NEW NET Weekly List for 04 Sep 2012

Below is the final list of issues for the Tuesday, 04 Sep 2012, NEW NET (NorthEast Wisconsin Network for Entrepreneurism and Technology) 7:00 - 9:00 PM weekly gathering at Sergio's Restaurant, 2639 South Oneida Street, Appleton, Wisconsin, USA.

The ‘net

1.        Bing Maps high-resolution imagery project now complete in the US  http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/30/3278363/bing-maps-global-ortho-project-us-completion  “Microsoft has been collecting detailed maps of the United States over the past two years and the project is reaching its conclusion this week. The Global Ortho Project kicked off in the Spring of 2010 with an ambitious promise to map every square inch of the Continental United States and Western Europe at 30cm resolution. Microsoft is announcing today that the US side of the project is complete, providing high-resolution imagery across Bing Maps. Over the past several months we've seen hundreds of terabytes of new high-resolution imagery added to Bing Maps across the United States, Europe, Australia, and elsewhere. The software maker has been collecting imagery using specially modified aircraft and an Ultracam camera to capture data that would stretch around the world 999 times or to the moon 104 times. The results are stunning, with the high-resolution imagery providing clearer aerial views and Bing's Bird's eye feature for a unique perspective from above…”

2.       Enterprise telepresence sales slide: More than economy at fault  http://www.zdnet.com/enterprise-telepresence-sales-slide-more-than-economy-at-fault-7000003150/  “The enterprise videoconferencing and telepresence market revenue pie shrunk 10 percent in the second quarter relative to a year ago, according to IDC data…The culprit for the weak sales, based on earnings conference calls and IDC, has been the economy and lower spending by governments and education institutions. However, I'd argue something else is behind the slide---good enough video conferencing. Immersive telepresence is great technology, but there are back-end bandwidth costs as well as the need to retrofit conference rooms. In other words, the market is a bit limited to multinationals who have a bunch of employees flying around the world. Meanwhile, videoconferencing is going mobile as bring your own device and consumerization dominate enterprise IT. Where does immersive telepresence fit in that equation? The average corporate cube dweller can get by with Skype, FaceTime, Google Talk, Microsoft tools, Citrix's GoToMeeting and a bevy of other technologies…”

3.       Amazon teams with Nokia, snubs Google for maps  http://finance.yahoo.com/news/exclusive-amazon-teams-nokia-snubs-230910150.html  “Amazon.com Inc's new Kindle Fire will have mapping services via a tie-up with Nokia Oyj, according to two people familiar with the situation, filling a gap in the tablet's capabilities while snubbing Google Inc's popular service. The world's largest Internet retailer, which says its nine-month old Kindle Fire now accounts for one in five U.S. tablet sales, has teamed up with Nokia on mapping…Amazon will release at least one new version of the Kindle Fire next Thursday. Amazon will also add location capabilities to the new Kindle Fire, which requires either a GPS chip or a process known as WiFi triangulation…”

4.       Bing Now Lets You Search And Browse Your Friends’ Facebook Photos  http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/30/bing-facebook-photos/  “Microsoft just launched a new search feature for Bing that lets you search your friends’ photos on Facebook. This new tool, says Microsoft, is essentially an expansion of the photo experience Bing introduced as part of Bing’s redesign earlier this year. Today’s launch takes this experience a bit further, though, and you can now browse your friends’ photos, ‘like’ them and add comments to them right on Bing. Previously, clicking on a link to a photo in Bing’s sidebar would take you to Facebook. The experience actually looks quite a bit like Facebook’s standard photo pages…Bing and Facebook always had a very close relationship and Microsoft has worked hard to highlight this alliance in Bing’s social sidebar (Google, after all, doesn’t have access to this data). Indeed, while Bing offers a landing page for the new search feature, there won’t be a link to it from Bing itself…”

5.        Microsoft Live Mesh users: Read the Windows Essentials 2012 fine print  http://www.zdnet.com/microsoft-live-mesh-users-read-the-windows-essentials-2012-fine-print-7000002341/  “It's looking like Microsoft is doing what some users of its PC sync service had feared: Replacing it with SkyDrive, even though it still doesn't offer the same set of features. Microsoft released on August 7 a new bundle of free services meant to complement Windows 7 and Windows 8. Now known as "Windows Essentials" rather than "Windows Live Essentials," it adds some new capabilities, but also removes Live Mesh from the PCs of those who install it. Microsoft has used the "Windows Live Essentials" name to refer to the bundle of services that has included Windows Live Mail, Messenger, Movie Maker, Photo Gallery, Family Safety (parental controls), Writer (its blogging tool) and Mesh (its PC sync service). Microsoft released the 2011 version of its Windows Live Essentials bundle in mid-2011. The 2012 version of the Windows Essentials bundle includes updated versions of Movie Maker and Photo Gallery. Mail, Messenger and Writer are all still in there but don't seem to have been updated much, if at all, based on comments from those comparing the new Windows Essentials 2012 bits to the Windows Live Essentials 2011 ones…There is one change though that some users are discovering by unhappy surprise. Microsoft is replacing Live Mesh with SkyDrive, its cloud storage service, on the PCs of those who install Windows Essentials 2012…”

6.       Iterations: The New Movable Type  http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/02/iterations-the-new-movable-type/  “Back in the 15th century, Johannes Gutenberg changed the world with movable type, laying a foundation for a new printing press to spread ideas faster. Fast forward a few hundred years, and the comparisons made between the Internet and Gutenberg were predictable. Specifically with respect to the written word, the web made any literate person with access to a computer into a writer. Today, most barriers to creating, sharing, and distributing written content have been stripped away, and for every newspaper that seems to be going out of business, a victim of modern times, a new publishing engine is born. As someone who writes a bunch online, I’ve been thinking about the sheer plethora of choices I have at my disposal today to publish content, as well as what people have used historically over the web. I’ve only had a blog for a few years, but from what others tell me — and this will be a gross oversimplification compared to how new media experts may portray this — there have been many online publishing phases over the past decades. People used to set up their own sites on properties like Geocities, for instance. One could argue email lists, groups, and community boards, such as Craigslist, also created places for writers to post content and connect with others. Powerful forums, such as Reddit, Stack Network, Hacker News, were built as communities to surface novel content and communicate with others. Then, more robust writing platforms were created, such as Blogspot and WordPress, among others, providing writers with better publishing tools, the ability to customize, optimize SEO, and in some cases, to earn income. Over the past few years, new properties such as Tumblr and Posterous, among others, emerged to further simplify the ease of creating and sharing content…”

Security, Privacy & Digital Controls

7.        We need to talk about sensors: How the internet of things could affect privacy  http://www.zdnet.com/we-need-to-talk-about-sensors-how-the-internet-of-things-could-affect-privacy-7000003147/  “Here at Telefonica's Campus Party Europe tech festival in Berlin, this morning has seen some interesting sessions about privacy, with one in particular tackling the potential and risks of the internet of things. We should already be having a widespread discussion about this subject, because the push is on, even if – as with the embedded sensors themselves – it's not visible to most people. The talk that really grabbed me was by Joe Huser, an LA-based corporate attorney who tends to represent entrepreneurs that are trying to get their heads around the regulatory issues associated with the internet of things. He ran through several scenarios that may or may not happen, as the world around us becomes subtly but pervasively connected — with each scenario relating to certain legal principles of data protection and privacy. Without saying whether or not I agree with his analysis, I think it's worth looking at a few of his scenarios…”

8.       Shamoon malware infects computers, steals data, then wipes them  http://www.zdnet.com/shamoon-malware-infects-computers-steals-data-then-wipes-them-7000002807/  “Security researchers are investigating a piece of destructive malware that has the ability to overwrite the master boot record of a computer, and which they suspect is being used in targeted attacks against specific companies. Reports of the 'Shamoon' malware began emerging from security companies on Thursday. Like other malware, it steals information, taking data from the 'Users', 'Documents and Settings', and 'System32/Drivers' and 'System32/Config' folders on Windows computers. One unusual characteristic, however, is that it can overwrite the master boot record (MBR) on infected machines, effectively rendering them useless…Shamoon, which is also known as Disttrack, is being used in targeted attacks against at least one organisation in the energy sector…”

9.       The myth of pinch-to-zoom: how a confused media gave Apple something it doesn't own  http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/30/3279628/apple-pinch-to-zoom-patent-myth  “In 2007, Steve Jobs stood on stage, listing the benefits of Apple's then-new iPhone touchscreen. "You can do multi-finger gestures on it," he said, moving his hands back and forth in the now-familiar pinch-to-zoom motion. Then he paused, and his expression changed. "And boy, have we patented it." The crowd laughed and began applauding as the word "Patented!" appeared on the screen behind him. You can draw a straight line from that classic Jobs moment to last week, when a jury decisively agreed with Apple that Samsung had copied the iPhone too closely. But you can also draw a line from that moment to another, much more insidious phenomenon: the persistent belief that Apple has a definitive patent on the pinch-to-zoom gesture. This myth is everywhere at the moment, in the wake of the Samsung trial: Fast Company. The Washington Post. MIT's Technology Review. Slate. Here's Business Insider suggesting it. Kevin Drum basically tore his hair out in Mother Jones trying to figure it out. Nick Wingfield put it in his New York Times piece about the lawsuit — and much to his credit, emailed me after he saw my increasingly-frustrated tweets about the subject. So let's just be extremely clear about this: the jury ruled that 21 of 24 accused Samsung phones infringed claim 8 of Apple patent 7,844,915, which specifically covers a programming interface which detects if one finger on a screen is scrolling or two or more fingers are doing something else. It is one possible step along the road to pinch-to-zoom, but it is definitely not pinch-to-zoom itself…”

10.     Linux users targeted by password-stealing 'Wirenet' Trojan  http://news.techworld.com/security/3378804/linux-users-targeted-by-password-stealing-wirenet-trojan/  “Malware writers are interested in Linux after all. Russian security firm Dr Web has reported finding a shadowy Trojan that sets out to steal passwords on the open source platform as well as OS X. Technical details of Wirenet.1’s operation and technique for spreading are sparse for now, but the company reports that the backdoor program targets browser passwords for Opera, Firefox, Chrome, Chromium, and as well as applications such as Thunderbird, SeaMonkey, Pidgin. Under Linux it copies itself to the ~ / WIFIADAPT directory before attempting to connect to a command and control server hosted at 212.7.208.65 using an AES encrypted channel. That at least offers a simple way of blocking communication and any further payloads…”

11.      Judge orders Oracle to pay Google $1M for court expert fees  http://www.zdnet.com/judge-orders-oracle-to-pay-google-1m-for-court-expert-fees-7000003716/  “…Google stood by its previous claims that it did not pay any journalists or bloggers, but that other individuals might have received compensation in relation to the case, including Google attorney William Patry and Java creator James Gosling. Both Oracle and Google's legal teams met in court on August 23 to discuss Google's motion for judgment as a matter of law filed in July, asking for a new trial in regards to the nine lines of code in the rangeCheck method, on which the jury found Google liable for copyright infringement this past spring…on Tuesday, Judge Alsup issued a lengthy order regarding the bill of costs in the trial. The major takeaway is that Google won most of what it asked for after a June 20 hearing addressing legal costs -- although the court asserted that Google's request was "granted" and "denied in part." Oracle has been ordered to pay $1 million to Google to cover expenses incurred by the work of court-appointed expert Dr. James Kearl. Overall, Google also asked Oracle to pay $4,030,669 in legal costs, but the judge denied the request for $2,900,349 in e-discovery costs because "many of its line-item descriptions are of non-taxable intellectual efforts." All other requests for costs were granted as Alsup wrote that Google was the "prevailing party" in this case…”

12.     Honeytrap reveals mass monitoring of downloaders  http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/onepercent/2012/09/honeytrap-catches-copyright-co.html  “Anyone who has downloaded pirated music, video or ebooks using a BitTorrent client has probably had their IP address logged by copyright-enforcement authorities within 3 hours of doing so. So say computer scientists who placed a fake pirate server online - and very quickly found monitoring systems checking out who was taking what from the servers. The news comes from this week's SecureComm conference in Padua, Italy, where computer security researcher Tom Chothia and his colleagues at the University of Birmingham, UK, revealed they have discovered "massive monitoring" of BitTorrent download sites, such as the PirateBay, has been taking place for at least three years. BitTorrent is a data distribution protocol that splits an uploaded digital media file into many parts and shares it around a swarm of co-operating servers. Birmingham's fake server acted like a part of a file-sharing swarm and the connections made to it quickly revealed the presence of file-sharing monitors run by "copyright enforcement organisations, security companies and even government research labs…”

Mobile Computing & Communicating

13.     Sony's Vaio Duo 11 blends tablet with laptop to create a 'tabtop'  http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-08/29/sony-vaio-duo-11  “You're looking at the start of a curious new trend: tablets that want to be ultrabooks. This is the Sony Duo 11, one of the first Windows 8 tablet-cum-laptops, a "tabtop", if you will. This 11-inch hybrid is a touchscreen slate that slides up to reveal a small keyboard, becoming an ultrabook in the process. Sony announced this chimera at its IFA keynote this week and it riffs on Windows 8's use of two desktop interfaces -- one for tablets, one for desktops -- by literally changing form factor. Need a tablet? Use it as such. Need a keyboard? Behold! One's hiding under the screen. As if that wasn't enough, it comes with a stylus for handwriting and it can detect when your palms are resting on it to write (as opposed to your fingers selecting something on the screen). It's a weird machine. I stood and stared at it for a good two or three minutes, asking, "What are you?" I must have said it loud enough because a Sony rep slithered over to explain that it's aimed at "productivity people" -- users who need a tablet for the train, a stylus for taking notes in meetings, a desktop for writing up reports…”

14.     Li-Fi: 10 ways visible-spectrum wireless will make your life better  http://dvice.com/archives/2012/08/lifi-ten-ways-i.php  “Li-Fi — that just-over-the-horizon wireless technology which could transform your everyday LED lighting fixtures into 10 Gbps wireless modems — has a lot of people talking these days. With a commercial product promised later this year and the tech already in beta, we might all be trippin' the lamplight fantastic real soon. But other than really, really awesome movie streaming speeds, what do we care? According to its inventor Harald Haas, Li-Fi offers a bundle of niche applications that regular Wi-Fi just doesn't measure up to. Here are a few of those unique benefits. The basic principle of Li-Fi is this: visible light has 10,000 times as broad a spectrum as the radio frequencies which Wi-Fi uses, allowing for much more bandwidth, once tapped. This is accomplished by the flickering of LED lightbulbs to create binary code (on = 1, off = 0), and is done at higher rates than the human eye can detect. The more LEDs in your lamp, the more data it can process. A side effect of Li-Fi is that your power cord immediately becomes your data stream, so if you have power, you have Internet…”

15.     Android Smartphone Sales, Led By Big Screens, Are Growing Everywhere Except In The U.S.  http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/03/android-smartphone-sales-led-by-big-screens-are-growing-everywhere-except-in-the-u-s-kantar/  “We’ve seen a lot of images of an (alleged) iPhone coming soon with a bigger screen, and some numbers out from Kantar Worldpanel ComTech, the WPP-owned market analysts, underscore how a bigger iPhone may not be coming a moment too soon. In the last 12 weeks, it found that Android-based smartphones have continued to extend their lead over the rest of the pack, and the charge is being led by the big boys — literally. Of all the Android devices that have been sold in the last three months, nearly one-third (29%) of them had a screen size of over 4.5 inches, with large-screened devices from Samsung, HTC, LG (pictured), Huawei and more. Apple’s current iPhone has a screen of 3.5 inches. Kantar also found that Android’s market share in Europe has gone up by 20.2% in the past year; its devices now account for two-thirds of the smartphone market in Europe. In fact, as you can see in the table below, Android grew its share by double-digit percentages in just about every major market, except for the U.S., where it actually declined by 4.5% as iOS increased by nearly 9% over the same period a year ago. Still, the U.S. appears to be an outlier at the moment (if not marching to the beat of a different drum altogether). Overall, there is not a single market among those surveyed by Kantar where Android does not have over 50% of all smartphone handset sales and is still growing stronger than the rest. And in some markets like Spain that percentage is even approaching 90%…”

16.     Galaxy S III passes Apple's iPhone 4S, becomes top selling US smartphone  http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/12/09/04/galaxy_s_iii_passes_apples_iphone_4s_becomes_top_selling_us_smartphone.html  “For the first time since it launched last October, Apple's iPhone 4S was not the top selling smartphone in the U.S., as the newly released Samsung Galaxy S III took the top spot in the month of August. Samsung's lead is expected by analyst Michael Walkley with Canaccord Genuity to be short-lived, however, as Apple is widely expected to unveil its next-generation iPhone next week. Walkley said in a note to investors on Tuesday that his checks with U.S. carriers found that iPhone sales have been soft ahead of the launch of Apple's next iPhone, allowing Samsung's Galaxy S III to take the top spot. The data from carriers indicated that many U.S. customers are holding off on buying a smartphone until Apple's next iPhone debuts. The Galaxy S III was the top selling handset at three of the four major carriers in America: Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile. But the iPhone 4S remained the top seller at AT&T, according to Walkley's checks. In fact, at Verizon the iPhone 4S was bumped down to third place in August, finishing behind the Motorola Razr Maxx as well. The iPhone 4S took second place at Sprint, while it is not available through T-Mobile…”

Apps

17.     Smartphone apps track users even when shut down  http://www.boston.com/business/technology/2012/09/02/smartphone-apps-track-users-even-when-shut-down/IH5UM0d4FYU5Gf5GlFjWcL/story.html  “Some smartphone apps collect and transmit sensitive information stored on a phone, including location, contacts, and Web browsing histories, even when the apps are not being used by the phone’s owner, according to two researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  “It seems like people are no longer in control of their own privacy,” said Frances Zhang, a master’s degree student in computer science at MIT. Zhang and fellow researcher Fuming Shih, a computer science doctoral candidate, found that some popular apps for phones running Google Inc.’s Android operating system are continually collecting information without informing the phone’s owner. The popular game Angry Birds uses the phone’s GPS and Wi-Fi wireless networking features to track the owner’s location, even when he’s not playing the game, for example. Another game, Bowman, collects information from the phone’s Internet browser, including what websites the owner has been visiting. And WhatsApp, a popular text-messaging program, scans the user’s address book when it is seemingly idle. What is not known is whether apps that run on Apple Inc.’s iPhone and iPad tablet computer collect information in similar ways…”

18.     Baidu launches mobile Android browser, claims it's 20 percent faster than rivals  http://asia.cnet.com/baidu-launches-mobile-android-browser-claims-its-20-percent-faster-than-rivals-62218572.htm  “There's a new mobile browser in town and it's from Chinese search company Baidu. The company announced Baidu Explorer, a mobile browser for Android handsets, at its annual developer conference today. Baidu, which dominates search in China, claims that the browser is, on average, 20 percent faster than its competitors, thanks to a new engine dubbed T5. When we tested it out, the T5 engine had to be enabled after we installed the browser (which involved downloading an additional 5MB file) and the performance improvements only kicked in after that. The numbers seem to confirm this--Baidu Explorer managed 482 out of 500 when it comes to HTML5 compatibility, easily beating current rivals such as Chrome (371), Firefox (349) and Opera (367). Other benchmark figures from Baidu also showed it beating other browsers in JavaScript tests. Just like how Google's Chrome browser helps drive traffic to its search business, the Chinese company is hoping to do the same with Baidu Explorer, which comes integrated with its search engine…”

SkyNet

19.     Google Master Plan Finally Comes To Light With Fiber Network  http://seekingalpha.com/article/843021-google-master-plan-finally-comes-to-light-with-fiber-network  “…recently, Google was awarded permission to offer TV and Internet services in the Kansas City area…Although for now the service will only be available in Kansas City, that appears to be temporary…It's clear that Google's plan is to offer an Internet service rivaling that of the dominant cable titans such as Comcast and Time Warner. This has massive implications for the future of Google's advertising business and expanding tech dominance. Reports indicate that Google is planning to offer a pay TV service…This means Google could start to take market share of the TV advertising market…Google has the opportunity to bridge the gap between Internet and TV advertising with Google Fiber…Google has been buying up massive amounts of 'dark fiber' since 2005. Now Google is committing to Internet speeds of 1gb per second. That's almost 100x faster than the average American's current Internet service. Unless traditional cable companies can figure out a way to match this temporarily unparalleled speed, they won't have a chance of survival. Total Internet traffic is expected to quadruple from 2010 to 2015. The biggest driver of this growth? Flat panel televisions…With lightning fast speeds that can handle unreasonable amounts of data, Google will soon be far ahead (of the current competition) in potential TV offerings…The potential of Google Fiber seriously dwarfs almost every other one of Google's projects. It's clear that consumers' new thirst for massive amounts of data will not be satisfied by traditional cable companies in the near future…The media content offered through the TV service will most likely be in the form of Google Play…Google Fiber customers, with the TV service, will get 2tb's of DVR storage. Google's Nexus 7 tablet will act as a controller for the service, and content can stream to any Android device or even an iPad…In September 2012, Google Fiber will be connected to its first clients. This is clearly the new wave of consumer Internet connection (fueled by the surge for more data) and is going to completely revolutionize the traditional TV/Internet landscape. Although it's too early to tell just what kind of financial impact this will have on Google's bottom line, it's potential is enormous. The combined market capitalization of Direct TV, Time Warner and Comcast is ~$150 billion. Google Fiber is threatening to make all of those services (and many more) obsolete in the next 5-10 years…” [While I disagree with the author’s interpretation of the facts related to Google Fiber, he does present an interesting interpretation of where Google is headed with their ultrafast gig symmetric internet access – ed.]

20.    Google lands patent for automatic object recognition in videos, leaves no stone untagged  http://www.engadget.com/2012/08/28/google-lands-patent-for-automatic-object-recognition-in-videos/  “Google has already been working on patents that could pick out faces and song melodies in our YouTube clips. Now, it might just have the ultimate tool: the technique in a just-granted patent could pick out objects in a video, whether they're living or not. Instead of asking the creator to label objects every time, Google proposes using a database of "feature vectors" such as color, movement, shape and texture to automatically identify subjects in the frame through their common traits -- a cat's ears and fast movement would separate it from the ball of yarn it's attacking, for example. Movie makers themselves could provide a lot of the underlying material just by naming and tagging enough of their clips, with the more accurate labels helping to separate the wheat from the chaff if an automated visual ranking system falls short…”

21.     How Our Digital Newsroom Uses Google’s Chart Tools  http://www.motherjones.com/mixed-media/2012/08/mother-jones-digital-newsroom-google-chart-api-visualization  “…at Mother Jones, our reporters, editors, and army of fact-checkers hoard more troves of chart-tastic data than our 2.5-person interactive team can keep up with…But our booming daily content calls for a charting method that allows for faster, easier collaboration across the newsroom, and our go-to solutions—Illustrator and Excel—don't always cut it…our interactive editor…asked me to dig into Google's Chart Tools API. Two nice things about this approach: first, our reporters and editors already know and love Google Doc's collaborative editing features…second, since Chart Tools can hook into a Google spreadsheet, a reporter can easily update a chart visualization themselves by simply changing the data in the underlying spreadsheet…Here's how we got it working for us…I found a Google bar chart example that used the Fusion Table API, and, even better, included some sample code…To get it working properly with our data, I copied the code into TextMate and started tweaking…Pulling data from a Fusion Table would certainly make collaboration easier, but pulling it from a spreadsheet was the real goal here, since our reporters and editors are already familiar with dumping data into Excel…Google has documented how to query data from a Google spreadsheet. There are two ways to do this: You can follow Google's instructions here to query your data source and select the data all directly in the dataSourceUrl line. Alternately, you can paste your spreadsheet URL into the dataSourceUrl and select your data in the query line…Here's a handy reference guide to all of the API options on Google’s documentation site for developers…Once we started charting, we ran into a number of limitations. Chiefly, layout…we finally had the charts where we wanted them. A bit of initial investment paid off nicely. The best part was that even as the piece went through multiple drafts and fact-check, changes we made to the data in the Google Spreadsheet automatically loaded on the chart embedded on our site…”

22.    Google+ Is Going After Yammer To Flank Facebook  http://seekingalpha.com/article/841821-google-is-going-after-yammer-to-flank-facebook  “Google…announced that it will begin offering corporate control features for its Google+ social network to businesses for free…If you run a Google Apps domain, you can set up domain-wide restrictions on how your users interact with Google+. Your users can also make "restricted" posts to Google+ which are visible only to members of your domain…That's sounds a lot like Yammer (which Microsoft recently bought for $1.2 billion) and Salesforce Chatter: Sharing streams designed for employee collaboration rather than personal socialization…That Google is choosing to make the same bet on corporate social networks that heavyweights like Microsoft (MSFT) and Salesforce (CRM) are making isn't surprising. What's interesting is that Google isn't segregating private Google+ from public Google+. That suggests Google's move into corporate social-nets is as much a flanking maneuver against Facebook as it is a direct challenge to Yammer and Chatter… restricted, company-only posts that Google Apps users make to Google+ will appear alongside the same public, personal posts everyone else is making on Google+. What better way to get a few million Google Apps domain users comfortable with Google+ than to have their employers require (or at least encourage) them to use it?…”

General Technology

23.    A Motorized Unicycle? The RYNO Motors Microcycle May Be Future Of Urban Transit  http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/374739/20120817/ryno-motors-unicycle-electric-microcycle-ev-portland.htm  “In a world where personal mobility is dominated by the bland dorkiness of the Segway, a 13-year-old girl and her inventor father are hoping the RYNO Motors microcycle, a motorized unicycle, will revolutionize how mall cops, Arab sheiks and Hollywood glitterati get around. The original concept drawing of the RYNO motorized unicycle by Hoffmann's daughter Lauren. The RYNO has been in development for five years and has gone from a videogame-inspired fantasy to a product and company on the brink of securing series A investment to launch production and global sales. The RYNO looks distinctly like the one-wheeled motorcycles the chimp henchmen in the old Windows 3.1 computer game "Gizmos & Gadgets" rode. "The idea came from my 13-year-old daughter [Lauren]. We were going out fishing one day, and she said, 'Daddy, I saw a one-wheeled motorcycle in a video game. Can you even build that?'" RYNO Motors founder, CEO and inventor Chris Hoffmann said Thursday. Lauren's question stuck with Hoffmann, who has a long history of engineering and tech development…”  http://e-ditionsbyfry.com/Olive/ODE/PDD/Default.aspx?href=PDD/2012/07/01 (pages 16 - 17)

24.    Missing Mozilla Thunderbird? Here are five email alternatives  http://www.zdnet.com/missing-mozilla-thunderbird-here-are-five-email-alternatives-7000000492/  “Mozilla has put Thunderbird out to grass, halting development on the venerable desktop email client. Here are five multi-platform, open-source alternatives for fans looking for a replacement. With the news that Mozilla will no longer be developing its long-standing email client, there will undoubtedly be a lot of disappointed Thunderbird users out there. Worry not: ZDNet has put together a list of five alternative desktop email clients that can be used in place of the venerable software. In general, we've gone for similarly open-source multi-platform clients, eschewing native options such as Microsoft Outlook or Apple Mail. All testing was done a Windows XP machine, so the clients may look slightly different depending on which platform you are using…”

25.    Western Digital retakes lead in hard drive market from Seagate  http://www.zdnet.com/western-digital-retakes-lead-in-hard-drive-market-from-seagate-7000003332/  “Western Digital looks to be on the path to recovery following the floods in Thailand last year, which threw the hard drive market for a loop that hasn't been entirely controled yet…Western Digital retook the lead from Seagate in the global hard drive market during the second quarter of 2012 with roughly 71 million HDD units produced. That's on top of $4.8 billion in revenue for the quarter -- a company record, IHS points out. Fang Zhang, an analyst for storage systems at IHS, explained in the report that Western Digital lost the top spot during the fourth quarter of 2011 following the flooding. It's worth pointing out that Seagate fared better and saw a quicker recovery because its factory is on higher ground than Western Digital's location. Zhang asserted that Western Digital "now has fully recovered from the disaster, allowing it to sharply increase shipments of HDDs for notebook PCs, up 28 percent from the first quarter…” 

Leisure & Entertainment

26.    The Brooklyn bookshop saving out-of-print science fiction, one ebook at a time  http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-08/30/save-the-sci-fi  “With its dramatic cover art and fantastical story plots, science fiction dared readers to dream of amazing possible futures filled with aliens, robots, and all sorts of gadgetry. Now, ironically, some of the earliest books of the genre find themselves precariously near extinction, never to make it to the future they describe. Until Singularity & Co came onto the scene, that is. Lawyer Ash Kalb, musician-anthropologist Cici James, stylist-writer Jamil V Moen, and former Gawker media community manager Kaila Hale-Stern are the intrepid crew behind the Brooklyn-based bookshop. Each month, Singularity & Co -- with the help of its community -- chooses one great out-of-print or obscure science fiction novel, tracks down the copyright holders and makes that work available in DRM-free PDF, Epub and Moni format for subscribers. Founded in April, after a massively successful Kickstarter campaign that earned them 350 percent of their $15,000 (£9,500) goal and kudos from authors like Neil Gaiman, Cory Doctorow and Ken McLeod, Singularity & Co hasn't always had the easiest time unraveling vintage sci-fi's copyright issues. "We knew it would be difficult to track down the legal status of the books, but it's simply much harder than we though it would be…”

27.    Black Mesa to finally launch on September 14^th  http://www.computerandvideogames.com/366081/black-mesa-to-finally-launch-on-september-14th/  “Development of the fan made re-creation of Half-Life, Black Mesa, began in 2004, and it will finally see release on September 14th. Black Mesa was often believed to have fallen into the void of vapourware, but fears have been eased in recent months and on Saturday a first release date was published on the game's website. A post by project leader 'cman2k' on the forum confirms that the game will be made available on September 14th, but the team is "still working hard on Xen and BMDM, but instead of making you wait we are giving you Black Mesa as soon as it's ready…”

28.    Lunar Lander In HTML5: Atari Teams Up With Microsoft  http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/30/missile-command-in-html5-atari-teams-up-with-microsoft-to-bring-8-classic-games-to-the-browser/  “Atari is turning 40 this year and with the help of Microsoft and the HTML5 specialists at gskinner.com, it is now bringing eight of its most popular classic games to the browser. The games are optimized for Internet Explorer 10 and touch controls, but also work well on any other modern browser. To do so, as Microsoft’s general manager for Internet Explorer Ryan Gavin told me yesterday, Atari’s new browser-based arcade uses over 30 new HTML5 and CSS3 standards, including WebSockets, CSS3 media queries, font and text glow, as well as CSS3D transitions and animations. Atari plans to add over 100 games to its library in the coming months, but for now, the available games are Asteroids, Combat, Centipede, Lunar Lander, Missile Command, Pong, Super Breakout and Yar’s Revenge. Many of these games, and especially Missile Command, have been optimized for multi-touch capable devices running IE10 and Windows 8. Most of the games also feature multi-player capabilities using WebSockets…”

Economy and Technology

29.    How Apple And Google Could Make QR Codes Mainstream  http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/01/how-apple-and-google-could-make-qr-codes-mainstream/  “QR codes are everywhere. Frustratingly everywhere in my opinion. Countless companies put them on marketing materials, but not a single person I know actually scans them. I’m friends with lots of smartphone owners, and I’ve literally never, ever seen someone pull out their phone and scan a QR code. There are even a handful of startups that consider QR codes part of their core offering to small businesses. They’re relying on people actually scanning these stupid things for their products to work. Silly. However, as negative as I am about them, QR codes actually make a lot of sense. One of the most challenging things about the gluttony of digital offerings is bridging the gap between the digital and physical world. Mobile devices present the opportunity to do this better than ever. If I’m standing at a store, and they want me to follow them on Twitter, mobile devices allow me to follow them immediately, as opposed to waiting until I get home to do it. QR codes simplify it even more. It’s much easier for me to scan a code and have it take me directly to their Twitter page than have to type in their username. Or even better, if I get a reward for taking a digital action, like filling out a survey, it’s easier to get me to the survey with a scanned code than giving me a URL to enter…”

30.    del.icio.us founder’s Tasty Labs launches Human.io micro-task platform  http://gigaom.com/2012/08/30/delicious-founders-launches-human-io-launches/  “It is always fun to watch successful founders come back into the startup arena again. Joshua Schachter, who created the social-bookmarking service Delicious, is back with Tasty Labs and today released Human.io, a platform for micro-task collaboration. It seems like a good platform for creatives. Joshua Schachter, who in a past life founded the social-bookmarking service delicious and sold it to Yahoo, has released Human.io, the newest offering from his startup, Tasty Labs. Last year, Tasty Labs launched Jig.com, a “market place for things people need.” What is Human.io? To me it appears to be a micro-task platform that uses mobile devices as a way to distribute and aggregate tasks. Schacter defines it as a platform for doing micro-tasks. In a blog post announcing the launch he writes: Human.io provides a simple way to allow a publisher to turn a passive audience into a mobile army of participants. This allows publishers to easily create missions and activities to get people involved more directly than just reading stuff on a screen…”

31.     Facebook Cancels Secondary Offering, Zuck And Board Members Won’t Sell To Keep Shares Off The Market  http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/04/facebook-cancels-secondary-offering/  “With its share price ailing, Facebook doesn’t want to flood the market with any more stock, so it has cancelled its secondary offering and will instead pay for taxes on its RSUs with cash as detailed in an 8-K filed with the SEC today. Also, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has informed the SEC he has no plans to sell any of his stock in the next year. Meanwhile, board members Marc Andreessen and Don Graham will sell some to cover taxes but beyond that “have no present intention to sell any shares”. Along with allowing employees to sell stock two weeks sooner than the original November 14th lockup expiration date, today’s announcement will let Facebook get the lockup over with sooner, avoid a secondary sale or big shareholder dump from hurting its share price, and finally get back to business. In Facebook’s original S-1, it had given itself leeway to sell up to 122 million shares to the public market in a secondary offering to pay for taxes involved in settling the distribution of pre-2011 RSUs. Later it planned to sell 101 million shares to cover these taxes. But now with its share price so volatile, it’s chosen to scrap the secondary offering and spend some of the $10 billion it raised through the high-priced and divisive IPO to pay these taxes in cash…”

DHMN Technology

32.    Memphis engineers, tool enthusiasts develop 3D printing technology  http://www.commercialappeal.com/news/2012/sep/01/memphis-engineers-tool-enthusiasts-develop-3d/  “…"You can make just about anything you could imagine," said Hess, who is president of MidSouth Makers, a nonprofit, communal group of tool enthusiasts with a shared shop space in Bartlett. "If you can make a 3D model of it on a computer, within certain limitations, you can print it." Several members of MidSouth Makers have been building their own 3D printers in the last year. Typically, 3D printing technology, which has been around about 10 years, has been the toy of large-scale manufacturers, whose equipment costs in the tens of thousands. "It's nothing more than a couple motors, a heating element, and putting the plastic into it and it will spit out 3D objects," Hess said. "You take a regular ink jet printer and add an extra motor to it and you've got the third axis."…Hess said one of the most popular items his groups like to print is a whistle. The bead that helps make the sound is printed inside the whistle and detached by a screwdriver. But the potential for small-scale makers is pretty huge. "People are designing custom parts for projects, like custom enclosures for electronics," Hess said. "If you have a piece of electronics that you personally built, you're not going to be able to go and find an enclosure for it. So people are designing a 3D model of a container and they can print it out on their printer.”…The group of 33 members was founded in January 2010. Members pay monthly dues to have 24/7 access to a 1,500-square-foot shop, all of the tools inside it, and the know-how of other members…In major industries, 3D printing companies, chiefly 3D Systems, Stratasys and Proto Labs, saw sharp increases in stock value over the first half of 2012. Matt Cilderman, an investor writing for the investment blog Seeking Alpha, predicted in May that toy companies like Hasbro could lose value if their products can be easily scanned and reproduced with 3D printers…"What can Hasbro do to solve the problem? I think their best bet is to not waste money by lobbying Congress, but to partner with someone like Apple Inc. or Amazon.com Inc. to sell the schematics of their products as DRM (Digital Rights Management) downloads…”

33.    Computer models turn real with 3-D printer  http://www.citizentelegram.com/article/20120830/MISC04/120829974/1002&parentprofile=1001  “…architects Jeff Johnson and Rich Carter are just as pleased with their recent purchase of a three-dimensional printer. The high-tech machine allows the two, partners in Johnson Carter Architects, P.C., in downtown Rifle, to “print out” a 3-D form of anything that can be digitally modeled on their computer system. “The architect business was hurt by the recession just like everyone,” Johnson said. “We were forced to change.”…The firm's printing service, called Rifle Creek Studio, will be marketed to other architects, developers and contractors in the creation of printing small-scale buildings for clients to physically hold…accuracy and detail of the physical models is so intense, the prints even show brick and mortar lines. Print models can range from building design, prototype ideas, gadgets and custom artwork. The printer cost the company $25,000…“If you were to have an architect build a model like this by hand, it would take something like 15 hours, at $100 an hour,” Carter said. “So you have an actual mass you can hold. Sometimes it's hard to visualize the details of something in a 2D drawing…These are kind of like the first pocket calculators,” Johnson said. “Big and expensive, but the technology will improve and they'll be using more flexible material and there will be a smaller scale…All we have to do is figure out how to market it,” Carter said…”

34.    Robot dinosaurs printed in 3D  http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/48162587/ns/technology_and_science-innovation/t/robot-dinosaurs-printed-d/  “…Laser scanners, 3D printers and digital databases are just beginning to gain traction among paleontologists. Most haven’t used a 3D printer, but everyone knows someone who has, said Daniel Fisher, a paleontologist at the University of Michigan who uses laser scanning and 3D printing. "I think that is changing rapidly," he said. "As a new generation of students come along, many of them have been exposed somehow to this…Lacovara's lab in Philadelphia is an example. He is proud that students he mentors will be comfortable with the new technology he has purchased for the lab and calls himself old-fashioned compared with them…we watched Athena Patel, an undergraduate studying biology, scan a fossilized fish skull using a laser…The laser swept over the surface of the skull, gathering millions of data points and sending them to a laptop, where a 3D model of the fossil showed up on-screen. This was one of several scans Patel took. Any single sweep misses some areas of the skull, and so, in between scans, she used a computer program to line up multiple scans to get a complete picture of the fossil. Later, she used another computer program to reshape the skull, which flattened during fossilization…With 3D digital data, scientists who want to study a fossil held in another lab overseas won't need to travel to do so. Two paleontologists anywhere around the world will be able to look at the same fossil at the same time and collaborate on analyzing it…One of the most exciting uses for digital data is that scientists are able to send them to 3D printers and then print them into plastic replicas of the real deal. Researchers can then work with the facsimiles, storing the originals to preserve them in better condition…Lacovara…wants to use the printouts to build dinosaur robots and study how the animals moved…James Tangorra…studies how to mimic the natural, efficient movement of animals in robots. He's working on creating robotic muscles to attach to Lacovara’s 3D printed bones…Lacovara will piece together the limb bones in different configurations, looking for the most energy-efficient design…Scientists think the most efficient skeletal arrangement will be the real one the animal had when it was alive…Scientists can also perform such efficiency studies entirely on a computer, using a program to manipulate the 3D data from a laser scan. Often, this method works well and there is no need to print out bones…Most scientists in the future may use this method because 3D printing will probably remain too time-consuming and expensive…The advantage of getting a printout is that no program precisely replicates all the math and physics of the real world…”

35.    3-D Printing Services At Local Shipping/Printing Stores  http://www.txchnologist.com/2012/3-d-printing-revolution-stymied-by-high-prices  “…Such a development could very well push the price down to about $1,000 in the near future, which is the same amount you would have paid for Hewlett Packard’s first personal DeskJet in 1988. At that price, HP was able to sell enough printers to awaken a whole new market…Those who still could not afford to buy a printer benefited from a relatively new service. By the nineties, Kinko’s copy stores were selling printouts by the page. This trend is just emerging with 3-D printing. A passerby looking through the window into Diane’s Mail Room, a shipping provider in Buckley, Wash., can see the 3D Touch, a $4,000 double-headed 3-D printer, next to the laser printers and inkjets. “We’re probably the most innovative mailbox store you’ve ever seen,” says owner Ted Griffiths. “We’re probably the only retail store in America that’s got one.” He bought the printer in February and charges $15 for every ounce of plastic that is used to print something. So far, only about four customers a month come to print on the machine. They use it for small, personal jobs, just as you would use a copy machine at your local library. Griffiths has made dice, model airplanes, and bride and groom cake toppers from 3-D models of the real people. “We had a couple people coming in to get little car parts made for old cars, windshield wipers and stuff for their pickups,”…Griffiths says he plans on upgrading soon to a ProJet 1500, a higher-end printer that sells for $14,500. “If it takes us five years to get this thing to where people are coming in and using it all the time, that’s okay,”…40 years ago the idea that you could print ten identical copies of a resume probably didn’t even occur to most people…”

36.    3D-Printed EV Racer Hits 88 MPH  http://www.wired.com/autopia/2012/08/3d-print-ev/  “A Belgian team of engineers has produced the first (mostly) 3D-printed automobile, the Areion, for the Formula Student Challenge. The instructions: Create a non-professional weekend autocross or sprint racer for a niche sales market that will be part of a viable business model. The creators, named Formula Group T, turned to 3D printing, specifically “mammoth stereolithography,” a process that uses a massive machine from custom object builder Materialise. The process and device can print out parts up to 2,100 x 680 x 800mm in size, big enough to produce the body for the Areion. The team then tested the car’s limits on the Hockenheim race circuit. Underneath the printed body, an 85 kW motor drawing power from 50-volt lithium polymer batteries sends the Areion from zero to 62 mph in 3.2 seconds with a top speed of 88 mph. Inside is an electric drivetrain made from bio-composite materials, and a bio-composite race seat that brings the total weight to 617 pounds. A double-A carbon wishbone suspension system with titanium uprights keeps the steering tight. 3D printing was responsible for the entire car body, including the shark skin-inspired coarse-textured nose, the aerodynamics of which reduce drag and increase thrust…”

Open Source Hardware

37.    Watch Your Back, Hasbro, 3D-Printed Games Have Arrived  http://www.wired.com/design/2012/08/pocket-tactics-the-3-d-printed-open-source-game/  “3D printers are sometimes called Santa Claus machines because, like Santa, they can create anything imaginable. When used to make actual toys and games, this is especially fitting. The team at Ill Gotten Games is doing just that by creating Pocket Tactics, the first open source miniatures game designed to be manufactured on a 3D printer. In Pocket Tactics, witches and warriors fight to control a diminutive, hexagonal world. Designer Arian Croft says ”it’s so small you could literally play the game on an airplane seat tray.” Consisting of character figurines, tiles, and dice, the pieces can be downloaded from Thingiverse and printed on a MakerBot. A complete set of parts takes several hours to extrude, but games can be played in just over 20 minutes. The tiny project started out on a much more ambitious scale. The three-person Ill Gotten team has spent seven years prototyping a multi-genre role playing game system — think epic battles with wizards fighting vampires while dodging aliens. Then Croft discovered the world of 3D printing, combined it with a portion of his game system, and found near-overnight inspiration. “Pocket Tactics was conceived on Tuesday night and by Friday I had a playable prototype…”        

38.    Tools for open source hardware: Upverter's browser-based EDA tools focus on collaboration, usability  http://www.ept.ca/news/upverters-browser-based-eda-tools-focus-on-collaboration-usability/1001645531/  “…Homuth, the co-founder of Toronto-based Upverter, would like to see nothing less than electronic engineers around the globe accessing his web-based schematic editing tools to design anything that has a printed circuit board (pcb) or that plugs into a socket. Officially launched a year ago by Homuth and his partners Stephen Hamer and Michael Woodworth, Upverter (upverter.com) builds on the progress of the open source hardware community, bringing free and open electronic design automation tools to everyone. “We've moved a lot closer to the enterprise world with our latest upgrades. We are very confident that this will save engineers a bunch of time and money,”…Expanded beyond its original capabilities as strictly a schematic capture tool, Upverter’s online electronics design tools now also perform pcb layout and simulation all together in a single editor on the web browser. This includes schematic diagrams, design hosting, parts library and GitHub integration…”

39.    Open Source Cameras : A new digital innovation  http://www.ciol.com/Open-Source/News-Reports/Open-Source-Cameras-A-new-digital-innovation/165173/0/  “…there exists another concept termed as “Open Source Cameras”, sounds interesting isn't it? It is indeed interesting and is definitely worth a check. Open Source cameras is basically an initiative of the Open Source hardware project and involves intuitive interfaces and an even better user friendly operating environment. Since the performance of a camera is measured by the software that comes pre-loaded with it, naturally this performance level will be on par with the working of the software which in turn may lead to a reduction in the overall functionality of a particular digital/Polaroid camera…researchers have come up with an Open Source camera design prototype that will allow people to download open source software and apps to their cameras and use these cameras in their own way thereby continuously  providing scope for improvement and better performance…People can add their own set of features and make changes since the software that drives these gadgets will be open source. Even developers from throughout the world can continuously work in tandem towards bettering performance and including new, intuitive features that people will enjoy using…The paramount factor here is the open source and open platform software that will give people ( especially developers) a chance to work on its open source nature through which more intuitive features can be added and thus photography can be made more fulfilling and enriching…”

Open Source

40.    HP Releases Two Beta Versions of Open-source WebOS  http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/261840/hp_releases_two_beta_versions_of_opensource_webos.html  “Hewlett-Packard released two beta versions of its open source webOS on Friday: one for developers that runs on the Ubuntu Linux desktop, and one for the "OpenEmbedded" development environment, intended to help developers port webOS to new devices. The August Edition, as the webOS team calls the latest release on the project website, consists of 45 open source webOS components and 450,000 lines of code. The two versions were released under the Apache 2.0 license, which is one of the most liberal and accepted in the open source community…The beta desktop build includes a version of the webOS System Manager that will run as an application on the Ubuntu desktop, the team wrote. System Manager's functions include rendering the webOS Card View, Launcher, Status Bar and other user interface elements. Core webOS applications such as Calendar and Contacts run within System Manager, and the new version also supports apps built with the third party JavaScript framework Enyo…”

41.     Open Source in Action: LinuxCon 2012  http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/31/open-source-in-action-linuxcon-2012/  “I participated in a panel discussion at LinuxCon today with other journalists who cover Linux and open source goings-on, including our own Alex Williams. One of the questions that was asked was “What was the most important story for you this week?” The answers from my peer journalists were interesting, and reflect the diversity in interest (and beats) between us all. From Google’s admission to using — and paying for support for — Ubuntu on the desktop, to Linus’s revelation of a Linux 4.0 release within the next couple of years, the things that piqued our various interests covered the spectrum of what happened this week. When the question was posed to me, my immediate response was “The Hallway track”. For regular conference goers, this is a colloqualism to describe the ad-hoc conversations that spring up in the hallway between sessions. This is where conference participants most interact — both with one another and with session presenters…”

42.    Xfce 4.10, the Sane Linux Desktop  https://www.linux.com/learn/tutorials/624056:xfce-410-the-sane-linux-desktop  “Xfce 4.10 is the latest release of the excellent Xfce desktop, full of useful incremental improvements and no shocking surprises. Workflow and efficiency are everything. I want my Linux graphical environment to be the way I like it, and not an obese system hog. I have a lot of favorite Linux desktop environments (Fluxbox, KDE4, Ratpoison, E17, Razor-qt) and Xfce is always near the top. Xfce 4.10 was released on April 28, and Linux Mint 13 Xfce was released on July 21 with Xfce 4.10. After beating up Linux Mint 13 Xfce for a few weeks my executive summary is Xfce 4.10 is Pretty Darn Good, and a worthwhile upgrade from 4.8. There isn't anything radically new, but more of a nice bit of polish and finishing touches. To me XFCE is a useful blend of the best of GNOME 2 and KDE: It's fairly easy to configure, it uses middle- and right-click menus and it handles GNOME and KDE applications without freaking ou…”

Civilian Aerospace

43.    Why The Space Democratization Movement Blows My Mind  http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/01/why-the-space-democratization-movement-blows-my-mind/  “There’s real movement behind the democratization of space. Not in the form of sending more people into space, but in giving more people access to satellites. Nano-satellites are getting cheap enough now that groups can raise enough money on Kickstarter to buy and launch them. That’s only a slightly interesting development on its own, but what fascinates me is that some of these groups are promising amateur scientists to opportunity to write software for these satellites and essentially rent time on the satellites the way you might have rented time on a mainframe back in the day. That kind of blows my mind. William Gibson, the author of Neuromancer and several other books, wrote a while back about the idea of future fatigue. He starts off by describing the feeling of reading about real life quantum teleportation: In quantum teleportation, no matter is transferred, but information may be conveyed across a distance, without resorting to a signal in any traditional sense. Still, it’s the word “teleportation”, used seriously, in a headline. My “no kidding” module was activated: “No kidding,” I said to myself, “teleportation.” A slight amazement…I suffer from a bad case of future fatigue myself. I read about stuff like this all the time, and just forget about it. “Quantum teleportation? Did I read about that? Yeah, maybe. Seems familiar.” My hypothesis is that we feel this way because it’s taking a long time for our technology to catch up to our imaginations. Siri may be pretty cutting edge voice recognition software, but it’s no HAL…”

44.    LiftPort plans to build space elevator on the Moon by 2020  http://www.gizmag.com/lunar-elevator/23884/  “…a rocket the size of a skyscraper that blasted out jets of smoke and flame as it hurtled skyward. For over half a century, that is how all astronauts have gone into space. It’s all very dramatic, but it’s also expensive. Wouldn’t it be cheaper and easier to take the elevator? That’s the question that Michael Laine, CEO of LiftPort in Seattle, Washington, hopes to answer with the development of a transportation system that swaps space-rockets for space-ribbons. Rockets have done sterling service in launching satellites and astronauts into orbit. The trouble is, they’re inefficient and therefore expensive. Putting a payload into orbit means that the rocket must not only lift the payload, it has to carry the payload, the fuel to lift it and the rocket, the fuel to lift the fuel, the rocket and the payload, the fuel to lift all that and so on. The space elevator is based on the idea of cutting out the middleman and just lifting the payload. It does this by way of a tower of mind-boggling height – from sea level at the equator, clear up to geosynchronous orbit 35,800 kilometers (22,238 mi) up with an elevator for going up and down it …”

*****