Wired 2.

The I discovered their cover story was an ad! How far they have fallen. Is Chris too busy selling his book to do some original editorial work?. I sent this:

Sorry about my last letter on the first demo of the mouse. I just realized that your cover story is a paid advertisement for Geek Squad. I apologize and should maybe get in touch with them for editorial comments.

Strange…

Wired 1

As sent to Wired earlier today:

In your August 2006 issue you feature a timeline of computer and technology development where the 1973 XEROX Alto is credited with being the first computer with a mouse.

You know that this is not the case right? I hope this was just sloppy editing. Or an intern who thinks computers started with the PlayStation. Wired used to be cool, cutting edge and insightful. Now it’s boring, filled with How-To’s and full of press releases. Come on guys, you are not Wallpaper for gadgets. Or maybe you are.

In 1968, at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco, right round the corner from you guys, maybe 20  ins walk, Doug Engelbart gave “The Mother of All Demos”.

This is where he showed NLS to the world. In a 90-minute multimedia presentation, Doug used NLS to outline and illustrate his points, while others of his staff linked in from his lab at SRI to demonstrate key features of the system.

This was the world debut of the mouse, hypermedia (what we would later call word processing), and on-screen video teleconferencing. And more.

You can see the video here:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8734787622017763097

Read more about it here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos

And revisit your own article on him here:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.01/mouse_pr.html

Later people from his lab would go to work for XEROX PARC.

And his work continues with our joint project at http://www.hyperwords.net but I guess I blew any chance of you looking at that with my tirade in the intro here. (BTW: nice article on the $100 laptop!)

To foil plots like these.

As posted on IP:
On 10 Aug 2006, at 14:32, David Farber wrote:

And so the question:  To foil plots like these, what would IPers do?

For me, the short answers would be: Kill a lot less people.

The long answer would begin by asking the question again, in a broader setting: What is the goal here, go hunt/arrest/kill ‘terrorists’ or to create a less dangerous world?

If the latter is the goal, then it is not very useful to simply ask a group of people to change. In this case the group of people are terrorists or those thinking of becoming terrorists. I’ll go out on a limb (and if I am right, the world has just become an even more dangerous and complicated place) and talk of these potential terrorists as radicalized, militant, jihadist Muslims.

There are calls to simply fight them. Which will inevitably spawn more.

There are also calls for the radical Muslim world to change and integrate into the modern world. This is a call for them to – to put it in different terms – evolve.

How does evolution happen? Evolution is about fitness to environment. When the environment changes, the organism/organization/what-have-you needs to change if the environment is sufficiently disruptive to the kind of existence perviously led.

OK, simplified and I guess somewhat distorted, but I am trying to highlight the need for the external environment to be conducive to change.

What would happen if American and UK foreign policies changed to be more inclusive to the needs of the Muslim world? What would happen to the (and there will always be a few of them, on any side of religion) clerics and their hate-the-west and the modern-world message? Many people would simply not buy their hate anymore, they would choose to buy a better life for themselves and their families.

As is stands now, hundreds killed in Lebanon, thousands killed in Afghanistan, hundreds of thousands killed in Iraq. How can we expect that some won’t get angry and listen to the (selfish, evil, myopic, power-mad) voices of some of those around them who suggest a way to ‘get back at’ the west?

Of course it will happen, of course some people will get angry, of course some people will want, even in a general sense, to extract revenge.

Our job is to find the fine line between taking out much of the desire for someone to ‘get back at’ the west, while actively hunting down those who will attack us no matter what (yes, there are people like that, who will attack us no matter what) and deal with them like what they are: criminals.

Finding this line, though continuos dialog, like the one you started today Mr. Bray, is maybe the defining argument of what it means to be free in the beginning of the 21t century: freedom from oppression and freedom from being oppressing.

BTW, I live in the flightpath to Heathrow, so this is not theoretical for me.