"legislation" entries

Four short links: 30 January 2015

Four short links: 30 January 2015

FAA Rules, Sports UAVs, Woodcut Data, and Concurrent Programming

  1. FAA to Regulate UAVs? (Forbes) — and the Executive Order will segment the privacy issues related to drones into two categories — public and private. For public drones (that is, drones purchased with federal dollars), the President’s order will establish a series of privacy and transparency guidelines. See also How ESPN is Shooting the X Games with Drones (Popular Mechanics)—it’s all fun and games until someone puts out their eye with a quadrocopter. The tough part will be keeping within the tight restrictions the FAA gave them. Because drones can’t be flown above a crowd, Calcinari says, “We basically had to build a 500-foot radius around them, where the public can’t go.” The drones will fly over sections of the course that are away from the crowds, where only ESPN production employees will be. That rule is part of why we haven’t seen drones at college football games.
  2. Milestones for SaaS Companies“Getting from $0-1m is impossible. Getting from $1-10m is unlikely. And getting from $10-100m is inevitable.” —Jason Lemkin, ex-CEO of Echosign. The article proposes some significant milestones, and they ring true. Making money is generally hard. The nature of the hard changes with the amount of money you have and the amount you’re trying to make, but if it were easy, then we’d structure our society on something else.
  3. Woodcut Data VisualisationRecently, I learned how to operate a laser cutter. It’s been a whole lot of fun, and I wanted to share my experiences creating woodcut data visualizations using just D3. I love it when data visualisations break out of the glass rectangle.
  4. Why is Concurrent Programming Hard?on the one hand there is not a single concurrency abstraction that fits all problems, and on the other hand the various different abstractions are rarely designed to be used in combination with each other. We are due for a revolution in programming, something to help us make sense of the modern systems made of more moving parts than our feeble grey matter can model and intuit about.

From SOPA to speech: Seven tech trends to monitor

Data, voice recognition, and the "social backbone" will shape the months ahead.

Mike Loukides weighs in on the tech trends — good and bad — that will exert considerable influence in 2012.

Congress considers anti-piracy bills that could cripple Internet industries

SOPA and PROTECT IP would harm innovation.

In a time when the American economy needs to catalyze innovation to compete in a global marketplace, members of the United States Congress have advanced legislation that could cripple the Internet industry, damage cybersecurity and harm freedom of expression online.

Why don't they get it?

Tech predictions focusing only on technology miss a key component: people.

If you comment on new technology, you should get to know as many of the quirks and biases of human behavior as you can. That's because you're modeling people first and technology second.

News Roundup: Google Mobile App Taps Amazon for Data, Orphan Works and Copyright Confusion, Arguing Against "Freemium," Digital Marketing Examples for Publishers, DRM on Comeback Trail?

A Google-Amazon Mobile Application Android Scan, one of the winners from the Google Android Developer Challenge, uses cell phone cameras and barcode recognition to tap into Amazon's review database. (Continue reading) Orphan Works Legislation and Copyright Conundrums Kenny Crews at Collectanea says the orphan works bills in the House and Senate impose hurdles for scholarly/research/casual uses. Crews offers a real…

Orphan Works Legislation and Copyright Conundrums

Kenny Crews at Collectanea says the orphan works bills in the House and Senate impose hurdles for scholarly/research/casual uses. Crews offers a real but slightly absurd example to illustrate the point: I visited the Grand Canyon with the family not too long ago. After cajoling family members into several snapshots, I kindly handed the camera to a total stranger,…