No, augmented reality doesn’t deserve anything at all. But its cheerleaders (as all cheerleaders) deserve to be mocked.
And the mindless utopian enthusiasm for technologies instead of ideas and the uses to which technologies are set, deserves to be taken down, taken out.
In a church. In bare feet. With powerpoint and a beer.
Just learning about all this from Mohamad Al Abdallah. Imagine if, say, the United States declared war on one of its own cities, and killed everyone in it (at a magnitude of about a dozen 9/11s) and no one ever heard about it.
This was 1982, and what’s difficult now is to imagine that no one would hear about it, and that’s one of the things that make these days these days.
Taking nothing away from everyone at LinkedIn, and everything they’ve done to get there. It’s about the banks they’re working with, and who benefits how.
The central mystery of Jamestown is why the badly led, often starving colonists were eventually able to prevail over the bigger, better-organized forces of the Powhatan empire. In other parts of the Americas, colonizers had their way smoothed for them, so to speak, because they landed in places that already had been devastated by Eurasian illnesses like smallpox, measles, and typhoid—diseases that had not existed in the Americas. When the Pilgrims came to Massachusetts in 1620, for instance, they established Plymouth village literally on top of an Indian village that had been emptied two years before by an epidemic (apparently spread by survivors of a French vessel that shipwrecked on Cape Cod). In Virginia, despite previous contact with Europeans, the Powhatan had somehow avoided any epidemics and were going strong when the Jamestown colonists arrived. Yet by the late 17th century, the Powhatan too had lost control of their land. What happened?
One answer emerging points to what historian Alfred Crosby calls “ecological imperialism.” The tassantassas replaced or degraded so much of the native ecosystem that they made it harder and harder for the Indians to survive in their native lands. As the colonists bitterly came to realize that Virginia had no gold and that the Indians weren’t going to selflessly provide them with all the food they needed, they began to mold the land to their needs. Unable to adapt to this foreign landscape, they transformed it into a place they could understand. In doing so, they unleashed what would become a multilevel ecological assault on North America. Their unlikely weapons in this initial phase of the campaign: tobacco, honeybees, and domestic animals.
This is shoddy journalism; the use of porn-based steganographic encryption by Al Qaeda is in fact old news, pre-dating 9/11.
