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1. It sounds like they won't be pulling NSA cables out of the AT&T (and other) facilities. They're just claiming to use them under FISA now. This wired blog raises some interesting questions about this.
2. During Attorney General Gonzales' previous congressional testimony on this topic, he was very careful and lawerly in asserting that his statements only applied to the program under discussion, that is the "Terrorist Surveillance Program". The clear implication is that there are other programs besides TSP which have not seen the light of day.

In short, don't let this stop the oversight hearings.

Okay, I'm seriously not sure whether you're just baiting me or whether you're serious. Either way, you're wrong. Copyright holders have quite a bit of rights to restrict what users can do with their works (ever watched a DVD which told you not to show the film publicly?). In fact, creative commons licenses will probably be updated to reflect the Zune's DRM:

But this approach may not be legal for long, especially if the Zune becomes a big hit. Garlick told me that should the device become popular, the Creative Commons could revise its license so that the device-level hampering of sharing would violate the license as much as adding file-based digital rights management to a CC file does today.

wired.com

For reference, here's the part in the CC licenses which was supposed to prevent DRM:

You may not distribute, publicly display, publicly perform, or publicly digitally perform the Work with any technological measures that control access or use of the Work in a manner inconsistent with the terms of this License Agreement.

Its perfecly within the rights of the copyright holder to specify constraints such as these. In fact, I'm not quite sur how this doesn't already disallow what the Zune is doing.

Can we even apply the car anaolgy to running Linux?
Running Linux (ignition lock out chip)

Of course no one can steal a car with a transponder antitheft system, right?

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.08/carkey_pr .html/

Finally someone who has played the Columbine RPG

Clive Thompson over at Wired wrote an article entitled "I, Columbine Killer"

http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,72491-0.html?t w=rss.index

Here is why he gets mocked:

"There's one company now you can sign up and you can get a movie delivered to your house daily by delivery service. Okay. And currently it comes to your house, it gets put in the mail box when you get home and you change your order but you pay for that, right.

"But this service is now going to go through the internet* and what you do is you just go to a place on the internet and you order your movie and guess what you can order ten of them delivered to you and the delivery charge is free.

"Ten of them streaming across that internet and what happens to your own personal internet?

"I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why?

"Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially. ...

"They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a truck.

" It's a series of tubes.

"And if you don't understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.

"Now we have a separate Department of Defense internet now, did you know that?

"Do you know why?

"Because they have to have theirs delivered immediately. They can't afford getting delayed by other people."

This quote (more fully found here; there is also a link to the audio recording on that page) doesn't actually get at what the Senator was talking about--how corporations clog the "tubes," causing them to be unavailable to the average consumer for sending "internets," and therefore telephone companies should be allowed to charge fees to content providers to discourage clogging the "tubes."

Here is a tracking of the Senator's delayed "internet."

Also see, of course, the relevant Wikipedia entry.

[and this is why we should probably hand decisionmaking authority with regard to this type of regulation to an expert body, rather than leaving it to congresspeople who don't even know the proper use of the word "email."]

Here is why he gets mocked:

"There's one company now you can sign up and you can get a movie delivered to your house daily by delivery service. Okay. And currently it comes to your house, it gets put in the mail box when you get home and you change your order but you pay for that, right.

"But this service is now going to go through the internet* and what you do is you just go to a place on the internet and you order your movie and guess what you can order ten of them delivered to you and the delivery charge is free.

"Ten of them streaming across that internet and what happens to your own personal internet?

"I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why?

"Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially. ...

"They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a truck.

" It's a series of tubes.

"And if you don't understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.

"Now we have a separate Department of Defense internet now, did you know that?

"Do you know why?

"Because they have to have theirs delivered immediately. They can't afford getting delayed by other people."

This quote (more fully found here; there is also a link to the audio recording on that page) doesn't actually get at what the Senator was talking about--how corporations clog the "tubes," causing them to be unavailable to the average consumer for sending "internets," and therefore telephone companies should be allowed to charge fees to content providers to discourage clogging the "tubes."

Here is a tracking of the Senator's delayed "internet."

Also see, of course, the relevant Wikipedia entry.

[and this is why we should probably hand decisionmaking authority with regard to this type of regulation to an expert body, rather than leaving it to congresspeople who don't even know the proper use of the word "email."]

Next thing you know, they'll be mandating a terrorism futures exchange

Oh, wait...

Long, superb Neal Stephenson article on laying FLAG. If you don't know what FLAG is but you're interested enough in cables to be reading this far down the comments, you really should read it. I never knew long wires were so interesting until I read this, and it's still a classic I refer people to when cables come up at work (so to speak) - fairly often, my employer's in over a dozen data centres round the world. Oh, the fun we had between Christmas and New Year's Day thanks to this earthquake (one of the DCs is in Hong Kong...)

the link quote by parent poster:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive//4.12/ffglass.h tml?pg=2&topic=(none)

FLAG (www.flagtelecom.com), a 50'000 km fiber network was bought by a Indian company
(http://www.rediff.com/money/2003/oct/16ril1.htm) for about 207 million dollars. weee...

latest news is that they are trying to list them at the
london stock exchange for 500 million dollars.

as a previous poser said that good engineering stays invisible,
well, it might not be so good in the long run.
maybe we should all chip in for a garuntee future of the GLOBAL internet.

there's a big difference between owning stock in say at&t,
sprint and a undersea network /methinks.

on a side note, i think it's amazing that FLAG was able to go bankrupt
anyway ... 207 Million seems to be jump change for a network like that;
just to compare it to AT&T 50 BILLION bid for ... err that other american
network >>>:P (
(bell south would have to be 241 times bigger then FLAG)

It's reasonably easy to find a cable. At those depths the cables lie directly on the sea floor, and if you run a hook across the sea floor from one side of the cable to the other, you'll cross it by definition. Sure you might then end up some distance from the break, but they are apparently reasonably good at handling that. Such techniques don't work with shipwrecks -- and even if they did, there may not be anything the right shape for a hook to catch.

Anyway, there's an old but interesting article on undersea cables by Neal Stephenson.

You're funny. I'd like to know where you heard they had a drop in traffic after all that publicity (care to cite some sources)? Everything I remember reading about it last year said they had a three-fold surge in traffic.

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,71089-0.htm l?tw=rss.index

In the previous discussions about pornography decided the HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray battle, I'd always said that the porn industry was fully capable of going both ways, and a few others besides (with the double-entendre wholly intended).

However, hearing that Sony itself has been pressuring the porn industry away from the Blu-Ray format, it seems they've shot themselves in the foot and mooted their brand from competition.

I suspect they want to keep the format that is used in their gaming system free of purient-interest content and not be a portal for pornography, preserving it as a "kid friendly" device. And with a limited number of facilities able to produce BD disks compared to DVD houses refitted for HD-DVD production, that scarcity allows Sony more control. Perhaps Sony is still stinging with the parental backlash against kids putting porn on their PSPs. How many more PSPs to adults did that revelation sell again?

...had a great article on this back in September of 2003, interviewing people from all over the globe who were getting benefits out of MIT's OpenCourseWare initiative:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/mit.html? pg=1&topic=&topic_set=

A nice read.

You know very well that isn't what I mean. Do you think the janitor that scrubs the toilets at Ford drives a Chevy? How about IT guy at the Coke bottling plant - think he brings a Pepsi in his lunch? Hell, it's a news story when a MS employee blogs about his iPod, PRE-ZUNE! See here. The guy says that he was getting harassed at MS for having an iPod - I imagine it would be even worse for him now.

Whether or not you think that you are biased or loyal or whatever, I think that you would be better off disclosing that you work for MS when pimping their products.

Seagate announces Hard Drives will be at 300TB in a few years

" ... the all-electric vehicle has a gasoline ... " WTF? ( http://blog.wired.com/wiredphotos14/ )

Wired magazine these days is nothing but one long advertisement after another. Circuit city probably paid them to be included in the rankings.

The days where Wired could be seen as a credible source of information on technology is long over. I mean these are the same people who proudly declared that the Internet was no longer important enough to be granted proper noun status.

Wired and others speculated whether the "new economy" would spawn different behaviour patterns. The answer appears to be that business wants to buy in and dominate, using old patterns.

Clearly a fork to a truly free wiki 2.0 ;~)would be permitted under the wikipedia copyright terms. This would seem to be the only answer to such commercialisation.

The strange reflection I have reading what I have written, is that having spent years questioning religion and the belief in "unlimited riches etc" like the dot-com boom, I find that I feel a near relgous need to see communities like Wikipeadia succeed - which for me means no advertising... I believe, I believe.

Huh? You mean the internet really isn't a series of tubes?

I'm not sure I like all this progress. Hell, even podunk l'il Jackson MS is getting in on the act: http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/01/precrime_ eyeint.html#comments kidding about Podunk. Jackson is the capital. but seriously, in this case, Cops having the helicopter would be a clear violation of civil liberties, so they just hired it out to the OCP..er, a private firm.

Ironically, this link was next to the article.

Well - if the island is formed close to another chain of islands, whoever lays claim to the original chain, probably by default has claim to the new one simply due to proximity.

However being able to occupy and defend this island is only part of the ability to claim it, because the governing organization of the island must also be recognized by other governments as being the official governing body for that area of land. Anyone can say they are an independent sovereign nation-state, but even if they have the guns to back it up, it doesn't do much good unless they are recognized by other sovereign states.

Since this is NOT the first time in history that a volcano has produced a new island, I am willing to bet that there is either previous common law on the subject, or there are treaties that have been signed by the majority of states on this specific issue. Any international attorneys in the house?

A few sources of information of relevant subjects:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conch_republic (Key West, FL ceding from the USA)
and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealand
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,36749,00 .html
http://www.havenco.com/

qz

Our government needs an elected body of IT experts

If, as you say (and I entirely agree) that "A democratic system cannot work unless there is absolute transparency in the voting process." then simply making the code availble for public perusal (open source) would be sufficient, as with the Australian system. Indeed, if you can't trust an elected government to manage it's evoting systems properly, then electing a second body to police the system doesn't ensure that the system will be any fairer.

Sounds like a nearly impossible task to replicate lunar dust considering how abrasive the stuff is. This article does a good job of explaining.

There is a great need to increase world-wide carrying capacity without impacting high biodiversity ecosystems such as the Brazilian rainforests or continental shelf fisheries, and that reduces greenhouse phenomena. There may be an economic option that uses sea water pumped to desert areas powered by the fact that ground level temperatures are much higher than temperatures at high altitudes. Indeed, it would dump greenhouse heat to space for its power while producing biodiesel, electricity, fish, fresh water, salt and real estate -- all in quantities demanded by developed-world populations -- without adding to, and possibly even sequestering, greenhouse gases.

Proposals for solar updraft towers have typically assumed that they would be single use structures: solar to electricity via heat differentials between high altitude air and ground level greenhouse-enclosed air. The resulting system has marginal economic value.

Something which would further enhance the value of the solar updraft tower power structure is to use the greenhouse area for algae ponds to add biodiesel, water, fish and salt production to the production of electricity normally envisioned.

Doing so brings the proposal from marginally viable to viable, with a net present value, primarily from live fish production, of $3.5 billion per system, thereby allowing for far higher capitalization and/or return on investment.

Let's start with just the value of algae biodiesel:

The greenhouse area required per solar updraft tower of is huge:

(pi * (5km/2)^2) ? hectares
= 1963.49 hectares

producing peak at peak 200MW via a 1km tall tower.

We now add to this the production of algae biodiesel:

The UNH estimate for algae biodiesel production is 1 quad per 200,000 hectares. Let's assume only half of the area of the solar updraft tower greenhouse would be available for production at any time (the other half would be used for ponds that buffered heat for the inner ponds, produce fish, provide additional evaporative surface for desalination and provide recreation for residential areas at the outer rim).

That gives us:

(1963.49/2)hectares/tower;200000hectares/quad ? towers/quad
= 203.719 towers/quad

Or about 200 towers per quad of biodiesel.

We can now calculate the biodiesel per tower:

7.2gallon/1e6btu;200tower/quad ? gallon/tower
= 3.5998E+07 gallon/tower

or about 35M gallons of biodiesel per year per tower.

At $2/gallon for wholesale diesel, this yields $70M biodiesel revenue per year.

Now for electrical revenue:

At an average rate of sold production only 1/2 (100MW) of peak capacity (200MW), electrical production per tower per year, is:

100MW;year ? GWh
= 876 GWh

At $30/MWh wholesale:

100MW;year;30$/MWh ? $
= 2.628E+07 $

or about $25M electrical revenue per year.

Interestingly, the biodiesel revenue is nearly 3 times the electrical revenue of a solar updraft tower!

200*200MW or 40GW electrical peak capacity is produced per quad of biodiesel.

Further that same UNH document estimates 19 quads to replace all transportation fuel in the US or 3800 towers, which would also produce 3800*200MW or 760GW or .76TW of electricity.

Current winter capacity in the US i

Single page, printer-friendly version

Just a comment--passports don't have addresses. They aren't like driver's licenses; you don't need to notify anyone and get a new passport when you move. This just reinforces your point.

Oh, and as someone who has been very interested in the John Gilmore case, I was pleased to read about someone who managed to fly without ID (though he had to submit to extra security checks), who actually got through security more quickly without his ID. From the article:

Harper told the identification checker he had no ID, and the attendant quickly wrote "No ID" with a red marker on his ticket and shunted him off to an extra screening line -- generously allowing him to bypass the longer queue of card-carrying passengers.

Build all the Wright replicas you like. That's what the Experimental category is for.
Better pick a perfect day to test it though.

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,61655, 00.html

you can also record your own version of any copyrighted song and put it on a CD for sale without asking anyone. This is called a cover song, and the law gives you explicit permission to do that.

Could you give a citation of the passage of copyright law that does so? I could not find one on http://www.copyright.gov/ but admittedly did only a cursory search. I remember numerous examples of lawsuits, and threats of lawsuits, against artists "covering" or sampling other people's copyrighted work, e.g. U2 vs Negativland and SST Records, for which U2 may forever burn in hell.

You're not at all familiar with the Air Force's Active Denial System... are you.

Thanks for playing.

You're not at all familiar with the Air Force's Active Denial System... are you.

Thanks for playing.

What with patented GM crops we see farmers being sued in the US for reusing GM seeds grown from their own crops.

"Uh, no. That would be being sued for violating the contract they entered into when they bought said seeds"

Do you have a citation for a farmer knowingly violating such a contract. Do you see such restrictions as being ethical. This link refers to the company saying that it didn't matter whether the farmer know his field was contaminated.

"You're second paragraph ignores the aspect of the neighbor farmer suing the GM crop farmer for polluting his strain"

What a ludicrous statement to make. Can you produce any citatin of just such an occurance. He's more likely to sue the GM company and not a fellow tiller of the soil. Farmer sueing farmer bares no relation to my other points.

The GM companies would of course have the farmers buying their seed annually from the companies.

"Uh, yeah. That would be the contract mentioned. Funny how you're on the side of someone who knowingly buys GM seeds to reap the benefits of, say, bh and then knowingly tries to avoid the stipulation and scam -- that is, rip off -- to get the benefits free the next years"

Nothing I said previously supports your assertion that I approve of farmers knowing stealing. To go back to the source analogy, your accusation of farmers stealing the benefits sounds similar to accusations leveled against the OS community, stealing our IP, violating our patents, is a clone of 'commercial' software.

My point is that farmers who want to opt out of GM will be unable as they will only be able to buy GM crops or will be unable to reuse seed from bought GM crops or their crops will be contanimated with GM and the won't be able to use their own seed or non GM seeds will be banned.

The plant breeders have been producing better crops and able to make a profit for decades before GM. You bought from them when you wanted a guaranteed good seed. You then had a choice as to whether to reuse your own seeds or buy new. You could also breed your own strain and resell it on. GM if it becomes will virtually eliminate the smaller plant breed or good amatur. Similar to what the current US patent regime and IP laws are doing to the computer industry.

Incidentally I believe that most of the methods for injecting foriegn DNA into a cell have also been patented. So even if I clean roomed a method for injecting frost resistance, I couldn't sell it without paying the owner of the patent. In todays IP climate I doubt if two bright computer hackers (Apple) could start a business in their garage. The lawyer fees alone would have them bankrupt on the first day. 'Steve , I have an idea for building a GUI, other Steve, I dunno dude, lets consult a lawyer first in case we're violating some somebodies intelluctual property', first Steve, I dunno, it's going to cost a lot of granola, if only we had a dad for a lawyer'.

Old fashioned plant breeding is a threat to GM, that's why the companies would like it banned. The same with Open Source v Closed Source. While OS exist the bottom line of the closed source companies are threatened. The computing version of GM would be certain patented protocols. Doesn't matter who builds or sells the systems, everyone has to pay you-know-who for the Intellectual Property. That's another good analogy.

--

"Canadian organic farmers have launched a class-action suit against two major manufacturers of genetically modified crops"

"Six farmers from France and the United States have launched a lawsuit against Monsanto and other corporations involved in genetic engineering of crops. The lawsuit, filed early this year in Washington DC, alleges that Monsanto, the Dow Chemical Company, AstraZeneca and Novartis International formed a cartel

You're wrong, and it shows just how much you really don't understand what you're talking about. Phil Ryu tried to dispute them, but he actually confirmed them. He said that "Doubling [Gruber's] estimation of dev fees would bring it closer to reality, but even then, not quite."

So basically, doubling Gruber's numbers is pretty much where it's at. That means that MacHeist's share of the profits was 75%. Straight from the horse's mouth. Gruber was right.

Additionally, it seems that they doubled the dev's share only after Gruber's blog post, so they should thank Gruber for that additional money, even if it doesn't change his original point: MacHeist got most of the money, the devs got very little.

If you really don't want the government to know, you have many options

1. Phone, where lots of legislation will protect your call unless they have a warrant or your're the target of a warrentless tap.
   
2. Skype, where the communication is encrypted and so protected unless the government goes to skype/ebay with a warrant.
   
3. Physical mail, where there are laws protecting you, and it's kinda hard to read without the tampering being detected.
   
4. Nothing to hide -- if you're not expecially interesting to the government, noone will bother to read when you showed up at Christmas, so email is perfectly fine. The practical matter is that though your email probably ends up in archives and databases at the NSA (if your ISP is AT&T = http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,70619-0.htm l) noone will ever see it if your life is boring enough.
   

To be fair, Bill Gates denied saying it, and nobody has come up with an original cite or witness to the quote. That doesn't mean that he didn't say something "wrong or stupid" (which he admits to doing on other occasions). Not like he hasn't been wrong in the recent past (SPAM predictions, for example - it's been two years, Bill, and it's getting worse.

Speaking of things acting like on Earth and gravity and such. I think one of the big hurdles is going to be dealing with the dust, note the small images on the right. See also here and here.

According to this article, it was put on YouTube and floated to a WaPo reporter before it ever went to the mainstream TV stations. So, no it wasn't shared "after the fact" on the web - this by admission of the Webb staffers themselves. So, yes, more people saw it on CNN than on the 'Net, but the free distribution of the Internet (and the resulting steam it got from there) is what got it larger media attention.

Go back to reading Tom Clancy novels.

I have never read a Tom Clancy novel but a quick google turns up the fact that their plots typically revolve around things like CIA spies and plots to blow things up and double agents and such, none of which are being suggested here. Instead, what is being suggested is that corporate executives might funnel money to third parties to do their dirty work, defame competitors, and bring frivolous lawsuits against groups or individuals who threaten their market dominance. Where might we have read about such things? Oh right--in the newspapers. In fact, several of the stories have involved Microsoft, and some even involved Darl McBride, as well as hundreds of other companies big and small.

Unless you are going to stick to your guns claim that we can drop all the white-collar crime laws off the books because nobody actually does such things and people who claim they do are just reading too much Tom Clancy, you'll have to come uyp with a better argument than that.

--MarkusQ

I agree whole-heartedly. It is just disgusting to watch how people wince and cross their fingers every time they make a change on a Microsoft OS, blink in astonishment if it works the first time, and think of this as normal.

I'm a fossil; I date back to the days when computers were housed in big white rooms, programs were punched into little pieces of cardboard or paper tape, and little Billy Gates slept on computer room floors. Want to know something? Even with those clunky, cantankerous, 16-64KB machines, we were astonished if things didn't work the first time. What happened? Microsoft happened.

I never heard of a "snow crash" until the first time I touched MS-DOS. Windows 1 & 2 were sick jokes. Windows 3.x froze the machine at least four times a day, to the point that PC manufacturers actually started installing a button leading directly to the CPU's RESET pin on the front panels of their machines. That sort of thing was unheard of until MS came into town.

I was foolish enough to hope the MS hell was over when NT 3.51 showed up, it was so good in comparison to what went before; probably because most of the code was derived from IBM's work. But then Bill Gate's so-called programmers 'accelerated' NT 4.x by loading the drivers into kernel space and everything went to crap again. An earlier post tried to point fingers at badly-written device drivers. Here's news for you, kiddies: bad drivers should not be able to crash a properly-written OS!

Then their horrific coding practices began to catch up with them, and now every user of a MS OS has to wrap it in layer after layer of security software just to keep the silly thing from getting eaten alive the moment it's connected to the Internet....

And people think this is all normal.

Shall I now mention a few of the lovely, anti-competitive dirty tricks built into the code? I personally remember the coding trap deliberately written into Windows 3.x so it would bomb when you tried to run the thing atop Digital Research's DR-DOS. Then there was the esoteric memory-addressing stunts built into a lot of MS apps and designed to do just one thing: page-fault Windows emulation sessions under OS/2.

And that last paragraph, my friends, is as far as I'm going to get into their business practices, as Wired did a very nice job of that back in 2000 with this article at http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.11/microsoft_ pr.html. I'm done; just thinking about Microsoft and all the grief they've caused people over the years has just about ruined the rest of my day.

And people still think this is all so very, very, normal.

Incredible.

http://www.engadget.com/2006/10/23/researchers-hac k-rfid-credit-cards-big-surprise/

Seeing as companies don't really care about a consumers privacy (they sell the data as fast as they can anyways) its no surprise that the government wants in on the action.
GET YOU NEW IDENTITY HERE! NO APPLICATION NEEDED!

The tinfoil hat idea may be passe, but the tinfoil wallet may be the wave of the future.
http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,61264,00. html?tw=wn_tophead_1
So long as the RFID signal is kept weak, atleast.

http://www.epic.org/privacy/dv/real_id.html
And of course it was added as a rider, and got through, as the REAL ID act was put into a "must pass" bill appropriating money for tsunami relief and defense. Pub. Law 109-13. REAL ID was added to this bill without any hearings.
Sometimes I -HATE- the fact that little bits of law can be added in as a rider and passed with otherwise "must pass" bills, even if the bits added in as a rider never would have passed on its own.

Would this do? Pornography does indeed have a measurable effect on the human mind.

Zelda:TP sold 139,011 units the first two days in Japan.

http://blog.wired.com/games/2006/12/wii_sports_top s.html

From a a Wired interview:

My basic strategy has always been to not care too much. It actually ends up working wonders - avoiding confrontation by just walking away. The thing is, I don't usually feel as deeply about some of the issues they feel strongly about, and that makes it easier just to ignore the politics - and as a result, the political consequences. That also allows me to concentrate on the things I do enjoy, namely the technical discussions.

Whether that position is good or bad is a matter for debate, but Linus himself is on record many times saying that he simply isn't interested in political discussions. I think it's pretty fair indeed to characterize him that way.

the author of a wired magazine article on the game makes a very good point. the game is no where near as graphic as the description given in the book of Revelation and other fundamentalist sources for the endtime frenzy. when the author contacted the game makers about this they replied that while the bible was more graphic they didnt want to make the game too violent and thereby inappropriate for children so...its okay to believe this stuff literally is going to happen to people, but its not something you want your children to watch...just what kind of god are these people worshipping? heres the link: http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,72071-0.html

But at least some of the cool stuff is available in the archives. I still have a bookmark to Neil Stephenson's Mother Earth Mother Board. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass_pr .html

This is the intent of the http://www.all-species.org/ ALL Species Foundation.

Their mission is to "The ALL Species Foundation is a non-profit organization dedicated to the complete inventory of all species of life on Earth within the next 25 years - a human generation."

A Wired article http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,50942, 00.html/ about them has some interesting information.

Since new species are always being generated and old ones going extinct continuously, this organization will NEVER be able to fullfil their charter.

This is the intent of the http://www.all-species.org/ ALL Species Foundation.

Their mission is to "The ALL Species Foundation is a non-profit organization dedicated to the complete inventory of all species of life on Earth within the next 25 years - a human generation."

A Wired article http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,50942, 00.html/ about them has some interesting information.

Wired is an overrated collection of BS.

If there was a single adjective I'd use to describe Wired, it would be "inconsistent". Because some works of pure genius came out of Wired, too.

For example, The Transparent Society is perhaps the best, clear, concise description of the privacy issues we face, and has the sharpest resolution picture of the best way to approach it.

Seriously - this article was prescient when it came out (now almost exactly 10 years ago!) and has altered my opinions about freedom and privacy forever.