good tech articles of the day

Nelson was right-on with his thoughts of using images as passwords – it seems as though Microsoft thoughts of that. People have much better visual memories that verbal ones…

It scares me to realize the approach that our government is going in copyright protection. I think that we’ve lost a sense of the purpose of copyright. The idea is to get more information to the common good in a way that protects the creators of the ideas. Alas, we are now seeing bills like the SSSCA/CBDTA. Of course the tech-industry is up in arms – this is against everything that we stand for, and it’s just not reasonable for the common technologies.. talk about a way to make all but the monopolies have no chance…

And remember all of my worries about consumer agents being automated, meaning that you could prioritize your customers in scary ways. It seems as though more and more companies are using bots to replace customer service folks. And i thought Sprint’s Claire was annoying… Shit… How can you make a bot realize that what you need is important or doesn’t fit into the previous protocol? How will i be treated as a young person without enough credit?

And isn’t it funny that the government can order websites to delete data, but consumers and general people can’t? I really hope that archive.org works here…

Oh.. and it’s really funny to think about artificial societies– how do you grow them and what can they tell us about the future? I think that my problem is that i want to have my own society, my own rules, my own system.. i keep thinking that i should start my own country.. i wonder if i would be a bad dictator…. i still believe that the best countries are run by benevolent dictators..

They just announced that CNN Student News will remain commercial free – thank goodness!! To me, this situation is a *big* sign that capitalism has reached a point of being absolutely ridiculous. I mean, isn’t it a bad sign that everyone needs corporate sponsorship in order to be functional in this society? Corporate sponsorship means corporate control which means limited control. If a site is supposed to be educational, supposed to teach students (which means is supposed to give multiple perspectives, not just the ones desired by that corporation), isn’t it dangerous to imagine corporate sponsorship? It reminds me of the battles that Ms. went through when they were battling whether or not to have advertisements. They couldn’t get food-related ads because they wouldn’t put recipes in their magazine; they were denied makeup-related ads because some of the images on their cover had women without makeup on!! If educational material was all corporate-sponsorship, would students not be able to hear conflicting perspectives? Would they not hear about oil spills because Exxon was a sponsor? Eek!

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