Friday, January 06, 2006

Bruce, Jon, and the State of the World. Once again, WorldChanging Ally #1 Bruce Sterling is holding court on the state of the world at the WELL, in the public "Inkwell" forum. Readers without WELL membership can send in questions via email. As always, our own Jon Lebkowsky is the moderator. This isn't a "Chinese century," or anything so corny and fearsome. The Chinese have got maybe 25, 30 lively years in the sun before they run into the weirdest demographic problems on the planet. That doesn't even count their restive land-empire and the pervasive corruption problems they have. We ought to be crossing our fingers for the Chinese people, rather than sitting in some neocon bunker plotting their demise. (Posted by Jamais Cascio in QuickChanges at 02:10 PM) [WorldChanging: Another World Is Here] As Jon also notes in State of the World 2006. < Once again, I'm leading a State of the World discussion with Bruce Sterling on the WELL. Bruce has just finished a year-long gig as Visionary in Residence at Art Center College of Design, and is in Austin for the holidays before setting out for Belgrade and other parts of the world. India and China are tremendous stories. Even big pieces of Eastern Europe are getting onto the EU carousel. America's being run by corrupt Lysenkoist morons, but, debilitating as that may be for us Yankees, it also means that the remaining 94 percent of the planet has some chance at the limelight. Hey, South Korea could have been full of cloning superstars -- if they could just get over their endemic Asian urge to cook the books. The USA right now is the buried shadow of the Confederate States of America. You can watch GONE WITH THE WIND, and it's the secret textbook of the Bush Administration. The South lost that war for a reason. The South didn't have it in them to be a major power, because they were bold, gallant, devout, crooked, dumb and full of unexamined anxieties. The thing is, though: when a culture is "gone with the wind," it's never utterly and entirely gone. You can't make things go away by distributing them into the wind. It's just... up in the atmosphere. The emissions of the past form a smog. A breathable compost. You can't throw the past away and start over with a Year Zero. There is no "away." Tomorrow is this place, at a different time. [Weblogsky] It's a fine discussion-with-the-occasional-rant interspersed with the occasional tinfoil-hat moment. C'mon over and check it out! 6:01:51 PM    comment []

Beautiful Evidence, by Edward Tufte. After 9 years, I have completed Beautiful Evidence, except for the index and a few loose ends. We are currently proofing some difficult images on press, negotiating with printers, planning the order for paper and binding, and working through other production issues. Probably the major threats to breaking the schedule will be in color-correcting images and in importing some paper used in one section of the book. We should have books in mid-April (p = .7). There will be some kind of pre-publication ordering mechanism on this site; details to follow in about 1 month from now when we have greater certainty about the schedule for printing and binding. From Beautiful Evidence, the book, on Edwardtufte.com. I'm very excited. [Emergent Chaos] 6:01:02 PM    comment []

IRS to tax your World of Warcraft booty?. Mark Frauenfelder: Posted on Gareth Branwyn's Street Tech: Julian Dibbell has an interesting piece in the Jan/Feb issue of Legal Affairs where he explores the idea of whether the trading of virtual "goods" in virtual worlds could constitute an income-generating, and therefore, taxable exchange under the IRS rules of barter. This may sound ridiculous on the face of it, but because virtual world goods now have real-world market values, there is a legal argument here (albeit an unsettling one for anybody who plays online multiplayer games or hangs out in SecondLife). The good news is that, when he pursued the question with IRS officials, they cocked their heads to the side like dogs hearing a high-pitched noise, i.e. don't expect to see 1099 forms shipping with multiplayer games anytime soon. Link [Boing Boing] 5:59:42 PM    comment []

Live TV is dead, and we're noticing the smell Doc notes the Viiv announcement with trepidation, and also says: I've almost given up anyway. The other night in the hotel we watched Anderson Cooper, CNN's version of Geraldo Rivera (always On the Scene, always Concerned, always Talking With The People Involved), report for 45 minutes on word that nearly all the trapped miners in West Virginia were saved. In the morning we found out that the report was false. Not from the TV, but from a phone call and from bloggers deconstructing the whole mess. Live TV is dead. Last week I was waiting for my car to be serviced, (which took 2 hours longer than expected because of a recall), so I sat in a room with CNN on for 3 hours, hearing the 'live' announcers link to the same taped stories over and over again, using the same 'spontaneous asides' repeatedly. It made Dinner For One look fresh and new. I stopped watching Local TV news years ago - their endless teasing to tide you over the adverts "Bubonic plague struck a South Bay town today - after the break, find out which one" is completely useless in a world where we have Technorati and Google News to find us the answer before they've finished the link. TV people will be the last to notice this, because "here I am, with the nation hanging on my every word" is the dream that brought them into the business in the first place. As I said at Streaming Media , the 1940s hack of synchronising everyone's TV set to the same signal was a workaround for having video storage measured in milliseconds. By the 70s and 80s we had videotape, so TV could be stored, but it required hugely expensive machines that took work from video engineers to line up to record onto giant reels of two-inch tape. So there was only usually one copy of each program, and lots were wiped and reused. Around the time I got there, the BBC realised that tapes decay - the oxide falls off, and that they had lost 20 years of TV recordings by not having a rolling backup program. In 1998, I went to work at Apple on QuickTime, and started work on live streaming. This was hard work, but interesting - making a personal TV Transmitter for anyone with a Mac, so they could use the internet for lots of people to watch them at once. Having built this technology, I started looking for uses for it, and was rather bemused to find there weren't any. The problem was storage again. It was always better to have a locally stored copy of the video than to try to get it over the net in real time. It just didn't use the net efficiently, and the 'buffering' experience really sucked. In fact, what I realised was that live TV was a waste of time too. But now we had enough storage. People spend lots of money on iPods and TiVo's, whose whole purpose is to turn live streams into files so you can pause and skip them, moving the storage into their houses, and pockets. This personal storage is why Podcasting makes sense. Downloading is always better than streaming, and Edited better than Live, except in one instance. That difference is when you have 2-way interaction. When you can speak back to the person at the other end, either via iChat AV or Skype, or just by having a textual back channel to a conference. That's where Live is needed. [Epeus' epigone] 5:59:24 PM    comment []

How Profitable is Cybercrime?. Interesting quote: The Treasury Department says that cyber crime has now outgrown illegal drug sales in annual proceeds, netting an estimated $105 billion in 2004, the report said. [Schneier on Security] 9:25:06 AM    comment []

Privacy Competition in Politics. Two leading governor candidates are trying to outdo each other in protecting Minnesotans’ privacy...The candidates’ dueling news conferences produced more politics than policy, with each charging the other with not doing enough to protect citizens’ privacy. From "Governor is seeking privacy law changes." I don't like some of the proposals. It seems to me that facial recognition searches of databases don't enhance privacy, but authentication when trying to get a license, and hassle when the computer is wrong. I point out the article because I suspect that competing on privacy or data protection policy may be the start of a trend. There's also the interesting question of what to call higher quality standards for issuance of ID cards or benefits. There is an interaction with privacy in the sense of reducing fraud-by-impersonation, and a drive to extract more and more data in order to approach the possibility of perhaps achieving the goals of such a system, with the associated data protection and exceptions issue. [Emergent Chaos] 9:24:25 AM    comment []

Google to sell video, release OS-oid software bundle. Xeni Jardin: During his CES keynote tomorrow at 4pm, Google co-founder Larry Page is expected to announce details on two much-discussed new product offerings: * Pay-per-download content through Google Video, including programming from CBS and the NBA. * "Google Pack," a software bundle that looks, walks, and quacks a lot like the beginnings of a web OS. A Wall Street Journal article (Link, paid subscription required) broke details this morning, citing a source familiar with Google's plans. Tim Beyers at Motley Fool provides astute analysis here, including thoughts on how tomorrow's anticipated announcements might relate to the company's rumored plans to offer a sub-$200 thin client computer. Saul Hansell's New York Times piece (reg-free link) compares the company's video-related plans with those of competitors Yahoo and Microsoft. And in Technology Review, Eric Hellweg dissects the "Google Cube" rumors (Link). A Google rep I spoke with this afternoon said the company would not confirm the contents of the WSJ article or related reports, deferring comment until tomorrow's 4pm announcement. Author and Boing Boing "band manager" John Battelle will no doubt have much to say on his blog after that time. Update: I'll be a guest on ABC's "Good Morning America" Friday for a segment exploring what announcements from Google, Microsoft, and others this week mean for consumers. [Boing Boing] 9:24:08 AM    comment []