Tag: future

Bookmarks for July 13, 2010

  • Bankrupt Gay Teen Site May Be Forced to Hand Over Personal Information of Users
    This is why you need to be careful with what data you hand to what websites, kids. You might well trust any given website website and the people running it today, but if something goes wrong, and the company goes bankrupt, your data is an asset that belongs to them. And as this article makes clear, the only thing that bankruptcy administrators are allowed to care about it getting the most money back for the creditors. Which means (at the moment, pending a change in the law to improve privacy in cases like this) they're ethically constrained from being picky about what happens to your data – if the highest bidder is a shit who is going to use the data to make everyone involved's life in some way worse, that's just tough for them, because they have to sell to the highest bidder in order to fairly represent the creditor's interests.
    Tags: internet, privacy, law
  • The Technium: The Maes-Garreau Point
    Interesting piece about predictions, singularities, and the tendency of utopians (and a lot of doomsayers) to predict paradigm shifting event to occur around the end of their own lifetime.
    Tags: future, theory
  • HelvetiNote™
    If they add some form of over-the-air syncing, then I'm sold.

Bookmarks for April 27, 2010

Bookmarks for December 1, 2009

  • Local Bookstores, Social Hubs, and Mutualization « Clay Shirky
    Clary Shirky on the future of the bookstore. I think that the local bookstore probably has a longer future that the local record store did – I think it'll take a generational shift or two, until we've got people who are more used to reading on the screen than they are on paper, but I think he's right that they're going to need to make massive practical changes in the way they do business – perhaps becoming hubs for local POD services…
    Tags: future, business, books, publishing

Bookmarks for September 22, 2009

  • David Byrne’s Perfect City – WSJ.com
    A quote by David Byrne from Matt's article that I thought I was worth saving in it's own right:
    "A city can't be too small. Size guarantees anonymity—if you make an embarrassing mistake in a large city, and it's not on the cover of the Post, you can probably try again. The generous attitude towards failure that big cities afford is invaluable—it's how things get created. In a small town everyone knows about your failures, so you are more careful about what you might attempt."
    Tags: cities
  • The City Is A Battlesuit For Surviving The Future – Future metro – io9
    Matt Jones on the future of cities, their place in sf, and well, a typically smart piece of joined up thinking. Just go and read it.
    Tags: future, architecture, cities
  • YouTube – Outlaw commentary highlights
    This is one of the funniest bits of DVD commentary I've heard in ages. I am genuinely unsure if this is a joke or not, but still, it's hysterical.
    Tags: funny, video, dvd
  • The Ultimate Uncluttered Tube Map – Londonist
    This is inspired. I recommend this map to all vistors to London. It really does contain 90% of everything tourists need, and for the other 10%, just ask a native. (Assuming you know any. If you don't, then how the hell are you reading this?)
    Tags: maps, london, tube, funny

Bookmarks for June 1, 2009

Bookmarks for May 27, 2009

Bookmarks for April 3, 2009

  • John Thackara – Designing for Business as Unusual – Core77
    He starts out spelling how we're fucked on an economic and environmental level. And then he gets in to what we're doing about it. Some of this shit is fascinating – a set of tools for a completely new system of economics.
    Tags: design, business, video
  • 19.20.21.
    By the end of the 21st century, there are predicted to be 19 cities with a population of over 20 million. London is one of them, currently has a population of around 7-8 million, and large parts of it's infrastructure are creaking at the seams. We urgently need more thinking on how we will cope with the supercities of the near future, and I'll watch this project with interest.
    Tags: future, cities, research, urban, environment, population