"Coveting possessions is unhealthy. Here's how I look at it:

All of the computers on Ebay are mine. In fact, everything on Ebay is already mine. All of those things are just in long term storage that I pay nothing for. Storage is free.

When I want to take something out of storage, I just pay the for the storage costs for that particular thing up to that point, plus a nominal shipping fee, and my things are delivered to me so I can use them. When I am done with them, I return them to storage via Craigslist or Ebay, and I am given a fee as compensation for freeing up the storage facilities resources.

This is also the case with all of my stuff that Amazon and Walmart are holding for me. I have antiques, priceless art, cars, estates, and jewels beyond the dreams of avarice.

The world is my museum, displaying my collections on loan. The James Savages of the world are merely curators."

In 1884 Pitt-Rivers donated at least 20,000 items from all over the world and all time-periods to the University of Oxford, which founded the Pitt Rivers Museum. But he also had a second museum, established after 1880 in Farnham (Dorset) and a large number of artefacts in his homes at Rushmore and Grosvenor Gardens, London. Until now the full extent of his collections have never been known but we have established that this second collection also numbered more than 20,000 artefacts. It is probable that during his lifetime he owned in excess of 50,000 separate artefacts.

Increasing use of computers and networks in business, government, recreation, and almost all aspects of daily life has led to a proliferation of online sensitive data, i.e., data that, if used improperly, can harm the data subjects. As a result, concern about the ownership, control, privacy, and accuracy of these data has become a top priority. This project focuses on both the technical challenges of handling sensitive data and the policy and legal issues facing data subjects, data owners, and data users.

The PORTIA goals are (1) to design and develop a next generation of technology for handling sensitive information that is qualitatively better than the current generation's and (2) to create an effective conceptual framework for policy making and philosophical inquiry into the rights and responsibilities of data subjects, data owners, and data users.

Oil paintings ordered over the internet, inkjet on paper, 18 feet by 8 feet

Almost two thirds of the world’s oil paintings are produced cheaply in China and a large number of these are sold over the internet, raising questions of reproduction, authorship and copyright. These commissioned paintings represent a variety of experiments; painted feedback loops, open-ended instructional paintings, and paintings corrupted by digital transmission errors. They investigate the system in which these paintings are created, and more importantly directly address some of the individual painters’ aesthetics and ideas. This series of commissioned paintings blurs the boundaries between human creativity and machine-like, systematic intelligence.

"Noam Galai took a few photos of himself in 2006 and uploaded them to his Flickr. A few people liked those photos, but he didn't think of it. Over time, he began to see his photos popping up all over magazines, the internet and as street art. Then it began appearing on commodities (clothes, books, etc.). Now, it's being used as a symbol of protest in Iran. The crazy part is that nobody asked his permission.

Fstoppers are responsible for this great video narrative, titled The Stolen Scream, which details Galai's story, and the process of watching himself become an anonymous global icon with no control over how his image is used (in one case, the photo was attributed to someone else entirely). He even mentions that when he tried to register the photo with sites like Getty Images, they told him the image would never sell.

All in all though, it's a great story about the dissemination of digital media over the Internet and the inevitable conflict between those who create it and those who use it"

free software foundation on facebook: "TIME Magazine praises Mark Zuckerberg for creating a system that has connected people around the world with each other. Unfortunately, the terms under which he claims to have done this set a terrible precedent for our future — for our control over the software we use to interact with each other, for control over our data, and for our privacy. The damage is not limited to Facebook users. Because so many sites — including TIME — use Facebook's user-tracking "Like" button, Zuckerberg is able to collect information about people who aren't even users of his site. These are precedents which hurt our ability to freely connect with each other. He has created a network that is first and foremost a gold mine for government surveillance and advertisers. ...you can encourage people not to connect with Zuckerberg while thinking that they are connecting with you, by putting this button on your blog or web site, with a link to whatever method you would prefer they use to contact you directly..."

kind of embarrassing song and dance, but I like the idea

Response from Joel Spolsky on Stack Overflow

“The approach to digital culture I abhor would indeed turn all the world’s books into one book, just as Kevin suggested,” writes Lanier in his book. “What happens next is what’s important. If the books in the cloud are accessed via user interfaces that encourage mashups of fragments that obscure the context and authorship of each fragment, there will be only one book. This happens today with a lot of content; often you don’t know where a quoted fragment from a news story came from, who wrote a comment, or who shot a video.”

The issue isn’t one of taste. “I want to define a line,” said Lanier, “between subjective judgment of what future generations might like or care about, and just this basic functioning mechanism of civilization and culture. If it’s the case that future generations don’t like things the length of books, and prefer things that have a graph structure and are made of little pieces, then my hope is that whatever they do with that is done well. But what I think is crucial for it to be sustainable, and to be more than a single generation’s fling before the collapse of civilization, is that whatever they do respects the integrity of each personal point of view and grants the idea of personhood with an almost mystical stature.”