Talks from the 29th Chaos Communication Congress are beginning to appear online.
They can be downloaded from the official mirror or viewed on YouTube. There are a number of interesting talks that I’m planning to watch.
You are currently viewing all posts tagged with micro.
Foundation is the second-greatest science fiction series of all time.
(The greatest, of course, is Dune.) In 1973, the BBC recorded an 8-episode radio series of Asimov‘s Foundation Trilogy. The show is now in the public domain and available for download at the Internet Archive. It’s well done. When I read Foundation I failed to continue past the original trilogy into the later work. This show has encouraged me to revisit the books.
There's a lot of noise in this country about gun control right now.
People are impassioned on both sides, and much of what I’ve seen in the popular dialogue are people leaving behind rational discussion in favor of flaming the other. The Kontradictions blog has one of the most balanced pieces I’ve seen on the issue of an “assault weapons” ban.
(via Ben)
The Internet Archive is asking for donations.
They are trying to purchase another petabox (that’s one quadrillion bytes). Donations are being matched 3-for-1 till the end of the year, so now is a good time to give them money and support digital archiving.
The most dangerous slope angles for avalanches are between 30 and 50 degrees.
Statistically, 38° is the “oh-my-god-we’re-all-gonna-die slope”. An inclinometer is a useful tool to carry to help evaluate the potential of a particular slope. There’s no replacing hands-on training, but Bruce Temper’s Staying Alive in Avalanche Terrain is an excellent resource for learning more than you want to know about avalanches. (If you live in the northwest, you should give money to the Northwest Weather and Avalanche Center. They do good work.)
Today I went looking for some snow.
And I found some.
Dane is turning his eye to puffy-layers.
Over at Cold Thistle Dane muses on the appropriate use of a belay jacket. At Cascade Climbers he has an article reviewing various synthetic puffy jackets. (I’ve been using the Rab Xenon for over a year now and am very fond if it – although the Hill People Gear Mountain Serape, which I purchased last December, has replaced the Xenon in some settings.)
When mentioning the cypherpunks, I like to point to Moxie Marlinkspike's explanation of their failure.
In his talk from Defcon 18 (transcript available), Moxie argues that what we were preparing for was fascism and what we got was social democracy. For me it was an eye-opening explanation, and one that I think is important to understand given the ever-increasing network effect of technologies that are a not only a danger to personal privacy but can also grow to threaten free thought.