Week 32
OH I THINK WE ALL KNOW WHY.
#haha #NSA
"Tor usage doubles in under a week, and no one knows why.. [T]he number of Tor users has shot up to about 1.2 million from 600,000 [..] “And it's not just a fluke in the metrics data—it appears that there really are twice as many Tor clients running as before,” Dingledine wrote on Tuesday"
"The revelations about the monitoring of phone calls, emails and Internet traffic by the National Security Agency's Prism program will cost U.S. cloud suppliers [between] $35 [and] $45 billion [..][A] recent survey by the Cloud Security Alliance, which found that 56% of 500 respondents said the disclosures by the fugitive NSA systems administrator would cause them to lose non-U.S. business. Canada, plus Germany, France and other European countries, have rules that require companies to guarantee the privacy of data that originates within their borders. Most comply by keeping the data on storage inside its country of origin"
More often than not, founders, early employees, and investors of the largest tech companies will tell you that the product that took off was never part of (at least not fully) the original “plan.” Twitter spun out of Odeo, Instagram was a Burbn pivot, BuzzFeed evolved from one of many “for fun” experiments — the list goes on and on. Heck, even Facebook was originally Facemash.
By and large, innovative products aren’t strategically imagined ahead of time – they’re stumbled upon while experimenting on-the-go.
Furthermore, even when the game-changing idea is discovered, the founders and early employees tend to underestimate its magnitude and potential. They’ll tell you that they knew the product was special but did not realize how how special it was or what it would lead to next. The best example of this: Google was a graduate school project that Larry and Sergey tried to sell for $1 million. And there’s no way that Jack, Ev, and Biz could have been predicted from day one that Twitter, the SMS-based prototype, would eventually enable revolutions and reinvent news media. But despite initially linear growth, they knew they had something special on their hands because the product they had built delighted themselves and a core group of addicted users. In the early stages of a product’s life, all you can know for sure is whether or not you’ve built something that delights yourself and others. The rest — how many others it will delight, and in what ways — is typically felt out along the way.
In other words, “vision” is a popular industry narrative applied after-the-fact.
Despite these patterns, investors require conviction and grandiosity from budding entrepreneurs. As a result, most “dumb” and “small” ideas never make it to pitch meetings or even prototyping, and instead die in the heads of talented builders. Unless you’re someone like Kevin Rose, you can’t walk into an investor meeting and say, “We’re not really sure what we’re building,” or “We’re not really sure how this idea evolves and gets really big yet,” and expect to receive funding. Which is a shame, given that Facebook, Twitter, Airbnb, Dropbox and the like were all initially “dumb” and “small.”
"Power Corrupts. PowerPoint Corrupts Absolutely... [S]lideware -computer programs for presentations -is everywhere: in corporate America, in government bureaucracies [..]. Particularly disturbing is the adoption of the PowerPoint cognitive style in our schools. Rather than learning to write a report using sentences, children are being taught how to formulate client pitches and infomercials"
Stallman and Assange holding up a photo of Snowden. My favorite people in one place.
Following the most recent trend, the movie Elysium portrays Earth as a dump which anyone with their right mind already left, long ago. The movie sadly does not "click" with the audience, and I believe it's idiotic writing is at fault. There are some gaping holes in there, the kind you can fit a person in, bigger than even a scifi backdrop can allow. Here is one (maybe the worst): There are veeery, veeery advanced robots who can effectively act as soldiers, but then, Matt Damon's character (our hero) is working on the assembly line building those robots? Huh? Aren't there any robots who can be assembly line workers?
But no, the movie had to make the hero "working class", so he could suffer an accident "at the factory" and Elysium residents as rich, arrogant types (with healthcare), that's why the sci part of scifi had to be thrown out the window. Doesn't anyone with an ounce of brain knows that there will be no assembly line workers in the future?
Plus, if there is a "med bed" techology (some near-magical tech that cures you no matter what), everyone would have access to that technology. Why shouldn't they? What does it run on? Gold dust?
Who churns out this shit thinking it's scifi?
Damn. Did not know Carter was against the NSA "overreach".
"Actor Matt Damon says he feels like [..] “[Obama] broke up with me,” Damon told BET in an interview published on Thursday. The star, formerly a big supporter of the president, charged that Obama has “some explaining to do” for his actions in the White House.
“There are a lot of things that I really question – the legality of the drone strikes, these NSA revelations. Jimmy Carter came out and said we don’t live in a democracy. That’s a little intense when an ex-president says that.”"
Holly molly... These things can run at roughly 100 kilometers per hour.
Ridiculous speed.. Cool.
"The fastest cheetah on Earth has done it again, breaking her previous world record for the 100-meter dash and setting a new best time of 5.95 seconds."
About damn time. Toffler famously called the old GDP "Grossly Distorted Product". Even the recent additions might not be enough, but it is a good start.
"Yesterday, Alan B. Krueger, the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, announced that the [..] the past GDP numbers were [..] adjusted [..] It’s a change that’s partly the result of calculations that now factor entertainment and innovation. Adding the entertainment industry to the formula, according to Kreuger, presents a more accurate picture of the economy:
"The comprehensive revision to the national accounts [..] includes [..] methodological changes designed to better reflect the evolving nature of the U.S. economy. For instance, the GDP data released today … adopts an expanded definition of business investment that includes spending on research and development (R&D) and the creation of original works of art""