Category Archives: tech

iphone mania

I had the [tag]iphone[/tag] lust, as you may have noticed. I thought it would solve all of my problems. Then, my [tag]Spiritual Advisor[/tag] (not to be confused with Paris Hilton’s Spiritual Advisor) convinced me that it was better to just have no problems in the first place.

This was a good point, so I shed my problems and got a [tag]Blackberry Pearl[/tag] instead of waiting for an iphone. (Thus creating new problems, I’m sure).

Now I can just sit back with a glass of wine and watch the growing iphone mania with bemused detachment, which is much easier. Not to mention cheaper.

On a related note, there’s a decent piece in the Washington Post Outlook section today on the iphone and technolust: “Nanoseconds Of Happiness – You’re Going to Love Your iPhone, Until the Next Gizmo Calls” by Darrin M. McMahon.

now you can lojack your kids!

28,000 Texas schoolchildren are being electronically monitored. That’s good. That way school officials know everything about them and can learn their habits, figure out when they’re alone, stuff like that. No potentially for creepy shit whatsoever. Nope.

My Cyberculture students wrote so many great essays about the rise of electronic student surveillance. The kids are alright. It’s the administrators we have to worry about.

As a value-added feature, I bet they’ll find so many ways to harvest marketing-data out of this little experiment…

braingate

I’m up to Buffy season 5 (and rewatching Angel season 2 so that it all makes sense) and now I understand the whole “spike with a chip in his head thing.” That, in addition to the usual ethical digressions I would go on, dulls my enthusiasm for the latest developments in brain implants a bit.

Cyberkinetics, the company developing the neural prosthetics, has set up a brief informational site about their BrainGate system, but the good scientific articles are all in proprietary databases and I really don’t have the energy, strength, or coordination to type up any excerpts today so there will be no discussion of bioethics here today.

I have a feeling it’s going to be a while before they develop the technology to enable me to shoot laser beams out of my eyes. Keep trying, boys.

here's something fun:

You think history doesn’t repeat itself?

But now we are facing a very new and a very troubling assault on our fiscal security, on our very economic life and we are facing it from a thing called the video cassette recorder and its necessary companion called the blank tape. And it is like a great tidal wave just off the shore. This video cassette recorder and the blank tape threaten profoundly the life-sustaining protection, I guess you would call it, on which copyright owners depend, on which film people depend, on which television people depend and it is called copyright.
-Testimony of Jack Valenti, President of the MPAA, April 12, 1982