someone said that as bees are the sexual organs of the flowers, we humans are the sexual organs of machines.
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it’s no news that the (MAPHI)AA crew wants to have the best of both worlds in the market: their content is a service when it means we don’t own it, just a (revokable) license to use it, but it’s a product if by someway it gets broken and we need to replace it. and it’s no news they’re excercising their litigious muscle to get it done.
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so, EFF published a list of endangered gizmos that needs your help to reproduce and thrive in this harsh environment. mainly products & services that helps you to backup or translate your data flawlessly. (how dare you?) it’s divided in extinct, endangered and saved species, and it’s a nice way to use your compulsive consumerism (hey, I know you’re doing the bee dance around your gadgets, you sicko!) in a natural selction to a future we’re empowered by machines, not enslaved by them.
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don’t anyone please think of the machines?

from edge.org: ‘what do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?’
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hm, i believe (tho i cannot prove it) that we’re heading for a cognitive colapse… an information bomb, so to speak. a new state were linear thinking would be not only ineffectual but simply toxic.
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i believe more colapses are to come, but in our rearview-mirror mentality - protect airports after 9-11, check tectonic plaques after the asian tsunami - will only fully grasp the connected of it using a different state of mind. that oughta be mandatory in the years to come.
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i also believe that most of our frantic movements are in fact our counsciousness adjusting itself to swim in this symbol-less space. we’re avid collecting experiences mosaic-style to feed a “double”, this new counsciousness.
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and that objective looking at this work-in-progress somehow destroys a needed element, so all this has to be made in the back of our minds (heck, my dream-self got smarter than my awakened-self some time ago). objective thinking frames reality in ways that prevents this progress.

ok, more than 150,000 souls went to heaven this week… somehow natural disasters don’t make me feel as bad as political ones (iraq war). i mean, nature vs humanity is a recurring theme, eh?
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not to diss the dead, but we’re alive, and we’d better savor it.
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plus, an interview from suprnova creators and exceem project (descentralize, descentralize). in mp3, so alt+click on mac, or right+click & save as… on windows.
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bittorrent is a good piece of technology, and if we wanna get over this one-to-many media hell we’re trapped into (formulaic art, zombie lifestyle, celebrity whores all around, panis et circenses as political discourse) we gotta build our tools.

slashdot is a community that allow members to post news and comments, and also moderate others’ posts & commentaries. and also meta-moderate moderations, with a point-accumulation system - karma, in their lingo - to reward the good member on top of it. it may sounds confusing, but they created the first bottom-up news publication that beats the mass-media both in quickness and accuracy.
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being the ADHD person I am, i have no time to read all commentaries, so i set the filter to 5 (which means, only the top-rated commentaries even dare to touch my retina), and i’ve been collecting arguments since i started it. call it filtering of filtering of filtering. in a bottom-up world where are our own gatekeepers, it’s never enough.
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sadly, i lost most of the commentaries in a backup crash 2 years before. i realized that once you erase the concept of property, share and back up has the same function: preserve data for the future generations (some old post about it).
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i know better now, so i’m sharing some of the arguments with you, in order of… none at all. consider yourself lucky.
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• this guy shares some interesting pattern in SCO suing behavior
• about reblogging
• blogs as a threat to traditional media
• links of good cooking sites
• litigious society and the price of health care
• also (talking about the ethics of a doctor’s blacklist database)
• real network’s bad karma
• an open letter to real networks
• VoIP and 911, and why it’s jsut FUD from the traditional telecoms
• some revealing statistics pointing for a rigged (2004) election
• venezueln voting system vs american
• a bunch of links pointing to the tampering of this election results.
• list of politicians and pundits that served the army, comparison between democrats and republicans.
• internet & narrowcasting
• doctors and insurance and the price of health care, again
• filtering and elitism
• interesting comparison between RIAA and papal authority, pre-protestantism
• some hints on good blogging systems
• why RIAA is afraid of P2P distribution, and piracy is just a flag
• trademark vs copyright
• freenet and sharing/RIAA battle
• interesting view of microsoft tak on netscape
• this is good: remember all those newbies asking you to fix a windows problem? some hints to stop helping bill gates for free
• a meme’s hype curve
• brazilian government answer to microft suing for defamation
• bittorrent and the reversal of traffic patterns
• traditional media blind spots on networked publishing
• shopping in a battlefield, a nice idea on shopping clubs
• debunking “extendend warranty”, an inside view. precious.
• RIAA scared of P2P, not piracy, again
• computer code as ammunition
• som thoughts agains “winner-takes-all” theory
• creativity and rewards
• RFID and privacy
• microsoft mentality on users
• ??AA against all-purpose computers
• ten things you can do to make your program at least tolerable for end users
• chess movements explanation
• republican vs democrats as corporate smokescreen
• technical argument agains evolution of camera lens
• disney reputation going downhill
• disney and soviet-style control
• internet activists rebuilding syndicalism
• open source mentality as a clash of wordwiews
• funny rant about letting media studios encrypt everything
• some key-examples on how USA is losing the technology race because of copyright lobby
• CYA litigious society and the death of common sense
• Caller ID spoofing with 3-way tools, a funny story of a father and smart teenagers
• Caller ID Falsification Serviceproving wireless harmless is stupid!
• in google times, obfuscation is not security
• kyoto, USA and plain numbers on US efficiency
• kyoto protocol explained, and why russia, USA behave the way they do

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my mourning technique has been frantically visiting forums to read their opinions about the reelection… some quotes below (and above).
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Dan Gillmor’s eJournal: “The latest word on climate change is that with the uncovering of sequestered carbon in the arctic by melting ice sheets, the rate of climate change will increase, not decrease. There’s a positive feedback loop in place now, and it will take even more to counteract it. Without added forests, greenbelts, and estuaries, there won’t be adequate photosynthetic activity to counteract the increased burning of fossil fuels. We could see 20 foot rises in ocean level in 50 years. Dan could be going to his office in San Jose by boat.

Ask yourself this: Why has the Bush administration fired scientists who won’t write biased papers to support the administrations pro-industry agenda? Why have lobbyists for energy and chemical companies been put in charge of our environmental protection, our public lands, especially our parks and precious remaining wilderness areas?

A: The large corporations, who owe no aliegance to any particular people of the world, are perfectly willing to corrupt the political system to boost their short-term profits, with no regard for our long-term welfare. You don’t have to work for any multi-national corporation for very long to see how that happens.

Perhaps the religeous right foolishly believe that god will take their faithful to heaven in the next four years, leaving the rest of us rot in a planet increasingly like Venus. It appears that their blissful ignorance, their reliance on one ancient book as the source of all truth, has made them sheep, lead by myopic executives with only quarterly profits in mind. They’ve blissfully carried us closer to our own destruction.

What we really need in technology policy is the principle that no costs be externalized. Companies and individuals must be responsible for the polution they create, the resources they extract, the health risks they cause. Tech policy should be based on true capitalism where products and services actually have to include the costs to the commons, not government subsidies to extractive and environmentally exploitive industries.”

“being a
is not a substitute for a good personality.”

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reuse as necessary.

outfoxed
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every single subway ad here in NYC is written over by the users. i pay a lot of attention to the messages, because they tell me the american opinion better than the media conglomerates, and brings me relief, because people know what’s going on.
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this one i found on the lorimer station… it was an ad for fox news.
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the television here is sicken to the core. to compare american news and international news (both about america), you can realize how the american population has been living in a bubble, their opinion carefully controlled.