Squint and you can just make out… a couple of grasping hands?link » tags: [weird] posted via Wists: permamark
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V for Vendetta will have Fox Newsites foaming at the mouth, their legacy as bitparts in a modern day Dr. Strangelove. And the challenge – that there is no such thing as a freedom fighter, on the same weekend that Gerry Adams dines at the White House. link » tags: [movies] posted via Wists: permamark
Did Digg get spammed to help ramp Sun's Stock?link » tags: [news] posted via Wists: permamark
Boing Boing quotes Alan Moore (Creator of V for Vendetta) as saying that the real polar opposites in politics are not right or left but fascist vs. anarchist – i.e. how much government you have. This clearly does make the political scale less abstract, but the problem is that Anarchy is by definition not really a political stance but an apolitical one. As another web bubble brews, there was a definite Libertarian smell in the atmosphere at South by Southwest. By any logical definition of anarchy, Libertarianism is just an erm ‘politically correct’ term for anarchy. On the right Libertarianism is pretty simple – its about gun nuts. But it seems that on the left, Libertarianism is often the choice of former liberals who have made lots of money and choose a cause which allows them to support rights which don’t cost them anything. For ‘Liberaltarians’, supporting the right to…
Banks are plainly lying when they say that all you have to do is rip up the pre-authorized credit card offers they sent to you. The mail they send is one of the biggest sources of identity theft. This site allows you to directly opt out online.link » tags: [tips] posted via Wists: permamark
Most of all the species that have ever existed are extinct and it is certain that human beings will also one day be extinct, or our current cultural history lost through a Dark Age, most probably accelerated by our own doing. In the spirit of the Internet Archive and the Long Now project, perhaps we should look at mothballing human knowledge somewhere very safe – like on the Moon. A reverse of Arthur C Clarke’s ‘The Sentinel’ – where we put a monolith on the Moon for others. It seems like a text only archive would be around 30 Terabytes which could be stored in solid state form in a space the size of a large chest. I wonder how much this would cost, what the requirements would be to protect against radiation and whether a solar powered transmitter could be built to last for an extremely long time? I…
Creepy photos of a place in Bangladesh where they dismantle supertankers.link » tags: [photos] posted via Wists: permamark
For the New Version of Gawker Stalker, which launches today, Gawker are using Wists as their blog publishing system. This allows them to publish items and create maps which show pictures and locations of celebrity sightings in Manahattan and gives a sneak peak into some of the kinds of things that you’ll be able to do with the new version of Wists that we are working on.
The Apple Newton showed that form factor is everything. The Newton was pretty cool and ahead of its time – the first PDA. But it was the wrong size. The Palm Pilot did less (it didn’t even try to do full handwriting recognition), but it was the right size. The same form factor as Walkmans and cigarette packets and wallets and iPods, it slipped into existing shirt and jacket pockets, to be carried everywhere. Good design is about the right choices not technical wizardry. The Segway looked like magic – a two wheeled stable vehicle. But it needed gyros and computing power because its two wheels were next to each other. If its wheels were inline then it would have been a bicycle and the conservation of angular momentum alone would have kept it aloft. The bicycle is a better design for a two wheeled vehicle than a Segway. The…
Number of articles in english language version of Wikipedia: 1,000,000 Total articles in Wikipedia: 3,300,000 Total articles in Encylopedia Britannica: 65,000 Number of articles edited per day on Wikipedia: the same number as the total articles in Britannica. You don’t get what you pay for. Press releases/English Wikipedia Publishes Millionth Article – Wikimedia Foundation
Windows Live Local – Virtual Earth Technology Preview In 1994 lot of people thought VRML was cool, but it wasn’t cool compared to offline video games and it wasn’t useful compared to regular web-page search and browse. This mockup of Microsoft’s Local Live’ reminds me of VRML. As a video game, it’s crude by the standards of 1994 and as a web app it has none of the design sensibility of Google Maps. The mockup is from a multi billion dollar company whose most obvious online avenue of attack against Google is local advertising – and the end result is a maps application that allows you to choose a view that superimposes crappy vignettes of the interior of a ‘race car’ or ‘sports car’, as you ‘drive’ around maps. The product substitutes kitsch and gimmickery for ergonomics and usefulness.