Julian Bond

"Quite. And mostly because NYC can't work out what is a low powered, electric assist bicycle that can be unregistered and unregulated just as if it's a bicycle." - Julian Bond

"Another big possibility is electric bikes. The USA seriously needs some sense here to promote unregistered, unregulated, low power, standardised electric-assist bikes. Having different laws in every state and city and trying to make them high power compared with the rest of the world is holding back sales. The kind of designs in the picture may be great if you can build the road infrastructure from scratch. Or where there's plenty of space. But try doing that in London or NYC. Instead you'll get the madness of bike lanes sharing road space with parked cars and bus lanes." - Julian Bond

"As an obsessive, last.fm, discogs and audiomap (http://audiomap.tuneglue.net/) let's me explore N-dimensional artist space via "sounds like this". The second big route is curators in the form of music blogs from pitchfork to Xlr8r to Resident Advisor to Quietus. 3rd is word of mouth from friends. And the occasional 4th is things like this on Youtube. But I'm an obsessive, I'm frankly mystified how non-obsessives find music. Ask me? ;)" - Julian Bond

"Just a reminder. http://techno.org/electronic-m... needs updating but is still useful. And my favourite tool for exploring n-dimensional music artist space. http://audiomap.tuneglue.net/ It's not really about Tempo, Rhythmic Tendency, Bass Weight and Genre. It's about Mood." - Julian Bond

"I'm wondering which Macleod or Stross novel the rogue Police drone had escaped from." - Julian Bond

"Or. As a label you could fund and produce music deliberately aimed at people who still spend money on music. Like, say, Adele. Don't bother targeting an audience who won't buy your product no matter what it is, or how good it is." - Julian Bond

"There's no doubt that cheap, renewable, plentiful electricity changes the game in all sorts of interesting ways. But if all it does is fuel continued exponential economic growth and business as usual then it's just changing the cliff face for a brick wall at the end of the runway. We're still accelerating towards the point where it all goes unstable and chaotic even if the details change a little. Yes, air quality in the WEIRD countries is better than it was in the 50s, but we've just outsourced our pollution as well as our manufacturing. From a global perspective, the world3 model standard run doesn't look any better and is still on track. If you can reasonably argue for a better model then go for it. I applaud your aggressive optimism bias even as I find it hopelessly unrealistic. As always in these discussions, I've been waiting for the axe to fall since 1972. I still don't know if it falls on my children or their great-great-grandchildren. Meanwhile, it looks like I'll be able to..." - Julian Bond

"So how's that spreadsheet model working for you? The one where you feed in a value for yearly exponential growth in energy availability and then copy-paste it for the next hundred rows. Does it deal with the exponential growth in pollution and resource limits in other areas? To paraphrase Oliver Cromwell, "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that your model may be of limited use in predicting objective reality." and go back and re-read "The Limits to Growth". JFC!" - Julian Bond

"Why do you rob^H^H^H run banks? Because that's where all the money is!" - Julian Bond

"I wonder if more people are familiar with Mind Maps http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M... as a way of brainstorming. Since mind maps are almost always tree structured, they can just easily be done in outline software as mind map software. As for me, I'm nostalgic for Agenda and have been for years now. But then I'm of a certain age and remember doing everything in PC-Dos text mode programs." - Julian Bond

"Looking in from the outside, this seems completely insane to me. I can't get my head around the idea of a country (or group of countries) that doesn't have a single definition and set of laws for types of motor vehicles. So where's the trade body working to get this mess rationalised? How does the bicycle industry ever hope to expand the E-Bike market if the rules are different in every state and even city and town? There's a ot of money to be from consistency and standardisation. There's wisdom in the article though. If you look like a bicycle rider on a bicycle doing bicycle type things, you'll be treated like a bicyclist. So if it's legal for bicycles nobody in the law will care. Frat boys in SUVs will still throw beer cans at you. Joggers and horse riders will still swear at you. Everybody will hate you if you're stupid, but at least you won't get a ticket." - Julian Bond

"Retrophilia is a dangerous disease that is highly contagious so please take all necessary precautions before reading these. Unchecked it can lead to Retromania and severe neck problems as the sufferer attempts to walk backwards into the future. If you see a child or young adult suffering from nostalgia for a future that didn't happen, predicted in a past that didn't exist from before they were born, then report them to the authorities immediately. We can't be too careful or society may drown in waves of vintage whimsy. 1970s http://andwhatwillbeleftofthem... 1980s http://facesonposters.blogspot... 1990s, 2000s http://upclosemaspersonal.blog... And http://moundsandcircles.blogsp..." - Julian Bond

"Since my country left me I found a new place to dwell. Its down at the end of lonely street, It's Ricin hotel. From Elvis Impersonator's Las Vegas period." - Julian Bond

"Q: When Do Babies Become Conscious? A: Usually at about 17 years, but some times never." - Julian Bond

"Actually no. Sim-Free, unlocked Nokia 100. £19.99 http://www.tesco.com/direct/si... less tax is £17.99 but that includes shipping half way round the world along with Nokia and Tesco's margins. Now yes, that's more than $12 but it's in the same ballpark." - Julian Bond

"Quite. I'm struggling to see what the story is here when I can find pretty much the same thing in Tescos. Meanwhile, what is it about CleverPhones that make them an order of magnitude more expensive?" - Julian Bond

"And for our frickin' laser eyes." - Julian Bond

"Especially in London, The Mobility is always with us. Just like The Poor. /s" - Julian Bond

"I think the article forgot stuffing everything in bin liners and bungy-ing it to the pillion seat. More seriously I'm still searching for a 35litre rucksack but with plenty of bungy hooks on the outside to go on the pillion seat so it can be strapped down. The military understand the need for external fixings and the current trend there is to cover bags almost completely with webbing. Look at all the bags above and there's typically nothing on the outside to hook a bungy into. 25l isn't quite enough for a sleeping bag and bits for an overnight stay. And there's quite a few situations where you just want to grab the bag rather than leave it on the bike. For the same reasons a small tankbag works really well, not just as a stomach rest but as a place for valuables that can be grabbed and taken inside the restaurant or whatever. The other option here is throw over panniers but sports bikes are notoriously bad for this with high exhausts, wide plastics that scratch easily and limited..." - Julian Bond

"It's probably a good thing that the study of history doesn't require you to be old enough to personally remember it." - Julian Bond

"I think we need a kickstarter for a replacement Aeropress plunger that has space for a sealed coffee grounds container and another space for 10-25 or so filters. Creating a complete coffee production tool for 2-5 day road trips. Perhaps also including a  measuring spoon by re-purposing the lid or something." - Julian Bond

"If she gets a full military funeral, does that mean Major and Blair will as well?" - Julian Bond

"And. Evidence in after the fact prosecutions of high profile cases, rapid response to real time crime or prevention of crimes in the first place? So many questions thrown up by this post. Who owns them? Who's watching? How many are recorded for how long vs watched in real time? How many do Police have direct access to vs requiring a warrant to access? Do they have any effect on actual crime figures? How many belong to private traffic monitoring services or (outsourced) council parking enforcement services? The implication in most of these posts is that the UK is obviously a non-free police state because "cameras". Reality is more prosaic. UK maybe on the bleeding edge of technology usage but while they are everywhere, nobody's watching and they won't be until the singularity and then it will be an AI. If central counter terrorism has full access to every camera with face, profile and gait recognition and automatic crisis/riot prediction (which we know because of Spooks), then why..." - Julian Bond

"Need to think about the share button. It needs to be a bit more heavyweight than a +1 button but less heavyweight than G+ or blogging and perhaps less than even Twitter. It's interesting that you wrote "Maybe offer an optional field for comment.". Absolutely critical to making this work is that the list of shared items is itself available as RSS/Atom+PSHB. And the same with any composite lists of shares aggregated from multiple people, the results of tags[1] or searches. Which is why it's intensely irritating that G+, Twitter, Facebook don't or no longer provide RSS/Atom+PSHB output. "hey look at this" is one of the most common internet games people play. There's been lots of attempts at code to support this game. Stumble, tumblr, del.icio.us, Reader sharing, Flipboard magazines, etc, etc, but nobody's ever really cracked it. Then there's the professionals who specialise in the game. "Novelty Curators". Whatever we come up with needs to support both casual and full time actors. The..." - Julian Bond

"I think Aeropress are missing a trick here. There should be a model where the plunger also serves as a container for grounds and a small supply of filters. That would make a nice self contained coffee device for short trips. Are you still using the 3rd party metal filter? I couldn't get on with it." - Julian Bond

"But surely it was always a crime to beat the crap out of someone. Why should the reason (or lack of it) make a difference?" - Julian Bond

"Bruce Sterling has a good quote about this area: "Whatever happens to musicians will eventually happen to everybody." http://www.well.com/conf/inkwe... Needs quoting in full because it's equally applicable to Musicians, Journalists, Software engineers and many others. Come 2013, I think it's time for people in and around the "music industry" to stop blaming themselves, and thinking their situation is somehow special. Whatever happens to musicians will eventually happen to everybody. Nobody was or is really much better at "digital transition" than musicians were and are. If you're superb at digitalization, that's no great solution either. You just have to auto-disrupt and re-invent yourself over and over and over again. It's pretty awful to be a musician and have no possibility of health insurance (as Jaron Lanier keeps pointing out), but you could have been a Nokia engineer. You'd have been blindsided even harder and faster, and you wouldn't even have had the girls and the weed." - Julian Bond

"I'd really like to talk more about this project and flesh it out as I think there's some gotchas but also some potential wins. The problem is how to do that in a style that might actually get some attention and traction from people capable of helping build it. Back in the day, we'd start a mailing list and invite people to it. But whenever I tried to do that I couldn't get traction. And the FOSS world is littered with orphaned projects like that. So Dave Winer, Sull and others, where can we go and talk this out seriously? Meanwhile, Up thread Dave says 'The word "distributed" does not appear in this piece.' However I'm firmly of the opinion that something like this should be built as a set of conventions of use of open components and standards. So anyone can run a participating server, and each server could serve one author, a small group of authors or even thousands or millions of authors. So that looks distributed to me. Low volume php-Mysql hosting is so cheap now that even..." - Julian Bond

"A quick google suggests there are some possible vulnerabilities but they're either not widespread yet or being hushed up because there's a LOT of money now wrapped up in Chip&Pin and because C&P is (mostly) secure the banks shifted all liability to the consumer except under extreme duress. http://krebsonsecurity.com/201... The puzzle as usual is why the US is now decades behind Europe. But as one commenter says, magstripe plus bank liability is slightly better for the consumer than mostly secure P&C plus consumer liability. And as always incomplete security is not secure." - Julian Bond

"I'm curious to know how much of a problem this is in countries like the UK, France where Chip&Pin has completely taken over. Does it actually make it impossible to skim like this or is the problem just covered up? Because the systems are well on the way to making us cashless with virtually every retail transaction over about £1 and outside bars being done by debit card." - Julian Bond