Use your DS Lite like an iPod. Lovely touchscreen functionality.
Add more emoticons to GMail chat. Won’t work for me as my Firefox version is too old. I’m in fear of upgrading and having all my settings wiped. This version does me fine anyway.
Wouldn’t it be nice for SiliconValley to virtually extend itself to other places, such as Ireland. Shel Israel mentions that half of Silicon Valley startups were launched by immigrants but with connectivity getting better, do they need to move there now?
This issue is relevant to Global Neighborhoods because technology may make it less necessary for the world’s best and brightest visionary technologists to cluster here in Silicon Valley. In short, the flattening world may mean that the Andy Grove, Vinod Khosla and Sergey Brin, Alexander Hamilton, Andrew Carnegie of the future may not have to come here, robbing America of its ability to attract so many of the world’s best and brightest.
As recommended by Neil Gaiman. Neil Gaiman recommends some comic books to read. Great list.
Wow, now that’s an impressive attitude from a McDonald’s employee in Ireland.
Cringely’s latest column. This bit sticks out for me:
I would predict the fall of CEO Howard Stringer again if there were clearly somebody at Sony who wants his job. The business is in such difficulty that Microsoft is discussing internally how to help Sony from going under, since that would create a raft of antitrust problems for Redmond. I am not making this up.
This Irish Times story about Bebo suggesting giving all school kids email addresses for age verification is interesting for a few things. It is a good enough way of identifying ages and schoolkids and could easily be a way of blocking non-schoolkids from accessing profiles of kids. As it states:
Advocates of this system would hope that the special e-mail addresses would mean that older adults would be unable to misrepresent themselves as being of schoolgoing age.
This bit kind of annoys me:
A Department of Education and Science spokesman said access to social networking sites, such as Bebo, is blocked under content filtering services in place in schools.
Didn’t they have the same blinkered attitude to sex education years back? If you don’t talk about it, it might go away. Didn’t help with teenage pregnancies did it? Bebo is here and needs to be recognised as being here. A lot of the parents of kids might not know anything about the Internet or Bebo and wouldn’t have an iota about advising their kids about it. I think schools should have special classes on dealing with interacting with others online and how best to deal with unwanted solicitations. I don’t think denying these issues exist is a credible way of addressing them.
Actually Labour’s Kathleen O’Meara talks a little sense when she says parents should get training too but I would disagree with what she says about kids:
It seems to me that youngsters are themselves quite well clued in as to how to behave safely and responsibly when using services such as Bebo
And now here’s another interesting take about knowing some details for kids online.
Zadi wrote to her friends, begging for help. One of her friends found the boy’s school on his profile and contacted the principal who, in turn, contacted the family and got an ambulance to the boy in time.
The dance scene from Napoleon Dynamite. Reminds me of someone I see around college:
Keith Ellison makes a beeline for Virgil Goode. Goode is the congressman that caused a huge fuss that Ellison was a muslim and wrote unflattering remarks about stopping more muslims from getting into congress. Ellison seems to genuinely want to reach out to the Virginia representative.
All the Bebo haters can tune out now. 🙂 I’ll be on 