It's a good Saturday for geeks (see also last post). This week, OTM's lead story is "The Net's Mid-Life Crisis." You can listen to the show, or individual segments of it, as a stream or download the MP3(s).
Even better, OTM's site also has extended interviews with the people they talked to for this week's show: Richard Clarke, John Markoff, Jonathan Zittrain, and Clay Shirky.* Again, you can either download or stream.
Like the looming robot overlord (non-?)problem I mentioned in the last post, there is a big clash between the fearful and the optimistic (or the concerned and the naifs, as you prefer).
* [Added] Looks like they forgot to post the audio for Shirkey. Maybe they'll get to it later?
[Update] It is now available.
5 comments:
I for one am eagerly awaiting the arrival of our looming robot overlords, or even aggressive space aliens, indeed any outside force that would require us to adopt a single character set and collation for our digital effluvia. It would certainly ease my dba woes.
Self-justifying quisling!!!
I'm ashamed of my selfishness. Forgive me.
Actually, I feel your pain. Why everyone on the planet can't agree that seven bits is all anyone should need for a character set still bugs me.
However, I think we're at the point now where disk space and RAM are so cheap, and image recognition is so good, that it makes sense to store each letter as its own PNG file. At least that way we'd settle once and for all how many bytes a character is supposed to occupy.
I'd be afraid that my weekly 'Letter to the Editor' would be mistaken for a Scrabble game entry. Or Mah Jongg.
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