MAC SOFTWARE
Posted by on under mitsubhi, retinas, hdtv, home entertainment, nbsp, critique, mitsubishi, lt | 
Filed under: Displays, HDTV, Home Entertainment
Mitsubishi's $6,999 65-inch LaserVue HDTV now hitting retailers originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 28 Oct 2008 12:46:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Posted by on under samuel morse, iry, best thing since sliced bread, panics, phe, hysteria, thoreau, typewriters, backlash, aces, pencil, brains, critique, telegraph, waves, peoe, attitude, memory |
Salon has a refreshing take on the effect of the net on wider culture, courtesy of Dennis Baron, author of the new book A Better Pencil. Baron places hysteria about the net's supposed dumbing-down in context with other panics of years gone by. Historically, when the new communication device comes out, the reaction tends to be divided. Some people think it's the best thing since sliced bread; other people fear it as the end of civilization as we know it. And most people take a wait and see attitude. And if it does something that they're interested in, they pick up on it, if it doesn't, they don't buy into it. I start with Plato's critique of writing where he says that if we depend on writing, we will lose the ability to remember things. Our memory will become weak. And he also criticizes writing because the written text is not interactive in the way spoken communication is. He also says that written words are essentially shadows of the things they represent. They're not the thing itself. Of course we remember all this because Plato wrote it down -- the ultimate irony. We hear a thousand objections of this sort throughout history: Thoreau objecting to the telegraph, because even though it speeds things up, people won't have anything to say to one another. Then we have Samuel Morse, who invents the telegraph, objecting to the telephone because nothing important is ever going to be done over the telephone because there's no way to preserve or record a phone conversation. There were complaints about typewriters making writing too mechanical, too distant -- it disconnects the author from the words. That a pen and pencil connects you more directly with the page. And then with the computer, you have the whole range of "this is going to revolutionize everything" versus "this is going to destroy everything." Is the Internet melting our brains?...Posted by on under boing boing, ada lovelace, cindy cohn, pirate bay, crypto community, privacy fight, crypto keys, ixquick, google, line privacy, internet filtering, search engines, local network, wikipedia, community member, eff, encrypted, critique, amp, switches |
The Electronic Frontier Foundation and The Onion Router (TOR) project have teamed up to release a new privacy-enhancing Firefox plugin called HTTPS Everywhere. It was inspired by Google's new encrypted search engine, and it ensures that whenever you visit a site that accepts encrypted connections, your browser switches into encrypted mode, hiding your traffic from snoops on your local network and at your ISP. HTTPS Everywhere covers Google search, Wikipedia, Twitter, Identi.ca, Facebook, EFF, Tor, Scroogle, DuckDuckGo, Ixquick and other smaller search engines. It's still in beta (what isn't?) but I've been running it all morning with no negative side effects. Encrypt the Web with the HTTPS Everywhere Firefox Extension (Thanks, Hugh!) Psiphon: critique from a crypto community member EFF, AT&T and Google all on the same side of this privacy fight ... What will happen to your crypto-keys when you die? Pirate Bay offering crypto tools to fight Swedish spying laws ... Scalia Scoffs at Calls for More Data Privacy Protection, Students ... Talking About AT&T's Internet Filtering on AT&T's The Hugh ... HOWTO protect your online privacy now that the Senate repealed the ... HOWTO use TOR to enhance your privacy Ada Lovelace Day hero: Cindy Cohn...
