Is that a pair of balls I'm sniffing over at CNet? News.com(.com)'s Chief political correspondent Declan McCullagh makes no bones about his hope for the future of the FCC: time to fucking die. He uses all those pesky facts and logic that aren't really my forte, but the essence is that the FCC has far outlived any supposed regulatory usefulness it had in the first place while continually overstepping its bailiwick to apply its foot-dragging moral judgements to everything from wiretapping, to broadcast TV, to fair use rights of Americans to enjoy their culture how they see fit.
Read [News.com.com]

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Fair Use: Everybody Bends the Rules [Gizmodo]

8:50:18 PM    comment   

ComputerWorld's FutureWatch profiles Carnegie Mellon's Radar project (Reflective Agent with Distributed Adaptive Reasoning) which aims to build a computer-based administrative assistance that can intelligently guess what tasks need to be performed to help you in your daily routine.

For instance, suppose a manager receives an e-mail from a colleague requesting some slides. Fahlman and his team are trying to optimize the Radar system to understand the request at a basic level, draft a response and notify the manager with a message like, "Here's my proposed answer; do you accept this?" and then await the manager's response.

Radar isn't intended to act just as an e-mail filtering system, Fahlman says. As a text-in, text-out system, there's "a huge opportunity" for one Radar system to "talk" with another Radar system, schedule meetings and draw information from or post it to a company's Web site, he explains.

8:48:11 PM    comment