Bruno Unna

Dice Zenon Grocholewski, un padrecito del Vaticano, que los homosexuales no son bienvenidos en la iglesia católica:

porque [la homosexualidad] contradice "absolutamente la antropología humana" (sic).

Me impresiona su sabiduría milenaria.

• Seguramente los homosexuales son una aberración reciente, en la historia de la humanidad (la humana, por supuesto).
• Seguramente los homosexuales son menos humanos que los demás humanos (los que estudia la antropología humana, vamos), especialmente menos humanos que los sacerdotes que se prohíben (al menos en teoría) ejercer su sexualidad (y que cuando la ejercen lo hacen sobre niños).
• Seguramente las mujeres también contradicen la antropología de los hombres, y por eso no las dejan ejercer el sacerdocio. Habrá que crear una antropología «sólo para mujeres» que les abra un espacio.

Oremus.

I'm very glad since I've just learned that Kathy Sierra is again with us.

As usual, she provides us with a juicy piece of information for us to -mentally- chew: a process to come up with innovative (more than innovative: breaktrough) ideas.

She brings into our attention the analogy of the equalizer when designing a product or an strategy. Interesting approach, indeed, specially when the method for innovation involves the creation of sliders, instead of the mere tweaking of their values.

However, I think the analogy is incomplete. An equalizer is a two-dimensional device, in which the horizontal position of any given slide represents the frequency it will control. There is an order relationship between any two sliders in an equalizer: the one at the right controls a higher frequency than the one at the left. I would like to see some concept in the analogy mirroring the relation between the sliders. I gave it a thought before writing this very post, but haven't arrived to any intelligent conclusion. Ideas? Would love to read them.

How about this?

A 15-year-old Canadian girl with a peanut allergy died after kissing her boyfriend who had eaten a peanut butter sandwich hours earlier, reports say.

Isn't that a worrysome way to die? Poor girl. Her sin: kissing her boyfriend.

Trough 43folders, I got to Ev William's #10 rule for a startup:

#10: Be Balanced

What is a startup without bleary-eyed, junk-food-fueled, balls-to-the-wall days and sleepless, caffeine-fueled, relationship-stressing nights? Answer?: A lot more enjoyable place to work. Yes, high levels of commitment are crucial. And yes, crunch times come and sometimes require an inordinate, painful, apologies-to-the-SO amounts of work. But it can’t be all the time. Nature requires balance for health — as do the bodies and minds who work for you and, without which, your company will be worthless. There is no better way to maintain balance and lower your stress that I’ve found than David Allen’s GTD process. Learn it. Live it. Make it a part of your company, and you’ll have a secret weapon.

And this rule reminds me of one of the core practices of eXtreme Programming (XP): Sustainable Pace. XP is the realm I come from, and the reasons behind this practice are "suspiciously" similar to the reasons behind the "balance rule" of Williams.

In general, I think XP represents a wealth of knowledge (wisdom, perhaps?) that the "productivity seekers" can benefit from, even if they are not submerged in the software development world.

Juan ha recomendado en uno de sus posts este sitio para adultos: http://www.sofiasexy.com/

Se los recomiendo ampliamente a todos, aunque ahora no dejo de pensar en mi amiga Martha. Yo creo que le va a encantar esta pornografía.

Doug Kaye (IT Conversations) publishes his preliminar results on the survey he set up in order to better understand his listeners.

Personally, I find the results almost disturbing:

Some very interesting early results from the survey:

• 92% of you are male
• 40% of you have a Master's degree or higher (that surprised me)
• 76% have at least a four-year degree
• 47% of you are outside the U.S.

The results are well beyond the statistically significant threshold.

Attention: those are preliminar results. It would be nice to have more people taking the survey (of course I already did), to grasp some more valuable results.

This, in my opinion, has a lot to do with the new trends in advertising, well described by Juan in his recent post.

Steve Wosniak, part 2

The Gnomedex Geeks-Gone-Wild crowd was fixated on this rare and brilliant presentation by Steve Wozniak, a true geek's geek. His playing started with games and pranks, crystal-set radios, reading Popular Electronics. Then he met Captain Crunch and got into telco-busting Blue Boxes.

Woz wanted to be an HP engineer forever and never thought he'd start a company, but his friend, Steve Jobs, said, "Let's sell it!" at every opportunity. Good thing he did, and good thing HP turned down Woz's offer for the rights to build what would become Apple's first computer. You'll enjoy this -- one of the best from Gnomedex 4.0.

This is Part 2 of 2.

The 'to have done list'

Don’t get freaked out by the items on your to-do list; think of the tasks in terms of what they’ll mean to you once they’re done.

As usual, the messages from 43f have a lot of common sense on them.

SOA programming model, Part 1: The advantages of SOA

Listen to this informative interview with one of the IBM experts in service-oriented architecture (SOA) implementation. First in the WebSphere Technical Podcast series on developerWorks, this 15-minute discussion will help you understand the advantages of SOA, the skills you will need to implement it, and the fundamental principles behind the programming model and the Software Component Architecture.

A Nigerian state governor has denied reports that he escaped charges of money-laundering in the UK by disguising himself as a woman.

However, Diepreye Alamieyeseigha told the BBC that he could not remember other details of his journey back to the oil-rich southern Bayelsa State.

He insisted that he was innocent and that the £1.8m ($3.2m) found in cash and bank accounts was not his.

More information?

A US company has been given a two-year contract to help fight piracy off the Somalia coast - seen as among the world's most dangerous waters.

The $50m contract has been awarded by Somalia's transitional government.

More information?

America's Army is one of the most popular computer games on the planet and like many games, it is a shoot-em-up, get-the-bad guys kind of affair.

But unlike other games, America's Army is truly a product of the US military. The Army first released the game a few years ago as a recruiting tool.

But, at the recent Serious Games Summit in Washington, DC, the Army showed off a new use for its computer game - training soldiers for combat.

America's Army now has six million registered users, and scores of fansites, worldwide. That is not just because the Army gives the game away online for free.

More information?

Tomado de La Jornada:

En la construcción del país es necesario ir "pian pianito", aseveró el presidente Vicente Fox, quien de nueva cuenta alertó contra quienes, de cara a las elecciones de 2006, prometen resolver los problemas nacionales "de la noche a la mañana".

¿No es éste el muchachito que nos iba a resolver no sé qué importante problema nacional en 15 minutos?

¿Más información?

Encabeza el teniente coronel Moisés la Comisión Intergaláctica del EZLN.

¿Más información?

El diplomático estadunidense Joseph Wilson aseguró ayer que el primer ministro británico Tony Blair fue engañado por el presidente George W. Bush en torno a la guerra en Irak.

Wilson, quien sostiene que la Casa Blanca republicana reveló el nombre de su esposa, la agente especial de la CIA Valerie Plame, en venganza por haber rebatido las afirmaciones de Washington de que el régimen de Saddam Hussein poseía armas nucleares, sostuvo que funcionarios de la presidencia estadunidense llevaron un "doble juego" con sus aliados británicos".

¿Más información?

Sebastián has brought into my attention a very ugly animal. So ugly, that I decided to look for more photographs of it. Here it is:

Truth is: how can someone get close to it? I for once, couldn't.

Or at least: what do both of them consider of the utmost importance when hiring someone?

Good writing abilities.

Paul Graham writes:

I think it's far more important to write well than most people realize. Writing doesn't just communicate ideas; it generates them. If you're bad at writing and don't like to do it, you'll miss out on most of the ideas writing would have generated.

Whereas Jason Fried writes this:

If you are trying to decide between a few people to fill your position, always hire the better writer. I don’t care if that person is a designer, programmer, marketer, salesperson, whatever. Assuming your candidates are fairly equally skilled and qualified overall, always hire the better writer. This is especially true with designers since copywriting is interface design.

How come both of them value the writing abilies of the people so much?

Advertisemnt spaces have been added to both the truth sites, the english and the spanish one.

Otra jugarreta de bush:

Un reporte de inteligencia del Departamento de Estado estadunidense caracterizó en 1991 al fósforo blanco como arma química, después que fue utilizado por Saddam Hussein contra los rebeldes kurdos al término de la guerra del golfo Pérsico, declaró hoy el periodista italiano Sigfrido Ranucci, autor del reportaje que denunció que el ejército estadunidense utilizó esa arma contra civiles iraquíes en la ciudad de Fallujah, en noviembre de 2004.

El documento del que dio cuenta Ranucci en conferencia de prensa en Roma, señaló que en febrero de 1991 una fuente de inteligencia reportó que durante el alzamiento de la población kurda que siguió a la victoria de los aliados que sacaron a Irak de Kuwait, "fuerzas iraquíes leales al presidente Saddam Hussein probablemente utilizaron armas químicas de fósforo blanco contra los rebeldes kurdos y la población en Erbil y Dohuk".

"Cuando Saddam usó el fósforo blanco, éste era arma química", dijo Ranucci, pero "cuando los estadunidenses lo usan es arma convencional. Sin embargo, las heridas que esta arma provoca son terribles".

¿Qué ha hecho el mundo para merecer a bush y sus secuaces? ¡Ya perdónanos, diosito!

Meet David Irving.

The guy is under arrest in Austria, because he has publicly stated his doubts about the "official" number of deaths in the so called "holocaust".

This whole incident of a law suit against an historian because of his point of view reminds me of the authoritarian/presidentialist regime of Mexico after the revolution of 1910.

It reminds me as well of the witch-burning tendences the Europeans showed in the XVI century. Perhaps a characteristic?

The issue reflects the fact that there is no freedom of speech in those countries, and that those societies are (or so they pretend) deeply injured, sensitive to the matters in question beyond any rational judgment.

The truth is that there are things you can't talk about in Europe, for what I can see. Surprising.

Fuck. Having myself two babies, reading that this swiss company sells contaminated milk for babies is striking.

I don't think Nestle is scarce in resources to make sure the milk they produce is clean, is it? Is it demanding the quality they are so proud to have be accomplished?

Sure, everybody has bad days. But for god's sake: the truth is that we are talking about the food for babies.

Nestle: Sony/BMG has made a terrible mistake with their XCP code in their music CDs. It is now facing law suits in the US and Italy AFAIK. What are you doing? Trying to show the world that an European company can be as irresponsible as Sony? If so, you are walking the right path...

Or better yet: the kind of company I would love to see dissappearing.

This is (according to Sony/BMG) the company that handed them the software they -cowardly IMHO- included in their CDs.

The truth about DRM: it sucks and should be taken care of by everone. People should be aware that their rights are being taken away from them.

Distributing the Future: Beta Broadcast 003: Good and Evil

This week, O'Reilly's audio magazine program Distributing the Future takes a look at good and evil. Tim O'Reilly examines the good coming up in Web 2.0; David Smith and Peter Saint-Andrew work on helping you tell who's good and who's evil on the web; Ian Langworth and chromatic help to make Perl development better for everyone by pushing testing; Danny O'Brien shares what he's done to stop evil and encourage good; and Max Goff brings his law of medians.

Web 2.0 Day Two

This week, O'Reilly's audio magazine program Distributing the Future features day two from the Web 2.0 conference: Yahoo CEO Terry Semel on the convergence of media and technology, AOL CEO Jonathan Miller on changing what AOL means, Sun COO Jonathan Schwartz and Mozilla Foundation president Mitchell Baker on open source and distribution, Michael Powell on the future of entertainment, and 37 Signals CEO Jason Fried on doing more with less.

The truth about Hollywood stars it that they are still human beings, no matter how different we think of them after the image change they receive due to the work they perform.

Imagine the scene: a strong, powerful gladiator emerges from the darkness into the arena, willing to die, armed with the most terrible weapon: a telephone.

I for sure wouldn't like to be in Crowe's place at this time.

"The soldiers started shooting at us from all over," he told reporters. "I slowed down and pulled off the road, but they continued firing.

"I saw my family killed, one after the other, and then the car caught fire. I dragged their bodies out."

Since the US-led invasion in 2003, there have been repeated incidents in which American troops have fired on civilian vehicles.

Unbelievable. Disgusting. Indignant. I have no words to express what I think about this US government.

Cleaning off the bed

Every good habit requires a fresh start. Can you find the opportunity for a good habit hiding under a huge pile of crap?

Goin' on a Media Diet

Two simple things you can do this week to reclaim your attention and start enjoying the I/O in your life again.

Web 2.0 (Brendan Eich, Mozilla Foundation)

If you're not a Firefox user yet, listening to this Web 2.0 session may get you to switch, and if you are a user, you might discover many of Firefox's greatest capabilities most people are unaware of. In this Web 2.0 session, Brendan Eich, creator of the JavaScript language and one of the first people at Netscape, now at the Mozilla foundation, speaks about Firefox's greatest capabilities, how Windows Longhorn might impact Firefox, and what the future versions of Firefox are likely to hold, such as the tag.

Dr. Moira Gunn interviews Jason Pontin, Editor-in-Chief and Publisher of Technology Review, the tech magazine that comes to us from MIT.

Jason speaks about his job at MIT, and compares it to his previous one, as editor of Red Herring.

He seems to be passionate about the technology and the role it plays in enhancing the lives of the people, specially when it comes to poor countries.

He reveals as well that in this month (November, 2005) the on-line version of the magazine is going to start podcasting! I'm eager to try that.

Can you imagine? The DVD players are losing their religion!

Physics has shown that while it may be nearly impossible to predict the actions of individual items, by looking at patterns of a group, we can often very accurately predict trends. By looking at the large scale history of biological and technological evolution, we can see an exponential growth that is continuing through the current age and into the future.

In this address from Accelerating Change 2005, Ray Kurzweil outlines his startling predictions for the next twenty-five years. Based on recent progress in the fields of neurobiology and nanotechnology, Kurzweil predicts significant strides in the fight against disease and aging, as well as the augmentation of the human mind. In the future, the line between biology and technology will blur and eventually become irrelevant.

While there are many concerns about the impact of new technologies on human existence, Ray Kurzweil presents a vision of the future that is unequivocally positive. This perspective suggests a future where humanity is aided by our interaction with technology and potential pitfalls are mitigated by smart technological solutions. Kurzweil offers an amazing picture for our future, one in which many of us will live to participate.

Esta es la traducción al español de un breve artículo de Paul Graham sobre sus técnicas para escribir.

Escribiendo, Brevemente

Marzo 2005

(Mucha gente pide consejo sobre cómo escribir. En el proceso de contestar a uno, accidentalmente escribí un minúsculo ensayo al respecto. Usualmente me toma semanas un ensayo. Este me tomó 67 minutos --23 de escribir, y 44 de reescribir. Pero como un experimento lo puse en línea. Al menos es extremadamente denso).

Creo que es mucho más importante escribir bien que lo que la mayor parte de la gente se da cuenta. Escribir no solamente comunica ideas; las genera. Si eres malo para escribir y no te gusta hacerlo, te perderás la mayor parte de las ideas que escribir hubiera generado.

Acerca de cómo escribir bien, aquí está la versión corta:
Escribe una mala versión 1 tan rápidamente como puedas; vuelve a escribirla otra y otra vez; quítale todo lo que sea innecesario; escribe en un tono conversacional; desarrolla un olfato para la mala escritura, para que puedas verla y corregirla en la propia; imita a los maestro que te gusten; si no puedes comenzar, dile a alguien sobre qué planeas escribir, entonces escribe lo que dijiste; espera que el 80% de las ideas en un ensayo ocurran después de haber comenzado a escribirlo, y que el 50% de aquellas con las que comenzaste estén erradas; ten la confianza suficiente para recortar; haz que amigos en los que confíes lean tu material y te digan qué partes son confusas o pesadas; no (siempre) hagas resúmenes detallados; reflexiona las ideas por varios días antes de escribir; porta un cuadernillo o papel reciclado contigo; comienza a escribir en cuanto pienses la primera oración; si un plazo fijo te fuerza a comenzar antes de eso, di sólo la más importante oración primero; escribe sobre cosas que te gusten; no trates de sonar impresionante; no dudes en cambiar de tema al vuelo; usa pies de página para contener las disgresiones; usa anáforas para ligar las oraciones; lee tus ensayos en voz alta para ver (a) dónde tropezaste con oraciones embarazosas y (b) qué partes son aburridas (los párrafos que temes leer); trata de decir al lector algo nuevo y útil; trabaja en grandes cuantos de tiempo; cuando vuelvas a iniciar, comienza por releer lo que tienes hasta el momento; cuando termines, déjate algo fácil para comenzar; acumula notas para tópicos que planees cubrir al final del archivo; no te sientas obligado a cubrir ninguno de ellos; escribe para un lector que no leerá el ensayo tan cuidadosamente como tú, justo como las canciones pop están diseñadas para sonar bien en los autoestéreos baratos; si dices algo equivocado, arréglalo inmediátamente; pregúntale a tus amigos qué oración lamentarás más; regresa y atenúa los comentarios duros; publica tu material en línea, porque una audiencia te hace escribir más, y así generar más ideas; imprime los borradores en lugar de sólo verlos en pantalla; usa palabras simples, germánicas; aprende a distinguir las sorpresas de las disgresiones; aprende a reconocer la aproximación de un final, y cuando uno aparezca, agárralo.

A long, long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, there was a consumer electronics company called Sony. And this company was a good, sucessful one, until the day it decided to enter the mass media market.

It joined forces with another mass-media company called BMG, and it started the domination of the media in the planet this story takes place. It became a bad, bad company.

One day, the bad company decided to tighten up its control on the consumers. So it added a trojan horse (a rootkit, as a matter of fact) to the music CDs it sold to the public.

Thus, when a consumer bought a CD and put it to play in his/her computer, a rootkit would be secretly installed in the computer, thus giving Sony access and control of the consumer's machine.

That way of protecting their interests, besides, proved to be unremovable: if the DRM drivers are removed, the machine gets broken.

Fortunately, this is pure fiction and such an abuse from a company on the consumers could not possibly take place in the real life! It would prompt for a position from the general people: would people swallow and tolerate such an abuse? Or would it stand up and fight against it, perhaps boycotting the evil company?

No sería una mala idea darle unas palabras de consuelo, dado todo lo que ella nos ha dado a nosotros.

Kathy: espero que te recuperes muy pronto.

Como no sé si ella sabe español, va de nuevo:

Kathy: I hope you get recovered very soon.

A los que quieran darle un comentario de apoyo, la liga al post es http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2005/11/chicken_soup_po.html

The story of JBoss mirrors some of the hottest trends in IT today. The company's open-source implementation of the J2EE standard now carries enough weight to influence J2EE3 and beyond, and its innovation in aspect-oriented programming is reverberating around the entire application development world. In this conversation recorded at JavaOne, JBoss Founder, Chairman and CEO Marc Fleury speaks with guest producer Scott Mace about the state of professional open source, Java and EJB3, Eclipse, .Net, Mono, application development for rich Internet clients, Red Hat's success and detractors, Sun's detente with Microsoft, and why trained physicists such as himself make good Internet application innovators.

Born in Paris in 1968, Marc Fleury got his Ph.D in physics from the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris. He started in Sales at Sun Microsystems France and then moved to the US where he worked on early Java enablement of SAP at SAPLabs. Marc started the JBoss project in 1999. An ex-lieutenant in the paratroopers, Marc holds a degree in Mathematics from the Ecole Polytechnique, a master in Theoretical Physics from the Ecole Normale ULM and was a visiting scientist at MIT during his thesis. Marc's research interest focuses on aspect oriented middleware.

If someone knows about middleware and server-side Java in general, that's Mark Fleury. In this podcast he makes very interesting aseverations about what was the state -and the future- of Java as of the middle of 2004. And what he says is valid today, though his words should now be analyised over again, under the light of the new scripting-for-web-applications phenomena: Ruby on Rails.

He tells the truth: the only way for Sun to get some credit when speaking about open-sourcing Java is by means of open-sourcing the JVM. And he tells the truth when he says that the middleware layer of Microsoft, even when they have very good -mainly architectural- ideas to copy from, is very weak as of now in the implementation. Specially when it comes to persistency.

I've finally been able to configure my tiger-x86 image using vmware-workstation 5 for GNU/Linux, so now I have a fully functional Mac OS X. It works like a charm, though it haven't been exactly what I'd call "a piece of cake".

Several things had to be taken care of before the machine was usable.

1. Obviously, a vmware-workstation with a valid license must be available. The details of getting to this point exceed this explanation.



2. Obviously as well, the famous tiger-x86 image should be available. It can easily be found using a P2P service.



3. Time to boot for the first time. It can be useful for the virtual machine performance to deactivate the serial and parallel ports in the BIOS of the virtual machine, unless they are really needed.



4. Of the utmost importance is the deletion of a certain file: /System/Library/Extensions/AppleTPMACPI.kext



5. Time to reboot the virtual machine.



6. Certain applications (iTunes, for example) require a CPU with sse3 capabilities. Whether the machine has that capabilities or not can be found by running cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep flags in the host machine. If it happens that the CPU is sse2, the fabulous patch solution, by the fabulous Maxxuss, should be obtained and installed.



7. Time to reboot the virtual machine.



8. Almost there. The network card that vmware provides to the virtual machine is not usable by it, unless the fabulous AMD-PCNET-II Network Driver, by the fabulous Maxxus, is fetched and installed.



9. Time to reboot the virtual machine (hopefuly for the last time).

Most probably, the single most useful reference for me has been http://osx86.theplaceforitall.com/howto/ Kudos for them. And undoubtedly the most useful utilities have been the Maxxuss pcnet driver and patch solution. Without them it would have been impossible to make this work. My thanks to him.

Hard to believe, but true: my blog engine is not allowing me to put links to Maxxuss site. I'll keep trying, but in the meanwhile, a google search can easily find his page.

Three o'clock in the morning. Mabel is working with the computer, preparing a presentation she has to present at 11 o'clock. She's been working on it for several hours now. Meanwhile, I'm in a semiconscious state, half listening to an interesting podcast and half dreaming of it.

Ten minutes later, she awakes me very worried, telling me that something's wrong with the machine. Suddenly, with no further ado, windows decided it was time to shutdown the machine. She tried to stop it, to no avail. And the best part: the files she had been working on are no longer there!

-Ok, don't panic- I tell her. And I begin the search for the files. Again, to no avail. Wow! I ask the explorer program to show the hidden files. Nothing. I look in the list of recently opened documents. Nothing.

I notice something: some files (.ppt files, mainly) have their name written in blue letters. Besides that, and the fact that the files are not there, everything seems to be working all right. At that moment I started suspecting of some form of malware (besides the MS one).

I boot the machine in GNU/Linux. I mount the windows partition. I perform a find command, and voilà: there they are, the unconspicuous files. From this moment on, the recovery process is trivial and worthless to describe here.

What happened to the files? What happened to the machine? I don't know, and I suspect I'll never know. I have verified the presence and actuality of an antivirus. I have verified the configuration of the firewall, seemingly all right.

But people seems to like being treated the way microsoft treats them...

Culture is remix, and remix, culture. That's the message from an IT Conversations favorite, Lawrence Lessig, at O'Reilly's Emerging Technology (ETech) conference in 2005.

Humans have always made new culture by taking and remixing existing cultures, and have always been free to do so. Until recently the written word was the central medium for remix. As technology has advanced the mechanisms by which we remix our culture have changed to keep pace but the law has not. The question at hand is: should our freedom> to remix culture change when the ordinary means we use to remix culture changes?

As our technology and our culture become enslaved at the hands of the RIAA, MPAA, and others, Lessig proposes 4 steps we must take to counteract the degradation of our remix rights: 1) connect, 2) teach, 3) punish, and 4) politicize.

Following Professor Lessig's presentation, Cory Doctorow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation asks Lessig questions that further illuminate Lessig's concepts.

Very interesting one. If you are interested at all in the human digital rights, this podcast you must listen to.

The Gnomedex Geeks-Gone-Wild crowd was fixated on this rare and brilliant presentation by Steve Wozniak, a true geek's geek. His playing started with games and pranks, crystal-set radios, reading Popular Electronics. Then he met Captain Crunch and got into telco-busting Blue Boxes.

Woz wanted to be an HP engineer forever and never thought he'd start a company, but his friend, Steve Jobs, said, "Let's sell it!" at every opportunity. Good thing he did, and good thing HP turned down Woz's offer for the rights to build what would become Apple's first computer. You'll enjoy this -- one of the best from Gnomedex 4.0. This is Part 1 of 2.

This is actually one of the most entertaining podcasts I've listened to.

The Accelerating Change conference brings together change leaders to discuss how we can shape the future - how we can accelerate change and keep pace with changes already occurring. Organizer John Smart opens the 2005 conference with an overview of the philosophy guiding the Accelerating Studies Foundation, the organization behind the Accelerating Change conference.

The pace of technological change is increasing every day, and this can be frightening and confusing. In order to control how successfully we move into the future, we need to make policy, not take reactionary stances. We need to be a part of the change.

Technology is often invisible to the user, and therefore we often react with "future shock" when we encounter it. Instead, should be agents of change - actively engaged in the emerging future. Through the sharing of ideas and visions about the future of technology, we can the bridge between the present and the future.

Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with Eamonn Kelly, the CEO & president of the Global Business Network, and the author of "Powerful Times: Rising to the Challenge of Our Uncertain World." He takes us through the major impacts on the world today. It's his contention that we are in the midst of a great leap forward, not unlike what history has called The Enlightenment.

In this True Voice show, Stowe talks with Darren Barefoot and Jeremy Wright, two now-famous professional bloggers who originally met by selling their blogging services via eBay. The show was recorded at the Vancouver NorthernVoice conference, and centered on the topic "The Profession of Blogging". What does it mean to be a professional blogger? How is blogging distinct from journalism or corporate PR? What are the ethics of professional blogging?

Stowe Boyd is a well-known media subversive, and serves as the president of Corante, a social media pioneer. His most frequent thought on collaborative, real-time, and social media can be found at Get Real. Stowe is heading the True Voice project, which is a series of podcasted shows, embedded in conferences across North America and Europe. Stowe has been a contributor for many publications including KM World, Knowledge Management Review, Lotus Developer Journal, Enterprise Reengineering, Business Process Strategies, Darwin, and many others.

In this keynote address from Accelerating Change 2005, Vernor Vinge discusses the potential for a "technological singularity" - the event at which the creation of artificial superhuman intelligence changes the world so dramatically that it is impossible to imagine the world after that point. He explains that the singularity is not a given, nor is it necessarily a positive event. Many factors could arise that prevent the singularity from occurring and there is a potential for it to be a catastrophic event rather than a positive revolution.

Vinge suspects that if the Singularity arises after several years of progress rather than as an overnight event, it is more likely to be a positive step in human evolution. He calls this the "soft-takeoff," and offers some ideas that may encourage a longer approach to the point of change. The pace of progress may be exponentially increasing, but that does not preclude a gradual move toward the moment of transition.