NY Times: Travelers Warm Up to Videoconferencing. But even as fears of flying began to recede and airline schedules returned to near normal, there were signs that the moment of crisis might be prompting a nation of road warriors to consider supplementing travel with teletechnology as a general practice. [Tomalak's Realm]
Author: Vince Kimball
Gartner: Time to Drop IIS
Gartner: Time to Drop IIS. Gartner recommends that businesses hit by both Code Red and Nimda immediately investigate alternatives to IIS, including moving Web applications to Web server software from other vendors such as iPlanet and Apache. Although those Web servers have required some security patches, they have much better security records than IIS and… Continue reading Gartner: Time to Drop IIS
PHP Interface for HierMenus 4
PHP Interface for HierMenus 4. Among its other features, you can use PHP to retrieve, format, and pass dynamic data to Web pages as JavaScript structures. Guest author J. “JC” Chakrabarty introduces this capability by discussing his PHP/MySQL interface to HierMenus 4. 0924 [WebReference News]
Don't Press the Panic Button
National Review by Dave Kopel – Don't Press the Panic Button. The antiterrorism legislation before Congress is dangerous. Congress is being asked to rush to pass emergency antiterrorist legislation written by the Department of Justice. House Committee hearings are scheduled for Friday, Senate hearings for Tuesday, and the DOJ is demanding the bill be enacted… Continue reading Don't Press the Panic Button
Safety in spreading out
Dan Gillmor: Safety in spreading out. # [Scripting News]
Is knowledge inherently dangerous? A decade ago I read a book by Frank Herbert called the White Plague. It changed me. Bill Joy read it too and it lead him to write, “The Future Doesn't Need Us.” The concept is simple. A single biotechnologist has his family blown up in a IRA attack. He decides to make war on the world. So, for less than $200,000 he builds a basement biotechnology lab (I researched it and it can be done) and designs a airborned virus that targets females. He wants the world to feel as he does, bereft. He succeeds.
The question for Joy and myself became after reading this: is specific knowledge or will specific knowledge become too dangerous for society to let an individual know unsupervised? Will we need to control all people that know too much? I had an advanced physics instructor once (I almost became a physicist because it was easy and fun), that built designer nukes (BTW, you can do a lot with nukes. You can vary the radiation output, you can make it blast only without much radiation, you can shape the charge to have it blow in a single direction, and you can select the form the energy to yield). He was a controlled person. Why? Because he knew too much. Will that be the same with nanotech, biotech, and AI tech? My gut tells me yes. [John Robb's Radio Weblog
Is knowledge inherently dangerous? A decade ago I read a book by Frank Herbert called the White Plague. It changed me. Bill Joy read it too and it lead him to write, “The Future Doesn't Need Us.” The concept is simple. A single biotechnologist has his family blown up in a IRA attack. He decides… Continue reading Is knowledge inherently dangerous? A decade ago I read a book by Frank Herbert called the White Plague. It changed me. Bill Joy read it too and it lead him to write, “The Future Doesn't Need Us.” The concept is simple. A single biotechnologist has his family blown up in a IRA attack. He decides to make war on the world. So, for less than $200,000 he builds a basement biotechnology lab (I researched it and it can be done) and designs a airborned virus that targets females. He wants the world to feel as he does, bereft. He succeeds.
The question for Joy and myself became after reading this: is specific knowledge or will specific knowledge become too dangerous for society to let an individual know unsupervised? Will we need to control all people that know too much? I had an advanced physics instructor once (I almost became a physicist because it was easy and fun), that built designer nukes (BTW, you can do a lot with nukes. You can vary the radiation output, you can make it blast only without much radiation, you can shape the charge to have it blow in a single direction, and you can select the form the energy to yield). He was a controlled person. Why? Because he knew too much. Will that be the same with nanotech, biotech, and AI tech? My gut tells me yes. [John Robb's Radio Weblog
NY Times
NY Times: “For many Iranians, America is a country full of the scantily-clad, available women of Baywatch and MTV. First-time visitors to the United States are often shocked by the more spiritual and socially conservative side of America. 'What surprised me the most when I came to the United States was how many churches there… Continue reading NY Times
Q&A with Peter Bogaards
Argus ACIA: Q&A with Peter Bogaards. Everybody with a background and experience related to people and their communication can become an information designer. If you have a passion for the motives, needs, emotions, cognition, circumstances and values of people, you are more than half way there. [Tomalak's Realm]
Andre Durand
Andre Durand, the founder of Jabber, Inc. has a new Manila Weblog. Welcome! This is a well done site and a good demonstration of why every founder, CEO, or clear thinking executive should have their own site(s). Andre is able to post his point of view on current events, enhance his personal brand, and share his vision of where… Continue reading Andre Durand
Google Buys Xerox PARC Spin-Off's Assets
Interactive Week: Google Buys Xerox PARC Spin-Off's Assets. Search engine Google on Thursday announced that it will buy the intellectual property assets of Outride, an online information retrieval technologies developer that was spun off from Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center. [Tomalak's Realm]