This site is very slow, but the content is interesting. Chineese propaganda posters organized by topic.

Stefan Landsberger's Chinese Propaganda Poster Pages

"The problem isn’t figuring out how to get people to become more “innovative”; it’s figuring out how to get people to accept and apply innovations more productively."

Why Weeds?

News of death and destruction...

BBC News | SCI/TECH | Space rock hurtles past Earth

hrm.

playing chicken?

Lessig (Stanford Law) is interviewed on NPR, Hillary Rosen (RIAA) calls in and is shortly refuted. I'd like to see a more complete debate between the two.

The most striking part of the discussion is something else:
Lessig says computer people are "apathetic, a-political types." He doesn't think that there is anything that can be done to prevent a copyright distopia. He doesn't think the EFF has any real political support.

An hour long.

Lessig vs. Rosen

In the September issue of Scientific American, a number of articles cast doubt on certain aspects of nanotechnological building blocks promoted by the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing and the Foresight Institute. The organizations have responded with specific rebuttals to these articles and pointers to the previous literature on the subject.

Worth a look. I wonder which side of the debate Bill Joy supports ... if he supports the SciAm view, then is GNR a false threat?

A Debate About Assemblers

"Welcome To Freedom Ship ... a fascinating and unique place to live, vacation, run a business, retire, work, or visit. The ship will be home to a full spectrum residential, resort, and commercial community. The ship will continuously circle the globe, covering most of the world's coastal regions every 2 years.
It will spend 30% of its time in motion, and 70% sitting offshore exciting touring destinations."

If nautical nonsense is something you wish...

Welcome to the Freedom Ship Website

Philip S. Antón, Richard Silberglitt, and James Schneider
Prepared for the National Intelligence Council. 92 pages.

This (c)2001 RAND publication is freely available online in HTML and PDF. It provided input to the US government's Global Trends 2015 document. Here's the publisher's summary:

Various technologies have the potential for significant and dominant global effects within the next few decades. This report provides a quick look at global technology trends in biotechnology, nanotechnology, and materials technology and their implications for information technology and the world in 2015.

The Global Technology Revolution

Lots of interesting papers are available here. This conference was held in Ireland in June 2001. Here are a few of the paper titles:
Using Dimensionality Reduction to Improve Similarity Judgements for Recommendation
Paths and Contextually Specific Recommendations
Combining Dynamic Agents and Collaborative Filtering ... for Better Recommendation Quality
Relevance Feedback for Best Match Term Weighting Algorithms in Information Retrieval
Personalization through Specification Refinement and Composition
Relevance Feedback and Personalization: A Language Modeling Perspective
Comparing Recommendations Made by Online Systems and Friends
Flycasting: On the Fly Broadcasting
Personalization and Recommender Systems in the Larger Context: New Directions and Research Questions

Proceedings of the Second DELOS Network of Excellence Workshop on Personalisation and Recommender Systems in Digital Libraries

Apparently it may be illegal for record companies to employ CD copyright protection schemes because they are already getting paid for "piracy" when blank media is sold. Tangent: What if the government proposed an internet piracy tax in exchange for the end of all anti-piracy systems.... Much of "free software" is currently federally subsidised. One can imagine a future in which something like the NEA becomes the way that media is paid for...

Lawmaker: Is CD copy-protection illegal? - Tech News - CNET.com