Diesel Civil Trust

givinchycowgirl:

We are not used to the Internet reality that something can be known and at the same time no person knows it.

Privacy on the Web is a constant issue for public discussion—and Congress is always considering more regulations on the use of information about people’s habits, interests or preferences on the Internet. Unfortunately, these discussions lead to many misconceptions.
nomosshere:

techspotlight:

A bottle that uses ultraviolet light to sterilise drinking water has won the UK leg of the James Dyson Award.
The Pure bottle is the brainchild of Timothy Whitehead, a design and technology graduate from Loughborough University, who had the idea while travelling in Zambia.
It eliminates the need for chlorine and iodine tablets which take 30 minutes to work and can leave an unpleasant taste. The invention will now go forward to the awards’ global final in October (via BBC News - Clean water bottle wins UK leg of James Dyson Award)

nomosshere:

techspotlight:

A bottle that uses ultraviolet light to sterilise drinking water has won the UK leg of the James Dyson Award.

The Pure bottle is the brainchild of Timothy Whitehead, a design and technology graduate from Loughborough University, who had the idea while travelling in Zambia.

It eliminates the need for chlorine and iodine tablets which take 30 minutes to work and can leave an unpleasant taste. The invention will now go forward to the awards’ global final in October (via BBC News - Clean water bottle wins UK leg of James Dyson Award)

In a blinding flash of inspiration, the other day I realized that “interactive” anything is the wrong word. Interactive makes you imagine people sitting with their hands on controls, some kind of gamelike thing. The right word is “unfinished.” Think of cultural products, or art works, or the people who use them even, as being unfinished. Permanently unfinished. We come from a cultural heritage that says things have a “nature,” and that this nature is fixed and describable. We find more and more that this idea is insupportable - the “nature” of something is not by any means singular, and depends on where and when you find it, and what you want it for. The functional identity of things is a product of our interaction with them. And our own identities are products of our interaction with everything else. Now a lot of cultures far more “primitive” than ours take this entirely for granted - surely it is the whole basis of animism that the universe is a living, changing, changeable place. Does this make clearer why I welcome that African thing? It’s not nostalgia or admiration of the exotic - it’s saying, Here is a bundle of ideas that we would do well to learn from.

Brian Eno, Wired interview, 1995

via John Borthwick

(via underpaidgenius)

suburbananarchist:

In the developing world, cell phones come before land lines. Why? Because installing cell towers is cheaper than running landlines. But even lower cell phone costs turn telecom companies away from the poorest and hardest-to-reach areas. Where they do provide coverage, it’s expensive, especially for the 3 billion people in the world who earn about $3 per day.

A small team of telecom industry veterans has solved both of those problems. The team developed OpenBTS, an open-source, software-based cellphone network. Not only does it cost one-tenth as much as traditional networks, but carriers could charge callers about $2 per month and still make a profit.

moorewr:

alexanderpf:

Fiat says the TwinAir 875cc will be the world’s most fuel-efficient gasoline automobile engine — getting 57.4 mpg — when it appears in the 500 this fall. It meets Euro 5 emission regs and will allow Fiat to retain its position as the European automaker with the lowest overall fleet CO2 emissions.
The Little 57-mpg Engine That Could | Wired.com
Unfortunately it is doubtful if this engine (and it’s accompanying automobile) will make it on this side of the Atlantic.  
via dmdhashw

The 500 is coming here - www.ciaofiat.com

moorewr:

alexanderpf:

Fiat says the TwinAir 875cc will be the world’s most fuel-efficient gasoline automobile engine — getting 57.4 mpg — when it appears in the 500 this fall. It meets Euro 5 emission regs and will allow Fiat to retain its position as the European automaker with the lowest overall fleet CO2 emissions.

The Little 57-mpg Engine That Could | Wired.com

Unfortunately it is doubtful if this engine (and it’s accompanying automobile) will make it on this side of the Atlantic.  

via dmdhashw

The 500 is coming here - www.ciaofiat.com

morningstar:

azspot:

Malamud has taken it upon himself to see that all public information — from court decisions to financial disclosures to Army training tapes — is actually, well, public. Malamud, 51, has worked as a network administrator, run technology startups, and taught at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab and in Japan. He has written for Wired andComputerworld, and on one memorable day in the early 1990s, he hooked up the first White House Internet connection. Since 2007 he has devoted himself — and his bank account — to using technology to open the government to the people. He’s the sole employee of an organization, Public.Resource.org, dedicated to that purpose.

These days Malamud lives just outside of Sebastopol, a small town near San Francisco. When I met him in January, he was in New York City to make a presentation at Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy about his latest project, a proposed government-run online platform that would allow anyone to easily access all of the laws in the United States, from towns and cities all the way up to the federal level. Nearly everyone I’d talked to in Washington described Malamud as tireless, and he quickly proved them right. We talked nonstop for two hours.

The work of freeing government information often carries the connotation of exposing secrets about nefarious policies or officials’ bad behavior. Malamud, a technologist through and through, approaches it from a different angle, one that can be more palatable to the political class. His art is in figuring out how to free documents that aren’t restricted by secrecy but by the fact that the government has failed to put them online. The conventional wisdom about making all such information publicly available is that it would be too difficult, too invasive, too expensive. Malamud has made it his monumental task to disprove that. It’s a simple idea: If those materials affect people’s lives, they can and should be easily and freely accessible. Citizens must be empowered to see how the government machine works, and especially in the Internet era, there’s no excuse for keeping them in the dark.

Given Obama’s reputation as a our most tech-savvy president to date, and one whose election was due, in part, to online organizing, Malamud is betting that he can get this administration to see the wisdom in open-source government. His success or failure will speak volumes about whether Washington will reap the benefits of the Internet age — or whether the current celebration of technology culture will simply fade away.

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