3. Peter W. Singer at HacDC.

    17 March 2016

    Forget moblogging. It’s too much hassle to be workable because it never works, and it wrecks my formatting. I just got back from HacDC, where tonight Peter Singer, author of Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century presented on the topic of applied military robotics. While it seems a bit cliche’ to say this, they aren’t science fiction anymore, military robots are actually recent history. Drones and teleoperated robots have been in use in Iraq and Afghanistan since the get go, and the last official count has over seven thousand robots in use …

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  4. San Francisco Bomb Scare, 24 February 2016.

    17 March 2016

    On 24 February 2016 there was a bomb scare in the Financial District of downtown San Francisco, California. As far as I have been able to determine someone found an unattended FedEx box on the street, called the police, and the police called in the bomb squad (which doesn't seem to have a homepage of its own). For reasons not entirely clear to me I seem to have been one of very few people who covered it, which is kind of odd because they shut down streets for several blocks around, trapping many of us in place. I found myself …

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  5. The grand re-opening of the MADE.

    14 March 2016

    A couple of years ago the Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment opening in Oakland, CA. Due to some significant donations of exhibits by a number of people they swiftly outgrew their old space and held a successful Kickstarter campaign to fund moving to a new location and pay the rent for same. A few weeks ago they held their grand re-opening party in the new space, where they showed off their exhibits (both new and old) and the larger space. If you happen to be in Oakland, California they're open every weekend to not only show off their voluminous …

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  8. Telecomix activist crowdfunding translation of his autobiography.

    29 February 2016

    I don't ordinarily do this, but I think this is a special case.

    During the time of Occupy and the Arab Spring, the hacktivist collective Telecomix was the boots on the ground, the eyes in the sky, and a bloom of jellyfish swimming to and fro in the endless oceans of the Net. Among the many jellyfish who banded together beneath Agent Cameron's banner was the talented hacker Tomate, who later went public with his real name - Stephan Urbach. When the Telecomix network came under an unprecedented (at the time, anyway) attack that we were never able to trace the …

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  9. Another trip around the sun and another batch of things learned.

    22 February 2016

    This post is a day late because I've been on the road and pushing way out of my comfort zone for the past couple of days and learning a lot in the process, so here is my slightly belated birthday post (with the apropriate soundtrack, of course).

    I just turned 38 years old. Those seem like simple, empty words but they're anything but. Over a third of my expected lifespan is gone now, which is not an easy thing to admit to oneself. Looking at it one way, I've spent that time just trying to figure everything out - learning the …

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  10. Not yet in a position to post yet.

    16 February 2016

    Home from Pantheacon. Thank you, everyone, for your birthday wishes and greetings - after I got home I slept for a couple of hours due to convention-exhaustion and generally not feeling well at all. I will get back to everyone (and put up my yearly birthday post) in a couple of days, once I'm caught up from being away for four days.

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