My Thoughts Exactly – Page 46

Well, hello everybody

John April 27, 2004 February 24, 2013General, My Thoughts Exactly

I spend a lot of time reading weblogs.

I read TalkingPointsMemo and a dozen other lefty news blogs. I read about Bush and I read about Iraq. And I worry myself sick because just about everything I read tends to confirm my sense that (in the immortal words of an R. Crumb character that I’ll track down one of these days) “the whole fucking planet is turning to shit.” But I enjoy those blogs because they have personality.

Over the last few weeks I’ve checked wetmachine a few times just to see what was up, and nothing much was. And I remember thinking: Damn, what’s up with this site? Why is it so dull? Where is wetmachine’s personality?

Chips in the brain

John April 14, 2004 February 24, 2013General, My Thoughts Exactly

I keep trying to get myself ready for the future, and I keep failing.

On the other hand things like this used to scare me to death, and now they only give me the screaming heebie-jeebies. So I guess that’s “progress”?

Or not?

Existentialism is not easily definable.

sweetjain April 6, 2004 February 24, 2013General, My Thoughts Exactly

It really isn’t. Try it.

P.J. Harvey is cool.

sweetjain April 2, 2004 February 24, 2013General, My Thoughts Exactly

P.J. Harvey is cool.

Wetmachine Wants Music

Gary March 30, 2004 February 24, 2013General, General Exception, My Thoughts Exactly

Hi, it’s Gary, the guy who maintains the drunken machinery[1] here at Wetmachine.

John has asked me to install a Soundblox MP3 player on Wetmachine for your listening pleasure (don’t panic, it won’t start playing automatically, and it’s a lot better than those cheesy MIDI tunes of yesteryear).

But we need music to play!

We interrupt this program

John March 24, 2004 February 24, 2013General, My Thoughts Exactly

For a brief commercial announcement.

My employer, Laszlo Systems, makes some cool XML-based technology for so-called rich internet applications that run in Flash players. For those of you who don’t have a current degree in marketing buzzspeak, I’ll explain that that means you use Laszlo’s stuff to write nifty interactive web apps that don’t require page refreshes, and that the language in which you write them doesn’t suck. See the little blogging widget to the right for a micro-example.

As of yesterday Laszlo has greatly liberalized its free-for-developers and free-for-noncomercial-use policies. If you do any web development you really should go get the download. It’s cool, and it’s free.

Steve Talbott: Technopoly's eloquent critic

John March 20, 2004 February 24, 2013General, My Thoughts Exactly

I often describe myself as a technoparanoaic, or a technoskeptic, or a neoluddite, or whatever. I’ve used an excerpt from the Unabomber Manifesto as epigrams to my books, and I’ve called my Acts of the Apostles “Bill Joy’s Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us in convenient thriller format, with fewer pictures and more sex and car chases.” But although I might use a Kaczynski quotation in order to be provacative, and although I obsess on dystopian visions of the future, I really don’t have a consistent point of view.

To read somebody who does have a consistent point of view, see Netfuture:Technology and Human Responsibility, the occasional newsletter put out by Steve Talbott.

I don’t always agree with everything Steve says (although I usually agree with most of it), and once in a while his writing style gets a little floral for my taste. But he is a wise man and a thoughtful writer. I highly recommend him.

Orson Emergent: Subvocal speech

John March 19, 2004 February 24, 2013General, My Thoughts Exactly

I realize what a boon this will be for people who have lost their ability to speak.

However, all I can think about is how the thought police are going to love it.

There's still hope — robots fail in the desert

John March 14, 2004 February 24, 2013General, My Thoughts Exactly

Ever since watching the opening sequence of the first Terminator movie in 1984, in which autonomous battlebots relentlessly and remorselessly hunt down a pesky band of cockroach-like humans who refuse to be eradicated from what’s left of the Earth, the mad scientists at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration have been racing to beat the movie’s date of 2029 for the ultimate man-machine showdown.

Perpaps starting to panic a little–with only 24 years to go, no credible unstoppable AI-driven land-based deathmachines on the horizon and a whole world to destroy–the Military-Industrial Complex (MIC) challenged itself to “think outside the box(sm)” and so opened up the competitionto universities, entrepeneurs and even people who have no known connection to Haliblurton, Lockheed or Raytheon.

Sausage Factory: a partial index to date

John March 11, 2004 February 24, 2013General, My Thoughts Exactly, Tales of the Sausage Factory

Here’s a nearly complete list of Harold Feld’s “Tales of the Sausage Factory” articles here on Wetmachine. Real Soon Now I’m going to get organized and use the blog software to keep track of this stuff so I don’t have to manualy copy and paste to generate lists like this. . .

On the Nader copyright case

Justin/Janet part 2

Justin/Janet part 1

The ICANN Train Wreck

Unlicensed Spectrum Access

Why Disney/Comcast Merger Sucks Rocks

On RFID

CBS Caves Again for Bush

Yet more on Fileswapping

Fileswapping — whither to in ’04

ABA article:“More than a Toaster with Pictures”

On making the Wall Street Journal’s Shit List

Golden Globes, Former Presidents, Media Ownership”