Sunday, September 26, 2010

Some explanation of the case against Wikileaks' Julian Assange. Here and here.

(Note, I'm not entirely happy with the anti-feminist tone of the second of these links, but there seems to be enough smoke there (in terms of further references) to justify reading it.)

Saturday, September 25, 2010

Wow! I didn't know that there was already a quad-copter drone platform that you could buy and develop software for.

Here ...

Monday, September 20, 2010

Worth reading Sovereign Subjects.

Here's how I interpret it : the financial sector is trying to push governments towards the same short-term thinking and reduced horizons of action that drives / contains companies and other market-players.

Friday, September 17, 2010

Saturday, September 04, 2010

Couple of random thoughts on this and this.

1) Interesting, William Gibson writing about this. Remember this?

2)
"We also seldom imagined (in spite of ample evidence) that emergent technologies would leave legislation in the dust, yet they do."
What about Asimov's 3 Laws of Robotics? Asimov's big theme is surely that technology has hard-to-codify ethical consequences.

3)
"Bentham’s all-seeing eye looks down from a central viewpoint, the gaze of a Victorian warder. In Google, we are at once the surveilled and the individual retinal cells of the surveillant, however many millions of us, constantly if unconsciously participatory."


Compare Foucault :
"The panoptic schema, without disappearing as such or losing any of its properties, was destined to spread throughout the social body," Foucault explains; "its vocation was to become a generalized function" (Discipline 207). The ultimate result is that we now live in the panoptic machine: "We are neither in the amphitheatre, nor on the stage, but in the panoptic machine, invested by its effects of power, which we bring to ourselves since we are part of its mechanism" (Discipline 217).