Bruce Sterling's Blog, page 680
March 3, 2010
Dead Media Beat: dead cloud ghost
*Kinda moaned from the spooky dead-media afterlife from the very beginning…
http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/02/ghost-cloud-files-shuts-down/
G.ho.st's Web-Based Operating System To Shut Down March 15
by Jason Kincaid on Mar 2, 2010
Ghost Inc., also known as G.ho.st, is shutting down its personal cloud-based services in two weeks, according to an email the company just sent out to users. Ghost cites "changes in the marketplace" as the reason behind the shutdown, but says that the startup will...
March 2, 2010
Dead Media Beat: was-once-There.com
*One of the many joys of formerly-new media is that, instead of shutting down a TV series or a movie franchise, you can obliterate an entire world.
http://www.virtualworldsnews.com/2010/03/therecom-shutting-down-on-march-9th11.html
March 02, 2010
There.com Shutting Down On March 9th
Today Makena has announced that it is closing down its virtual world, There.com, on March 9th. The company has always been tight lipped about its user base–I can't remember hearing a growth update in any recent...
March 1, 2010
Drug War Insurgent — the reality-tv show
*The planet's full of cops who figured out that the drugs are winning the Drug War, but this Texan ex-cop who's an American media prankster and using video-surveillance entrapment techniques against American cops… man, that's eerie. That's just chock-full of social not-okayness.
http://trueslant.com/stephenwebster/2010/02/25/barry-cooper-drug-war-insurgent/
Barry Cooper: Drug War Insurgent
To call Barry Cooper "over the top" is an understatement.
You may have seen him on the pages of Maxim, or ...
February 28, 2010
FREEDOM FIRST, and China last
*Rather a lot of blather here. Goes on and on and on, and the quality varies. However, it's of great interest to see that self-appointed Indian military strategy experts pound their chests just like American pyjamahideen bloggers.
*This is also an interesting spectrum of pretty much every aspect of popular Indian attitudes toward China — every aspect, that is, that fears and resents China and really likes artillery batallions. Got a real storm in an Oolong teacup here.
*By the way...
The Zero Dollar Laptop
*A *hundred* dollars? For pikers!
Press Release: Growing Demand for Zero Dollar Laptop Workshops
Zero Dollar Laptop Workshops for street-smart technical knowledge and a media laptop, classier than any shiny power-book are subject to growing demand.
The Zero Dollar Laptop is a recycled computer, running Free Open Source Software (FOSS) that is fast and effective- now and long into the future.
Clients of St Mungo's charity for homeless people are recycling hardware, breaking Windows and...
February 27, 2010
When the "makers" take over the design academy
*If you ask me, this hands-on Maker doctrine sounds even weirder than the supposedly intellectual and abstract "critical design."
*I really enjoy rhetoric like this. I dunno why I'm such a design-teacher groupie, but I could read this stuff all day.
Session Topics
Written by Chris Beorkrem
Monday, 14 December 2009 15:32
Session Topics
Making Real
Moderator: Greg Snyder
Making Real (and exploring the real) will involve questions and practices surrounding the...
Design Fiction: Golden Orb Spider Farm
http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2010/02/adam-smith-ads4-have-a.php
*Another imaginary-gadget scheme out of the critical-design mill of Dunne and Raby at the Royal College of Art.
*This one is particularly out-there, very nails-on-the-chalkboard. You'd be hard put to jam that intervention into a book, a film, a role-playing game, anything but design-fiction.
The Philosophy of Punk Rock Mathematics
*Math guys have consistently been some of the most interesting eccentrics I know.
*Math can be a great clarifying haven from the evil fogs of philosophy. Except for, like, computational and simulated math where the process is never in a human head at all. And then there's that annoying Godel Incompleteness thing.
*Maybe what's really called for at this historic juncture is m...
Given that the USA is bound to lose a cyberwar…
… how about a strategy of preemptive attacks on political fanatics, so that nobody ever gets around to really launching a cyberwar?
*Oh yeah. That scheme's practically bound to work, don't ya think? Practically pays for itself, too!
*The eventual upshot of a pre-emptive policy by scared nations with cheap, frail infrastructure sounds pretty much like "hunting suicide bombers in the ruins," but one wouldn't call that, like, a plausible face of modern warfare or anything.
*From SANS, who is...
February 26, 2010
The static universe in the middle of the entropic universes
*I'm wondering if there's any way to test this guy's theory. I was about to remark that it's weird, but it looks rather less weird than a lot of others.
*After that earlier business about gravity being a form of entropy, I'm no longer bothered much. And the idea of a central universe where time exists but randomly fluctuates, where time has no direction, no events, memory, causality or entropy… in some ways that is an oddly comforting idea.
(….)
Wired.com: In this multiverse theory you have a ...
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