July 22, 2009

The National Data Center and Personal Privacy



"The modern computer is more than a sophisticated indexing or adding machine, or a miniaturized library; it is the keystone for a new communications medium whose capacities and implications are only beginning to realize. In the foreseeable future, computer systems will be tied together by television, satellites, and lasers, and we will move large quantities of information over vast distances in imperceptible units of time."
"The National Data Center and Personal Privacy",Authur R. Miller, The Atlantic, 1967, courtesy of Modern Mechanix

Read the whole article here

Modular Men

Dear faithful legion of 'The Modern Malaise':

My brother Melvillian and I have been co piloting this blog together since it's inception from our wild rants on humanity, technology, the past, the present, and the future. Melvillian has lately bowed out of The Modular Man for reasons that may stagger our audience: he was blogged out. He is a very busy man, what with blogs, radio shows, school, family, the summer of George, ect. I am sure this is not the last we will see of him, and he will be WATCHING from afar.

Last night, he did a radio show dedicated to this corner of the globe, and it was excellent.
So then, I tip my hat to my brother as I begin the journey of posting all things modular by myself. Please feel free to contact me with anything that raises the hackles on your sensitive necks, and bear with any lack of postings for some days, as well as a lack of imagination in others.

Alright then, to it!

The Secrets of the Temple





The Daily Bail

Secrets of the Temple

July 21, 2009

Why 2024 Will Be Like Nineteen Eighty-Four

Let's give Amazon the benefit of the doubt—its explanation for why it deleted some books from customers' Kindles actually sounds halfway defensible. Last week a few Kindle owners awoke to discover that the company had reached into their devices and remotely removed copies of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm.

Slate