Great blog post by about Google Glass by Jason Calcanis.
I’ve run into several friends wearing Google Glass in the past three months, and I have three words of advice for them:
Take. Them. Off.
First, you look like an idiot.
Second, you’re killing the party.
Third, are you recording me right now?!?
Great, illuminating post. Worth reading in full.
Needs to be taken with the mandatory dose of salt but still…. If autonomous vehicles do become an everyday reality, then lots of other things will start to change.
While driverless cars might still seem like science fiction outside the Valley, the people working and thinking about these technologies are starting to ask what these autos could mean for the city of the future. The short answer is “a lot.”
Imagine a city where you don’t drive in loops looking for a parking spot because your car drops you off and scoots off to some location to wait, sort of like taxi holding pens at airports. Or maybe it is picked up by a robotic minder and carted off with other vehicles, like a row of shopping carts.
A test of Google’s self-driving car.
Inner-city parking lots could become parks. Traffic lights could be less common because hidden sensors in cars and streets coordinate traffic. And, yes, parking tickets could become a rarity since cars would be smart enough to know where they are not supposed to be.
As scientists and car companies forge ahead — many expect self-driving cars to become commonplace in the next decade — researchers, city planners and engineers are contemplating how city spaces could change if our cars start doing the driving for us. There are risks, of course: People might be more open to a longer daily commute, leading to even more urban sprawl.
So the answer to the question is: a definite maybe (as Sam Goldwyn used to say).
Amazing report in the WSJ.
The National Security Agency’s ability to gather phone data on millions of Americans hinges on a secret court ruling that redefined a single word: “relevant.”
The National Security Agency’s ability to gather phone data on millions of Americans hinges on the secret redefinition of the word “relevant.”
This change—which specifically enabled the surveillance recently revealed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden—was made by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a group of judges responsible for making decisions about government surveillance in national-security cases. In classified orders starting in the mid-2000s, the court accepted that “relevant” could be broadened to permit an entire database of records on millions of people, in contrast to a more conservative interpretation widely applied in criminal cases, in which only some of those records would likely be allowed, according to people familiar with the ruling.
The ‘relevant’ language was added to the Patriot Act when it came up for reauthorization; it was signed by President Bush in 2006.
In interviews with The Wall Street Journal, current and former administration and congressional officials are shedding new light on the history of the NSA program and the secret legal theory underpinning it. The court’s interpretation of the word enabled the government, under the Patriot Act, to collect the phone records of the majority of Americans, including phone numbers people dialed and where they were calling from, as part of a continuing investigation into international terrorism.
“Relevant” has long been a broad standard, but the way the court is interpreting it, to mean, in effect, “everything,” is new, says Mark Eckenwiler, a senior counsel at Perkins Coie LLP who, until December, was the Justice Department’s primary authority on federal criminal surveillance law.
OK, I know you’re busy, but if you have eight minutes to spare, given this a play. (And skip the ad.)
Thanks to Desmond Hanlon for the link.