Interesting, but I think credit for this idea really rests with the folks at The Crucible.

Doesn't look like an online game for me. When I clicked "Play" it gave me download links for Mac/PC.

I get it. To say that you love Disney theme parks would be a complete understatement. I agree, as a child, they can be awe-inspiring places that excite the imagination.

That said, as time has marched along and the inevitable process of learning that everything you once loved is really not what you thought it was has worked its magic, my thinking on these sorts of things has changed drastically.

When I was a child I was obsessed with all things technology that integrated with society. Doors with keycards? How cool! You get your very own keycard that is keyed to the doors you need to access and they open for you. Disneyland, what a marvel! People get into the cars, the operator pushes the go button. The system takes them on a ride. The system handles n thousand people per hour. The whole system works like clockwork! Traffic lights, how neat! They tell people when they can go and when they have to stop.

For me, at least, I think I was attracted to these ideas for two reasons. One, they were very structured and regular. No surprises, everything works as expected, both machines and the people who's lives are intertwined (or even controlled) by them. Two, control. These systems provided centralized control. For some reason, that appealed to me, perhaps because I knew that I had a knack for systems.

Fast forward to now, I realize that these sorts of things are downright evil. Computers are used as tools in business to centralize control and stifle creativity. Security doors with personalized keyed entry aren't cool, they're a tool to control people. Traffic lights? Yeah, I guess they're necessary. But Disneyland...

As a stark contrast to years ago, Disney theme parks are now terrifying to me. They represent an experience so contrived and controlled that even Aldous Huxley would shudder. Think about it. Everything you do in a Disney theme park has been planned for. Your behavior is essentially being controlled, in exchange for a contrived experience. The folks that work the parks are part of an underclass that is not exactly in the right financial bracket to be able to visit them.

To me, Disney parks represent a terrifying dystopia where the gap between the rich and the poor is staggering. The rich march along exactly as they're expected to in their completely contrived wonderland, the poor mop the floors. When I think of Disneyland, I think of Metropolis. No kidding!

With that in mind, it's no surprise to me that biometric security would show up at a Disney park. Whether they realize it or not, the designers behind these parks are masters of treating people like cattle, controlling their range of behavior and securing against anything that might get in the way of their goals.

The fact that it's all behind a smiling mouse meant to appeal to children only makes it more creepy...

I don't like this guy. If his e-mail to the airline demanding specific compensation with threats of Internet retribution is any indicator of what he is like in person, then it's pretty clear to me that he is perfectly capable of embarrassing himself in public, even without a "Rude Roger."

In fact, it's people like this who get the hackles up in customer service departments which results in rude and/or unfair treatment for the rest of us.

He purchased a seat on an airplane. Not an exit row seat, but a seat. Perhaps in the past he was able to work out a system where he was able to secure exit row seats by showing up very early. That's great, but not anything the airline is contractually obligated to. Unfortunately, it didn't work this time. He whined about it and annoyed the crew, the crew threw their annoyance back at him. I really wouldn't expect much more than a $25 gift voucher for rude treatment by customer service staff.

But honestly, to e-mail upper management over such a trivial incident and demand a free flight? That is completely ridiculous. It's EECB abuse, and wankers like this who are just looking for a (literal) free ride will screw up the EECB for those of us who actually have legitimate and serious problems.

ps. In his blog post, he played the 9/11 card... YES! HE PLAYED THE 9/11 CARD, PEOPLE. THINK ABOUT THAT!

CORRECTION: I just looked at the old e-mail thread where this transpired. It wasn't the CEO that put the kabash on this, it was one of their techies. Nevertheless, he was on the thread and never intervened, which is almost but not quite as lame as I made him out to be in my prior comment.

Once upon a time, I scraped an external archive of craigslist and made some message frequency/time by category plots. The external archive contained data from 1998 through 2001 making for some very interesting pictures of a dot.boom and bust. Slashdot got wind of it and tens of thousands of folks came to look at the graphs.

Later I wanted to legitimize it and plot data in realtime. (Given the flip-flopping of the dotconomy over the past five years, it would have been very interesting.)

In a foolish choice to be a "good Internet citizen", I e-mailed the craigslist folks to ask for permission. I figured "Hey. Any community minded organization wouldn't mind, especially an organization like craigslist." That was true of Craig Newmark as he tried to help. However, their douchebag of a CEO wouldn't budge, claiming that there was absolutely no way I could possibly collect the data without crashing their servers. (Even when I suggested well spaced RSS pulls, he rudely said no.)

It really made me realize that no matter how much these guys like to present themselves as "community minded," at the end of the day, when it comes to their data, they're obnoxious closed businessmen all the same.

CFL sucks. Solid state LED ftw.

It was an online poll. w00t won! Imagine that!

This is exactly why Ron Paul scares me. As the line blurs between the Interwebs and real life, the power of a few kids with skillz grows exponentially.

I always thought that the "security seals" on airplanes were used to tape up loose bits of plastic and lock out overhead bins with damaged clasps.

That's pretty interesting, but have you heard about what they're doing with airtime?

Fashioning prepaid airtime minutes as a form of digital currency is really fascinating...

http://business.iafrica.com/features/649690.htm

"Tesla: man out of time" by Margaret Cheney is a very fun read for those interested in Tesla, Edison, Westinghouse and related antics.

Incidentally, I bugged out on the fact that at the time I was reading it I was living in lower Manhattan and that I could actually go to some of the places that were mentioned in the book.

I scoped out the old site of Tesla's Houston Street laboratory. Sadly, the old building was knocked down when Houston was widened, but you can still go stand on the sidewalk where it once was. If you know the Houston and Broadway area at all, there's a 24 hour pool hall right around there. Next to the pool hall is a Subway restaurant. His lab stood in the location of the Subway restaurant and the street in front of it.

ps. cow-orker has been part of Bay Area Internet geek vernacular since the late 90s.

Interesting, I remember superdeluxe.com being someone's vanity domain back during the dot-bomb frenzy. Now I guess it's a tentacle of Ted Turner's empire. I hope the guy who had it before was able to sell it, rather than losing it to a lapse...

Eh, changing keyboard layouts would be a pain.

Besides, technology doesn't adapt to meet the needs of society.. Society adapts to meet the needs of technology. With that in mind, it's time to toss English, dust off Esperanto and rework it such that it's optimized for the QWERTY keyboard...

Who's down? Lets do this! It'll be just like Welsh, but weirder!

larry?

sergey?

we know you're reading this...

we know you want it...

Woah! Wait a minute!

The only thing that is clear to me when reading the article you linked is that the format of the iTunes database on the iPod has changed.

While it *looks* like it might be a cryptographic signature, that has not yet been confirmed.

Have you attempted to contact Apple for comment?

Seems like that would be the reasonable thing to do before publishing a scathing artcle based on an unconfirmed claim on a blog as well read as yours is...