The catapults can launch cats to leap 18 inches to 6 feet. The idea is for a cat to launch from one pad and land on another, thereby launching the cat on that pad to yet another pad.

Sculptor Invents Catapult Toy

The coffee-houses that sprang up across Europe, starting around 1650, functioned as information exchanges for writers, politicians, businessmen and scientists. Like today's websites, weblogs and discussion boards, coffee-houses were lively and often unreliable sources of information that typically specialised in a particular topic or political viewpoint. They were outlets for a stream of newsletters, pamphlets, advertising free-sheets and broadsides. Depending on the interests of their customers, some coffee-houses displayed commodity prices, share prices and shipping lists, whereas others provided foreign newsletters filled with coffee-house gossip from abroad.

Coffee-houses: The Internet in a Cup

It's the FBIs, NSAs, and Equifaxes of the world versus a swelling movement of Cypherpunks, civil libertarians, and millionaire hackers. At stake: Whether privacy will exist in the 21st century.

Cypherpunks write code.

In the Los Angeles of the not too distant future, perhaps the hipster's first question will not be about your car; rather, it will be about your code.

"V unir n qernz ..."

Crypto Rebels

The most profound effects of the music industry's efforts are not about music.

This is a proxy war. Ostensibly the fight is about music, but the veil is thin. This is Afghanistan in the 1980s.

Are you mujahideen?

The RIAA Succeeds Where the Cypherpunks Failed

Clay Shirky argues that the RIAA has succeeded, where the cypherpunks failed, in bringing encryption to the masses.

The RIAA makes everyone a cypherpunk

The Museum currently has over 80 aircraft and dozens of space artifacts on display including the Space Shuttle "Enterprise"; an SR-71 Blackbird reconnaissance aircraft; the Dash 80 prototype of the Boeing 707; the B-29 Superfortress "Enola Gay;" and the de Havilland Chipmunk aerobatic plane, to name a few. The Space Shuttle will soon undergo restoration inside the Space Hangar where it now resides.

Air France has donated one of its recently decommissioned Concorde aircraft to the new musuem. It will be put on display next year.

Steven F. Udvar Hazy Center

More than a simple tally of engineering achievements, A Century of Innovation is proof positive that the genius and the talent of the world’s engineers have truly transformed the way people live.

Go engineers!

A Century of Innovation: The Engineering that Transformed Our Lives

Our panelists, all respected Computer Scientists introduce topics as new disclosures are made, and the forum is open to the public for discussion. This site is hosted at the Information Security Institute at Johns Hopkins University.

I presume Bill Joy will be joining the center any day now? Surely genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics are open to abuse, right? I have to wonder if the panelists realized the fundamental alignment with Joy's argument when they established the Center. There is no mention of Bill Joy on the web site.

This center needs to rapidly expand its scope (and membership) beyond information technology.

Abusable Technologies Awareness Center

(My rephrasing of Mitch Ratcliffe's notes)

Sclavos: "The next three years of innovation in technology is about integration. ... We route half the calls in North America and will move that to the Internet in the next year. The RBOCs are both our largest customers and our largest competitors.

This is not your grandfather's Internet. It's time to stop playing consensus builder and go commercial, like every other industrial revolution.

We need to move the complexity back into the center of the Net. The edge can't be so complex.

SiteFinder was a way of monetizing DNS searches. We're not going to let this go. We are laying the groundwork to bring back SiteFinder, and we will find new ways to monetize DNS. We will talk more about this in the future."

Here we go again with the "we've always done it that way" argument.

I find it telling that Sclavos thinks the Internet is just another industrial revolution.

Stratton Sclavos at Red Herring Conference

(Rephrasing of notes from Ross Mayfield)

Sclavos: "There are 400 million plus users, and the majority of them like SiteFinder. 200 people are against it, and they turned the press against it. SiteFinder was a way to monetize DNS lookups.

We have to move the complexity back into the center of the network and remove it from the edge."

Oh. My.

Maybe the SEC should institute mandatory drug testing.

Stratton Sclavos at Red Herring Conference