1984 a reality?

The British Government is planning to install CCTV cameras in people's homes. So that government workers can monitor the citizens and stop undesired behaviour. Although it's not as completely evil as it sounds at first blush.

The government isn't putting cameras in private residences, but making families who are abusive or neglectful live in government compounds with surveillance and supervision. Still authoritarian, but not quite a plot point from Orwell.

Still, holy crap. And this is proposed by a Labour government.

Google image search includes rights

I don't know how long this has been going on, but it's awesome. When using advanced Google Image Search, you can search for images that are legal to use. Now you can choose to not steal!

Creative Commons had a search tool to comb flickr legally already. And Wikimedia Commons is a great repository of images that are legal to use. But I'm delighted that Google has gotten into the game, too.

Why did the Segway fail?

Why was the Segway such a colossal failure? While I think it's because the inventor was used to the medical market and built a product that costs way more than it's worth, Paul Graham has another idea. He thinks it's because the Segway looks too easy.

Segway riders glide effortlessly along the road. If they were positioned in a pose that looked like it was work, and the machine looked like it takes skill to ride, people wouldn't lash out at it as slothful.

He gives some pretty convincing examples.

Carbon eating cement

I didn't know this, but cement creates a lot of CO2. Cement is just about as bad for global warming as cow farts. Which is actually quite bad. Not everyone-in-China-driving-an-SUV bad, but bad.

Which is why cement that absorbs carbon dioxide is so cool. By changing the chemical reactions that make the cement strong, scientists have developed a new form of cement that makes the world a better place instead of a worse one.

Yay, science!

DRM is bad news

Wal-Mart and others sold music with DRM - copyright protection software that kept you from copying the music. It logged into corporate servers regularly.

Then they got tired of paying to operate those servers. So they shut them down. And all that music you paid for and bought? Gone.

The corporate response? Too bad. What, you thought when you bought that album you'd be able to listen to it forever? For more than 4 years, even? That's ridiculous, the RIAA says. You should be paying us a toll every year to listen to our products, because we can't figure out a way to sell you music that makes enough money for us.

A wedding story

You think you know how this marriage story goes. After years of marriage, man comes to woman and says he's leaving, doesn't love her anymore, never did.

But what happens next is amazing and surprising.

Bike law

So, on the heels of an awesome bike video, an article makes me want to write about how bikes are treated legally.

Traffic law does need to require bike riders to behave responsibly. We should be allowed to use the road, but we also should be required to obey signs and signals.

But the idea, often floated, of requiring bikes to pay for road-building? Doesn't make sense. We require people to pay vehicle registration fees because a truck does damage to the roads. Over time, we need to maintain the road surface and those fees compensate. Gas taxes are even more fair because you pay based on how much road you use.

But bikes do no damage to the road surface - they weigh far too little. We don't require pedestrians to pay a license to be allowed to walk on the sidewalk; we figure out how to maintain a decent surface by paying for it other ways. Oregon's existing funding system of devoting 1% of all road funding to bike projects is a great way to go: the infrastructure gets built with funding generated by people that use it, and a fringe is created for biking.