Golden Gate Bridge directors voted decisively Friday to try to stop people from jumping to their deaths from the landmark bridge by hanging nets along the sides of the span.

This is totally assinine.

Bridge directors vote for net to deter suicides

Jeffrey Nelson, a spokesman for Verizon, said the company was exploring ways to charge fees to commercial senders of text messages to add a new revenue stream to its wireless business.

“It is not a free service,” Mr. Nelson said. “It didn’t cost us zero to build or to buy spectrum rights.”

This is obscene. The marginal cost to deliver SMS is practically zero.

Verizon Wireless Plans to Charge Senders of Text Messages - NYTimes.com

But the laboratory is too big and heavy to employ the bouncing cocoon of airbags that cushioned the landings of Spirit and Opportunity. Instead, engineers devised a completely new landing scheme. After parachutes slow the spacecraft’s descent through the atmosphere, rocket thrusters are to fire, enabling the craft to slow to a stop and hover in midair. The rover would then be lowered via a winch to the surface. (The hovering part of the spacecraft would fly away and crash.)

I hadn't heard this detail before. This seems pretty ambitious. And it's powered by RTGs so it could leave radioactive mess if it crashes.

New Cost Overrun Bedevils Planned Mission to Mars - NYTimes.com

Today [08/15/07], the Graham-Dodd approach produces a very different picture from the one that Wall Street has been offering. Based on average profits over the last 10 years, the P/E ratio has been hovering around 27 recently. That’s higher than it has been at any other point over the last 130 years, save the great bubbles of the 1920s and the 1990s. The stock run-up of the 1990s was so big, in other words, that the market may still not have fully worked it off.

Remembering a Classic Investing Theory - New York Times

Speculation has started to mount in recent months that Fujitsu, which shares server technology and manufacturing with Sun, will seek a merger with the company.

Sun Microsystems: A Lesson in Failed Cosmetic Surgery - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com

The ingenuity and sheer incredibleness of the creations in the Little Big Planet beta continues to ratchet up with each passing day. I really was not expecting to see anything that could top the video we posted yesterday which recreated the theme to Final Fantasy X, but it's been done: Behold the "Little Big Computer."

The creator, PSN user 'Upsilandre,' admits that there are probably easier ways to create a calculator, but he opted to create an electronic calculator capable of doing decimal and binary conversions, as well as addition and subtraction. It was built using more than 1600 parts, including 610 magnetic switches, 500 wires, and 430 pistons. I find it difficult to wrap my head around organizing that many things, let alone making them the backbone of a functioning calculator.

ZOMG!!!

Working Calculator Constructed in Little Big Planet

A week spent reviewing data has confirmed that the flight went really well, including the coast and restart. The mood here at SpaceX is just ecstatic! This is the culmination of six years of hard work by a very talented team. It is also a great relief for me, who led the overall design of the rocket (not a role I expected to have when starting the company). I felt a little sheepish receiving the AIAA award for the most outstanding contribution to the field of space transportation two weeks before this flight.

Space Exploration Technologies Corporation - Updates

A federal panel of policy makers and scientific experts urged a government-wide evaluation Tuesday of programs that sift through databases looking for clues on terrorism, to determine whether the programs are effective and legal.

Study of Data Mining for Terrorists Is Urged - NYTimes.com

The presidential candidates claim to see America’s energy future, but their competing visions have a certain vintage quality. They’ve revived that classic debate: the hard path versus the soft path.

Findings - Energy Lessons From the ’70s - Hard Power vs. Soft Power - NYTimes.com

Greed underlies every market outcome, good or bad. When important conditions are met, greed not only poses no threat to Smith’s “invisible hand” of competition, but is an essential part of it.

The forces that produced the current crisis actually reflect a powerful dynamic that afflicts all kinds of competitive endeavors. This may be seen clearly in the world of sports.

Economic View - Pursuit of an Edge, in Steroids or Stocks - NYTimes.com