I was out of town and I FORGOT MY LAPTOP’S CHARGER. On reaching the hotel, I had only enough juice to check my mail and maybe make one reply. Scanning my inbox, there seemed to be one message I could send that might plausibly be useful. It turned out to have a huge impact for some of our users. What was this wisdom?….
Tag: wisdom
A Promising First Step
O.K., it is only a modest first step, but it is still nice to see.
In keeping with that whole “use the internet and new technologies, government transparency, yadda yadda yadda” stuff from the campaign, Obama and his transition team have now set up a new website for the transition at change.gov.
The website includes many of the features that made the Obama campaign website so effective. It is also an unprecedented time to compliance with a campaign promise (even before taking office). More importantly, if you click on the technology agenda, you will observe that it is pretty much the same tech agenda as from the campaign website.
That may not seem like a big deal, until you notice the top items. Protect the Openness of the Internet and Encourage Diversity In Media top the list.
Yes, it is merely a continuation of his previous campaign commitments. Yes, simply saying protecting the openness of the internet is your top priority does not actually gaurantee you will do it. I am not some Kool-Aide drinking neophyte. But I am also not someone who thinks that cynicism substitutes for wisdom and can’t wait to rush to proclaim that all that progressive stuff was just campaign chin music. I find it pleasantly reassuring that (a) these guys continue to show the same level of discipline in planning and execution they did during the campaign, (b) they appear quite serious about the business of governing, and (c) they seem to be on track to take us in the right direction.
Not bad for Day 2 after the election . . . .
Stay tuned . . . .
“tense unrelenting fear and dread. . .”
Light posting from me lately, as my personal time has been taken up with work, a funeral, weddings, medical procedures and lots of visits to see loved ones in hospital.
It’s hard to know what to make of all this “real life” stuff. I feel like I have great wisdom to impart to y’all, but cannot seem to formulate much of any of it into actual human language. Like Gene Hackman’s character in the movie Heist, I’m reduced to muttering, “It’s a hell of a thing. A hell of a thing.” In general, however, I do recommend weddings over funerals, and health over sickness.
On my ear-goggles this morning, as frequently, I’m listening to the late risers’ club on MIT radio, WMBR. And I just heard a recursive promotion for its own self, saying how this same show was a cure for “tense unrelenting fear and dread.” I certainly hope so.
Well, almost. I don’t want a complete cure for my tense unrelenting fear and dread, which is the essence of my persona here, for there would go the whole of my contribution to Wetmachine. But some relief would be welcome, you know what I’m say’n’?
Anyway, just for yucks & to lighten your day, here’s an article from the BBC about the dollar scale of the criminal war profiteering engineered by Cheney et al, and abetted by the USian people and their chickenshit congress, and here’s a BBC article about one teensy-tiny bit of the human cost–but one that is at least a little hopeful. We can’t all be melancholic all the time, now can we.
So What The Heck Is M2Z? And Why Do I Support It?
So recently, with all the spectrum stuff going on, I hear a lot of people asking about something called “M2Z,” usually like this: “So, what the heck is M2Z? And why should I care?”
Two very good questions. Briefly, M2Z is yet-another-plan to solve our national broadband woes through exclusive licensing. Specifically, it is about giving this one company a free, exclusive, national license for the 20 MHz of spectrum left over from the federal spectrum cleared for last summer’s AWS auction. While M2Z filed its application in May ’06, it took the FCC awhile to figure out what to do with it, since it doesn’t have any rules or pending proceedings that cover what M2Z wants. Finally, back in February ’07, the FCC issued a generic public notice of the application as required under the Communications Act and asked for piublic comment on what the heck to do about it.
Given my rather low opinion of Cyren Call’s efforts to get a free, national license, one might expect me to take a similar dim view of M2Z. Nor has M2Z helped its case much with some rather ham-handed “outreach” to the public interest community, by spamming the attendee list of the National Conference on Media Reform and creating a “Coalition for Free Broadband” website that looks all the world like an off-the-shelf Astroturf project.
Finally, Sascha Meinrath, who I look to for wisdom and advice on all matters spectrum, has written this blog entry on why he opposes the M2Z proposal.
Despite all this, I still think that M2Z deserves support. My employer Media Access Project filed a letter in support of M2Z. At the least, it deserves a good hard look before writing it off as yet another theft of spectrum via privatization.
Why? See below . . . .
“The first cyberage-religion”
A friend sent me a link to the Frequently Asked Questions page for Logologie, “the first cyberage-religion” with the simple subject heading, “it’s all you”. I kind of dug the first paragraphs of the answer to the Frequently Ask Question, “What is Logologie?”:
LOGOLOGIE is “the first cyberage-religion”.
Main topic of Logologie is the entire abandonation of brutality and of
senseless brain destruction,because with the development of technologies the
man got more and more destructive power in a way that now the single man has
become a danger for the survival of the entire human race.Though the mankind
can only further survive when the wisdom(capability to overwiew complex cy-
bernetic relations in a holistic way) of all men will reach that level of
development that the men’s cleverness(capability to apply technologies) al-
ready has reached,because otherwise the mankind will destroy itself.
Now that sounds like something a technoparanoid like myself could get behind! Not only is the author right-on about threat amplification through technology, but he’s also in favor of the entire abandonation of brutality. Which is a proposition I also favor. Moreover, the “cosmic destiny” of Logologie sounds remarkably similar, dare I say it, to the cosmic destiny of Wetmachine, at least insofar as the perfectation of man is concerned:
The cosmic destiny of the man is persuit of perfectation and not destroying
himself – though Logologie’s task is to teach this mankind in sovereignous
holistical thinking to avoid mankind’s lemmingish selfdestruction and avoid
turning this nice world into a grey,dread,dead ball drifting through the
empty space…
Why, this paragraph would find itself quite at home in my own Cheap Complex Devices:
Logologie is a religion of logics and reason,though it is against forbidding
things without any logical reasonings – it trusts more in unbiased resear-
ching and experimenting then in strictly believing dogmatically to bookish
texts written by some ancient priests or by certain ferengiish(i.e. selfish
and capitalistic) cravat wearers of “white”(i.e. officially acknowledged,but
unholistic) sciences.
Could this Logology be just what I’ve been looking for? The perfect evolutionary synthesis of Unitarian-Universalist quasi-religious humanism and computer-tinged scientistology? Follow me below the fold for stunning answer the answer!
[UPDATE: fixed a few typos and the one word “application” to “amplification”. D’oh!]
Black Monday
As I demonstrated last fall when I predicted a Kerry victory, my powers of prognostication are nothing to write home about. OTOH, I suppose this demonstrates the wisdom of the old saw that you ca’t judge an outcome by oral argument.
We lost Brand X by 6-3. Interesting split that put Scalia and Thomas on opposite sides but, as I have observed in the past, telecom issues do not fall into the neat conservative/liberal divisions everyone is so fond of making.
Grokster also went the other way, with the Court not even remanding for trial.
I will have more later when I have read the decisions. Right now I’m trying to sort things out.
Stay tuned . . .
-
But while the uproar has swayed much of the public to Johansson's defense at a time when #genAI is increasingly under scrutiny, this may not quite be an open-and-shut case should she decide to sue . Read the breakdown from @M_F_Rose in her latest article:
The release of @OpenAI's new digital assistant "Sky" stirred controversy after actress Scarlett Johansson alleged that the company had infringed on her rights by using a soundalike voice of hers after she'd declined to voice it herself.
Just saw @MargotSusca fantastic interview with @adamconover about the death of local news at the hands of hedge funds. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N21YfWy0-bA A theme I have written about *a lot*. Like this blog post from 2018: https://wetmachine.com/tales-of-the-sausage-factory/we-need-to-fix-the-news-media-not-just-social-media-part-i/ This has been a long time in the making.
I wrote yesterday on the terrifying escalation of antisemitism in Canada, citing events just over past week. Now there is more: last night a firebomb attempt at a Vancouver synagogue. Daily antisemitic incidents is who we are now.
https://www.jewishvancouver.com/important-community-updates-may-20-2024
https://x.com/mgeist/status/1796233336203194446
Load More
A Promising First Step
O.K., it is only a modest first step, but it is still nice to see.
In keeping with that whole “use the internet and new technologies, government transparency, yadda yadda yadda” stuff from the campaign, Obama and his transition team have now set up a new website for the transition at change.gov.
The website includes many of the features that made the Obama campaign website so effective. It is also an unprecedented time to compliance with a campaign promise (even before taking office). More importantly, if you click on the technology agenda, you will observe that it is pretty much the same tech agenda as from the campaign website.
That may not seem like a big deal, until you notice the top items. Protect the Openness of the Internet and Encourage Diversity In Media top the list.
Yes, it is merely a continuation of his previous campaign commitments. Yes, simply saying protecting the openness of the internet is your top priority does not actually gaurantee you will do it. I am not some Kool-Aide drinking neophyte. But I am also not someone who thinks that cynicism substitutes for wisdom and can’t wait to rush to proclaim that all that progressive stuff was just campaign chin music. I find it pleasantly reassuring that (a) these guys continue to show the same level of discipline in planning and execution they did during the campaign, (b) they appear quite serious about the business of governing, and (c) they seem to be on track to take us in the right direction.
Not bad for Day 2 after the election . . . .
Stay tuned . . . .
“tense unrelenting fear and dread. . .”
Light posting from me lately, as my personal time has been taken up with work, a funeral, weddings, medical procedures and lots of visits to see loved ones in hospital.
It’s hard to know what to make of all this “real life” stuff. I feel like I have great wisdom to impart to y’all, but cannot seem to formulate much of any of it into actual human language. Like Gene Hackman’s character in the movie Heist, I’m reduced to muttering, “It’s a hell of a thing. A hell of a thing.” In general, however, I do recommend weddings over funerals, and health over sickness.
On my ear-goggles this morning, as frequently, I’m listening to the late risers’ club on MIT radio, WMBR. And I just heard a recursive promotion for its own self, saying how this same show was a cure for “tense unrelenting fear and dread.” I certainly hope so.
Well, almost. I don’t want a complete cure for my tense unrelenting fear and dread, which is the essence of my persona here, for there would go the whole of my contribution to Wetmachine. But some relief would be welcome, you know what I’m say’n’?
Anyway, just for yucks & to lighten your day, here’s an article from the BBC about the dollar scale of the criminal war profiteering engineered by Cheney et al, and abetted by the USian people and their chickenshit congress, and here’s a BBC article about one teensy-tiny bit of the human cost–but one that is at least a little hopeful. We can’t all be melancholic all the time, now can we.
So What The Heck Is M2Z? And Why Do I Support It?
So recently, with all the spectrum stuff going on, I hear a lot of people asking about something called “M2Z,” usually like this: “So, what the heck is M2Z? And why should I care?”
Two very good questions. Briefly, M2Z is yet-another-plan to solve our national broadband woes through exclusive licensing. Specifically, it is about giving this one company a free, exclusive, national license for the 20 MHz of spectrum left over from the federal spectrum cleared for last summer’s AWS auction. While M2Z filed its application in May ’06, it took the FCC awhile to figure out what to do with it, since it doesn’t have any rules or pending proceedings that cover what M2Z wants. Finally, back in February ’07, the FCC issued a generic public notice of the application as required under the Communications Act and asked for piublic comment on what the heck to do about it.
Given my rather low opinion of Cyren Call’s efforts to get a free, national license, one might expect me to take a similar dim view of M2Z. Nor has M2Z helped its case much with some rather ham-handed “outreach” to the public interest community, by spamming the attendee list of the National Conference on Media Reform and creating a “Coalition for Free Broadband” website that looks all the world like an off-the-shelf Astroturf project.
Finally, Sascha Meinrath, who I look to for wisdom and advice on all matters spectrum, has written this blog entry on why he opposes the M2Z proposal.
Despite all this, I still think that M2Z deserves support. My employer Media Access Project filed a letter in support of M2Z. At the least, it deserves a good hard look before writing it off as yet another theft of spectrum via privatization.
Why? See below . . . .
“The first cyberage-religion”
A friend sent me a link to the Frequently Asked Questions page for Logologie, “the first cyberage-religion” with the simple subject heading, “it’s all you”. I kind of dug the first paragraphs of the answer to the Frequently Ask Question, “What is Logologie?”:
LOGOLOGIE is “the first cyberage-religion”.
Main topic of Logologie is the entire abandonation of brutality and of
senseless brain destruction,because with the development of technologies the
man got more and more destructive power in a way that now the single man has
become a danger for the survival of the entire human race.Though the mankind
can only further survive when the wisdom(capability to overwiew complex cy-
bernetic relations in a holistic way) of all men will reach that level of
development that the men’s cleverness(capability to apply technologies) al-
ready has reached,because otherwise the mankind will destroy itself.
Now that sounds like something a technoparanoid like myself could get behind! Not only is the author right-on about threat amplification through technology, but he’s also in favor of the entire abandonation of brutality. Which is a proposition I also favor. Moreover, the “cosmic destiny” of Logologie sounds remarkably similar, dare I say it, to the cosmic destiny of Wetmachine, at least insofar as the perfectation of man is concerned:
The cosmic destiny of the man is persuit of perfectation and not destroying
himself – though Logologie’s task is to teach this mankind in sovereignous
holistical thinking to avoid mankind’s lemmingish selfdestruction and avoid
turning this nice world into a grey,dread,dead ball drifting through the
empty space…
Why, this paragraph would find itself quite at home in my own Cheap Complex Devices:
Logologie is a religion of logics and reason,though it is against forbidding
things without any logical reasonings – it trusts more in unbiased resear-
ching and experimenting then in strictly believing dogmatically to bookish
texts written by some ancient priests or by certain ferengiish(i.e. selfish
and capitalistic) cravat wearers of “white”(i.e. officially acknowledged,but
unholistic) sciences.
Could this Logology be just what I’ve been looking for? The perfect evolutionary synthesis of Unitarian-Universalist quasi-religious humanism and computer-tinged scientistology? Follow me below the fold for stunning answer the answer!
[UPDATE: fixed a few typos and the one word “application” to “amplification”. D’oh!]
Black Monday
As I demonstrated last fall when I predicted a Kerry victory, my powers of prognostication are nothing to write home about. OTOH, I suppose this demonstrates the wisdom of the old saw that you ca’t judge an outcome by oral argument.
We lost Brand X by 6-3. Interesting split that put Scalia and Thomas on opposite sides but, as I have observed in the past, telecom issues do not fall into the neat conservative/liberal divisions everyone is so fond of making.
Grokster also went the other way, with the Court not even remanding for trial.
I will have more later when I have read the decisions. Right now I’m trying to sort things out.
Stay tuned . . .
-
- Load More
But while the uproar has swayed much of the public to Johansson's defense at a time when #genAI is increasingly under scrutiny, this may not quite be an open-and-shut case should she decide to sue . Read the breakdown from @M_F_Rose in her latest article:
The release of @OpenAI's new digital assistant "Sky" stirred controversy after actress Scarlett Johansson alleged that the company had infringed on her rights by using a soundalike voice of hers after she'd declined to voice it herself.
Just saw @MargotSusca fantastic interview with @adamconover about the death of local news at the hands of hedge funds. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N21YfWy0-bA A theme I have written about *a lot*. Like this blog post from 2018: https://wetmachine.com/tales-of-the-sausage-factory/we-need-to-fix-the-news-media-not-just-social-media-part-i/ This has been a long time in the making.
I wrote yesterday on the terrifying escalation of antisemitism in Canada, citing events just over past week. Now there is more: last night a firebomb attempt at a Vancouver synagogue. Daily antisemitic incidents is who we are now.
https://www.jewishvancouver.com/important-community-updates-may-20-2024
https://x.com/mgeist/status/1796233336203194446
