Dear the venture capitalists. I am a very charming white man and am prepared to drop out of university if you'll invest in these ideas. In the future, all your clothes are an NFT. "Wow! I love your blouse." "Thanks, here's a smart contract showing where I purchased it from. If you buy one, I get 10% of the sale price back in WoolworthsCoin." Applause Tokens™. A smart monitor under your theatre seat detects how long (and how loud) you applaud for. Remember, the more enthusiastic you are a…
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Many gallons of digital ink spilled at Google's plans for "Web Environment Integrity" which - depending on who you believe - is either an entirely reasonable proposal to protect users or a devious plan to add DRM to the entire web. (It's the latter, obviously.) We'll never know exactly whether users want this because Google is pathologically adverse to performing or publishing user research. Anyway, I have a solution to all of Google's problems. Forget this notion of untrusted "user agents" …
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I used to be a member of social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, Flickr, etc. But I felt guilty because I didn't run my own servers. OK, I could host content with them. But I had a severely limited way of curating what I saw and how much I could customise what people saw of me. So I signed up to a cloud provider and installed Mastodon and Pixelfed. Neat! But I didn't really run that server. Sure, I could install software - but I didn't have root. It was all managed by someone else. …
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Whenever you buy a second-hand book, you are stealing revenue from the author and publisher. It makes no difference whether you buy from a charity shop or a for-profit store. All the money goes to the seller of the book, and none of it flows back to the copyright holders. (The situation is slightly different if you borrow a book from a library. In the UK, authors earn money every time a book is borrowed.) Is it fair that authors' works can be sold like this without any recompense? It isn't…
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This pre-release whitepaper is a multidisciplinary approach to the challenges associated with using Quantum BlockChain technology to improve the performance of 6th Generation data networks for their performance with neural objects. By reconceptualising the way the nano-structures of 5th Generation (5G) networks interface with the OSI stack of traditional networks, we have found a way to perform novel temporal manipulation of the bitstream to deliver data at super-luminal speeds. Quantum…
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Lab grown meat is nearly here. To be fair, it has been "nearly" here for a long long long long long time. But with the imminent arrival of lab-grown meat, it is time to investigate Synthetarianism. A diet of Synthetic food. I haven't eaten meat for... oh... 20 years now. I live with a carnivore but, despite her amazing cooking, I've no real desire to eat animal flesh. I'm sure it tastes nice to you, but my (smug) morals just don't allow it. But is it morally OK to eat synthetic meat? I…
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When I become Emperor Of The World, I will implement my favourite method of electing officials. The Single Stochastic Vote. It's a cheap, simple, and quick way of electing people. It retains the best features of First Past The Post and Proportional Representation. Here's how it works: Everyone in the constituency votes for their most favoured candidate by marking an ☒ next to the candidate's name. All the votes are placed into a ballot box. The ballot box is shaken and stirred. A single b…
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What does the design of cables tell us about the men who invented them? Computer designers often strictly gender the components they create. The most obvious example is the motherboard - the central hub of the computer from which all electronic life descends. As well as circuit boards (often called daughter-boards) - cables are also subject to strict gender rules. The convention is that the part with the most obvious protrusion is assigned as "male" - it then slots tightly into the "female"…
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