DRM is some suits in the corporate world trying to make ordinary people submit to their every demand: We control what you consume, when, how, and for how much. And we use DRM to ensure that you stick to the rules. ------ Anything positive about DRM? Sadly, no.

The NYPD doesn't give a DAMN what installing cameras everywhere will do to people's privacy. NYPD has one mission and one mission alone: To protect the capitalist businesses in NYC from attack, most importantly of all Wall Street. You thought you could live in NYC with some anonimity in public places? Well, you simply thought wrong. NYPD will do anything to protect businesses in NYC. But protecting YOUR PRIVACY? That's simply not part of the NYPD's mission. NYPD exists to protect the big capitalist cahunas, and not YOU, the common man. If you live in NYC, expect thousands of new CCTV cameras to be installed in the next 6 - 12 months. And yes, all those cameras will be wired into a central NYPD command post, where realtime face recognition algorithms will allow Bloomberg & Friends to track your whereabouts in NYC 24/7. ---- Sorry to be so negative, but this is what NYPD's mission is - to protect large businesses in NYC from attack. Yes, you will loose your privacy because of this. And NO, nothing you do - protest, write letters, collect signatures, sue the city - will prevent those 2,000 - 5,000 new CCTV cameras from being installed. ----- So this is pretty much it for New York City. As if NYC wasn't a nasty, dirty, crowded, expensive place to live in before, the CCTV will make it EVEN WORSE than before. Good luck to New Yorkers. Once those CCTV cameras are in place, nothing will make the NYC bureaucrats take those cameras down again. ---- On some level it doesn't matter. New York has little to offer over other large cities in the world that are still - for the time being - relatively free.

Around 10 years ago, there were some promising Web3D technologies around. VRML was easy to create VR walkthroughs with. But there was no unified VRML browser plugin - there were multiple plugins, each with its own quirks - and it was hard to create meaningful interaction with it. Shockwave3D was introduced with Macromedia Director 8.5. It was great for creating Web3D applications. It failed on 3 counts though. 1) It had no 3D creation UI whatsoever. Everything had to be scripted by hand with Lingo code, which made it a "programmers only" 3D solution. 2) The Flash crowd put a lot of pressure on Macromedia not to develop Shockwave3D further, and to instead put a 3D engine into the Flash plugin. 3) After Adobe bought Macromedia, nobody updated the DirectX 7/OpenGL based Shockwave3D engine for several years. The engine fell behind the state-of-the-art in graphics quality, and the handful of people who were capable of using Shockwave3D stopped developing web3D apps with it. --- Then there is the sorry story of Virtools 3D, now owned by Dassault Systems. Virtools had a great 3D engine, coupled with a visual-programming paradigm that was as easy to program with as connecting visual flowchart elements with lines. Virtools failed terribly in the market because the ahead-of-their-time French company that created it insisted on pricing Virtools at 25,000 Dollars a seat or thereabouts. That was so expensive that Virtools never attracted more than a handful of users, even though it featured a powerful & easy to use toolset. ----- One more case. Quest3D combined a great-looking, web-capable 3D engine with a visual programming paradigm. But Quest3D's connect-the-nodes programming paradigm was not intuitive at all. Even though it was cheaper than Virtools, the idiosyncratic, and some would say eccentric - way you had to program Quest3D caused it to fail. ------ To sum it up in a few words, the companies that WERE capable of creating Web3D authoring tools in the early 2000s made mistake after mistake, eventually causing Web3D to fail completely. Shockwave3D had no GUI for 3D work. VRML was too simple, no good for anything more than interactive walkthroughs. Virtools was great, but cost as much as a fricking car to buy. Quest3D failed on the user-friendliness front. Flash never got a usable 3D engine integrated. ---- Basically, Web3D had lots of potential as far back as 10 years ago. But the lack of user-friendly or affordable tools caused Web3D to fail. ----- Today there are powerful and easy to use 3D engines like Unity for web development. But it took way too long for it to arrive, and the Web3D market went flat - as in "flat coke" - during the years that passed without any progress being made on the Web3D tech-front. ------- Web3D may eventually come back because of another trend, and that is "Augmented Reality". But nobody knows that for certain.

Google logs the private search data of billions of people across the world, and voluntarily pipes all of it to various 3 letter agencies in the U.S. ---- Google has no understanding of what privacy is, had not had an understanding of what privacy is, and will likely never have an understanding of what privacy. ----- Google is a spying machine disguised as a useful search engine. Period. ----- None of what they are doing on their app store is thus terribly surprising. Google suxxors at protecting your privacy. Something we all have to live with (... and the reason I personally don't use Google's services anymore).

A manager does not have to innovate very often - a so-called "cash cow product" may do fine in the market, and remain a profitable sell for years, without anything substantial being changed about the product. If and when something needs to be changed - when the product is about to enter the decline phase of its lifecycle - there are people you can hire with cash, whose job it is to figure out any changes/improvements to the product. The manager will not do this work personally - he/she will delegate the task to people trained to perform just that function. The most a manager will do is to apply some common sense thinking as to whether the "new product" is going to be a big seller or not. ---- Your average entrepreneur on the other hand has to develop an idea from absolute infancy to marketable maturity. That takes a lot of brainpower, and especially so if there is little or no money at the inception for specialists to be hired with. In many cases, the entrepreneur will perform 3, 4, 5 different roles in the development of the product. Inventor. Prototyper. Tester. Strategist. Of course doing all that stuff yourself will keep both of your brain lobes busy. Unlike the manager, there is nobody to delegate vital tasks to, and you have to wear many hats at the same time. The manager, on the other hand, has many people he/she can delegate vital tasks to. He/she merely has to pick the right people and assign them the right tasks to get a good result. With the entrepreneur, a lot will fail or succeed based on how well the entrepreneur handles multiple active roles without failing in one or more of them. Thus the entrepreneur has a higher and more diverse cognitive load than the manager. That makes sense, doesn't it?

The brilliant thing about Braben's original ELITE was that he managed to squeeze a huge, open, varied, explorable 3D universe into 32/48/64 Kb of RAM on early 8-bit computers. He also had to publish the game himself - the big game publishers of the time wanted ELITE to have "waves of enemies, short levels, collectable powerups, 3 player lives", because that was the formula popular side-scrolling space games like R-TYPE used. Braben refused to do that - it flew in the face of the 3D space sim he was building - and thus ELITE became the first space game to feature realtime 3D wireframe graphics and break the "R-TYPE" space-game formula. Many people consider David Braben to be something of a gamedesign pioneer and genius. If Braben hasn't lost his touch, the new ELITE: DANGEROUS should wind up being a seriously impressive Space Trading/Exploration/Combat game. ---- For those who prefer action to trading and exploration, there is always "Star Citizen", a Wing Commander sequel made by Chris Roberts. That game will feature high-end CryEngine 3 graphics, and will be all about space combat.