Catching up on the California RFID bill in Deep Links I can’t help but being struck by the limited view of RFID that these discussions are taking.
(Aside: even though I’m ‘in the industry’, I don’t have a problem with the proposed CA law. People have got to think through some issues before this stuff goes into IDs.)
The following systems all involve sending your ID through the air (the first two are over RF, so are technically RFID, I’m not sure what the third uses).
ESPN.com recently discussed their least favorite rules in sports (e.g. “Fumble was caused by the ground, offensive team will retain the ball”). I’d like to highlight my top two:
Baseball: I’m in awe of the dimensions of the baseball field. There’s so much magic in the 90ft from home to first, 60ft 6 inches from the pitcher’s rubber to home distances. On one day you can get a perfect game, and the next can be a 10-9 battle with the exact same set of players.
Well, hockey is finally on again, which is welcome news around our household. What’s interesting to watch now is how complex it is to restart the league after a 1 year hiatus and a good fraction of the off-season gone (except, of course, for the Cup finalists who would have played into June). For example, the Bruins only have 4 players signed right now (last time I checked), and here’s the schedule for filling out their roster.
The victory in Lafayette, Louisiana may be the first hole in the dike for the telcos v. do-it-yourself cities and towns around the country.
I know that in our town of Concord, MA the city (which runs the electric company in town quite successfully) has been laying fiber for years, primarily to control the power grid, but have also been laying the groundwork for a town-wide rollout. Verizon only covers about 1/3 of the town space with DSL, but Comcast has high-speed cable access, so the town is mostly a monopoly from the point of view of broadband.
Mark Cuban (aka BlogMaverick) gets realistic about podcasting.
I’m going to agree on one thing. Almost by definition, most podcasts are going to be in the long tail of podcasts, so will have almost no traffic. If I put podcasts in with the broader set of media options, then very few may make it out of the long tail. And, remember, long tail = no $$ for the individuals inhabiting it.
I rebooted by desktop Mac today and suddenly I couldn’t sync NetNewsWire from my laptop to my desktop (acting as ftp server) anymore. I starated getting a “Connection Timeout” message where it was working prior to the reboot.
I realized that I had done a software update on the desktop (ftp server) to OS X 1.4.2. Poking around I found that ftpd was no longer getting launched by xinetd, but had been migrated to launchd.
Being a general sports fan is nice because there’s always interesting stuff going on somewhere. For some reason, this week is really hopping:
Baseball is back underway, and the Yankess are coming up north for a series at Fenway. Schilling is going to be in the bullpen for the first time, adding to the usual tension and excitement of the biggest rivalry in baseball (all of sports?). Tiger is tearing up the course in St.
A great overview of yesterday’s tragedy with links to details.
Last week we were in London as part of a family trip to the UK. Watching the horrible news today was a stark reminder that we were in some of those tube stations within the last few days.
It’s heard not to be struck by the juxtaposition of the exciting news on Wednesday that London would get the 2012 Olympics with the horrible tragedy of Thursday morning. London was so excited about getting the 2012 Games; you could really feel it when you were immersed in the huge Back the Bid effort that was ubiquitous in London.
Yesterday I was at an RFID conference in Wisconsin and the lunch speaker gave a very convoluted privacy talk which basically told the audience (mostly consumer goods companies and suppliers to them) that a) RFID is going to be misused by some company or the other, b) people will freak about privacy, and c) ignorant lawmakers would then regulate the whole thing out of existence. Oh, and by the way, it was going to be the fault of everyone in the room for not heading this off.