"Hey! I can see my house from here"
22 Apr 2003I just GeoURL’ed this page. In doing so I found my house on ACME Mapper.
I just GeoURL’ed this page. In doing so I found my house on ACME Mapper.
Getting a whole political structure running inside of a computer network sounds like some interesting futuristic thing, that one day we’ll have. I’m now thinking that this is the only way to bring democracy to the developing world. This idea popped up reading /. comments on wiring Senegal. Here’s a great one:
I had a friend named Martin who was an expatriate from Sierra Leone. He worked with me at IBM. Talented guy, college educated. He spent a lot of his time rounding up junk computer equipment (what we’d consider junk) and shipping it to Sierra Leone. He’d go back and visit occasionally.
I asked him - if people can use these computers (implied literacy and education), then why can’t they form up a westernized culture and enrich themselves, at least to the extent of getting decent housing and food self-sufficiency. His answer was that the lacking required factor was law and order. The leaders fleece the country, selling off natural resources at cut-rate to benefit western corporations. Eventually the enraged local youth (of a political bent) get fed up and revolt, and stuck in the middle are all the regular people of which this mythical culture would be fashioned.
What’s the answer, I said. He shook his head. He does what he can.
We need to give this middle class of people oversight to their government. Every dollar the govt. spends should be logged and available to all citizens in real time. Every deal made needs to a web page with a comment forum at the bottom. Office holders will be tracked by whuffle.
I just wrote down on my TODO list in the “Net” section: “Nation scalable admin system for gov’t based on capabilites”
The Hush Tech. Silent Mini-ITX PC is pretty darn neat. I want one for a set top box.
What would be better is a case with a dot matrix lcd panel covering the front, front side IR port, and 4 front side usb ports.
Next you run Freevo (because it’s python) and Mnet, and MAME+SNES9X+whatever other game system.
I want a browser with a built in XHTML vaidator built in. It’s UI would be like the SSL icon in the corner of your screen. You could click it and get the W3C validator report for the html in your browser’s buffer.
(this is not going to make sense unless you know the inner workings of mnet or freenet)
Software reads and encodes 1m of video, then publishes those FEC blocks, then the inode block and then waits for the next 1m of video to be published with an inode. Then it publishes a metadata block with the info about this clip (stuff like timecode in UTC, the URI of the channel you are encoding) and then three mnet/freenet URI’s one pointing this 1m of video, the next 1m and prev 1m. So then, anyone can pick up the video stream from that point and follow it either way.
This would be great for allowing people to refer back into time and point their friends at a bit of CNN/FOX/BBC/MyersTV/Whatever.