I'm indebted to those that posted here, and heartily, if tearfully, thank them. That made my day.

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Now, can we do something about the Canadian government? I know they're supposed to "serve" us, but look at the track record. Our politicians have only twenty digits. Ancient MIT devices parsing primes could do better back in the eighties. Please, please! Send up an Obama replacement for our "server," and we won't nuke it!

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After your President leaves today, of course... :-)

Two words: resale value.

I've always been a big Robert Heinlein fan, and the character of D.D. Harriman was particularly fun to imagine.

With this, it looks like Bob's vision of commercial space flight is finally starting to stretch to the plateau that he saw. I'm more than excited: maybe this means that that elusive space elevator is possible too? Oh, not by the same people, but hey! Maybe that's the next step.

In any case, kudos to the two companies. Thanks for seeing Mr. Heinlein's vision come true.

Thanks for this. I was really inspired by the bottom-quote today, in light of most of the responses to this article:

The more I see of men the more I admire dogs. -- Mme De Sevigne, 1626-1696

I don't know if context is the most important part of this, although it's more relevant than other issues brought forth. (Emo kids? GW Bush? Fuck me...) The real issue here is the abuse -- abuse to death!!! -- of another person. I personally don't care what the mechanic of that abuse was: MySpace, stalking, kidnapping, Facebook, playground bullying, financial or identity theft... what was the end result?

The result was the death of a human being. Period.

It's really nice to sit back on a forum and analyze, and dissociate. It's easy to remove yourself from the humanity of the situation. I'm not a social networker, but I'm as choked as anyone that something Internet-related was involved in something this heinous. That said, this reflects our evolution. We've gone from the playground to the virtual ground, from the meatspace to cyberspace. The mechanic is different; the results of abuse and violent behaviour are the same.

I'm not sure which makes my guts clench more: the fact that some psychotic bitch was able to use a supposedly-benign site to inspire another person to end their own life, or the idiotic, inhuman responses I've seen here from people reacting to this story. Even given that most of these crass responses are from ignorant adolescents who know the value of human existence from Halo and Half Life, I'm fucking appalled at what I've read.

Thanks for participating. Perhaps you're too jaded to suffer such abuse to such an extreme. I hope that everyone you love is as strong as you. Otherwise, you'll be reading these responses with the bitterness and bile that I'm sure the victim's family has.

Yes, Toe. Good call.

Anyone for a grendel cluster of imaginary, EU-sponsored grids?

I'm not a visionary in this space, by any means, but it seems that "cloud," "grid," and the like are being bantered around willy-nilly, like some sort of scientific Web 3.0 mantra that will propagate and solve all the problems that the physicists and mathematicians are encountering getting computer time.

Now, that's not as cynical as it sounds. We've heard this stuff from a lot of very "credible" sources in the past, and even seen some very viable solutions to this, in many number-crunching areas.

I've yet to see, however, any viable option proposed by a concrete, wide-spread and (forgive me) organized body that really convinced me that something like this is on the horizon. SETI was dis-organized. The genome project was dis-organized. Is this any different?

Unfortunately, I think so. By putting a "cloud" or "grid" under a bubble of government organization, somehow this seems to correlate to an impetus to regionalize the benefits into a small area, and really not let it benefit from a wider frame of resources. Obvious? Probably. Why let those snippets of information out into the public?

Well, because that's where the computing power is. My question is: when are the powers that be going to understand that there are more flops out in the meatworld than they have at their fingertips, and make use of them? If these questions, problems and potential solutions are important, then all of the resources should be utilized. Encryption? Maybe. Compartmentalization? Perhaps. But there's got to be a better answer than these proposed government botnets that seek to harness something that is already willing to be granted.

Man, all of that really sounds paranoid, doesn't it? :-)

Oh, and I really like the idea of Grendel clusters!

Man, I should forward the email I just got from a blogger, in reply to one of my posts. If there wasn't a difference between her brain and the electronic medium, then she wouldn't have written the tripe she did, in such an obviously "blunted" state.

I've never had such a basic lesson in the distance between mind and medium in my in-box before. Some 60's parent's didn't live in vain.

I see so many new applications, improvements, and developments out there, and nine-nines of them never make it to consumer use, or even to specialized uses in specific labs and industries.

I realize (from above) that this isn't new, but it's new to me, and it looks like a very, very interesting interface. Virtual keyboards? Too esoteric, even for a geek like me. Gestural control? No. I've tried those mouse-gesture control thingy's, and they're okay, but too intrusive. But if I could merely tap, click or trace on ANYTHING... now that's something I could readily and easily incorporate into my interface!

I hope CM pulls an MIT and makes sure this gets a real chance at flowering. Heck, even the non-geeks out there can tap a finger, can't they? Hmmm... paraplegics? What a boon!

I disagree. It's not only creative, but very lucrative. And the models in the (wet) white tank-tops didn't hurt. T'was a Bud Light ad, my friend.

I'm really sorry you weren't invited... perhaps you were coding a pet food web page at the time? ;-)

I've worked with a studio in Toronto that uses these cameras, especially for the image capture. I've been most impressed with the quality of images I've gotten out of it. I was giving them a really insane task (capturing a spray of liquid) and they came back with a "no problemo" answer. I didn't believe.

Needless to say, when we got to studio shooting, it was as seamless as spraying beer around a closed area could be (please allow for physics in this case!). If equipment like this wasn't available at an affordable price to smaller studios, there would be a lot of creative visions that wouldn't be realized. As another post above said, not everyone can afford to rent a Panavision for a day... especially when that day could be a few... or a few weeks.