the.Inevitable.Org/anism

I actually like this idea … a USB drive with a way to display a message, along with the free space!

A new window on USB drives.
Blog: Memorex unveiled its next USB drive with an LCD screen it says
takes the guesswork out of remembering what is stored on the… [CNET News.com]

I know that this is older news, however I still love reading articles
about this race.  This is truly amazing and is going to alter a
lot of things.  The fact that a computerized car can drive itself
131.6 miles and avoid getting stuck.  Oh yeah … and this is only
2005.  So what are we going to be hearing about in 2010?

With the current rate of technological advances, five years is a huge amount of time for amazing developments to occur.

Driverless robots reach milestone in DARPA race.
Stanford University’s Racing Team has accomplished a historic feat of
robotics, finishing first in the DARPA Grand Challenge, a 131.6-mile
driverless car race that no artificially intelligent machine has ever
conquered before.

Stanford’s “Stanley,… [KurzweilAI.net Accelerating Intelligence News]

I liked reading Phil’s post about the word ‘Identity’.  This is
one of the core issues surrounding the subject … the definitions and
understanding of the words.  Without a common language and lexicon
it becomes very difficult to nail down specifics on anything!

Years ago while looking into Identity I came across an article that
discussed the origins of the word … and it was a real breakthrough
for me.  From Dictionary.com, Identity is:

[French identité, from Old French identite, from Late Latin identits, from Latin idem, the
same (influenced by Late Latin essentits, being,, and identidem, repeatedly), from id, it. See i-
in Indo-European Roots.]

“Being the same as” … so the two core thoughts in this are that it is
something that is derived from observing, and it is relative or
comparative.  There is an observer who assigns you identity by
comparing you - or some aspect of you - to something else that is
known.  I believe this is the cornerstone of identity.

On the Word ‘Identity’.

On the way back from a meeting in Salt Lake this afternoon, I was
pondering the word ‘identity’ and the way it is used in the physical
world and the way we use it in the world of IT. Something I heard on
NPR set off this navel gazing–I can’t remember what. Coincidentally,
when I got to my office, I found this post from Tim Greyson on the living language of identity. And so, a post…

If I ask my wife, kids, or neighbors “what is identity?” they
answer in various ways that I think reduce, at their most basic level,
to this: “identity the sum total of who I am…my uniqueness.” It
includes not only attributes like height, eye color, and so on, but
also their personality, hopes, and dreams–everything that makes them
them. One way of sussing this out is to ask: do identity twins have
different identities? We would say yes, even when we can’t tell them
apart.

…

[Phil Windley’s Technometria]