You Can Bank on It

Interesting:

The ease with which technology allows customers to move their money around by internet or phone has introduced a new financial phenomenon – the "silent run" on a bank.

Within hours, telephone and internet banking customers can remove huge amounts of money from a bank rumoured to be in trouble, without telltale queues, or any other outward sign of the flood of cash.

The shape of things to come.

Mapping the Fourth Dimension

Good to see that Yahoo is letting OpenStreetMap use its aerial imagery to speed up the process of free map creation.

Of course, we still need to get all those street names and features. GPS traces are by no means dead - think of the new housing estates and areas without imagery. But instead of cycling down every road you should be able to just pass lots of them at either end to get the names. Or just from memory.

Where does this bring us to? Well the ‘big map companies’ use expensive cars and expensive aircraft with expensive cameras and expensive GPS units to create maps. Maybe our GPS units are cheaper and less accurate, but does it matter? I think not. We now have all the pieces of the puzzle and we’re putting out great maps for Free using Free tools.

But I was even more impressed to see that OpenStreetMap has already mapped some of the future too: take a look at the entries here for March 2007.

Microsoft's Eternal Cheek

This is rich:

In this culture of instant information, some Microsoft Corp. researchers are pursuing a radical notion -- the concept of saving messages for delivery in decades, centuries or more.

The project, dubbed "immortal computing," would let people store digital information in physical artifacts and other forms to be preserved and revealed to future generations, and maybe even to future civilizations.

So, the company that more than anyone has tried to lock people into opaque, closed formats that will be unreadable in a few decades, let alone a few millennia, and which even now is trying to foist more of the same on people, suddenly discovers the virtue of unconstrained accessibility.

But to add insult to injury, it then tries to patent the idea. Earth to Microsoft: this is called openness, it's what you've been fighting for the last thirty years. There's a fair amount of prior art for the basic technique, actually.

Scanning the Big Delta

"Delta Scan" sounds like one of those appalling airport potboilers involving mad scientists, terrorists and implausibly durable secret agents, but it's actually something much more exciting: an attempt to peek into the future of our science and technology. A hopeless task, clearly, but worth attempting if only as a five-neuron exercise.

The results are remarkably rich; considerable credit must go to the UK's Office of Science and Innovation for commissioning the report and - particularly - making it freely available. I was glad to see that there are plenty of links in the documents, which are short and to the point. Great for, er, scanning.