Daring Fireball: Jackass of the Week: Larry Seltzer
Daring Fireball takes Larry Seltzer to task over his interpretation of a Symantec report. How secure is OSX? According to Seltzer Mac users have been lucky and we get fewer attacks because people can’t be bothered to write malware. hmmm.
This is another satellite viewing like, but you get to choose the city. Belfast and Dublin are both there, as are a bunch of others.
You can choose a satellite from a list and see the view from it. This is too cool. I now have to go and check a bit more to see how old the images are and stuff.
Free Speech: Because We Can (Aaron Swartz’s Raw Thought)
Swartz argues that free speech isn’t an instrumental, but a fundamental right, which I’m inclined to agree with. He also makes the slightly odd argument that it could in theory be taken away justifiably if people were being hurt by the lack of constraints on that right.
I wonder where he would set the bar for proof of such hurt: I imagine fairly high. It’s just that most people who want to ban or limit speech claim that people are being hurt because of what is being said. So it’s interesting to be a free speech fundamentalist who concedes that people being hurt would justify limiting freedom of speech. I’m fascinated by the idea of how you determine what kind of hurt, how severe it would have to be and how you could prove it was caused by speech.
BuzzMachine » Blog Archive » Gannett explodes the newsroom
I haven’t been reading much Jeff Jarvis recently, but I used to be a big fan. I guess I might still be, but there’s a weird evangelical puritanical streak coming into some of his writing that makes it less enthusiastic endorsement of new technological possibilities and more technopolist ranting at anyone who dares challenge the new truths he has discovered.
This article comes somewhere close as does another recent one about Dean Baquet. It’s as though people’s jobs and livelihoods should count as nought before the inevitable engine of progress. As though any viewpoint that doesn’t embrace the new stuff is automatically wrong.
I’m all about new stuff, new possibilities but I think it’s really, really important to keep sceptics around me who’ll ask the questions about whether this stuff is really so new, really so great, really something we should embrace without looking behind us, which would be my instinctive reaction.
Just because you leave your job in frustration with how slow moving you think your industry is doesn’t mean that everyone who stays and sees the value in the old ways is wrong.
It reminds me of an article I read in the media guardian today where some editors of some newspaper, The Telegraph?, not sure were complaining about how their staff who voted to strike were Luddites. And I couldn’t help thinking it was kind of sad that the Luddites are still considered to have been stupid idiots with no point, when in fact their point about humans over technology was a valid one, even if it didn’t win the day.
One thing I fear is people who think we should embrace technology at all costs and who are so over-excited about it they can’t see how totally not new so much of its implications are. And I very much count myself among those people. But in many ways I am a fool. I just wish I knew all the ways, then I could avoid the many mistakes I’m bound to make in my life.
Last week or the week before in The Observer Euan Ferguson wrote quote someone talking about the “breathless enthusiasm” for new technologies (or maybe the idea that old media, or television or something, was dead) and he said we need to insert “ly minless” into that phrase. He was right. And I bet he’d hate being called right on a blog of all things, especially one that nobody reads, which is his least favourite kind, or the only kind as he sees it.
pouringdown » Blog Archive » begin here
A beautiful videoblog – captures a moment wonderfully and you have to wait to find out what you’re watching. Inspired use of text, gorgeous music this dude makes himself. Good for watching over and over.
