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The ever-insightful Jon Taplin has this image on his site today, along with more interesting analysis of the current financial clusterfuck:

I just about lost my coffee through my nose when I saw this. Yes. Jump. All of you. Right now.

…is my thriteith birthday. I’ve heard that the thirties kick ass. I’m looking forward to how this next decade will turn out. If I reach forty without losing any hair, buying an expensive car, wearing ties on a regular basis, or growing a paunch, I think I’ll have done okay.

From McSweeney’s: Plato’s Allegory of the Cave as Explained by Popeye to Bluto:

POPEYE: I’m gonna explain ta yer that we’s is either dumb or not so dumb, accordin’ ta how ya figger out this allergorter. See, there’s fellers livin’ in a cave and they canst sees nobody or nothin’. They’s been there since they were little infinks and they’s got their arms and legs all locked up. An’ they canst move their necks, neither. So all they can sees is some shadders of gentlesmen what’s comin’ from a fire behind their backs. Garshk, it’s like bein’ in a puppet-show circus.

BLUTO: Argerghirrnama!

Here’s a wonderful animation based on the audio track from a recorded interview with John Lennon. Enjoy:

The first installment in the Science Fiction and Fantasy Book cover review is now up on Tor.com. Go check it out.

It’s 3:26am local time, San Diego. I’m having a cigarette on a very nice outdoor balcony at my hotel, and I figured it’s as good a time as any to try out the new WordPress app for the iPhone. I’ll link to it later, the iPhone’s lack of copy/paste makes linkability…problematic, to say the least.

It’s been intense so far: panels, shooting the daily artist demo, finding some corner in which to blog (I discovered some nice balconies way too late in the day. Note to self: use them), tech issues to sort out, etc.

On the plus side, much, much win. Hung with the folks at io9, met Vernor Vinge, Steven Moffat, Jon Foster, Walter Koening. Had dinner with some of my Tor peeps and Tobias Buckell. Saw a kickass demo of Spore. check out the coverage on www.tor.com.

Via Boing Boing: In reaction to the Swedish government’s decision to pass a law that makes it legal for the authorities to spy on phone calls and network connections that ‘leave the country’ –essentially every connection, due to the way their telco system is set up– the Pirate Bay has decided to not only promote but host a suite of crypto tools to help regular internet users like you and me protect our privacy. In addition to securing their own website with SSL, TPB will offer cheaper versions of the VPN services they’ve been offering up until now, and open up access to said services to the international internet community. This, in addition to Google’s announcement that it will be developing tools for consumers to monitor whether their ISP is throttling their connection, seems to herald a future in which regular internet users will have to resort to additional techniques and services in order to keep their net neutral.

As telcos, governments, and entertainment companies conspire to ‘crack down’ on so-called illegal activities on the internet, push forward anti-net neutrality initiatives, and destroy emerging technologies in the name of safeguarding their intellectual properties, I wonder: Is this the shape of things to come? Will the future of the free internet resemble the file-sharing darknets, as opposed to a free (as in speech) and open communications network? It’s probably too early to tell, but things don’t look good.

As many have noted in the past, when you criminalize ordinary citizens’ activities, you essentially back people into a corner, and force them to resort to activities that are labeled as illegal in order for them to go about their business with some sort of semblance of privacy. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Shades of Little Brother, indeed. It’s all-too plausible to imagine a world in which children will have to learn how to use technologies such as the TOR router and other privacy-ensuring software in the same way they learn how to use a web browser or an e-mail client. Those that toe the line and remain on the public (and surveilled) internet will suffer from a greatly diminished online experience. The future free internet might be composed of hacked Xboxes running Paranoid Linux, after all.

Posting will probably be greatly diminished around here this week, as I prepare to move to a new home over the coming weekend. As of right now, half my possessions (read: books) are in boxes, and the other half (read: computers and printmaking stuff) is in a state of mind-crippling disarray. Madness, I tell you.

After next week, I’ll be heading off on vacation back home to Puerto Rico, from where I probably will be posting, since there’s nothing better for engendering shadenfreude in my readers than posting from a tropical island.

Here’s a few items of note from around the web:

The Associated Press works on its corporate bully-fu. They want to extort money from anyone who wants to quote more than five words from their stories, even if the usage is covered under fair use guidelines. Others have expounded on this over the last few days, including PNH, Cory Doctorow, and John Scalzi. Once those three get into it, all I can do is issue a hearty “What they said”, and leave it at that.

Castro’s still tickin’. He’d been MIA for a while (at least in terms of media exposure), but re-surfaced in a silent video that’s been posted on the Beeb.

Despite initial hopes to the contrary, scientists have yet to find any indication of water in the soil samples collected and processed by the Mars Phoenix Lander. Oh, and that white material that was originally thought to be ice? could be ice, or could be salt. Stay up to date with MarsPhoenix via Twitter.

In the ‘toldja so’ department, the results of a survey sponsored by British Music Rights state that most young people are willing to pay for music, as long as it’s DRM-free and they can do whatever they want with it, i.e. own their media. Ars has a great writeup on that.

Here’s a handy countdown for when the Large Hadron Collider at CERN is scheduled to go online. For those of you with an apocalyptical bent, naysayers think that the LHC will generate a black hole that we won’t be able to control, and will end up eating our planet. For those of us who think otherwise, we’re fervently hoping for the CERN team to spot the elusive Higgs boson, or so-called ‘god particle.’

. . . and now Salon’s saying it too: it’s not unthinkable that Barack Obama would choose a Republican as his running mate. If he could pull it off, it could go a long way towards creating a good, wholesome sense of bipartisanship. Improbable, unlikely, and possibly ill-advised? Sure. Especially if it’s not the right Republican.

Now, I don’t necessarily think Chuck Hagel is the right one (anti-choice? anti-gay? screw that), but I’d be hard-pressed to think of who would be ideal off the top of my head, since I’m not very familiar with the more moderate—hence less headline-grabbing—Republicans out there. Ironically enough, four or five years ago, John McCain would have sprung to mind.