The source code files for other SQL database engines typically begin with a comment describing your license rights to view and copy that file. The SQLite source code contains no license since it is not governed by copyright. Instead of a license, the SQLite source code offers a blessing:
May you do good and not evil
May you find forgiveness for yourself and forgive others
May you share freely, never taking more than you give.
I believe the Google-China faceoff a momentous occasion. A major fallout between 2 of the very most powerful organizations on Earth.
So I created this experimental summary to try to wrap my head around it. The idea is to aggregate all the developments of a major news story, linking even more aggressively than Wikipedia and straight to first sources as much as possible. The favicon bullets are links to that paragraph’s source. All emphases mine.
Similar cover articles have been common for more than a decade now.
In computer magazines.
This is a women’s fashion magazine (!).
220 sites you’ve never heard of, devoted to makeup, fashion, beauty, style..
The jocks, the cheerleaders, the geeks—we’re all webheads now.
This may just be the coolest interface ever. I thought it was a joke when I first read about it: interact with computers through scratching your fingernail on surfaces. Simply amazing.
From the prolific interface genius that is Chris Harrison. Jump to 3:14 for the best concrete example of the technology in use: controlling your phone with gestures on a normal table with nothing but a stethoscope on it.
Computation at its root is distilled physics, interacting with our everyday physics it can produce pure magic. Think of accelerometers as well, or the now commonplace touch displays.
Effective today, isn’t it shocking, how fast the world can move?
Yesterday, as a Mexican, I was able to travel to Canada without jumping through any hoops (other than border agents) for up to 6 months.
This effectively makes me unable to travel there, my ticket to Canada from London is in just a month, far too little to obtain a visa that even in Mexico can only be processed from Mexico City and that is sure to have a huge backlog with the extremely sudden imposition.
I lose my ticket to Canada and I have to get a ticket to Mexico (there’s no more developed world to visit visafree as a Mexican) in the highest season (>$1000 dollars one-way).
She was literally going to buy today her ticket to Vancouver to meet me.
I’m sad, stunned.
I thought the world was moving in the opposite direction…
Just yesterday, for no particular reason, I was idly daydreaming of a future North American integration.
In the age of globalization, my life is unexpectedly being defined by immigration tensions.
A few years ago, I learned from Jaron Lanier about a beautiful dream he calls post-symbolic communication. It’s a dream that has stayed with me since, a powerful, subtle idea. It’s the dream that in the near future we’ll be able to talk not only through words and our voice, but through anything we can dream of. Instead of describing something with words, we would build it, as naturally as we now shrug or wag our finger. It’s about how gods might talk.
This video, so clearly a labor of love, is a marvelous embodiment of that dream. Fittingly, not a word is spoken in the entire 9 minutes.
If art is already there, perhaps we’re closer than we think.
The present’s already hard to believe. It’s the most hopeful of times, the most dreadful of times.
On one hand, the Pirate Party—a left/right-bloc-independent party pursuing “the reform of laws regarding copyright and patents, the right to privacy, both on the Internet and in everyday life, and the transparency of state administration.”WP— wins an astonishing 7.1% of Swedish votes and gets a seat in the European Parliament.
We’ve felt the wind blow in our sails. We’ve seen the polls prior to the election. But to stand here, today, and see the figures coming up on that screen… What do you want me to say? I’ll say anything.
Pirate Party leader Rick Falkvinge, via TorrentFreak
On the other hand, in less than a month, China will start forcing PC manufacturers to include censoring software —ridiculously named Green Dam Youth Escort— on every computer’s hard drive.
It’s like downloading spyware onto your computer, but the government is the spy.
I went to Lisbon because I got hostel stranded for the weekend in Spain: all the hostels in Madrid and Barcelona were booked and hotels were so expensive that it was cheaper, and more interesting, for me to take a night bus to Lisbon. Of Lisbon I knew close to nothing.
I arrived at downtown just as the sun was coming out, groggy from barely catching a wink, without a reservation because the hostel aggregators showed there were rooms aplenty (were I not recklessness I would not have gotten stranded in the first place). I decided, at a whim, to follow the first pair of backpackers that I saw. Which I did, and ended up at the other bus station.
This is such a great animated explanation of the credit crisis—a success in using new media in the service of clarity. It almost makes me angry of all the sweet hours I spent in the Economist, Answers, Wikipedia wrangling with finance jargon.
It’s also, interestingly, very much in the style —fast pacing, soothing, professional voice, electronic soundtrack, swooshes, a galore of icons, symbols and visual metaphors (that touch of houses as arrows was brilliant!)— of recent nonfiction (!) animations—that famous anti-trusted computing video, EPIC, The Machine...
