On the night after the Heaven's Gate UFO cultists were discovered dead by mass suicide in a San Diego suburban McMansion, I was standing in a dark patch of the Presidio, watching the Hale-Bopp comet and its forked tail over the Marin Headlands. Someone passed around binoculars, somebody else passed a little pipe around, and after a half hour everyone was cold and bored and we drifted back to the battleship-gray Victorian on Haight Street that I shared with a rotating group of five or six pals.
My bedroom was just a large closet on the upper floor, with enough room for a narrow mattress and a chest [...]
Now that the December Wired is hitting inboxes, some women are noticing that the cover image, which is breasts, seems to them like an extension of the magazines use of women as rare decorative objects. (Even while the issue does address advances in tissue reconstruction.) Since in particular women don't make the cover this decade on their Wiredey merits. Fortunately Wired editor Chris Anderson is listening! .bbpBox2588347767726080 {background:url(http://s.twimg.com/a/1288981003/images/themes/theme14/bg.gif) #131516;padding:20px;} p.bbpTweet{background:#fff;padding:10px 12px 10px 12px;margin:0;min-height:48px;color:#000;font-size:18px !important;line-height:22px;-moz-border-radius:5px;-webkit-border-radius:5px} p.bbpTweet span.metadata{display:block;width:100%;clear:both;margin-top:8px;padding-top:12px;height:40px;border-top:1px solid #fff;border-top:1px solid #e6e6e6} p.bbpTweet span.metadata span.author{line-height:19px} p.bbpTweet span.metadata span.author img{float:left;margin:0 7px 0 0px;width:38px;height:38px} p.bbpTweet a:hover{text-decoration:underline}p.bbpTweet span.timestamp{font-size:12px;display:block}
@anildash I hope your 2nd reaction was to read the article, [...]
Oh, more must-read today! In which Joel Johnson discusses Wired editor Chris Anderson's thoughts on "atoms are the new bits." (I know, wot?) "To marvel that you can convince a Chinese company to make a small batch of electronics for you? In many cases, that's when conditions are worst. Try to get something that is more than a greenboard made and you're back to standard manufacturing issues like making dies for stamping parts. Why? Because real 3D printers don't exist yet."
Wired editor Chris Anderson is giving away 200 free copies of his book, Free! (Pause for light laughter.) There are two ways to get a free copy of the book, he blogs. One is: "Impress us with your cool friends (you get FOUR books!)" Can't pull that off? "Impress us with your social media skillz (you get one book)." Wow. It gets… I guess the word is "grosser"?
Nice! This new Nas song (co-produced by the late Heavy D!) would indicate that the excellence of last year's "Nasty" was no fluke, and raises the hope that the new album, Life Is Good, is going to be good indeed, when it ever comes out. (He should change the album title before it does, though. Because, come on, hasn't he read that article in Wired, or the new report from the OECD? Life sucks.)
This sure is a neat graph in Wired, to accompany the new theory that "the web is dead" and that the future is apps. The graph explains that, since 1990, usage of the "web" has peaked (at about 50% of Internet use, in 2000) and has since declined, to about 23% of Internet use. There's another graph that might be of interest when looking at this!
This seems to be the March cover of Wired. That coverline is: "MONEY wants to be FREE"! So listen. No, it doesn't. That's the last thing money wants. In fact, as money moves closer towards free, it loses value. Money hates to lose value. Money's life goals include: 1. Not losing value and 2. Gaining value. Anyway, maybe this is a joke mock-up cover they made for some free Wired party, where all the food was free, and no one had a salary, because their work was free. But if it does arrive in people's mailboxes (for free), they're gonna have some serious explaining to do, which they [...]
In 2008, Wired editor Chris Anderson brought in circa $2 million in speech fees. His forthcoming book, "Free: The Future of a Radical Price," says the promotional materials, "makes the compelling case that in many instances businesses can profit more from giving things away than they can by charging for them."
If you're one of the ten people on the Internet who haven't read the new Wired cover story that went online last night, you probably should join the rest. It describes how, beginning in 2001, when warrantless wiretapping by the NSA began, they started with recording "320 million calls a day." Which we began to learn about in 2005. Oh, do you already feel bad about the way the materials for your iPhone are gathered? Well, feel worse! Because AT&T provides the government secret access to your billing records. (So does Verizon.) And now the government is building the computing and storage infrastructure to really start analyzing [...]
Hey, remember how we saw that Wired piece on Money Wanting To Be Free coming down the pike and we were like, uh, oh boy? Hey, it is here now! And it asks: "What if people could transfer money over Twitter for next to nothing, simply by typing a username and a dollar amount?" Well, what if I could shit gold coins, and pay people simply by pulling down my pants? That is totally possible as well, if I swallowed a bunch of gold coins and then had the ability to excrete at will. Let's make this happen, people! Okay, but seriously, it's fair to agree with [...]
