Hasta La Gadget!

“Lots of times the families will go down to Kinko’s,” the funeral director tells me. “They can do a memorial folder thing down there.” Do you help them get photos off Flickr, off Facebook? “We don’t really help with that.”

The old woman looks up from her brush pile. “My husband has to redo that roof every year.” Her husband is crawling around their roof, sweeping pine needles from the angles to the ground below. “We’ve been here fifty years. You see these two pines?” They’re impossible to miss, at least eighty feet tall. “When we moved in to this house we planted those.”

The second of June, a couple of years back. A 27-year-old man is biking in downtown Eugene, Oregon. David’s a clumsy, funny man. Easy to love. Lived here his whole life. He’s unsure of what he’s going to do with his Bachelor’s in Environmental Studies—maybe become an activist?—but for now he’s managing this restaurant that also does live music and maybe it’s not what he wants to do forever, but it’s pretty great right now.

He turns on to 13th & Willamette, but so does the woman in the car.

A grey wedge juts from the side of an Arctic island, a stark entrance to a stone vault. It is quiet under the snowy mountain. Beneath the rock that shelters the vault there are rows of cabinets, each a berth for tens of thousands of sleeping seeds.

I sit in my living room, thumbing through a notebook full of her poems. They’re old poems, from back when she was going through that first really awful breakup. Themes repeat. Learn to live in the moment, she writes to herself. Then its corollary: Who will remember me?

“Why did you want me to read those?” I ask her later. “Because you asked why I have a fear of commitment,” she says.

Now I look out the window at my neighbor’s two tall pines. The top of one comes to a point, then goes on for another ten scrubby feet, as if a smaller tree is growing from the crown of a larger one.

“Do you know how your ears pop at altitude?” says her poem. “Sometimes I can feel the change of pressure in my heart.”

Friends gather at David Minor’s Myspace page, sharing shock and grief. The page isn’t decorated for a wake. David’s profile picture is of the kid from Growing Pains that wasn’t Kirk Cameron. His last status update says he is “at werk dreamin of hot tubs”.

She’s made a ghost bike for him, painted a thick-pipe commuter bike white with spray paint. Going to leave it on the corner, chained to a lamp post. She posts a time on David’s Myspace page, lets her friends know when to gather.

Word spreads. She’s pushing the bike down the street, surrounded by hundreds of mourners. They saw her message on his Myspace page. They walk by the bike, tossing down flowers and photographs and messages to David. She didn’t expect this.

She’s driving me to the bank. My car’s busted and I have to get money for the mechanic. “It’s over on Willamette,” I tell her. “It’s sort of across from that Kinko’s.” She doesn’t know where the Kinko’s is, she says.

The Kinko’s is huge, unmissable with its backlit purple awning. It’s on the corner of 13th & Willamette.

I’d never noticed the ghost bike before. It’s nearly invisible, surrounded by flowers maintained by his parents, who still visit nearly every night.

David’s Myspace page is still online. His friends still stop by, leaving messages, telling David they had a glass of bourbon in his honor. But most of them have moved on to Facebook.

The Cloud is just the internet. And the internet is just a bunch of hard drives.

The internet is really good at replicating discrete bits of self-contained data. There are probably a few million copies of any given Loretta Lynn song out on all the hard drives of the world, because lots of people care about Loretta Lynn.

But my photos on Flickr only live on a few hard drives in the world. The hard drives in the database servers. The hard drives in the networked-attached storage devices that are used to backup the database servers. A few of the pictures are on my friends’ hard drives, but not most of them, and certainly not the complete collection.

When I die my Flickr Pro account will expire and a large percentage of my photos—girlfriends, family, vacations, my dog—will disappear from public view. They’ll sit on Flickr’s hard drives until Flickr goes out of business or loses the data.

Someone might send Flickr my death certificate, prove that I’m gone. Flickr might even give them access to those photos, should one of my friends even think to gain it. But more likely no one will even think to look. Part of my trivial legacy will go dark, sleeping quietly on a handful of hard drives.

She hands me a manila envelope, tipping it to spill old slides and prints into my hands. “Have you scanned these in?” I ask. “I don’t know how,” she says. “Then they don’t exist,” I reply. It’s bedroom-level profundity, but I surprise myself by believing it more than a little bit.

I pick up a photo of her father. He’s spread out on a bed with his shirt off, his infant daughter sleeping in a bundle on the floor beside him. The little tab in the corner of the print says “1982”.

“My mom never liked having that picture of him in the album,” she says. “She thought he looked too sexy.” I tilt the picture in my hands just a bit until I can see the scratches on the matte surface. There are hundreds of little indentions, tracks from fingernails showing the many times the photo has been held.

When we scan this picture in those scuffs will disappear. The rest of the world will see only the young, bearded man smiling in some sepia living room. They’ll increment the file’s viewcount by one, leaving their own perfect hash mark. It won’t be the same as the photo I’m holding in my hands, shifting in the light to read its physical metadata, but it won’t be inferior, either.

Today, 10.22 billion miles from our sun, a golden phonograph with a badly laid-out label holds a message from Jimmy Carter to the rest of the universe.

She and David dated, sort of. It was an on-again, off-again thing. They both grew up here. Everybody dates everybody eventually. It was confusing. It always is.

One mistake, a broken condom or just a drunken infelicity…who knows? There could have been a kid. Not a copy. Better than a copy. A mix. The only thing that, before we invented culture, we ever passed on. Our stupid, maniacal genes. Us but not us. Our bodies and brains, but not our thoughts. Not our art, but our brush.

We’ve made a lot of brushes.

Chances are we’ll each be lost to time. 100 billion people have been born before us. Most of them no longer exist as individuals in our memories. No names. Faces only reflected in our own and not in any way that really matters.

But not us. We might be remembered forever. All our Twitter updates, our email, our Vimeo movies, our Xbox Live profiles, our wormy FourSquare maps. They won’t be important. Not to most people, anyway. But they’ll be there if the sysadmins take care of us, if the corporations and machines to whom we’ve entrusted our records do not fail or are not destroyed.

We won’t matter to most. But our memories will be cataloged, indexed, made available along with our stories, our names. $viewcount++.

Somewhere in the future, a picture of David Minor—in jeans and a tie, face beatific under a studio light, sleeves rolled up to expose the Eugene Debs quote tattooed on his arm—is berthed in a database table in off-system storage, waiting to be remade.

Memory [Forever] is our week-long consideration of what it really means when our memories, encoded in bits, flow in a million directions, and might truly live forever.

It’s too easy to pat Google on the back for taking such a firm stance against China. The two behemoths’ fingers are twitching by their sides, ready to whip their pistols out. But what of the repercussions on the spectators?

It wasn’t until January 2006 that Google.cn launched, with their Vice President of Global Communications and Public Affairs, Elliot Schrage, admitting that “figuring out how to deal with China has been a difficult exercise.”

What was described as a “challenging, complex, promising market” was obvious to Google however. Expanding there was never something they could ignore. What company, dating back to when the Chinese and Europeans traded goods on the Silk Road, has not wanted to import or export from China? Google couldn’t say no. They promised to “make a meaningful – though imperfect – contribution to the overall expansion of access to information in China.”

Google now employs 700 or so people in China. That’s a lot of job losses if they were to exit completely—though presumably not all of them work on just Google.cn. A lot of companies are reliant on Google, if you consider those who—like many companies in the western world—buy keywords for their products.

Reuters has reported today that 27 Chinese companies which have bought ads on the search engine have banded together and sent Google a letter asking for answers. They want their issues to be addressed, with the letter saying “we see business sliding, but there is nothing we can do…we are waiting now in incomparable pain and disquiet.” These companies have invested in Google, put down pre-payments on keywords and if Google were to shut down its Chinese arm, potentially have drastic knock-on effects for a lot of people. Demands for job loss compensation, company compensation and even just a refund of their money is expected.

Not to mention how this could affect other partners, such as Samsung and Motorola, whose Android phone launches were delayed in China thanks to their association with Google.

Supposedly only one per cent of Google’s revenues come from China, so while they won’t be missing out on much, it’s the users, businesses and partners that rely on Google which will be losing here. So much investment has gone into Google China; a lot of users placed their hopes in Google’s hands that they could one day help them climb out of this tank of censorship—but threatening to pull out of the country altogether unless they bow down to the American giant isn’t the way to do it.

I think it’s time to take a step back and consider the fact that Google pulling out of China might not be the answer. Oh, their exit would be a great step forward in tackling censorship, giving Google’s 35 per cent marketshare-worth of users another reason to be upset at China’s constant internet lockdown. We’ve also already heard that Twitter wants to open the micro-blogging site up to the Chinese, with activist/artist Ai Weiwei being the main advocate for a launch in the country bound by strict freedom of speech issues.

The thing is, Google sacrificed any moral stance they could possibly adopt, when they entered China and set up business in 2005. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not in favor of censorship and just can’t imagine living with such heavy restrictions. But how are you going to enter a country, comply with their censorship, then turn around and complain about it five years later? I wish there was an easy way for both sides. Yet barracking Google on isn’t the way to go about it. It’s not for us, for Google, or for anyone to really tell China how to manage itself, how to govern its people and tell them they should be able to access all the information they want. I mean, we can tell China to quit its censorship practices, and we can do it online, because it’s our right to do so in whatever country we live in, but how much use is it going to be, really?

Google knew what they were getting into when they made agreements with the Chinese government, they knew they couldn’t take the country’s censorship lightly, and just like how you and I respect countries’ customs when we visit—by handing a Korean a business card with two hands, or standing on the right-side of the escalators in England—they knew they couldn’t just waltz in and try and change the situation. True, when governments can see ill-goings in other countries they try and intervene, wars break out this way, but was it up to Google to break the Chinese people from their firewall manacles?

Eric Schmidt, Google’s grown-up Chairman and CEO, has been quoted as saying Google is “99.9 per cent” sure they’ll cease working with China. When their corporate mantra is “don’t be evil,” you’ve really got to wonder whether them compromising on their ideas of censorship and values are really as important as the problems which will arise in China for the Chinese and the companies that do business there Google does back out four years after traveling the Silk Road information superhighway.

Image Credit: 9GAG

Yesterday, the FCC submitted its National Broadband Plan to Congress, essentially requesting that six goals be met over the next decade, including sizzlers like access for “every American” to “robust broadband services,”which apparently equals a minimum of 100 million US homes with “affordable” access to at least 100MBps down / 50Mbps up speeds. Pretty heady stuff, we know. We thought we’d contact a few of your friendly ISPs for comment, and we’ve got Comcast, Time Warner and Verizon going on record here — all in all, they’re rather predictable ‘rah rahs’ for the plan, especially considering that whole “affordable” bit. We also threw in part of Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s response. The statements are after the break, and hit the source links for the fuller, long-winded versions.

Continue reading FCC National Broadband Plan: some of your favorite ISPs respond

FCC National Broadband Plan: some of your favorite ISPs respond originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 16 Mar 2010 16:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The light from the lamps in your house could carry a wireless signal that could power internet connectivity at home, say a group of German researchers who say they have found a way to encode the signals into visible frequency.

Though it would provide much lower speeds than Wi-Fi signals, it can offer less interference and is likely to offer great protection from hackers, say the researchers.

Currently, most homes use radio-frequency based Wi-Fi signals for broadband service. But Wi-Fi has limited bandwidth, says the researchers, and it is difficult to get more radio spectrum for it. Visible frequency would be a good alternative, they say.

Flickering the lights can generate the signal in a room. The change won’t be visible to the human eye because the rate of modulation is millions of times faster than what we can see, say the researchers. And since, visible light can’t penetrate walls there will be no interference.

Since incandescent and fluorescent bulbs can’t flicker fast enough, LEDs would be the right choice, say the researchers.

Commercial LEDs have a bandwidth of only a few MHz. But Jelena Vučić, a researcher at the Fraunhofer Institute for Telecommunications, and her colleagues who have been working on the project have found a way to increase the bandwidth by filtering out all wavelengths but blue.

Using the visible wireless system they built, the team downloaded data at up to 230 megabits per second. The researchers will present their findings at a conference in San Diego later this month.

[via Inhabitat]

Photo: (slworking/Flickr)

We know you’ve got questions, and if you’re brave enough to ask the world for answers, here’s the outlet to do so. This week’s Ask Engadget question is coming to us from Mitchell, who couldn’t care less if you have a problem with his question. If you’re looking to send in an inquiry of your own, drop us a line at ask [at] engadget [dawt] com.

“I just got a new laptop and am looking for a WiFi detector. The catch is that I want one that will tell me if the network it is detecting is open or not. I can’t fathom the point of one that doesn’t tell you that information. If posted, this will probably generate a lot of snark, but whatever, I just want to be able to find open networks!”

You know, we appreciate the honesty here. And we totally feel you. If anyone out there has found a fantastically useful WiFi detector, throw your recommendation(s) in comments below!

Ask Engadget: Best (useful) WiFi network detector? originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 12 Mar 2010 00:23:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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