The Exercise of Vital Powers

Yet another sign of the pending robot uprising. Our GPS systems are leading us into a Trap!

[Israeli] Army sources said Wednesday that since the beginning of this year there have been several dozen cases of Israeli civilians mistakenly entering [Palestinian] Area A, because of GPS navigational errors…. (link)

He put himself to the fullest possible use, which is all I think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.

Science fiction author Arthur C Clarke dies aged 90:

Science fiction writer Sir Arthur C Clarke has died aged 90 in his adopted home of Sri Lanka, it was confirmed tonight.

The visionary author of over 100 books, who predicted the existence of satellites, was most famous for his short story “The Sentinel,” which was expanded into the novel on which Stanley Kubricks “2001: A Space Odyssey” was based.

He was also credited with inventing the concept of communications satellites in 1945, decades before they became a reality.

He first introduced me to the concept of the Space Elevator.

Minus the voice recognition, this was exactly the system I wanted to build back in 2001-2002, but the hardware wasn’t yet available. It does a much better job in the UserInterface department than MythTV (my current PVR solution). Plus it includes a built in Asterisk PBX for VOIP phones, lighting control and manages IP cameras for security purposes. I really like how the media can follow the remote control around the house.

Pretty neat, and something I’ll definitely play with. Biggest problem is that the cost of some of the equipment used in the Demo. The remotes are $150, the 1″ PC that attaches to the back of the LCD/Plasma TV is $899.

“Science is a philosophy of discovery. Intelligent design is a philosophy of ignorance. You cannot build a program of discovery on the assumption that nobody is smart enough to figure out the answer to a problem. Once upon a time, people identified the god Neptune as the source of storms at sea. Today we call these storms hurricanes. We know when and where they start. We know what drives them. We know what mitigates their destructive power. And anyone who has studied global warming can tell you what makes them worse. The only people who still call hurricanes “acts of God” are the people who write insurance forms.” — Neil deGrasse Tyson : The Perimeter of Ignorance

A good read.

I may have to take back my statement about V for Vendetta never happening.

Many of Britain’s millions of public surveillance cameras are now talking. If they spot you engaging in uncivil behavior, they scold you. Even weirder:

…to make the systems seem more friendly, they’re talking about holding contests for local school children to become the “voice” of the surveillance cameras.

I can’t think of anything more apropos of the almost-fully-realized UK Nanny State dystopia than an anonymous British child scolding the citizenry over a loud speaker for littering or loitering or public ass-scratching.

“Please sir, remove your hand from her bum. No public affection on city streets is permitted.”

Blatently stolen from:
TheAgitator.com: Britain Gets Yet Creepier

Interesting List

Get a First Life: A One Page Satire of Second Life

This is Hilarious. For those who don’t get the joke, Second Life is a Stephensonesque virtual world where people go to create a second personality. I don’t see it any different that hanging out with friends at a pub/mall/racetrack - Its just another venue for socializing. Some people do take it a bit far.

That said, Western culture has moved from the industrial age to the information age and from manufacturing to intellectual property. I think its perfectly reasonable for someone to create a fulfilling career inside a game like Second Life. Musicians, artists and movie producers are obvious examples, but it applies to engineering related pursuits too. I can write software as Moldar the Magnificent^* just as easily as Chris Farris, and lets face is Moldar is a cooler name.

In one of my recent “I hate my job and what I do moments” I decided it would be fun to become a Central Banker in World of Warcraft. Several Massive Multiplayer Online Games (MMORPGs) had run into issues where either too much gold is in the system that they experience currency devaluation (think Wiemar Germany) or they make it too easy to create value (if you’re a geek think magic items) and suffer massive inflation. In a digital world a simple sql statement can double the amount of precious metal. A way is needed to maintain a robust economy while adjusting for changes in population (aka subscribers). This becomes even more important in games like Second Life where the user base wants to be able to exchange in-game currency for real dollars/euros/yen.

Finally, Kudos to Second Life creator Linden Labs for not going nuts over the parody site. See their response.

They’ve invented the Caffeinated Doughnut

HT: GriftDrift

Ever since the Internet became a shopper paradise - no screaming children, parking woes, and bad Christmas music - there has been a public policy issue that has raised its ugly head time and time again: how to collect sales taxes on purchases made by a resident of Georgia from an Internet site located in Texas by a company based in California and shipped out of a warehouse in Kentucky.

The Internet retailers complain, rightly so, that it is next to impossible for a small shop to keep up and remit taxes to the several thousand different taxing jurisdictions (state/county/city) in the US. Local and state governments on the other hand have tried several heavy handed, and ultimately unsuccessful attempts to collect the money they believe is theirs.

Part of the problem with finding a solution to the Internet sales tax collection issue has been rent-seeking on the part of the brick and mortar retailers. Department stores don’t want people shopping online and those retailers, being more established, have better lobbying ability. Brick and mortar retailers want the government to screw over the Internet retailers because they don’t want the competition.

With the Georgia General Assembly looking at scrapping the income tax with a sales tax increase, the issue of Internet sales will become more of a concern.

Should the General Assembly decide to go down that path, this would be an excellent time for Georgia to become a model for a sane and workable Internet taxing system that doesn’t burden small Internet retailers. Instead of 159 different county rates (plus whatever SPLOSTs and city sales taxes might also exist), Georgia could establish a single state-wide Internet Sales Tax rate. All a retailer would have to do is send the Dept of Revenue a spreadsheet of the Zip+4 and the purchase amount. The DOR would then be responsible for apportioning the sales tax revenue between the counties and state based on a fixed formula.

Internet retailers would send this spreadsheet, along with a check, on a monthly, quarterly, or annual basis depending on transaction volume. So an Amazon with millions of dollars of annual sales might send a check monthly, but a small mom-and-pop shop that might sell $15,000 in Georgia would only have to send a check once a year.

So as not to ensnare individuals into having to collect and remit Internet sales taxes, all retailers would be exempt on the first $5,000 of purchases each year. Companies like Amazon would exceed that by about 9am on Jan 1st as gift certificates are redeemed, while someone selling that old couch on Craigslist would never be subject to having to collect and remit the Internet sales tax.

I think not.

The Wall Street Journal did a piece on On BlackBerry Orphans, children of parents who are totally obsessed with their BlackBerry or Treos.

I’m getting really sick and tired of these “work/life balance” articles. I understand why the media does it. Filling column inches based on the random drivel of so-called experts is pretty easy. Still, there never seems to be much perspective, and what little there is comes in the form of a one line quote from someone interviewed for the story.

In this case the perspective comes from the CEO of RIM (maker of the blackberry) and a 15 year old kid who seems to understand that work equates to earned income.

One of BlackBerry’s biggest defenders, Jim Balsillie, the chairman of Research In Motion, says children should ask themselves, “Would you rather have your parents 20% not there or 100% not there?” ….

Chris DuMont, 15, of San Marino, Calif., recognizes that his father’s habit helps bring in income. “Sometimes when we’re on vacation he’ll be on” his device, Chris says. “But the whole reason we’re on vacation is because he’s working.”

Balsillie’s point is quite valid. In the “good ole days” before cell phones, the bread winner (usually the father) worked late and was never home for dinner. Now, with the availability of cell phones, email, IM and PCs, parents can leave the office at a decent hour, get their kids from school or daycare, take them to soccer practice and still get some work done at home when the kids are doing homework.

Embrace the technology folks.

All that said, we have a major cultural problem in this country with people and their phones. If you and I are having a face to face conversation, don’t answer the phone if its not important. If its your boss or your kid or your wife and you take the call thinking it might be important, but it turns out that it isn’t, tell them you are in the middle of a conversation and you’ll call them back. Don’t make the person standing in front of you wait why you idly chat on the phone.

If a group of friends are at dinner, get up from the table to take that important call. Don’t make the rest of us sit quiet or talk over you. If you can’t safely drive and talk, then send the call to voicemail. I’ve never had any issue telling a non-emergency caller that I can’t talk because I’m driving, or that I’m at dinner and I’ll call back in an hour. Use that caller-id.

Those guys in California, Europe or Japan who can’t calculate time zones and call you during dinner can wait. The project deadline won’t slip because you decided to have an uninterrupted dinner with your kids. Face it, your job isn’t that important, and people aren’t impressed.

And for that matter, get some perspective on the terms important and emergency. At my current job, I’m responsible for systems that if they go down can affect people’s ability to dial 911. That’s important. I’ll leave the table to answer the phone from the office. And if I’m at dinner and people can dial 911, I’ll tell them I’m at dinner and I’ll deal with it later.