Some food for thought:
Technologic wonders and adventures: Jules Verne
1902 - 3 millions of telephones (US)
Dark industrial SF: H. G. Wells
1917 - World War I
Hero SF: John Carpenter of Mars, Buck Rogers
1929 - Economic chrisis
Political SF: Foundation, Robert A. Heinlein
Technologic wonders and adventures: Star Wars
198x - Internet
Dark technologic SF: Cyberpunk
2001-2004 - Middle East war
Hero SF: Transformers, Ironman, Hancock
2008 - Economic chrisis
Political SF?
Oh, finally. There’s free wifi at the beaches of Valencia city. This is the news article, in Spanish: Las playas de Valencia no se olvidan de Internet.
The beaches with wifi are El Cabanyal and La Malvarrosa, with a 500 meters radius (that should be, like… 1600 feet I think). La Malvarrosa is right north of the docks, you just cannot miss it. The hot spots are the Bibliomar beach libraries. I’ll try to locate them with my mobile and take some photos.
It’s crazy that, even in Ubuntu Linux, vanilla Firefox 3 still opens .txt files by default as ISO-8859-1 when they are encoded as UTF-8. So, after scratching my head for a while, I tried to trick it with a piece of XML:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
Yeah. If you use that header as the first line of the .txt file, Firefox will render it as UTF-8.
The misuse of the rel=”nofollow” attribute can harm the structure of the CC web, and may be even against attribution and non commercial terms. I’ll explain why.
The nofollow, introduced by Google, tells search engine robots to not give weight (relevance) to a link. That, for example, is an effective way to discourage spammers that drop links in blog comments to give an artificial weight to their scammy webs.
But, when a CC author requires that the attribution of a work includes a link back to the source —perhaps, because he wants to ensure that future users can check any clarification or notice about the situation of the work—, adding a traffic and/or semantic restriction to the link means that access to the attribution resource has been arbitrarily blocked by the receiver of the license for certain modes of access, using a method which original purpose was to restrict potentially malicious links. What you must keep in mind is that, actually, the Creative Commons license already contemplates that the link should point only to the page where the author’s attribution and licensing information can be found. That’s it, it must not be malicious. You cannot modify a Public Domain work, license it with CC-BY, and ask for a link back to an unrelated resource.
Read more…
As someone that finds himself comfortable at any area of knowledge, I had at some point to make a difficult decision between the arts and the sciences. I like the scientific knowledge because its set of truths is reliable enough to construct thought from. I hate half-truths and obscure reasoning for that same reason. This text from Félix Guattari, quoted by Dawkings and seen in Certain Doubts blog sums up pretty well what I generally consider a shameless attempt to build basaments on air:
We can clearly see that there is no bi-univocal correspondence between linear signifying links or archi-writing, depending on the author, and this multireferential, multi-dimensional machinic catalysis. The symmetry of scale, the transversality, the pathic non-discursive character of their expansion: all these dimensions remove us from the logic of the excluded middle and reinforce us in our dismissal of the ontological binarism we criticised previously.
Simpler is better:
Firefox 3 default theme under GNOME (Ubuntu), with the Tiny Menu extension. I removed the icons from the top bar because I found myself using always the keyboard shortcuts instead. I can’t remember when was the last time I clicked the “home” button.
From a 1986 interview to Leonard Michaels for Paris Review, seen in Jacket Copy:
It’s a question of attention span, or maybe toilet training, for those novelists. Maybe they assume that a character is, like themselves, capable of astounding concentration on a subject, unrelieved for years and years. […] I’ve never met anyone, except for people who are profoundly depressed or trapped in some neurosis, who exhibited a novelistic consistency. Usually they can’t remember where they were or what they did last week.
I use this macro a lot when I’m adjusting the hyphenation:
sub Condense
dim document as object
dim dispatcher as object
document = ThisComponent.CurrentController.Frame
dispatcher = createUnoService("com.sun.star.frame.DispatchHelper")
dim args1(0) as new com.sun.star.beans.PropertyValue
args1(0).Name = "Spacing"
args1(0).Value = -3
dispatcher.executeDispatch(document, ".uno:Spacing", "", 0, args1())
end sub
Hit Alt+F11 to open OOo Basic, hit Edit on a module in My Macros (not in the document section), paste it and assign a shortcut in the customization preferences (I use Ctrl + C).
They call it “economy of attention”. They write (and sell) books about the economy of attention. They make (and monetize) blogs and sites about the economy of attention. They give (and get paid for) conferences about the economy of attention hullabaloo. They even make webcomics about the economy of attention. Don’t get surprised if from now on you start to see bankers turning gold ingots into shiny fish knives. If you didn’t notice, we are actually living a global revolution bigger than the 70’s curly haircuts.
Here you can see a typical Web 2.0 guru making a life from the new opportunities:
Foto: Masayuki - Licencia: CC-BY
I always thought there were only two options in economy: selling a product, and selling air. Little I knew how wrong was I! Competing to get customers using skills and baits is totally a different platform! Forgive me if I did even dare to think something like that already existed in classic television, newspapers, cinema, radio, vacuum cleaner industry and tupperware social meetings. The inventor of the economy of attention is definitively a genius, and deserves his or her place in History among the likes of Galileo or Da Vinci.
Of course, back in our grandfathers’ time they didn’t have this kind of sophisticated know-how. They either sat in their shops letting the chaos theory do the work of sending some customers in or were assigned buyers through a random lottery hosted by their paternalist big brother government.
Here in the sidebar you can see an example of their miserable failure to grasp the concept of “economy of attention” —haw, haw! the poor chaps wouldn’t have figured AdSense in a million years!
Now it’s time to stop basing our economy on the value of ridiculous things, like, food, water, fuel or homes, and embrace the new awesome economy of looking at each other! You’ll be able to pick anything you want from groceries and shops if you stare at the vendor during a certain amount of time, though you’ll need to choose carefully the time of the day if you don’t want to be forced to stay longer to outbid the other stare-buyers. Meanwhile, goods of all sorts will be magically produced by tiny angels in steampunk factories and they’ll ship them to vendors priced in stare-time currency (exchange fees to listen-time, smell-time and touch-time currencies may vary), within 15 labor days, free shipment for 10 units or more.
It really sounds like a perfect plan, and I don’t really know what could ever go wrong with it. Really.
Kate Beaton is undoubtablely my favourite webcomic author since Aaron Diaz stopped doing crazy scientific comics to start an actual storyline.
And if you ever wondered how cool a dystopian can get, you gotta check the one she drew about George Orwell.
