Aloha

Burger giant McDonald's Corp. will begin renting DVDs at all 105 of its stores in the Denver area. The McDonald's video rental program is more loosely structured, and cheaper, than what Blockbuster has to offer. The DVDs can be returned to any McDonald's, and at $1 a day is less expensive than the $3.99 Blockbuster charges to rent a DVD for three days. However. McDonald's will only carry the 30 most popular titles.

A system to enable federal authorities to track foreigners in the United States via a global network of databases and biometric sensors raises questions about its feasibility as well as its impact on visitors' privacy. Three bidders are vying for the US-Visit contract from the Homeland Security Department, which could end up costing up to $15 billion. The system is designed to set up 'virtual' borders where people seeking to enter the country are first screened by the database network, and are subjected to 'real-time identification' at checkpoints to confirm their identity, after which they can be monitored within the United States, at least in theory. Under secretary for border security Asa Hutchinson calls the system an all-inclusive solution that 'is hugely important for the security of our country and for the wise use of our limited resources.' The company that wins the contract will be responsible for developing a standard that blends multiple tools, including photos, fingerprints, iris scanning, and others. Privacy proponents are concerned that the US-Visit program will give the federal government even more authority to track visitors' movements by exploiting databases that contain credit card data and other kinds of sensitive information, which could be construed as privacy infringement; what is more, civil libertarians claim the system could just as easily be employed to monitor American citizens. Furthermore, reports from the General Accounting Office indicate that progress to address issues related to the system's management and oversight has been moving at a sluggish clip, while report author Randolph Hite argues that the effort's cost and viability remain high concerns. M" - John Markoff, New York TImes, May 24, 2004, via ACM News Service

Jessie Scanlon, writes in her interview with MIT Media Lab's John Maeda, "Technology, which was supposed to make our lives easier, has taken a wrong turn. In 20 years we've gone from the simplicity of MacPaint to Photoshop. While the first fostered a creative explosion, the second gave birth to an industry of how-to books and classes. " - New York Times, May 20, 2004.

"Science.gov allows users to search 30 government databases and 1,700 Web sites, officials said. The portal has metasearch capabilities, making massive databases in the Deep Web part of the Internet searchable in a single query. Involved in the Science.gov effort are: the departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Education, Energy, Health and Human Services and Interior, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Government Printing Office, NASA, the National Science Foundation and the National Archives and Records Administration."

S.1301 would make it illegal to videotape, photograph, film, broadcast or record a naked person or someone in underwear anyplace where a "reasonable person would believe that he or she could disrobe in privacy."

The legislation also would make it illegal to sneak photos of a person's "private parts" when "their private parts would not be visible to the public, regardless of whether that person is in a public or private area."

A person convicted under the law could face a fine and as much as a year in jail.

Picturephoning.com, a Web log that follows camera phone trends: http://www.picturephoning.com

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"Ten major trends are shaking the foundations of society as we've known it. Nowhere will these seismic shifts have greater impact than in our schools. After all, educational institutions are not only forced to function within their environments, but they are also expected to prepare their students, not for the past, but for the future. Today's children will live, work, and interact with everyone from professional colleagues to parents and grandparents in profoundly different ways"

I guess cafes and coffee took off from people buying into that whole era of French existentialist culture. It was the last time you had that leisured, dole culture of people hanging round talking.

Earlier in the 50s the cafe was pre-eminent. Soho and the start of pop and all that. But it all devolved to pubs culturally there was a moment of division there. You used to get science fiction writers like Michael Moorcock and JG Ballard meeting in these select pubs and discussing imaginative writing and Sci Fi.

If those days come back it'll be a pastiche, a parody, with people pretending to read Colin Wilson. But now the whole culture has speeded up so that people just queue to get takeaways. And it's the death of cafes. Who's going to spend days hanging out at cafes? It's gone."

Yury Gitman, a self-described "wireless and emerging-media artist" in New York, has outfitted his bicycle with an iBook laptop and Wi-Fi antennas so that everywhere he goes, a cloud of free, high-speed wireless Internet access follows him.

"I'm interested in exploring the Internet physically, in motion," said Gitman, who calls his vehicle the Magicbike. [1] "It's not on our radar screen, even though we're obsessed with mobility and wireless. But in the future, we're going to do that a lot."

The earliest example Gitman cited was known as the Behemoth, [3]. [4] or the Big Electronic Human-Energized Machine, Only Too Heavy. More recently, networked (and pedaled) "tricycle taxis" in Denmark have organized under the Copenhagen Connected Cycle [5] banner.

[1] http://www.magicbike.net/

[2] http://www.itp.nyu.edu/

[3] http://www.computerhistory.org/events/lectures/roberts_09062000/

[4] http://microship.com/resources/winnebiko-behemoth.html

[5] http://wire.less.dk/?en.9.3