Pornographic speech does not prevent women from making utterances. Rather, the thought is, pornographic speech may create communicative conditions that result in illocutionary disablement of women’s speech in specific contexts. Particularly this may be so with respect to women’s refusals of unwanted sex: if pornographic speech prevents the locution “No!” from being seen to be a refusal in a sexual context, due to which sex is forced on the speaker, she has not successfully performed the illocutionary speech act of refusing the unwanted sex. In this case, there may be a free speech argument against pornography.
Monthly Archives: January 2013
Hong Kong has fastest peak internet speed in world
The top recorded speed of 54.1 megabits per second was documented in Hong Kong in the third quarter of 2012, according to the State of the Internet report issued by Akamai Technologies yesterday.
No country previously had gone beyond 50 Mbps.
“It wouldn’t have been possible without changes in policy earlier to force competition between internet service providers,” Edmon Chung Wang-on, chief executive of DotAsia, and vice chairman of the Internet Society of Hong Kong, said yesterday.
“Without the competitive environment we wouldn’t have such a good network at such a low cost. Before there were only a couple of providers, and when the new guy came in things started to move.”
via scmp.com
Broadening the value of the industrial Internet
In one project, students designed an application that monitors power plants, providing real-time operating statistics as well as summaries that help managers optimize maintenance investment. It was clear that managers above the level of an individual power plant would want an application like this, but buy-in from lower levels might be harder to achieve; managers are often reluctant to submit themselves to measurement by their bosses.
The best way to build support, Liguori???s students found, was to offer everyone involved useful information, so they added diagnostic features to the app that help plant managers isolate problems with their machinery, as well as contextual documentation that helps workers get to solutions faster. ???Once [the plant staff] saw that they would be getting more data out of this, they bought into it,??? says Rebby Bliss, one of the students developing the project.
Asteroid mining and a post-scarcity economy
By 2017, larger DragonFly probes will be sent out on two- to four-year missions that will employ a unique 3D printing system to process asteroid ore and produce pure nickel, which could be stamped into specific parts or ingots. The probes will collect 50-100lbs of material and return it to orbit ??? but there it will most likely stay, for use as building materials.
DSI says it has designs for robots that can be sent off to harvest not just nickel, but also other metals, liquids, and petroleum products. The end goal is a series of machines such as those proposed by US physicist John von Neumann, which could self-replicate and strip asteroids down to nothing.
Scientist Confessions #OverlyHonestMethods
"Photography is now a form of immediate and direct conversation feedback"
Now photography for me and for many others is a form of social communication. We shoot images, we share those images with immediacy and often a conversation comes forth because of the sharing of those images. It is certainly true for me that when I shoot a digital mobile image and share that image on a social platform I know that more people are experiencing my vision than ever before.
Many conversations from technical questions about my work or constructive criticism are now part of my photographic process. Photography is now a form of immediate and direct conversation feedback and part of the social fabric of our artistic culture like never before.
via blog.eyeem.com
A thousands words, but the ones you want to say?
Truth and Consequences: Using the Bogus Pipeline to Examine Sex Differences in Self-Reported Sexuality, 2003
Google wants to take on Apple with an open AirPlay alternative ??? Tech News and Analysis
Google isn???t the first one to work on an alternative to AirPlay. In fact, the widest-supported AirPlay alternative actually predates Apple???s protocol: The Digital Living Network Alliance launched in 2003 to bring content sharing to the living room. It???s DLNA protocol has been widely adopted by numerous players, with a total of 500 devices supporting DLNA today. However, the actual level of support varies widely, and many manufacturers have opted to roll out their own branded solutions on top of DLNA ??? but even those see little use from consumers.
via gigaom.com
"If you receive the #FIRE Tweet"
via engageweb.co.uk
Facebook Fires ‘Killing Blow’ Into $55 Billion Market
As we reported last August, Open Compute could disrupt some of the largest enterprise tech companies in the world like IBM, HP, and Dell. It does for commercial hardware what open source did for commercial software???lets the users design what they want.
OCP has created a new type of server that costs less to build and operate. It uses fewer materials and causes less waste for the landfill when decommissioned, too.
This week, the project introduced new features that turn a computer server into a Lego-like assembly project where IT people can pick and choose all the components, right down to the CPU, and snap them together.
Plug and play down to the metal.
Hamish MacEwan 