This is what happens when everyone is afraid of everyone else: His mission was to photograph each of the nation’s 50 state capitol buildings and dispatch a postcard from each city, using postage stamps from a childhood collection. Each postcard would be mailed to the next state on his journey, where he would pick it… Continue reading Our Paranoid Society
Tag: society
Democracy and Liberty
This little analogy, found in a signature on Slashdot, sums it up quite nicely: Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what’s for dinner. Liberty is a well-armed sheep contesting the vote.
Applying Old Laws to New Technology
You’ve probably heard of the RIAA and the MPAA (the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America, respectively) before. They’ve been in the news a lot lately – suing old people who don’t have a computer for sharing mp3 files on the Internet and so forth. A recent Slashdot story… Continue reading Applying Old Laws to New Technology
The Right to Read
I stumbled across this the other day – it’s a sort of story about the future, or what it might be like, if we continue to allow both large corporations and the government dictate what we do with the information we buy. I came across it because I was reading about Amazon’s new e-book reader… Continue reading The Right to Read
Time flows like a river… and history repeats
It occurred to me recently that Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, and all those sorts of sites are just like GeoCities and Tripod were back in the early days of the web – in other words, filled with awful, horrible, ugly web pages that nobody wants to look at.