George Rebane

Amazon to save newspapers with its new large-screen Kindle, so reports the 05may09 NYT.

Now the recession-ravaged newspaper and magazine industries are hoping for their own knight in shining digital armor, in the form of portable reading devices with big screens.

And just in the nick of time, judging by the looks of things.  But not so fast, see below.

Brownouts on the Internet.  Some experts say that by next year or so we should start experiencing the WorldWide Wait for real as the Internet’s backbone pipes start getting clogged with too much traffic.  Right now we don’t care how many YouTube videos we watch or how many 12MB attachments we send to our friends and colleagues – the marginal cost of such behavior is zero.  But it won’t be for long; more here.

Economic Armageddon by 2012?  Those of you girding your loins for what our government is cooking up are probably noticing a whole bunch of reports that confirm your worst fears.  Well, here’s another one (3:43 min YouTube video) by master financial prognosticator Gerald Celente.

In the minority, RR reader Scott Obermuller expresses some typical grassroots frustrations about what the government is cooking up (printed by permission) –

Contract law is nothing more than a speed bump for “progressives” who would do the peoples business.  The way and course are clear in this nastiness.  Consider BO’s upbringing and education.  Add in his associations on the left in his early formative years in training.  A quick tutelage under one of the infamous Daleys, and you have a full blown lefty who has never had to nor been exposed to anyone who has risked hard earned capital.  It’s all a game of ‘who has who’ to BO.  Hard work and risk are nothing more than folk myth to a child of wanton greed such as are the well-heeled offspring of the idle rich that populate the elite ranks of the left.  BO is a steel-eyed leftist humanist who would advance the human cause through various machinations of his own doings, oblivious to the well chronicled pitfalls of those who have tried all of this before.  This time it will be different, he thinks – because it is I who will be in control.

Not to be discounted, the Tea Party movement will now also serve as ‘aggregation central’ for such feelings.

In the same vein, local businessman and RR reader Mike McDaniel writes in the Union’s Other Voices: ‘Let’s give free market capitalism a try’.

“Would you pay $68,000 to unlock the secrets of your genetic code?” asks ScientificAmerican.com here.  Apparently the bidding for this service that recently cost $2M is not going well these days according to the auctioneer Knome Inc.  If you are generally healthy, have no dreaded disease ridden ancestry, and do a little Bayesian decision analysis, you’ll probably wait until it gets much cheaper.  Anyone care to predict what this service will cost three years from now (assuming we don’t have “affordable” government health care shoved down our collective throats)?

Could the Internet become self-aware?  RR readers are familiar with this notion as, perhaps, the event signaling the advent of the Singularity (see Singularity Signposts and links therefrom).  The NewScientist.com reports – “The internet behaves a fair bit like a mind,” says Ben Goertzel, chair of the Artificial General Intelligence Research Institute, an organisation inevitably based in cyberspace. “It might already have a degree of consciousness” (emphasis mine).  Notice that we now have a specific field called ‘artificial general intelligence’ (AGI) to distinguish it from AI, a label that is relegated to specific areas of knowledge many of which are already commercialized.  Good or bad, it’s coming, and only the current programs of ‘hope’ and ‘change’ can throw some sand in the gears to slow it down.

Re the I-80 detour – Caltrans’ mailed announcement about a 29apr09 local informational meeting arrived yesterday (5may09).  I wonder what caused that delay given all the hullabaloo about timely notifications and community input that’s going on at Russ’s place (NC Media Watch).  There he’s being pursued rather relentlessly by the Pair Pellinos, a dynamic duo that doesn’t seem to understand Russ’s role as a commentator who needs not subscribe to their or anyone else’s views on ‘balance’.  (There commenter Ralph Short does try to make the obvious more obvious, to no avail.  Jeff Ackerman in his Union piece yesterday also threw a little more oil on these roiled waters.)  Maybe Russ can now take a break and look into such mail delays that seem to hamper Caltrans’ best efforts.