Model Airplanes

One of us is writing this piece from an airplane over the Atlantic Ocean. The other is working from his home in California. Not long ago this would have sounded like science fiction. Today it’s becoming routine in a world where we do more and more with amazing digital tools on far-flung networks.

But there’s a catch. We’re doing this on an Internet that is breaking its original promise.

We rarely think about how it works, how our data moves around the Internet. We need to, because this government-created, radically decentralized network of networks, which has spawned so much innovation at the edges, is rapidly being re-centralized. Control is being captured by and corporations and taken away from—or being ceded by—the rest of us.

What’s at stake here? In a word, permission. People should not need permission to speak, to assemble, to innovate, to be private, and more. But when governments and corporations control choke points, they also control whether average people can participate fully in society, politics, commerce, and more.

That’s why we spent three days earlier this month in San Francisco with technologists and activists who are determined to re-decentralize or redistribute the web (and by extension, the broader Internet), by returning control and permission to the edges. Hosted by Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle, who has called for a “moon shot”

Article source: http://www.fastcompany.com/3061357/the-web-decentralized-distributed-open

Edward Snowden lay on his back in the rear of a Ford Escape, hidden from view and momentarily unconscious, as I drove him to the Whitney museum one recent morning to meet some friends from the art world. Along West Street, clotted with traffic near the memorial pools of the World Trade Center, a computerized voice from my iPhone issued directions via the GPS satellites above. Snowden’s lawyer, Ben Wizner of the American Civil Liberties Union, was sitting shotgun, chattily recapping his client’s recent activities. For a fugitive wanted by the FBI for revealing classified spying programs who lives in an undisclosed location in Russia, Snowden was managing to maintain a rather busy schedule around Manhattan.

A couple nights earlier, at the New York Times building, Wizner had watched Snowden trounce Fareed Zakaria in a public debate over computer encryption. “He did Tribeca,” the lawyer added, referring to a surprise appearance at the film festival, where Snowden had drawn gasps as he crossed the stage at an event called the Disruptive Innovation Awards. Wizner stopped himself mid-sentence, laughing at the absurdity of his pronoun choice: “He!” Behind us, Snowden stared blankly upward, his face bouncing beneath a sheet of Bubble Wrap as the car rattled over the cobblestones of the Meatpacking District.

Snowden’s body might be confined to Moscow, but the former NSA computer specialist has hacked a work-around: a robot. If he wants to make his physical presence felt in the

Article source: http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/06/edward-snowden-life-as-a-robot.html

They’re big, powerful and efficient. But operating today’s four-wheel drive tractors requires all the same attention to safety as tractor models of the past.

Tractor overturns continue to cause serious tractor accidents across the United States. However, as Theresa Zaluckyj and her family discovered, simple missteps on any tractor can result in serious injuries.

“We farm in southwest Michigan,” Zaluckyj says. “In 2014, just before we started planting, our son Jeremy was working on equipment, getting it ready. Our two tractors were parked next to each other and Jeremy was walking down the steps of one of them. He slipped on the step and as he started to fall he caught a finger in the tractor weight. As a result, he broke his finger.”

Theresa had no idea she would be the next family member to experience a serious incident involving a tractor.

“In the fall of that same year we were working to finish harvest before a rain,” she says. “We had worked one night until 4 a.m. and were headed back to the field at 8 a.m. the next morning.”

Theresa’s job at harvest time is driving the tractor that pulls the grain cart. After putting in another long day, working until about 9

Article source: http://www.yankton.net/community/article_7c5e5f80-3ce4-11e6-8953-4f8bf9fef3c9.html

Computer graphics have come a long way. Some video games today exceed what would have passed for stunning cinema animation only a few years ago. However, it hasn’t always been like this. One of the earliest forms of computer-generated graphics used text characters to draw on printers.

Early computer rooms were likely to have a Snoopy character on green and white fan-fold paper. Calendars with some artwork were also popular (see left, and find out about the FORTRAN that created it, if you like). Ham radio operators who use teletypes (RTTY, in ham parlance) often had vast collections of punched tape that held artwork. Given that most hams in the 1950s and 1960s were men and the times were different, a lot of them were more or less “R” rated.

Not all of them were, though. For example, Richard Nixon was decidedly “G” rated (see right). Simple pictures would use single characters, but sophisticated ones would use the backspace character to overprint multiple characters.

Ham Radio Art

You often hear this described as ASCII art, today, although hams usually use 5-bit BAUDOT code, so that’s a misnomer for those images, at least. Of course, today, people aren’t keen on storing roll after roll of paper tape (or even owning a tape reader) so there have been several projects to capture this art in a more modern format.

Although there is still

Article source: http://hackaday.com/2016/06/28/retrotechtacular-ascii-art-in-the-19th-century/