Live Mesh to the, uh, rescue?

reedme — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 22:50:38 GMT

One of my alleged New Year’s resolutions was to clean out the blogging back log. I have a bad habit of highlighting something on a web page, whacking the Live Toolbar button for “blog this” and letting my witty repartee rot in a folder somewhere in Documents. No more! I will have the “now habit” from henceforth… Mostly. It’s the end of January and I’m just now getting around to it.

Live Mesh is helping me by giving me a central place to keep everything, so I can blog whenever I’ve got a spare moment:

between meetings on the tablet (if my boss is reading this, I never do this during meetings – honest!)
lounging @ home watching some poor excuse for a TV show that the TiVo knew that I’d watch anyway (in all fairness I haven’t watched the show yet, but Kurtz was actually funny yesterday, so I linked it)
waiting for my teammates to rescue me after zombies had their way with my corpse in Left 4 Dead (my Xbox 360 game backlog is just as bad as blogging backlog, but I’m working on that, too!)
sitting in the garage on my motorcycle and wishing there was enough global warming to melt all this “unusual for the Pacific Northwest” snow and let me ride!

I really wish I’d meshed up my Windows Mobile phone two weeks ago… so that I wouldn’t’ve lost those notes and pictures when a keyboard malfunction (while entering the PIN) plus draconian security policy erased them all. Doh.

Live Mesh means that all my PCs have my blog post drafts from the past several years that never made it past The Censors™. Heh. Also, I can never claim to have lost a favorite link, either, now that they’re all meshed up.

Does censorship work as expected?

reedme — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 19:16:23 GMT

Tihs g0t m3 th1nklng…

Ars Technica, which reported on the patent both when Microsoft applied for it in 2004 as well as now that it has been granted, notes that the technology could be used for more than just censoring profanity, suggesting that perhaps China or another government would want it employed for other phrases, such as Tibet or free speech. Microsoft gets bleeping patent (news.cnet.com)

W3 konw taht t#e hmuan barin is a gaert ptteran mtachnig mchaine, rgiht?

We all know know what the *bleep* stands for because of the context it’s used in. Profanyms are just polite self-bleeps that we insert instead of using Full Strength® profanity… Bleeping out Tibet in news reporting (or Palin, for another timely US-oriented example) won’t change what the news consumers understand. Listeners will still get the full message, plus the added meaning of naughtiness, unless it’s so badly redacted that it carries no meaning whatsoever.

Rather than worry about censors using technology, I think we should be worrying about making sure that those who “might” be subject to censorship still have the technology to communicate!

Reed Me : censorship

Live Mesh to the, uh, rescue?

Does censorship work as expected?