The Blast Shack Bruce Sterling writing at Webstock.org: Diplomats are people who speak from nation to nation. They personify nations, and nations are brutal, savage, feral entities. (tagged: politics culture hacking privacy technology essay ) Angry Robot to open the floodgates for one month SFScope (tagged: scifi writing publishing todo ) Axe Cop. That is […]
The Word "Hacker" Why have I never seen this before? Hacking predates computers. When he was working on the Manhattan Project, Richard Feynman used to amuse himself by breaking into safes containing secret documents. This tradition continues today. When we were in grad school, a hacker friend of mine who spent too much time around […]
Netflix CEO: We’re a Streaming Company at Fast Company (via 9-bits) — Reed Hastings, Netflix CEO: By every measure, we are now primarily a streaming company that also offers DVD-by-mail. (tagged: Netflix future tech business ) The Most Popular Phone in the World at Gizmodo (via Bruce Sterling): In buying that phone, this man was […]
How many users have JavaScript disabled? by Nicholas Zakas (at YDN Blog): The second takeaway is that JavaScript-disabled users exist. While 2% of U.S. visitors may not seem like a lot, keep in mind that over 300 million users visit the Yahoo! homepage each month. That means 6 million users visit each month without the […]
During my recent re-read of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, it occurred to me that one of its thematic elements takes the classic rich vs. poor conflict and intimates that it has transmuted into a conflict between a hyper-literate elite vs. an illiterate and/or aliterate Ünterleute. This is by no means a startling or even new […]