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When global warming really kicks in and the polar ice caps start melting, causing flooding along coastal areas world-wide, how bad will it really be? Check out this handy interactive map.
An interesting Dutch person who makes replicas of electronic devices and other precision electromechanical things.
Maisonneuve has a great article on why you should jaywalk (pdf). It's not rocket science really, cities with lots of pedestrian traffic have more pedestrians friendly environments, and drivers are more aware of pedestrians - so they can and should jaywalk to continuously promote the "pedestrian environment."
Here in New York City, my own particular "promotion" happens on Canal Street, where I purposely walk on the street and get in the way of traffic (not that I am the only person in the street, if you have ever been on Canal Street, you know that the sidewalks are ridiculously crowded and people are always walking in the curb lane). The New York City DOT and NYMTC have been studying the Canal Street corridor for a while, but the big problem with their studies is that they assume foremost that it should move lots of traffic through a crowded downtown city environment - Chinatown of all places especially. So, whenever I am down there I do my best to get in the way of automobile traffic. Maybe someday the powers that the will understand that New York is truly a walking city.
I was working for Sun Microsystems in 1999 when Scott McNealy famously said "You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it." I did not really want to believe him then, but I knew if we did not do something about it we would end up exactly in that spot.
On his blog, Bruce Schneier has posted one of his best all encompassing privacy essays to date, The Future Of Privacy. One of the good and bad things about wholesale surveillance is that it is so un-specific. We may no longer be anonymous with all this data about us stored in who knows how many databases, but just because it passes through a filter does not mean we are being watched in the same way it did thirty years ago. The problem lies in the filtering then, when a combination of things that we do raises a flag in some computer somewhere - and we become yet another example of an unduly harassed false positive. The numbers are so great at this point - the amount of data so large - that it does not seem to work out in our favor (the innocents) or that of law enforcement. And the amount of data seems like it will just keep pace with computing power and algorithm development.