Year: 2005

Paging John Connor: Hurry up with your training, son

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last year I gloated when the robots failed in the great Mojave off-road trials. Well, no gloating this time.

Ordinarily, yknow, as a bit of a technoparanoaic, I would feel a little uneasy about the prospect of indestructable autonomous hunter-killer machines each armed with more firepower than a Wermacht Panzer division, set loose to “police” the “evildoers.”

But seeing as this is all being done under the auspices of the United States Department of Defense, which never acts improperly or with suspect motives, and which never makes tactical, much less strategic, miscalculations, I can go to bed tonight knowing that there’s nothing to be afraid of.

By the way, I feel like watching a video. Has anybody seen my copy of T2?

My speech in SF

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Sorry to go dark so long. I was on the West Coast pretty much all last week, then came home in time for the Jewish New Year. Lots of stuff to blog about and will try to do updates over the next week or so.

Last week, I was at the amzing and cool conference put together by Esme Vos of muniwireless.com. Esme is proof of why the Internet is such a wonderful tool. With nothing more than interest and dedication two years ago, she created the muniwireless website which is now a central news source and repository of information about municipal wifi.

I’ve attached below the speech I gave at the conference last week. It’s 6 pages, so it’s kinda long.

Stay tuned . . . .

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Low res or no res?

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I sometimes get asked about Croquet for computing devices with lower graphics capability, such as today’s phone/PDA/iPods. I think the train of thought is that there’s so much in Croquet that could be valuable independently of the immersive 3D environment, so shouldn’t that part be available on lesser machines?

I feel it is only worthwhile to initially build Croquet – all of Croquet and only one Croquet – on machines with the best commonly available graphics capability and also on those with no visual capability whatsoever!

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I need help

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There’s a lot that the nation needs to clean up in the aftermath of Katrina. I have faith that we will — as long as we don’t get bored, pour another drink, and choose to feel better before the work is really done. Racism. Bureaucracy. Anarchy. Incompetence. Posse Comitatus.

There’s a particular issue that I’m interested in. I’m looking for is a word or phrase to help me define a tiny a piece of what I’m seeing. The concept isn’t any more or less important than the others that are being discussed. I’d like to find a label for the concept, so that we can talk about it, without simply saying “President Bush is bad.” That just cuts off conversation for 50% of the country. That’s not fair, and it doesn’t fix the problem.

There’s something happening here.
What it is ain’t exactly clear.
There’s a man with a gun over there.
Telling me I’ve got to beware.

The concept that I’m thinking about goes back to classical Rome. One faction would simply kill its enemies. It would reward only its political members. A guard would bear fasces before The Leader in a triumphant parade. Then the leader of the faction would eventually be murdered. It was all something like a To-The-Death form of a generic T-shirt that I’ve recently seen: “The local sports team from my area can beat the local sports team from your area.”

We’ve seen a lot of this from Karl Rove. Outing spies that criticize the administration, telling Barbara Walters how he was beat up as a geeky kid but nobody’s beating him up now, or openly excluding industry experts from US delegations to trade conferences because “They didn’t win the election.” We’ve seen it in blue state vs red state discretionary spending and base closings, and we’ve seen it in on-the-ground preparations for New Orleans vs Houston. I feel this is wrong, but it isn’t obviously and universally regarded as wrong.

My Republican wife is convinced that this is some sort of partisan genocide. I’m looking for a word that describes this as obviously and blatantly a Bad Idea. Not just soccer hooligans rooting for their team, but partisan soccer hooligans with their fingers on the Button.

It's not just open standards, it's open spectrum

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While not often disagreeing with Groklaw, I did have a concern with this piece on open standards and disaster relief. While agreeing with the general gist — that proprietary standards can hinder relief efforts and that open platforms can maximize the number of people helped — the problem of interconnecting communications services is not generally an open standards problem. It is an open spectrum problem — and one we could solve today.

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Martin Misses an Opportunity

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If you’re going to shake up the FCC’s open meeting by focusing on Katrina and moving to Bell South’s emergency HQ, why couldn’t Martin have focused a little bit on the future? Rather than looking at the way in which technology changed relief, Martin summoned the usual industry suspects who, unsurprisingly, explained to the FCC why they need regulatory goodies to better serve the public. Perhaps the Chairman can be persuaded to hold another meeting or forum a month or two down the road to look at where we should go, not where we’ve been.

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