Tagged: Technology

Official list of organizations supporting SOPA: Call for boycott, Move Your Domain Day

This deserves its own post, and I promise I’ll have a more comprehensive post about the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and why it’s a Bad Thing soon. Until then, have a look at this list of 142 organizations that are officially on record as supporting the bill. Some of the ones you may have heard of include ABC, CBS, Comcast/NBC/Universal, Disney, ESPN, GoDaddy.com, MPAA, NewsCorp, and several more. Several discussions on Reddit and around the internet have proposed boycotting the companies on the list. One specific proposal is Move Your Domain Day on December 29. On this day, if...

Google Reader sharing workaround

I don’t know a single person who isn’t at least a little upset over Google’s decision to remove Reader’s sharing capability. Sharing with and following friends, acquaintances, co-workers, fellow bloggers, etc. in Reader was, in my opinion, one of its best features. Jen McCreight has already outlined the biggest reasons why sharing is awesome and why it’s disappearance sucks, so I’ll just link to her post about that instead of repeating it. Now, there’s not much I can do about the excessive whitespace, although pressing ‘F’ toggles fullscreen mode, which collapses the sidebar and the black Google bar at the...

Cutting the cable

My experience with cable, why I canceled and what I use now instead When I moved into my apartment in 2006, I signed up for high-speed internet and digital cable with Comcast. In Atlanta, the only other cost-effective alternative is DSL through AT&T bundled with satellite through (I believe) DirecTV, and it really wasn’t as good of a deal. Not to mention, because of the location of my apartment, mounting a satellite dish would have been a problem. So in short, Comcast was really my only option. Over the four years that I was a Comcast subscriber, the problems I...

Third annual Georgia Tech Legislative Roundtable best one yet

In 2006, the Office of Policy Analysis and Research (OPAR), a small department within the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI), piloted a conference that brought together researchers, businesspeople and legislators to discuss a handful of issues in the domain of science and technology that was of interest and consequence to the state of Georgia. I was among the small group of interns in OPAR that helped launch this event. The format has essentially remained the same: five or six state legislators, typically associated with Assembly leadership or S&T committees, sit on a panel moderated by a notable research professional from...

Lawmakers lack knowlege of technology issues

In the past couple of weeks, ZDNet has picked up two related stories (Google CEO: Techies must educate governments, 10/17/06; Chris Patten: Politicians have no grasp of technology, 10/27/06) regarding government leaders’ lack of education regarding modern science and technology. Upon reading both of them, I joked that someone needs to call Ric Romero and let him know about this “breaking news.” I was shocked — shocked, I say — to discover that the people making important decisions regarding our technological future often have no idea as to what they’re even voting on. As a courtesy to those who haven’t...