Day: January 19, 2012

The other side of SOPA

Put Up or Shut The F… Up | The Cynical Musician:

Supposedly the tech crowd are some of the smartest people on this planet. I mean, they’ve come up with the free encyclopedia anyone can edit, a site where I can broadcast myself and a way for me to find what I’m looking for on the web, that’s not evil at all. Surely, figuring out a way how we can stop unprincipled, opportunistic arsewipes making money from creators’ work without paying them, while at the same time keeping the Internet secure and assuring that people’s free speech rights aren’t abridged, isn’t beyond the capabilities of those bright minds. I’m not asking for the impossible: I just want to see a situation where it is very hard to run a pirate site and the chances of getting caught and punished when doing so are considerable. I want to see piracy being a bad business to go into.

[I haven’t heard about this side of the argument from the tech people… it’s a problem and a half.]

Amazon DynamoDB

Amazon DynamoDB:

Amazon DynamoDB is a fully managed NoSQL database service that provides fast performance at any scale. Today’s web-based applications often encounter database scaling challenges when faced with growth in users, traffic, and data. With Amazon DynamoDB, developers scaling cloud-based applications can start small with just the capacity they need and then increase the request capacity of a given table as their app grows in popularity. Their tables can also grow without limits as their users store increasing amounts of data. Behind the scenes, Amazon DynamoDB automatically spreads the data and traffic for a table over a sufficient number of servers to meet the request capacity specified by the customer. Amazon DynamoDB offers low, predictable latencies at any scale. Customers can typically achieve average service-side in the single-digit milliseconds. Amazon DynamoDB stores data on Solid State Drives (SSDs) and replicates it synchronously across multiple AWS Availability Zones in an AWS Region to provide built-in high availability and data durability.

[Hmmm. I like some of the aspects of this… still digging’ into the details.]

Information wants to be expensive

Information wants to be expensive:

The full quote, from Stewart Brand, actually goes like this:

On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.

It’s interesting how the “information wants to be expensive” part of that axiom is largely forgotten these days, isn’t it?

[Always. Excellent point.]

Source: Coyote Tracks

Undetectable Technology

Undetectable Technology:

After all, SETI is essentially a search for technological waste products: waste heat, waste light, waste electromagnetic signals. We merely have to posit that successful civilizations don’t produce such waste, and the failure of SETI is explained.

[Nice theory. It works for me because I’ve always loved “undetectable technology”. I want my technology to disappear into the use of the item as much as possible.]

Source: The Technium