The Web Is for Serving, Not Surfing: on control of bandwidth, and hence content, by broadband providers as reflected by terms of service restricting home servers.
The three central tenets of the Internet are peer-to-peer, distributed control and free speech. If you ask me, the broadband companies are in favor of none of these. Since all of the broadband companies are also involved in the "entertainment" business, peer-to-peer distribution of entertainment, news, movie, books and music has them running scared. After all, if end-users of broadband also can be service providers, the power of the entertainment establishment is lessened.
I agree with the worry over the consolidation of content and bandwidth providers, but preventing home servers isn't really a symptom of that. It's cheap enough to get hosting these days. [via dangerousmeta]
Physics for future Presidents: Richard Muller's class on "what every world leader needs to know", including draft chapters from the accompanying textbook with chapters such as Explosions and Dropping food. [via Boing Boing]
A Time of Transition \ the human connection: W. Daniel Hillis on the rate of human progress.
You can tell that something unusual is going on these days by the way we draw our graphs. In normal times, we would use a linear scale to plot progress. The height of our graph would be proportional to the measure of progress. But we live at a remarkable moment in history, when progress is so rapid that we plot it on a logarithmic scale.
[via abuddhas memes]
