James R. Scott

The beginning of the end for cash

scotjam — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 14:01:07 +0000

The beginning of the end for cash? Louisiana has banned the use of cash to buy second-hand goods. A pretty disastrous step for freedom and privacy - hopefully so-much-so that this will be overturned by a sheer wall of pubic opposition.

http://www.klfy.com/story/15717759/second-hand-dealer-law

At the same time, the closest electronic analog to cash, bitcoins are suddenly very cheap

Bitcoin

Top 100 science fiction books

scotjam — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 14:44:59 +0000

A list of top 100 science fiction books has been put together by NPR
As a more digestible follow-up to this, an interesting “science fiction and fantasy decision tree” has been constructed by SF Signal - my taste seems mostly to be on the right hand side (SF) of the tree, and in particular in the bottom-right corner

SFF decision tree

Ofcom:[Maharishi School] pupil…

scotjam — Sun, 31 May 2009 14:09:06 +0000

Ofcom:[Maharishi School] pupils make outstanding progress from their individual starting points http://bit.ly/7hVNI Acad:http://bit.ly/b8Xzt

Twitter on my blog

scotjam — Sat, 30 May 2009 16:15:17 +0000

Given that I am now updating Twitter much more regularly than I update my blog, I thought it would make sense to link the two - there are a bunch of Wordpress plugins that do a good job of displaying your latest tweets in a sidebar on your blog, but I thought it would be better to have the tweets as actual blog posts (so that they don’t take ages to load, and disappear entirely during Twitter’s frequent downtime, as well as to make them searchable from my blog). This way, you save / archive your Twitter posts (tweets) for the rest of their natural life on your blog.

Thankfully, as always, there’s someone out there who has thought of this already and written a plugin for it - this time it’s Alex King with his Twitter Tools plugin - you can find Twitter Tools here: http://alexking.org/projects/wordpress - thanks Alex!

Love TechCrunch’s comparison o…

scotjam — Fri, 29 May 2009 08:55:10 +0000

Love TechCrunch’s comparison of the launch of Google Wave (on the day of Microsoft Bing! ’s launch) to Lord of the Rings http://bit.ly/95USl

Sky TV on demand coming out fo…

scotjam — Fri, 29 May 2009 08:38:53 +0000

Sky TV on demand coming out for Xbox - streamed only. Also large pay-per-view movies catalogue. Wonder why Xbox only? http://bit.ly/WDyWB

Ars Technica/Wired report on t…

scotjam — Tue, 26 May 2009 16:54:21 +0000

Ars Technica/Wired report on the damage caused by anti-piracy DRM in games - nice change from BSA’s ‘$x bn lost sales’ http://bit.ly/CVGvm

Cool new types of electric veh…

scotjam — Tue, 26 May 2009 16:39:46 +0000

Cool new types of electric vehicles just keep on coming http://bit.ly/CXzrW

Talk about generation gap - ev…

scotjam — Tue, 19 May 2009 12:36:31 +0000

Talk about generation gap - even for a media exec this is pretty short sighted w.r.t. the value of the internet http://bit.ly/ectNC .

Quite impressed by Wolfram|Alp…

scotjam — Tue, 19 May 2009 12:08:02 +0000

Quite impressed by Wolfram|Alpha so far - as they say, not a google killer but interesting. Falls a bit short on my site http://bit.ly/1s4c7