Internet years, but intellectually speaking, it's still new in the world. It's alarming how hard it is to say anything constructive about this from any previous cultural framework.

"This century we're going to learn a lesson about what it means to be unable to forget anything. And it's going to go on, and on. Barring a catastrophic universal collapse of human civilization [...] we're going to be laying down memories in diamond that will outlast our bones, and our civilizations, and our languages. Sixty kilograms will handily sum up the total history of the human species, up to the year 2000. From then on ... we still don't need much storage, in bulk or mass terms. There's no reason not to massively replicate it and ensure that it survives into the deep future."

"Envireugenics is less dangerous. It spreads through culture, not coercion. It doesn't employ murder or sterilization. Instead, it relies on segregation. If your kid is RR, he goes here; if he's XX, he goes there. We don't tell you whether you can have a baby. We just tell you whether your baby belongs on the track team, the chess team, or the assembly line.
What's really disturbing about this idea, in the case of ACNT3, is that it isn't crazy. The data make a strong case that being XX really does lock you out of success at the highest levels of sprinting and power sports. From an individual standpoint, that doesn't much matter: You can run track, play pickup basketball, and live happily ever after. But from your country's standpoint, putting you on the track team is a waste. We need that slot for an RR kid, and we need a genetic test to find him.
That's what worries me about Atlas Sports Genetics. It's not just selling a test. It's selling a mentality."

Steampunk's key lessons are not about the past. They are about the instability and obsolescence of our own times. A host of objects and services that we see each day all around us are not sustainable. They will surely vanish, just as "Gone With the Wind" like Scarlett O'Hara's evil slave-based economy. Once they're gone, they'll seem every bit as weird and archaic as top hats, crinolines, magic lanterns, clockwork automatons, absinthe, walking-sticks and paper-scrolled player pianos.

We are a technological society. When we trifle, in our sly, Gothic, grave-robbing fashion, with archaic and eclipsed technologies, we are secretly preparing ourselves for the death of our own tech. Steampunk is popular now because people are unconsciously realizing that the way that we live has already died. We are sleepwalking. We are ruled by rapacious, dogmatic, heavily-armed fossil-moguls who rob us and force us to live like corpses. Steampunk is a pretty way of coping with this truth.

Charles Stross finally reads about Bruce Sterling's Spime idea. I was convinced that he had been influenced by it a couple of years ago...

I’ve come to think, that a society guided by economic ideas treats pollution as an amenity problem, rather than a factor that can reduce the Earth’s ability to support human societies, and treats resource scarcity as something that can be solved by investing more money, rather than a hard limit to growth. On a larger scale, it’s for these reasons that the three-hundred-year boomtime of industrialism looks normal to so many people today. Looked at with an eye tempered by the cycles of history and the principles of ecology, it takes on a very different shape; its similarity to a speculative bubble is hard to miss; its dependence on reckless, unsustainable exploitation of half a billion years of stored photosynthetic energy, in the form of the Earth’s fossil fuel reserves, becomes just as visible as the dependence of the late housing bubble on wild overestimates of how much future buyers would pay for homes.

Midori, a speculative incubated software project, tries to expand on their Singularity OS project for more network-connected and potentially commercial prospects. Asynchronous promise-based (and capability-based?) security and concurrency are alluded to.

Traditional IT departments and practices—corporate desktops, networked shares, strict IT policies, etc.—will persist in companies and sectors where they make sense, but more startups will embrace IT consumerization, and established businesses will be

We've reached the point in our (disparate) cultural adaptation to computing and communication technology that the younger technical generations are so empowered they are impatient and ready to jettison institutions most of the rest of us tend to think of

Here's my overly reductive, incredibly nerdy way of thinking about the novel: Consider it a simulation, kind of like The Sims. If you run a realistic simulation enough times — writing tens of thousands of novels about contemporary life — eventually yo

The right research and policy question today is not “what kind of family do we wish people lived in?” Instead, we must ask “what do we know about how to help every family build on its strengths, minimize its weaknesses, and raise children more succe

This is a conversation between Bruce Schneier and Marcus Ranum. It will appear in Information Security Magazine in Dec 2007. They discuss trends in security over the 100x increase in processing power and connectivity, and particularly how our culture is n

It’s obvious that both Big Brother and the Panopticon are outdated, though they have not entirely disappeared. The question, then, is how do we characterize a surveillance regime that is neither totalitarian nor disciplinary, but depends primarily on th

Object-oriented port of the Lisp META parser as a DSL in Smalltalk/Lisp.

The original vision of the semantic web as a layer on top of the current web, annotated in a way that computers can "understand," is certainly grandiose and intriguing. Yet, for the past decade it has been a kind of academic exercise rather than a practic

Electric motorcycle in production target for Q3 2008.

Looking at Washington, dreaming of Rome

UK science fiction writer Charles Stross, author of novels Accelerando and Singularity Sky, posits a future in which all human experience is record on devices the size of a grain of sand.

Viewpoints Research Insitute recently began a five-year project to reinvent how we program and interact with computers. An early goal of our work is to make a practical, working mathematical model of a complete personal computer system that invites unders

An essay discussing Quiet AI versus older Soft/Hard AI distinctions, and how the cybernetic revolution is unfolding in ways unforeseen by its progenitors. This also ramps into discussions of the exocortical concept and social-computational soft-takeoff si

The Wikipedia article on Spimes which seems to be the best corral of extant writings about them and attempt at succinct description.