The Space Shuttle Atlantis has lifted off and is headed into space on the last ever shuttle mission. After 30 years of service the program is at an end. This means that the US will not have a manned program for a while, though we will send people up via the Russian program. Having heard some commentators complain about the ‘waste of money’ that NASA is I feel compelled to point out that the entire...

Brand Page Field Test To Start In About Two Weeks It’s only slightly more than a week old, yet news organizations and major companies have jumped into the new sandbox that is Google+ despite the fact that the field trial is supposed to be for “people”: Let me be clear – and I’m sorry if this wasn’t obvious – we are not currently supporting brands, organizations, and non-human entities...

In 2007, Microsoft invested $240 million to buy 1.6 percent of Facebook (preferred stock purchase; FB has yet to go public). The deal bought Microsoft closer access to Facebook’s ad revenue; at the time MySpace was still the largest online social network. Facebook attracted 30.6 million U.S. visitors during September [2007] compared with 68.4 million at MySpace. Microsoft’s entry in the social networking...

Is China the victim of a campaign mounted by the United States to turn the nations adjacent to the South China Sea against Beijing? According to columnist Liang Fengming of China’s state-run Huanqui, the U.S. is seeking to demonize China by inflaming territorial disputes between China and other states like Vietnam, Taiwan, the Philippines, South Korea and others – which are none of America’s...

Not good. Robin Wauters at TechCrunch: [S]ome stupid kids – actual age unknown – have taken over the (verified) @FoxNewPolitics Twitter account and posted a series of messages declaring U.S. President Barack Obama dead on the eve of the Fourth of July, the national day of the United States. The ‘hackers’ appear to have taken over the account around 2 AM Eastern time, and went on to claim President Obama...

Google Circles If you’re longing for a digital networking space that lets you easily share information with the different facets of your life, then put Google Plus at the top of your “to explore” list. (Assuming you can wrangle an invitation!) If you’re longing for a digital networking space that lets you easily videoconference with 10 people while everyone watches (and chats about) the...

Daryl Cagle, MSNBC.com This copyrighted cartoon is licensed to run on TMV. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited. EDITORS’s NOTE:I’m based in CA and today Amazon yesterday sent me this regretful notice of cancellation: Hello, For well over a decade, the Amazon Associates Program has worked with thousands of California residents. Unfortunately, a potential new law that may be signed by Governor Brown...

Looking for a signal that our economy has moved from scarcity to abundance? Look no further than the launch of Google+ and compare it to the sister app, Wave, launched less than two years ago. In October 2009, Google launched a not-quite-ready for prime time product. There was a virtual stampede for invitations, which were doled out slowly and in small amounts. Less than a year later, Google would retire Wave. It’s...

On Monday, I shared the classic EPIC2015 with my undergraduate new media class. We discussed which companies had been less or more influential than this 2004 vision and how the vision missed mobile and YouTube. 

Today on PRI’s “The World,” I heard a heartening story. Somebody was listening, somewhere. And that’s a good thing. Here is my original post: 5 APRIL 2010 · 8:55 PM Lazy Pro-Animal Blogging – Oregon Edition Electric cars are coming to Oregon, and they’re trying to figure out where to site the charging stations. I had been waiting for the right time to make this observation, and...

Almost unnoticed — save for the front page headlines day after day — the month of June 2011 has turned into the “Month of the Hacker.” Major cyber-attacks have been leveled at the Pentagon, CIA, Sony, PBS, CitiGroup, etcetera (hard to keep up, frankly) and, on Thursday, a major leak of sensitive Arizona police information exposed undercover agents, informants, ongoing investigations,...

How? They were ready to flick the switch because the lights had been changed or installed more than six months ago when the building was last seen sporting that fabulous purple and red glow. Not for Gay Pride, which is celebrated in June across the United States, but for a Further show, according to Phish message boards. A rock band founded in 2009 by Bob Weir and Phil Lesh, members of the Grateful Dead, Further...

It may have been largely forgotten by the global media, but the nuclear catastrophe in Japan has not been concluded. This editorial from Japan’s Niigata-Nippo Shimbun, packaged with video on the latest assessments on the disaster from both in and out of Japan, offers a glimpse of the ongoing nuclear turmoil confronted by the Japanese people. The Niigata-Nippo Shimbun editorial says in part: ‘If...

I was added to a Breitbart Report mailing list today (without opting in). The announcement mail assured me that I would be the beneficiary of Breitbart’s “timely news and other information, independent of media bias” and that I was receiving the mail based on my “past interest” which was reflected by my having commented on one of his sites. Breitbard told the marketing company that...

by Walter Brasch The federal government has launched what may become one of the most effective propaganda campaigns in American history. Beginning September 2012, every cigarette manufacturer must display one of nine government-approved graphics on the top half, both front and back, of every cigarette pack. Among the warnings is a picture of a pair of healthy lungs next to a pair of cancerous lungs, with the...

In Ogden, Utah last weekend, a 36-year-old man updated his Facebook profile a dozen times throughout a 16-hour armed standoff with local police. Subsequently, Facebook turned into a lynch mob (not unlike Cook’s Source) after national media reports on Wednesday stated (without sourcing) that Jason Valdez had held a woman hostage and had reported the event on his Facebook profile. The New York Daily News...

Update: @JoshRoseneau has a very good followup (July) at @SciAm: http://is.gd/AN1HHh In 1925, Tennessee prohibited the teaching of evolution in public schools (The Butler Act). John Scopes, a high school biology teacher, was convicted of violating the law, and his trial highlighted the divide between “science” and fundamentalist (literalist) religion. (It was the first live radio broadcast from...

Hassan I Sabbah, the first Grandmaster of the cult later called “assassins” is reputed to have said: Nothing is true, all things are permitted. Which is a very convenient and logical formulation: destroy facts and truth, and anything can be justified. Traditionally we in the West have viewed this with extreme suspicion — for reasons which ought to be obvious to the Reader. And yet, today,...

Several days ago I began writing a well balanced article about right wing ideas to dissolve, curtail or under-fund agencies (who knows actually) like the EPA and OSHA. Regulations are costing us jobs they say. They say the huge pile of private capital on the sidelines would come rushing to create jobs if only for those burdensome government regulations. I planned to point out in my column how a 50 state solution...

While the United States regards itself as a highly transparent democracy, columnist Enrique Lynch of Argentina’s La Capital writes that the photo taken during the killing of Osama bin Laden in the White House Situation Room reflects a blatant and dangerous exclusion of the public more reminiscent of a monarchy than a 21st century democracy. For Argentina’s La Capital, Enrique Lynch writes in part: What’s...

Managing the U.S. economic decline in relation to the emerging economies in Asia, Latin America and elsewhere, is hard for many Americans to take. But as this article by Financial Times Deutschland columnist Thomas Fricke makes painfully clear, there is no escaping the fact that the old rule, “when America sneezes, the world catches a cold” is fast becoming a relic of a bygone age. For the Financial...

It’s hard to know where to start, as a mother of three kids under 18, one of whom has a recurring respiratory problem whenever he gets a cold, and living in a state that gets an overall F in clean air, when it comes to how universally savage the Republican presidential hopefuls are toward the Environmental Protection Agency. If you missed the news, here’s a breakdown of how each of seven candidates...

Ethanol from corn was always a really bad idea.  It made food more expensive and cars less efficient while enriching agribusiness. In a bipartisan vote both Republicans and Democrats stood up to their corn belt piers and said enough is enough. The Senate voted 73-27 Thursday to kill a major tax break that benefits the ethanol industry, handing a political win to a bipartisan group of lawmakers that call...

Despite the fact that Japan was the first and only nation to suffer a nuclear attack, this editorial from Japan’s Chibanippo Shimbun explains that with time, much of the insecurity felt by Japanese over nuclear fission had diminished. That is until that fateful day three months ago, when an earthquake and tsunami triggered one of the most devastating nuclear accidents in history. The Chibanippo Shimbun...

Robert X. Cringely wonders why data security systems are proprietary and secret. If 1024- or 2048-bit codes take a thousand years to crack, isn’t encryption, combined with a limit on login attempts, good enough? He suggests it’s the U.S. government that doesn’t want us to have really secure networks: The government is more interested in snooping in on the rest of the world’s insecure networks....