Podcast Update

• Vernor Vinge talked about Technical Singularity. I got interested in this topic after reading an article in Wired. I thought that I saw references to hackers and terrorists as additional limitations on our ability to make progress towards something like the singularity to which Vernor alludes. But, I can't find it. Not worth the trouble. Vernor delivered a very interesting presentation. His ideas are great fodder for science fiction writers and for general contemplation. Vernor introduces some interesting ideas related to this singularity. So, what is singularity? I found this definition on Wikipedia:
  
  technological singularity (also referred to as just "the Singularity") is a predicted future event when technological progress and societal change accelerate due to the advent of superhuman intelligence, changing our environment beyond the ability of pre-Singularity humans to comprehend or reliably predict.
  
  Vernor adds concepts like a soft and hard take-off. A soft take-off refers to the idea that we gradually and relatively incrementally reach singularity. A hard take-off refers to the idea that it emerges as more or less a surprise maybe even without notice. As we continue to add chips to all kinds of things in our environment, what happens when the devices get ornery. Hum. The more we lean on computers for management of basic features of our social and general environment, the easier it is to imagine machines coordinating an automatic expansion of capabilities that just escapes us.
  
  Great presentation. The whole topic has me thinking about basic dichotomies like good-and-evil. In this context, I am treating the singularity as "good" which, of course, is not a given. Thus, the association with hackers and terrorists in my mind is related to the notion that worms, Trojan horses, viruses and those that introduce them distract from our ability to keep growing our abilities on exponential scales as we have to spend so much resources on defense. Terrorism and other social ills provide the same controlling impact on society. Of course, the troubling thought is that if singularity were to take place which side of the dichotomy would benefit? What if it just exacerbates the battle?
• Paul Le Dieu talks about how the BBC is participating in the digitization of more and more information. Further, that the BBC is participating in making this content available for those that wish to remix and redistribute under a creative commons license (limited to the UK). Very interesting presentation.
• Paul Graham talks about blogging and open source and how it compares to more traditional IT work environments. He hits the nail on the head so many times and does so with a nice peppering of humor. I laughed out loud so many times listening to this. Fortunately for me, I work for an organization that gets it. I don't trudge into a endless sea of cubicles each day and experience some of the humorous (well, maybe not really funny) events described by Paul so well. For example, to describe the motivation for making people go to work during certain hours he says "if you can't make people work, at least, you can prevent them from having fun". I do visit from time-to-time. In this case, my visits are packed with face-to-face meetings that are not just contrived or distracting but about making connections.
  One of the less obvious things Paul points out is that despite the traditional media's pointing out that the average blog contains content of average or worse content, they miss that what they will compete is against isn't the average blog. They will compete against the best blogs. This, of course, is comparable to Microsoft's position with open source. Paul's comments are on target, iconoclastic and highly recommended listening.