"There's never been a better time to fly. Now there are no fuel
surcharges within North America and you can check a second bag free!"
I think I can remember a time like that actually. Not that long ago.
"There's never been a better time to fly. Now there are no fuel
surcharges within North America and you can check a second bag free!"
I think I can remember a time like that actually. Not that long ago.
It gives real time guesses for when the next bus should have arrived.
And when you miss your stop it maps your trudging progress back to
where you need to be through construction zones and snow banks.
All it needs now is a screen heater so your fingers don't freeze while
you compose a blog post about it all.
P.S. If you're at the bus stop at Moodie and the Queensway and waiting for an eastbound Queensway ride like the 101 make sure you press the button that looks like a cross walk button. Otherwise the secret light a kilometre away on the Queensway doesn't light up and no bus will exit to pick you up. Much hilarity ensues as you decompose by the side of the road over the next few days.
Groundswell is a social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other, rather than from traditional institutions like corporations.A Groundswell example that comes to mind is Bookmooch, a neat little service that connects book traders in a global book swapping network. My youngest has become a rabid moocher, unloading her "Flat Stanley" collection as fast as she can and getting all sorts of new books in return.
The issue is that TV has masked for 50 years the great surplus of human time.
In the transition from the agrarian society to the industrial society one of the most important components was gin. The pace of change was so radical that gin became the means for society to cope. It took 30 years before the institutions of industrialIf the reference to gin as a societal pacifier during the transition through the industrial revolution intrigues you I'd recommend Craze: Gin and Debauchery in an Age of Reason
revolution we recognize came into being. This happened only after society was able to cope with and assimilate the changes which happened.
In the 20th Century the social lubricant was the sitcom. This occurred with the rise of the 5 day work week and creation of the middle class. As a society we had too much free time. This was filled with TV. Desperate Housewives was gin of our times.
Only now are we starting to see cognitive excess as a plus Where do we now find time which can be used creatively by society? Now it is being placed in TV. We should ask the questions what should be done with this time? The issue is that TV has masked for 50 years the great surplus of human time. For example, Wikipedia has taken 100 million hours of human thought. TV is consuming 200 billion hours every year. This equates to 2000 Wikipedia projects a year if television watch was turned to more creative uses.
The object isn’t to be perfect. The goal isn’t to hold back until you’ve created something beyond reproach. I believe the opposite is true. Our birthright is to fail and to fail often, but to fail in search of something bigger than we can imagine. To do anything else is to waste it all.I'm feeling a theme building here.
Evening launch party and performance June 21st, 8:30pm (the sculpture comes to life at dusk, ~9:30pm) | ||
We invite you to celebrate the summer solstice at the launch of Solar Collector on June 21st. Bring an evening picnic out to the grassy lawn under the apple trees, and enjoy live music to accompany the sculpture’s performance. 100 Maple Grove Road, Cambridge, Ontario (Google satellite map) |
In a collaboration between the community and the sun, Solar Collector gathers human expression and solar energy during the day, then brings them together each night in a performance of flowing light.
Twelve aluminum shafts rise from the grassy hill in front of the Waterloo Regional Operations Centre. Their graceful shape reflects the angles of the sun through the year. The tallest shaft is perpendicular to the sun at winter solstice, when the sun is low in the sky. The flattest shaft faces the high sun at summer solstice.
"Sean (Diddy) Combs ran the ING NYC Marathon in 2003 with a time of 4:14:54. In the process, he raised about $2 million for NYC schools."Oprah didn't stand a chance.
"Researcher discovers breathing is bad for your health", etc.I'm going to take on a some issues and causes here to figure out and share what I think is the right thing to do. Not big ones, mostly small ones. No answers today, just a list:
From This is Zimbabwe:Enquiries over the contents of a cargo of arms aboard the An Yue Jiang have sparked a media frenzy, however various government departments have declined to comment over the ship and its cargo.
Noseweek editor Martin Welz told Sapa on Wednesday that “the cargo ship was openly delivering a containment of arms for Zimbabwe”.
He said that he had copies of all the documents.
The controversial cargo packed into 3 080 cases includes three million rounds of 7.62mm bullets (used in the AK47 assault rifle), 69 Rocket Propelled Grenades as well as mortar bombs and tubes.
Dock workers and police send China arms ship packing from South African port
By Ian Evans in Cape Town
Saturday, 19 April 2008
Chinese troops have been seen on the streets of Zimbabwe's third largest city, Mutare, according to local witnesses. They were seen patrolling with Zimbabwean soldiers before and during Tuesday's ill-fated general strike called by the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).
Earlier, 10 Chinese soldiers armed with pistols checked in at the city's Holiday Inn along with 70 Zimbabwean troops.
One eyewitness, who asked not to be named, said: "We've never seen Chinese soldiers in full regalia on our streets before. The entire delegation took 80 rooms from the hotel, 10 for the Chinese and 70 for Zimbabwean soldiers."
Officially, the Chinese were visiting strategic locations such as border posts, key companies and state institutions, he said. But it is unclear why they were patrolling at such a sensitive time. They were supposed to stay five days, but left after three to travel to Masvingo, in the south.
China's support for President Mugabe's regime has been highlighted by the arrival in South Africa of a ship carrying a large cache of weapons destined for Zimbabwe's armed forces. Dock workers in Durban refused to unload it.
The South African government gave customs clearance for the weapons, which include more than three million rounds of AK-47 rifle ammunition, 1500 rocket-propelled grenades and more than 3000 mortar rounds and launchers.
But Randall Howard, general secretary of the South African Transport and Allied Workers Union (Satawu), to which the Durban dockers belong, warned: "As far as we are concerned, the containers will not be offloaded. The ship must return to China. If they the Mbeki government bring replacement labour to do the work, our members will not stand and look at them and smile."
I’ve made my views on SGC known before, but this week I was asked to restate in a more condensed way.
Enabling Server Gated Crypto on your web servers is tantamount to aiding and abetting cyber criminals.
“Of course it isn’t!” your SSL certificate salesperson will say. “SGC enables all your customers to use super strong 128 bit cryptography, even if they have older browsers.”
There’s the rub. Those older browsers are the only ones that need SGC. Unfortunately , those older browsers are also so full of unpatched security holes that you could encrypt the pipe between the browser and the web server with 256-bit AES and the criminals wouldn’t break a sweat as they collected your customer’s login information or credit card number.
The bad guys are able to install software on those older, unpatched systems that lives inside the browser or inside the operating system. That malicious software can log keystrokes or view submitted information before it is encrypted by SSL. The rogue software can then submit the collected information to a central place for aggregation and collection by the criminal group.
If you haven’t heard of botnets yet, that’s what we’re talking about here. They’re not new - if you’re a details person this three year old paper on botnets is a good introduction to the topic. Shadowserver Foundation has some interesting stats on bot counts and locations – today they’re showing ~110,000 infected systems. These are only the ones that are actively being controlled by a command and control server, and obviously they’re only the ones that they know of.
As for the accusation of “aiding and abetting”, it’s mostly tongue in cheek, but think about it. I’m no lawyer, and neither is Wikipedia, but this is what the Wikipedia community consensus says:
Where available, aiding and abetting liability generally requires three elements:
You have visibility into your users' configuration through user-agent info when they connect. Don't give them a false sense of security.
You owe it to your customers to help those with unsafe systems understand the risks and to strongly encourage them to upgrade their systems.
Are you doing the right thing?
April 12th 2008
Selections from The Economist
America's recession, a public-relations tip for China, malaria's breakthrough moment, and the Princess Diana inquiry
World leaders gather to discuss Iran, the Olympic Torch Relay continues and Gordon Brown visits Washington for talks with George Bush
"If I liked your store before, now I'm on notice to be careful--it might not be as good.
If I didn't like your store before, why on earth am I paying attention to your little sign and why should I go out of my way to take another chance?
This is a vivid symbol of the ego-centric nature of most marketing. The sign is about the owner, not about the prospect."
"Also, Oprah's getting scatological and ads for pro-biotic yogurt are everywhere. Since when did it become acceptable to talk about poo in public? And is it really necessary, or just grossly self-indulgent? We'll talk to the author of the new book, What Your Poo is Telling You."
The Answer to How Is Yes: Acting On What Matters
Block, Peter
Another set of insights from Peter Block. This one is less about specific tips on how to be a better consultant/advisor. Instead it focuses on the impact of our default attitudes and assumptions on how we handle change, particularly in organizational settings. In particular, Block takes aim at the debilitating affects of always and quickly shifting discussions about any kind of proposed change to discussions of how things should be done or how they are impossible to do.
He argues, successfully, that our disposition toward leaping into questions of implementation is a disguised way to block change. The first question should never be "how can we do this?" as pragmatic as that might appear. Instead, we need to begin with questions of value. "Is this something that we want to do or that we need to do?" If the answer to that is truly "yes" then we will find the answers to the "how" questions as they appear.
What limits willpower? Some have suggested that it is blood sugar, which brain cells use as their main energy source and cannot do without for even a few minutes. Most cognitive functions are unaffected by minor blood sugar fluctuations over the course of a day, but planning and self-control are sensitive to such small changes. Exerting self-control lowers blood sugar, which reduces the capacity for further self-control. People who drink a glass of lemonade between completing one task requiring self-control and beginning a second one perform equally well on both tasks, while people who drink sugarless diet lemonade make more errors on the second task than on the first. Foods that persistently elevate blood sugar, like those containing protein or complex carbohydrates, might enhance willpower for longer periods.I extended the research by eating chocolate before writing this post.
Add up enough urgencies and you don't get a fire, you get a career. A career putting out fires never leads to the goal you had in mind all along.
The story is still emerging, but it sounds like Hannaford didn’t detect it internally, rather normal card fraud alerts pointed back to them. Despite missing the breach itself, kudos to Hannaford for fessing up once they became aware.
Most of the ‘how it happened’ guesswork is pointing to malicious software that was able to spread inside the Hannaford network onto systems behind the protective measures prescribed by PCI DSS: “One piece of malware on one machine leaped to 300 other servers”. “Leaped”? That must be a new malware attack vector they’ll reveal this week at the RSA Conference.
Some are saying this shows PCI is ineffective: “In other words, PCI is worthless”
I disagree. (Even though one of my own credit cards was apparently duplicated in the last couple of weeks, giving someone a lucrative weekend shopping spree through central Ontario…)
While the Hannaford breach clearly demonstrates that PCI needs to go further before it is an effective weapon, there is no doubt that it is moving the payment industry in the right direction.