If anyone is truly interested in this, then they should google "Billion Dollar Charlie" who is the MIT Professor running the show here.

Also, there's a good interview on the Podcast "Search Engine" with Charles. You're clever enough. I'll let you find it.

I sold my Commodore Amiga 4000 in 1994. A few months later, someone phoned to ask if it was still available. They were willing to give me either money for it or a fully-loaded Pentium 60MHz machine.

This might be a useful comparison in relative worth.

The patent application makes for interesting reading, and they have certainly developed a clever system for monitoring their customers and the relationships they have with other callers. The application states the obvious: It is easier to retain customers than to search for new ones, and with church rates of possibly 50% to 70% of subscribers per year, this is something that mobile providers have to worry about.

But I think this misses the point completely. Why are people churning? Could it be that mobile telephone service has become a commodity, and that mobile users are unable to discern any difference in call quality or service level between mobile providers? That is also a possibility.

Not to mention the multitude of different calling packages that mobile operators offer. There are so many different plans with different features and options that consumers are unable to make a rational, meaningful decision on which plan is best for them. And so maybe the carriers have caused churn in the first place: If I can't tell I'm getting the best value for the money, my best option is to keep switching plans and carriers, as the odds of me ever discovering the One True Plan are vanishingly small.

Unlike something like Google Mail, offering a single user access to the Google Wave experimental servers just doesn't make sense at all. This is a collaborative tool. The magic is in working on waves with others.

The people at Google are pretty smart. I've been following Wave progress in the news and on blogs, but so far no one has answered this question.

Wintermute is just the Turing code for an AI in Berne, although the entity you wish to write to is really just some sort of sub-program.

Now I see the problem: The Dutch translation is the only one I know of that doesn't use a word very similar in spelling to the original "Neuromancer" in the title.
Is the Dutch title a combination of Xanadu and magician?

Would that happen to be Wintermute Ave, Newark, Licking, Ohio 43055?

Your post got me curious and Google Maps reports that there is only one place with that name. There's even a streetview of it http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=Wintermute+Ave,+Newark,+Licking,+Ohio+43055&sll=40.046655,-82.442586&sspn=0.009034,0.027466&ie=UTF8&ll=40.046655,-82.439282&spn=0.009034,0.01929&z=16&iwloc=A&layer=c&cbll=40.046692,-82.443081&panoid=BMYfmgDPuflnGagk4td1fg&cbp=13,0,,0,5.

Wherever it is, post a picture. Some of us would like that very much.

Incidentally, it seems very appropriate that the Google Street View van is visible along much of the street as a shadow cast by the setting sun. Capturing the artifacts in the story is something that William Gibson would appreciate.

The BBC radio play is really a hack job. Entire places and people that are pivotal to the book are removed, and of what remains, the people in the story have different motivations for their actions. It was like a bad 15th-generation copy of something brilliant: You could still make it out from under the smudges and corruption, but it was no longer the same thing at all.

Gibson didn't have cell phones, but he did have something even more interesting:1 When Molly goes to inquire about the Panther Moderns for the Sense/Net run, her contact thumbs a new 'soft into his socket and discovers that she's got "a rider".

Essentially, Molly was wired and Case could sense everything she did while he was plugged into his deck at home. Sure, Gibson had pay phones, but he had some sort of wireless communications channel too for Molly and Case that's better than any cell phone to date.

Yes, the reference to memory size in Neuromancer is horribly dated. But I can't think of another case where the book still doesn't seem fresh.

I read Neuromancer as an impressionable teen. I have to admit that it has been one of the two best books to prepare me for the world of today. Computers, AI, biotechnology, governments, multinationals, political disenfranchisement, reproductive technology, networking, drugs, poverty, wealth, history, and the human condition all spring to mind. I would be a very different person if I had not read this book (again and again) and not one for the better. Thank you William Gibson.