Former BP Engineer Releases Emails From Wake of Gulf Oil Disaster Showing A Coverup By BP
"Anil Dash has an insightful post about cutting through the social media hype to see all of the social functionality we've lost on the web over the past decade.
'We've lost key features that we used to rely on, and worse, we've
abandoned core values that used to be fundamental to the web world. To
the credit of today's social networks, they've brought in hundreds of
millions of new participants to these networks, and they've certainly
made a small number of people rich. But they haven't shown the web
itself the respect and care it deserves, as a medium which has enabled
them to succeed. And they've now narrowed the possibilities of the web
for an entire generation of users who don't realize how much more
innovative and meaningful their experience could be. ... We get bulls***
turf battles like Tumblr not being able to find your Twitter friends or
Facebook not letting Instagram photos show up on Twitter because of
giant companies pursuing their agendas instead of collaborating in a way
that would serve users. And we get a generation of entrepreneurs
encouraged to make more narrow-minded, web-hostile products like these
because it continues to make a small number of wealthy people even more
wealthy, instead of letting lots of people build innovative new
opportunities for themselves on top of the web itself.'"
Massive
new surveillance program will store data on innocent U.S. citizens for
up to five years, using “predictive pattern-matching,” to analyze it for
suspicious patterns of behavior. It represents a “sea change in the way
that the government interacts with the general public.”
TIL: Apple stores everything you say to SIRI on it's servers for an undisclosed amount of time
"Enthusiasm about Google's Kansas City fiber project is overwhelming.
But in the Emerald City, the government doesn't want to wait. They
have been stringing fiber throughout the city for years, and today
announced a deal with company Gigabit Squared and the University of
Washington to serve fiber to 55,000 Seattle homes and businesses
with speeds up to a gigabit. The city will lease out the unused
fiber, but will not have ownership in the provider nor a relationship
with the end customers. The service rollout is planned to complete in 2014. It is the first of 6 planned university area network projects currently planned by Gigabit Squared."
The FlÄmsbanen railway route
"I've been a staunch advocate of NOT joining Facebook or Twitter or
the other social networks to protect my privacy and to not voluntarily
give all my personal information away to corporate America, or even the
Government.
aLFRED e nEWMAN
"What, Me Worry?"
The amazing Aurora Borealis in Sweden.
Men who drink bottled water in plastic containers are doomed
"David Crane and Robert F.Kennedy Jr. write in the NY Times that with
residents of New Jersey and New York living through three major storms
in the past 16 months and suffering sustained blackouts, we need to ask
whether it is really sensible to power the 21st century by using an
antiquated and vulnerable system of copper wires and wooden poles. Some
have taken matters into their own hands, purchasing portable gas-powered
generators to give themselves varying degrees of grid independence. But
these dirty, noisy and expensive devices have no value outside of a
power failure and there is a better way to secure grid independence for
our homes and businesses: electricity-producing photovoltaic panels installed on houses, warehouses and over parking lots,
wired so that they deliver power when the grid fails. 'Solar panels
have dropped in price by 80 percent in the past five years and can
provide electricity at a cost that is at or below the current retail cost of grid power
in 20 states, including many of the Northeast states,' write Crane and
Kennedy. 'So why isn't there more of a push for this clean, affordable,
safe and inexhaustible source of electricity?' First, the investor-owned
utilities that depend on the existing system for their profits have
little economic interest in promoting a technology that empowers
customers to generate their own power. Second, state regulatory agencies
and local governments impose burdensome permitting and siting requirements that unnecessarily raise installation costs.
While it can take as little as eight days to license and install a
solar system on a house in Germany, in the United States, depending on
your state, the average ranges from 120 to 180 days."
"The United States said today that it will not sign an international telecommunications treaty thanks to the inclusion of Internet-related provisions. According to the BBC, the U.K. and Canada have also pledged not to sign the treaty in its current form,
while delegates from Denmark, the Czech Republic, Sweden, the
Netherlands, New Zealand, Costa Rica, and Kenya also have reservations."
Internet remains unregulated after UN treaty blocked
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