Saturday 31 July 2010

skullduggery

Failure to adapt to changing economic conditions, both on the part of predators and prey, give license for a lot of failed schemes to stick around like blots of quicksand: pawn shops, bail-brokers, pay-day loan offices and other lending sharks intent on unending swim.  This too has made those forces determined to glean whatever profits they can from one's privacy even more firmly entrenched and desparate to try the most distasteful and tactiest of tacits.  I imagine that tombstones (pepperoni and cheese) of the future will be equipped with USB ports where visitors can plug in and download the archives of departed loved ones' tweets and other exhaustively monitored cyber spasms.  Reminscing, of course, will be peppered with targeted advertizing.  The interwebs will be a very poor executor and not many secrets will be secreted away.

Friday 30 July 2010

minority report or farce protection

As Wired Magazine reports, Google and the CIA are exploring a partnership with a cyber-security firm, which I am sure was already double-dipping and in the rolls of the Washington Post's revealing exposรฉ on US intelligence's poorly-constructed parade float of an operation, that promises to deliver reconnaissance on future crimes. By trawling blogs, tweets and other social networking sites, the firm hopes to project and predict potential threats before they happen through examining the broader network of connection and links. I was under the impression that intelligence analysts fight crimes by looking at these same context clues and making projections. With all the other surplus and redundancy, it is a challenge to imagine that these techniques could produce anything original and would only reduplicate different drafts of the same information already in circulation. I am not sure what Google's interest in this enterprise is. Besides the role of technical advisor, as the company reinvented Project Keyhole as Googlemaps and makes it freely available though with possible, I can only think that such prognostication could maybe catch future file-sharers and copy-fighters. For the intelligensia, possibly the biggest benefit could be in plugging leaks and nabbing the snitches.

Oedipus Rex or was not was--everybody do the dinosaur!

The Sphinx challenged Oedipus on the road to Thebes with a riddle: what creature walks on four legs, then two, then three? Paleontologists have found themselves confronted puzzle, as New Scientist reports, and this is really mind-blowing and disabusing. Certain specimens that researchers have always held to be examples of different species may actually be the same animal at different stages of growth and development. If people did not have the experience of frogs and butterflies contemporarily, who would have thought to connect them to fossil evidence of tadpoles or caterpillars?

Thursday 29 July 2010

it's time to play the pyramid


I've think that a word cloud has been a good and accessible way to present a concept scatter-shot.  Maybe one's CV or rรฉsumรฉ in the future could be in word cloud form, plastered here and there like the translucent advertizing film that they preserve mass-transit busses in.  I stumbled across a snazzy, aesthetic word cloud generator called Wordle quite by accident.  I pasted the text from the last two months of blog entries in it and it spun out this picture.  It's funny to see one's words parsed this way and what tags are tops.

flavor-fla

At the beginning of the month, voters in Bavaria moved to reject (I believe) the state's remaining vestiges of smokers' protections.  The act, Raucherschutz, was criticized in part because the measure had a misleading name--were voters endorsing protection for smokers' and smokers' rights or protection from smokers and the rights of nonsmokers.  The confusion in wording smacked of the criticism levied against the 2008 US state of California's ballot Proposition 8.  Proposition 8 sought to formally define the institution of marriage to exclude same-sex partnerships, so an affirmative vote for Proposition 8 was delivering a resounding no to marriage equality.  In both cases, lobbyists took advantage of this fact.  The Raucherschutz also passed, some believe because enough people misunderstood the message.  Mostly the new law dealt with schemes that bypassed fairly comprehensive EU smoking bans, like hookah bars or beer tents or beer tents inside of nominally non-smoking establishments.  The debate is still on, and a second vote may be pending, whether "members' only" clubs and renting a restaurant for completely private function are exempt.

Wednesday 28 July 2010

alpengeist or keys to the kingdom

The town of Garmisch-Partenkirchen at the foot of the Zugspitze has been nominated once again to host the Winter Olympic Games. It did so once before in 1936. The planning and prom committees are of course excited and perhaps a little over enthusiastic, as the schematics were set forth, however, without first consulting local landowners, who are not eager to sacrifice their heritage for an Olympic media center. A lot of installations are already there in Garmisch, like the stadium, so I wonder what all needs to be built.
Now there is talk of re-appropriating some of the property the US military forces leases from the government of Bavaria as a ski resort for soldiers, like the golf course, for new Olympic facilities. Though positioned with pristine views of the mountains that rise up like surface of the moon, I have stayed at the "Edelweiss" and I don't think anyone should bemoan the loss of this government-run resort that is overpriced and preys on the uninitiated travellers' idea of fancy and does not nearly compare to the hospitality that locals offer.
In unrelated news, like the plot of some role-playing adventure quest, inventor of the Interwebs Al Gore, has vetted seven people across the Earth with electronic keys to restart the World Wide Web, I guess at a safe-point in case of catastrophic failure. It sounds as if these proponents were chosen for their propensity and life-force when it comes to the Legend of Zelda--pieces of the Triforce were scattered across the Land of Hyrule.

Tuesday 27 July 2010

jailbreak

A US federal judge and the Librarian of Congress, in two separate rulings, have in the former decided that it is permissible to disable, fold, spindle, or mutilate DRM (digital rights [restrictions] management) protocols to enhance functionality, so long as it's not with the intent of infringing copyrights, and in the latter that one can tinker with one's own smart phone in order to liberate the hardware and open it up to the service provider of one's choice.  This is fraptuous news, and I am sure after the browser choice injunction, the EU will welcome these precedents.  German-American legal relations on these sort of matters can be strange.  I have learned about an early, founding case, along with becoming more educated on Richard Wagner's opus of works.  There's a flood of publicity concerning the Festspiel in Bayreuth, who annually host productions of Wagner's works.  It's nearly impossible to secure tickets, and there's a ten year waiting list--if I tried for good seats, it would probably mean that I would have to choose between Wagner or Oberammungau, whose next Passion Play is the next decade.
 I did not realize that Wagner's operas debuted there under Wagner's direction and have a founding connection with that particular, storied opera house.  The early legal wranglings between America and Germany, with a collolary to copyrights, telephone and utility and bookface monopolies, regarded performances of Parsifal.  Staging rights belonged exclusively to Bayreuth and the opera was never shown outside of Germany, until US courts ruled that Germany had no jurisdiction over a group of Wagner enthusiasts in New York City and could not stop the show from being put on.  Wagner had hoped to secure a perpetual allowance for his wife and surviving family by granting Bayreuth exclusive rights, but this was in jeopardy by relinquishing control.  Quite a few singers from Germany repaired to the States for the first performance outside of Bavaria.  Wagner's widow, however, got her reckoning by making sure that none of these players ever worked in the German theater again.