- Pirate Party will run The Pirate Bay from Swedish parliament
As Ben Jones on TorrentFreak explains, this sounds like a natural evolution for the public action aspect of the site. The fact that the site is one of the most popular and best places to locate torrents for all kinds of media has almost been a side effect of the primary goal of sparking discussion. This definitely moves that to a whole other level. - Futures for SF writers that are not the Singularity
Rudy Rucker has been increasingly skeptical of the Singularity though not necessarily foregoing interesting possibilities for the future of cognition and computing. I am increasingly convinced the Singularity operates solely as a metaphor, not as any kind of realistic prediction. Cory at Boing Boing links to a Futurismic post contemplating and suggesting other rich futures for writers to explore that don’t invoke the Singularity. - Facebook adds facial recognition
As Mike Melanson at RWW explains, it isn’t for specific faces but merely that any faces exist within posted photos. I have to wonder if the limitation is essential, some inherent bound, or intentional given the recent privacy scrutiny. Compare with efforts of other photo sharing services that are competing with the specific facial recognition recently included by Apple in its entry level photo management software. - Using Bespin, in a bookmarklet, to edit almost any text on the web
Via Hacker News. - Knuth announces successor to TeX
- Obama announces broadband grants to spur jobs
- BitTorrent only show achieves considerable success
- OpenOffice replaces Java media handling with GStreamer