Don't be late for the singularity. Once your mates get their brains uploaded, if you wait a week they'll have experienced years of virtual time, and will have entirely forgotten about you. And you won't know any of the in-jokes.

Don't be early, either. I expect we'll get the ability to upload brains (let's assume it's possible) well before we've invented computers that are independent and self-repairing enough that you'd trust them with your newly-immortal self. I can certainly see several singularities starting and burning themselves out almost immediately. Pick the wrong one and your best-case-scenario is to be stuck in obsolete and unreliable hardware for the rest of time.

Sure, the desktop revolution was inevitable. But that doesn't help the people who invested in Be. Or those that invested in Microsoft in 2001.

Until yesterday, Flickr's photo pages had a little bit of text in the bottom right, 'Place this photo on a map'. and taking this photo got me thinking about that. 'A' map. Not 'the' map. I was on the tube at the time of taking that photo, so I have no GPS fix for it. But even if I had one, it wouldn't be meaningful. I want to place that photo on the tube map, because that's where I was, between stations.

So this example isn't terribly good. But there are 'hidden' tube stations, or closed stations. I'd like to put photos of them on the tube map, because that's where they are to Londoners. I'd like to place screenshots of World of Warcraft on a map of Azeroth. Putting them on a real map would be useless, it would bear no relation to other photos taken nearby, and would be missing the point. For Londoners, the Tube is a different place from the surface, and tagging every screenshot I take with the location of my computer seems pointless. But I'd love an in-game 'photos taken near here' feature. (Not that I play WoW any more. Not this month, anyway.)

Kicked off by a conversation in a pub with blech and the flurry of geolocation stuff from aaron about Flickr's new croudsourced geolocation work. Which, alas, changed the language of the link, and undermined my point.

http://flickr.com/photos/jerakeen/2728356923/

Had this sitting around in my 'things to think about' file for a bit now.

In the early days of the SNMP, which does use ASN.1, the same issues arose. In the end, the working group agreed that the use of ASN.1 for SNMP was axiomatic, but not because anyone thought that ASN.1 was the most efficient, or the easiest to explain, or even well liked. ASN.1 was given axiomatic status because the working group decided it was not going to spend the next three years explaining an alternative encoding scheme to the developer community.

rfc3117

Oh yes, micropayments. Our saviour. Everyone's got a stack of internet business plans that'll turn into liquid gold the very second the micropayment infrastructure arrives. I know I do. So where is it?

Lee Maguire