Data privacy is sooooo 10 minutes ago...

AT&T rewrites it's data privacy rules... as reported in the S.F. Chronicle.
Link via EFF.

Net Neutrality explained

Stanford Law Professor Lawrence Lessig provides a pretty good overview of the "Net Neutrality" issue now before the U.S. Congress... with a link to a video presentation by the inventor of the world wide web (and my favorite uber-geek) Tim Berners-Lee.
Link to LessigBlog post.
Link to Real video stream of Tim Berners-Lee 4:00 minute presentation.

Boeing Barrel Roll

Test pilot Tex Johnston shows off the capabilities of Boeing's new 367-80 "Dash 80" prototype -- which would later become the Boeing 707 -- at a 1955 air show. The barrel roll (or aileron roll to others), done twice, was a no-hazard 1G maneuver for the Dash 80, but thoroughly impressed the crowd. Following the roll, it's said that William Allen turned to an elderly attender to ask for heart attack pills.
(via MeFi)

Rather heading to HDNet?

Dan Rather may be heading to Mark Cuban's HDNet. This would be very cool.
Link to HDBeat
UPDATE: Yup, looks like this rumor was true.

Happy 175th Harriet!

The worlds oldest living creature... and she's pretty good looking :-)
Link via MeFi.
UPDATE: Harriet made a one way trip to Turtle heaven last month.

Navizon on ABC World News

Well... looks like we've made the "big time" with a brief story on the ABC Evening News about our technology (nice going Cyril!). The piece only covers a fraction of the power and capabilities of the Navizon Wireless Positioning system for mobile devices, but I always knew that world domination wouldn't happen overnight ;-)
Disclosure: I work for Mexens Technologies, home of www.Navizon.com
Link to ABC News story stream (you'll have to sit through a brief video ad before viewing the piece).

Lakeview Power Station take down

Early this morning and after 43 years of service (1962-2005) the "Four Sisters" stacks of the Lakeview Generating Station in near Port Credit, Ontario (Toronto West Suburbs) were brought down by explosives in a controlled demolition.

A good look at the GOOG

An fascinating critique / opinion / analysis / deconstruction of what's really going on inside Google. Link to Motely Fools via Publishing 2.0.

Net Neutrality

Here's a great example / illustration of what a future without net neutrality potentially holds: Cox Communications ISP service blocks Craigslist.
Link to SearchBlog.

Why "Tagging" Matters

By Jemima Kiss, PaidContent.org

Matt Locke, head of innovation for BBC New Media, focused on the complexities of folksonomies. He picked out six motivations behind tagging: future retrieval; contribution and sharing; attracting attention; play and competition; self presentation; and opinion and expression, which he expects to become a bigger part of tagging. That’s a move away from pure organization to a more tailored way of distributing and finding personally relevant content.
He said this kind of classification, which is essentially what tagging is, is not useful in areas where hard transactions need to be done but that “there are huge areas where we can categorize using folksonomies and those gigantic spaces are generally in social media”.
– He said the challenge for the BBC is to work out how people really feel about TV, what kind of things they want to say about it and how they want to link with it. There’s an API out for the new-ish BBC programme catalog and they are waiting to see how people want to use that information, expecting the most successful service in this area to be playful, content agnostic uses.

NOTE: if you don't know what "tagging" is check this out.

Great Ad

This full-page ad ran in the last issue of The Hollywood Reporter.
Brilliant.

Special Forces Wings

Yeah, but can you take them through a Wendy's "Drive Thru"?

Link to DailyMail UK.

Symmetry Thesis

"You can't chop down a symmetry"
-- Jane Siberry

...but more to the point, here's a great post on the subject of Symmetry Theory on the MarginalRevolution blog.

A Colbert Commencement

Delivered at Knox College, June 3, 2006:

"And when you enter the workforce, you will find competition from those crossing our all-too-poorest borders. Now I know you’re all going to say, “Stephen, Stephen, immigrants built America.” Yes, but here’s the thing—it’s built now. I think it was finished in the mid-70s sometime. At this point it’s a touch-up and repair job. But thankfully Congress is acting and soon English will be the official language of America. Because if we surrender the national anthem to Spansih, the next thing you know, they’ll be translating the Bible. God wrote it in English for a reason! So it could be taught in our public schools.

So we must build walls. A wall obviously across the entire southern border. That’s the answer. That may not be enough—maybe a moat in front of it, or a fire-pit. Maybe a flaming moat, filled with fire-proof crocodiles. And we should probably wall off the northern border as well. Keep those Canadians with their socialized medicine and their skunky beer out. And because immigrants can swim, we’ll probably want to wall off the coasts as well. And while we’re at it, we need to put up a dome, in case they have catapults. And we’ll punch some holes in it so we can breathe. Breathe free. It’s time for illegal immigrants to go—right after they finish building those walls. Yes, yes, I agree with me.

There are so many challenges facing this next generation, and as they said earlier, you are up for these challenges. And I agree, except that I don’t think you are. I don’t know if you’re tough enough to handle this. You are the most cuddled generation in history. I belong to the last generation that did not have to be in a car seat. You had to be in car seats. I did not have to wear a helmet when I rode my bike. You do. You have to wear helmets when you go swimming, right? In case you bump your head against the side of the pool. Oh, by the way, I should have said, my speech today may contain some peanut products..."

Link to ful text via OfByAndFor.org

Fuzzy Zoeller's Hole in One

This is truly amazing.

CBC Podcasts

It's about time.

The Boss hooks up with AOL Music

by Staci Kramer (www.paidContent.org)

"Maybe it’s just the longtime Bruce fan in me but this actually broke through a growing fatigue with announcements of broadband “firsts” … AOL Music is posting a new exclusive video the morning after each concert in Bruce Springsteen’s just-started five-week North American tour with the Seeger Sessions Band.
Video from the first four concerts is up now; the package — “18 Nights Of Bruce” — includes pix, set lists, commentary from fan site Backstreets.com, IM and email links, and, of course, a link to AOL Tickets.
This may be the only way I get to experience the Seeger Sessions tour as it happens (it isn’t coming to St. Louis) so I hope the balkiness I experienced loading the video in Firefox and two versions of IE was a momentary glitch.
– AOL’s effort has scale but it isn’t the first video broadband venue for the new album. The inaugural concert performance for Springsteen and the band streamed live on MSN Video as part of its New Orleans Jazz Fest coverage and is still up, along with the other video from the event."

I just watched "Oh, Mary don't you weep" from the Seger sessions tour. It's like "folk on steroids". Pretty cool.

Stolen Election?

What those dope smoking, VW van driving, bearded, beatnik hippies at Rolling Stone Magazine (in this case Robert F. Kennedy Jr.) are just figuring out now is... it's not the voting that matters... it's the counting.

Link to Rolling Stone article via MeFi.