] America's inmate population grew by 2.9 percent last
] year, to almost 2.1 million people, with one of every 75
] men living in prison or jail.

Look to your right, look to your left. Now, look to that neighbor's other side. And that neighbor's side.... One of you may be in Prison. Wow. Think about, if this ratio were demographically uniform, which it is not, how many people from your elementary, or high school, or college class should be in prison at this time. Or your little league. Or whatever.

Yahoo! News - Report: 1 of Every 75 U.S. Men in Prison

] The result has been $100M animation budgets. Even "Sky
] Captain", which was supposed to be a low-budget effects
] movie, is headed towards that figure. (The production
] team screwed up, and now ILM is bailing them out. ILM
] makes a sizable fraction of their money bailing out the
] botched productions of others.)

Shrek 2 How-To

] The Federal Aviation Administration's Associate
] Administrator for Commercial Space Transportation
] (FAA/AST) is expected next month to certify that the
] Mojave Airport Civilian Flight Test Center as a
] non-federal spaceport to handle horizontal launches of
] reusable spacecraft.
]
] As such, Mojave Airport can offer a range of launch and
] landing services making it a hub for high-flying craft
] intended to help spark public space travel. The Mojave
] Airport is located approximately 100 miles north of Los
] Angeles, in southeastern Kern County, along the western
] edge of the Mojave Desert.

Spaceport to Rise in California's Mojave Desert

] Wright: I'm uncollecting. I buy collections on eBay,
] and I disperse them out to people again. I have to be
] like an entropic force to collectors, otherwise all of
] this stuff will get sorted. It's like the opposing force,
] uncollectors.
]
] All of these things are collections of weird stuff. I
] go to estate sales and pick up collections from people
] who got tired of collecting.
]
] GameSpy: Are you trying to start a movement?
]
] Wright: No, it's just a hobby. It's fun.
]
] GameSpy: How much stuff have you uncollected so far?
]
] Wright: A lot.
]
] GameSpy: What are some of the things you have uncollected
] so far?
]
] Wright: Oh, lets see %u2026 little dolls--souvenir
] dolls from cities, dice, fossils, a lot of stuff.
]
] GameSpy: How much are you willing to spend on an
] uncollection?
]
] Wright: I don't spend much on it. It's always really
] cheap stuff. I've been spending my real money on Russian
] space hardware.
]
] GameSpy: Russian space hardware?
]
] Wright: Control panels, controllers, joysticks%u2026
]
] GameSpy: From Sputnik?
]
] Wright: Soyuz, Mir...

Except that with the Russian pins -- if these are like the russian pin collections being hawked at Red Square, they have bazillions of them and they go for $2-10, depending on how you negotiate. They always claim they are authentic, and they are nice and metal and old seeming, but you get the distinct sense there is a factory somewhere making them and they sell for $1 or so.

Good interview. Neat character.

GameSpy: Breakfast with Will

] Global warming is now advancing so swiftly that only a
] massive expansion of nuclear power as the world's main
] energy source can prevent it overwhelming civilisation,
] the scientist and celebrated Green guru, James Lovelock,
] says.

Something like this. I refuse to believe that it can not be done safely. Lovelock is a pretty interesting character, and he seems to agree. Fusion would be nice, but has the same safety issues. Really. Fission and Fusion is /where the energy is/ (in the universe). Maybe gravitation, but we don't know enough about how that works. All the other power technology is secondary or tertiary -- solar is just distance fusion, fuels are just stored energy from a previous fission, fusion or gravitation process. Why shouldn't we cut out the middle lossy processes, if we can?

News

] Buckminster Fuller pointed out nearly 50 years ago that
] the cost (in both $ and "lost energy" terms) of sharing
] power across great distances was rapidly dropping because
] it's a function of the voltage you can push the power up
] to. If you can transform it up to a million volts, you
] can share power across, say, 10,000km (all North America)
] with only a percent or so lost in transmission. This much
] is now becoming common today. BC and Alberta made out
] like bandits selling power to California during it's
] artificial "crisis" the other year.

Slashdot | Creator of the Gaia Hypothesis Urges Nuclear Power

] Microsoft has spent more on securing its software than
] was spent on the Star Wars missile project, the company's
] head of security has told conference guests. An
] unfortunate analogy for Iain Mulholland to use since the
] project was a complete failure and little more than the
] private obsession of a few top American ego-maniacs.

Techworld.com - Microsoft security spend greater than the Star Wars missile system

] So when Clark found the new generation of road sensor,
] Arnu drove out to help investigate further. The pair
] found that, at close range, they could use a handheld
] frequency counter to pick up the wireless signals given
] off by the devices as a car passes. Over the following
] month and half, Clark and Arnu engaged in a kind of
] geocaching game with the Men in Black, systematically
] sniffing out the road sensors with the frequency counter,
] exhuming them, and opening them up. They discovered that
] each device was coded with three-digit identifier that
] could be read off an internal dial, allowing Arnu to make
] a list that correlated each unit's I.D. number with its
] GPS coordinates, creating a virtual map of a portion of
] the surveillance network surrounding the Groom Lake
] facility. Some of the sensors were miles away from the
] base.

Interesting sensor network...

SecurityFocus HOME News: Area 51 hackers dig up trouble

] CRS-1, which previously had been code-named HFR for Huge
] Fast Router, also is the first core router to offer 40
] gigabit-per-second optical interfaces. Rumors and
] speculation about the product have circulated for almost
] a year.
]
] Four carriers, including Deutsche Telekom, Sprint, MCI
] and NTT Communications, were at a Cisco event here
] Tuesday to kick off the router. The carriers said they
] have been working with Cisco for the past few years to
] develop the product, which can be clustered through a
] switch fabric chassis to reach a routing capacity of 92
] terabits per second.

Interesting bits on the probable lag in selling, as well.

Cisco's $500 million router - News - ZDNet

] So he decided to make a camera that could create an image
] as awe-inspiring as the vista before him. The result was
] R1, a 110-pound, 6-foot film camera that produces what
] experts say are some of the highest-resolution landscape
] photographs ever made.
...
] But when Ross' 9-inch-by-18-inch negatives are digitally
] scanned, the result is decidedly high-tech. Each image yields
] a 2.6-gigabyte file — huge for a single image.

Yahoo! News - Photographer Makes High-Resolution Camera