By David Pescovitz
Small Times Columnist
July 25, 2003 – Imagine your kitchen blender conks out the day you’re hosting a large cocktail party. You search an online catalog, decide on a model, and click the “buy” button. But instead of waiting three days for the appliance to be shipped to your door, a new kind of printer on your desk springs into action. Layer by layer, the miraculous machine squirts out various materials to form the chassis, the electronics, the motors – literally building the blender for you from the bottom up in a matter of hours…
…”liquid gold” consists of gold nanocrystals…
http://www.smalltimes.com/document_display.cfm?document_id=6413
Monday July 28, 2003
Once upon a time, when Tony Blair was popular, Barry Sheen was alive and jeans didn’t come with those strange yellow fake dust stains on them, there lived three kings. These kings, called AOL, Lycos and Yahoo!, shared control of the kingdom of Internetia.
For many years the kings ruled with an iron hand; it was almost impossible to work, rest or play in Internetia without the permission of at least one of them. Internetia had vast natural deposits of news, information and shopping but the three kings were greedy, hiding these valuable resources away from ordinary citizens behind a wall of top stories, featured partners and stock quotes….
by Paul Carr
The Guardian - link here
The Truth Machine by James Halpern 1996 and the Matrix
It’s a book I bought to read because of the security books I buy on Amazon. It popped up as one of those ones - if you read X others read Y and you might like it.
I recommend these to anyone:
Database Nation: The Death of Privacy in the 21st Century
by Simson Garfinkel
Secrets and Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World
by Bruce Schneier
Please read on for my take on the book and a closed Matrix world
[b”>(1500 words - my LONGEST BLOG!)[/b”>
(more…)
Bad stuff? - Big Brother’s Enemy
“Some believe that RFID is going to usher in an age of government control, but that’s only because they don’t understand history.”
Mark Roberti is the Editor of RFID Journal
http://www.rfidjournal.com/article/articleview/509/1/1/
July 21st 2003 (more…)
Computers, Robots, the future - must read :
http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm
http://www.amazon.com/webservices/
Looks like activity around Amazon’s web services is heating up. In the latest issue of their web services newsletter, the following revelation:
We are almost ready to kick off the beta for our payment system. The payment system will allow visitors to your site to use their Amazon account to pay you for any product or service. You can also offer subscriptions and controlled access to content. You will be able to verify the status of any transaction to make sure that the user has not rescinded it. We will provide you with a base-level API and you can construct your business logic on top.
anildash
http://www.dashes.com/anil/index.php?archives/006765.php
is a window into weblog activity right now, at this moment. It is a real-time event stream of weblog updates, similar to the data provided by blo.gs or weblogs.com, without polling or a static data format. Pings to BlogChatter are displayed instantly the moment they are received, and only persisted in memory for no longer than 30 seconds.
http://www.mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatter/