Safety Drones

Anyone who thinks airport security in the US is good enough should think again. After reading this latest story of someone being refused access to the boarding area because of a pet fish and other similar stupidities like a kid having the miniature gun confiscated from his GI-Joe, one can only conclude that the security personnel are trained to be drones. And that means any terrorist that can get their hand on the drone manual will be able to smuggle a weapon on board a plane.

Vigilance needs people that think beyond the procedure. All this focus on nail clippers is taking the attention away from the next threat. Luckily there is one big security change since 9-11, passengers now know the odds are they will die if they don't do anything to stop a hijacking.

filed in: Politics - 31 Dec 2003 01:55 - #

How the Internet Invented Howard Dean.

After looking at a paper Ito and some of his colleagues have been working on called "Emergent Democracy," I contact him to ask if he thinks there's a difference between an emergent leader and an old-fashioned political opportunist. What does it take to lead a smart mob? Ito emails back an odd metaphor: "You're not a leader, you're a place. You're like a park or a garden. If it's comfortable and cool, people are attracted. Deanspace is not really about Dean. It's about us."

filed in: Internet, Politics - via Lisa Rein's Radar - 30 Dec 2003 01:30 - #

Project Looking Glass

Although this Sun 3D desktop demo is quite cheesy there are two very cool things that should be looked into:

• The back of the window concept, in this demo it is very crude but the concept is very powerful and already used very creatively by some applications. I would love to see it generalized as a OS level feature.
• The spine of the window, this would be a great way to improve on exposé.

Now the interesting thing is that these features don't require 3D, sure the animation of flipping the window should be in 3D so would the turning the window to show it's spine but that does still not require the whole desktop metaphor to be a 3D environment. I have yet to see a compelling argument for that.

filed in: Design, Mac - via Vincent - 10 Dec 2003 12:23 - #