Nikola Tesla Wasn’t God And Thomas Edison Wasn’t The Devil : Correcting some egregious misconceptions about an Oatmeal comic regarding Tesla and Edison — explaining some realities about invention, scientific progress, and the history of electricity. “I’d contend that nearly every invention in the engineering or sciences is an improvement on what has come before – such as Tesla’s improvements to alternating current. That’s what innovation is. It’s a social process that occurs in a social context. As Robert Heinlein once said, “When railroading time comes you can railroad — but not before.” In other words, inventions are made in the context of scientific and engineering understanding. Individuals move things forward – some faster than others – but in the end, the most intelligent person in the world can’t invent the light bulb if the foundation isn’t there.”
(tags: nikola-tesla history electricity innovation invention progress science thomas-edison the-oatmeal)

Jamming Tripoli: Inside Moammar Gadhafi’s Secret Surveillance Network : The very scary future of state control, censorship, and totalitarianism in the age of the internet. A presentation from Amesys, a subsidiary of Bull S.A. “explained the significance of Eagle to a government seeking to control activities inside its borders. Warning of an “increasing need of high-level intelligence in the constant struggle against criminals and terrorism,” the document touted Eagle’s ability to capture bulk Internet traffic passing through conventional, satellite, and mobile phone networks, and then to store that data in a filterable and searchable database. This database, in turn, could be integrated with other sources of intelligence, such as phone recordings, allowing security personnel to pick through audio and data from a given person all at once, in real time or by historical time stamp. In other words, instead of choosing targets and monitoring them, officials could simply sweep up everything, sort it by time and target, and then browse through it later at their leisure. The title of the presentation — ”From Lawful to Massive Interception” — gestured at the vast difference between so-called lawful intercept (traditional law enforcement surveillance based on warrants for specific phone numbers or IP addresses) and what Amesys was offering.”
(tags: massive-interception future state-control censorship privacy internet email totalitarianism libya amesys bull-sa gadhafi surveillance)

The Walton Bridge petition : ‘IOP Ireland is campaigning to have the new bridge across the Liffey in Dublin at Marlborough Street named for ETS Walton – Ireland’s only physics Nobel prizewinner.’
(tags: nobel physics science ireland ernest-walton scientists history naming dublin tcd)

zen.org Communal Weblog » Digital Legacy : Elana Kehoe on dealing with Brendan’s digital legacy: “What to do when you are next of kin to a geek?” A lot of good advice here, and plenty of things I need to think about…
(tags: brendan-kehoe digital-legacy wills legacy passwords accounts tips)

Pickstarter : ‘A curated blog of notable Kickstarter projects’ (via potentato)
(tags: via:potentato blogs kickstarter funding links projects)

Digital Rights Forum – Online Privacy : ‘The Digital Rights Forum is a public debate on the important issues surrounding digital rights, with each event designed around the general over-arching topic of digital rights, puls a more narrowly focused subject. On Friday, the 18th of May, the forum will tackle the issue of Online Privacy. With our lives ever more integrated with the web and social media, staying safe online is becoming an increasing concern to everyone. From mobile apps to websites and email, protecting our personal information and online privacy has never been more complicated and more important. Faced with software vulnerabilities such as contacts being leaked onto the Internet by mobile application providers, the increasing push toward revealing more private and personal information on social networks, and attempts by some to protect their businesses through litigation or processes which require the disclosure of personal information, the modern digital landscape has made protecting one’s privacy more difficult than ever before. With this in mind, this Digital Rights Forum will discuss the current state of data protection and online privacy in the current context of social networks and mobile applications.’ Featuring Billy Hawkes (the DPC, no less!), and Devore from Boards.
(tags: dpc digital-rights ireland politics online security privacy data-protection)

Welcome to Life: the singularity, ruined by lawyers – YouTube : ’some portions of the experience, such as the sky, may be replaced by personalised advertising.’ Uploading your consciousness in the age of copyright maximalism, as Nelson Minar put it (via Nelson)
(tags: via:nelson grim-meathook-future future singularity funny copyright advertising)

An IDE is not enough : Very thought-provoking response to that ‘Light Table’ demo which went round the aggregators a couple of weeks back. ‘The fundamental reason IDEs have dead-ended is that they are constrained by the syntax and semantics of our programming languages. Our programming languages were all designed to be used with a text editor. It is therefore not surprising that our IDEs amount to tarted-up text editors. Likewise our programming languages were all designed with an imperative semantics that efficiently matches the hardware but defies static visualization. Indeed it would be a miracle if we could slap a new IDE on top of an old language and magically alter its syntactic and semantic assumptions. I don’t believe in miracles. Languages and IDEs have co-evolved and neither can change without the other also changing. That is why three years ago I put aside my IDE work to focus on language design. Getting rid of imperative semantics is one of the goals. Another is getting rid of source text files (as well as ASTs, which carry all the baggage of a textual encoding minus the readability). This has turned out to be really really hard. And lonely – no one wants to even talk about these crazy ideas. Nevertheless I firmly believe that so long as we are programming in decendants of assembly language we will continue to program in descendants of text editors.’ (via Chris Horn)
(tags: via:cjhorn ide programming coding programming-languages semantics syntax source-code text)

Open Data Structures : A free-as-in-speech as well as -beer textbook of data structures, covering a great range, including some I hadn’t heard of before. Here’s the full list: ArrayStack, FastArrayStack, ArrayQueue, ArrayDeque, DualArrayDeque, RootishArrayStack, SLList, DLList, SEList, SkiplistSSet, SkiplistList, ChainedHashTable, LinearHashTable, BinaryTree, BinarySearchTree, Treap, ScapegoatTree, RedBlackTree, BinaryHeap, MeldableHeap, AdjacencyMatrix, AdjacencyLists, BinaryTrie, XFastTrie, and YFastTrie
(tags: algorithms books data-structures computer-science coding tries skiplists arrays queues heap trees graphs hashtables)

Chronon DVR for Java : “record entire execution of your Java app; play it back on any machine”. Other features: time-travelling debugger — step backwards, jump to any point in execution, designed for long running programs; post-execution logging — add log statements after the program has run, and see what it would have logged. Looks extremely nifty, but I wonder how big those recording files get…
(tags: debugging via:peakscale eclipse chronon dvr java coding logging jvm)

Diageo Screw BrewDog : Giant booze multinational screws tiny Scottish microbrewery. “Diageo (the main sponsor) approached us at the start of the meal and said under no circumstances could the award be given to BrewDog. They said if this happened they would pull their sponsorship from all future BII events and their representatives would not present any of the awards on the evening. We were as gobsmacked as you by Diageo’s behaviour. We made the wrong decision under extreme pressure. We were blackmailed and bullied by Diageo. We should have stuck to our guns and gave the award to BrewDog.”
(tags: brewdog diageo bii awards beer brewing dirty-tricks)

My Mexican Shop.ie : the Irish rendition of Mexican food has long been legendarily terrible, but this new web shop offers a fantastic range of authentic Mexican food ingredients, especially all those chilies you just can’t get here
(tags: chili food mexican spices cooking shop)