This San Francisco Chronicle story: Continent-size toxic stew of plastic trash fouling swath of Pacific Ocean, discusses "the so-called Great Pacific Garbage Patch - a heap of debris floating in the Pacific that's twice the size of Texas, according to marine biologists. The enormous stew of trash - which consists of 80 percent plastics and weighs some 3.5 million tons, say oceanographers - floats where few people ever travel, in a no-man's land between San Francisco and Hawaii."

But according to the wikipedia article on North Pacific Gyre, some details of this are in error: "Some sources[2] have incorrectly reported that there is a 'floating continent' of debris that is roughly twice the size of Texas, however no scientific investigation, including Moore's, has verified this." The Chronicle was using the terms "marine biologists" and "oceanographers" very loosely: this is not a finding that's been confirmed by any degree-holding scientists.

Jaron Lanier suggests in a New York Times op-ed that the web cannot survive on volunteerism and advertising alone, and it's time to figure out how writers can get paid: Pay Me for My Content; "Affordable turns out to be much harder than free when it comes to information technology, but we are smart enough to figure it out." So, is the time right to think about micropayments again?

You don't need slashdot to hear about this story: Three Share Nobel in Economics for Work on Social Mechanisms (New York Times, login required), but you might have missed this detail: "One recent subject of Professor Maskin's wide-ranging research has been on the value of software patents. He determined that software was a market where innovations tended to be sequential, in that they were built closely on the work of predecessors, and innovators could take many different paths to the same goal. In such markets, he said, patents might serve as a wall that inhibited innovation rather than stimulating progress." Here's one of Maskin's papers on the subject: Sequential Innovation, Patents, limitation (pdf).

A Survival Imperative for Space Colonization , in which John Tierney discusses the ideas of Dr. J. Richard Gott, an astrophysicist at Princeton. What we have here: a wonky technique for making predictions based on almost no data via the Copernican Principle; which demonstrates the pressing need to colonize Mars (not the moon? not the asteroid belt?); plus a dash of the Fermi Paradox along the way. Is this really the New York Times?

H.R.811 sounds great: It's stated purpose is "to require a voter-verified permanent paper ballot". Unfortunately, it sounds like the details have some devils, as per usual. From the Bev Harris article: Is a flawed bill better than no bill?: "the Holt Bill provides for a paper trail (toilet paper roll-style records affixed to DRE voting machines) in 2008, requires more durable ballots in 2010, and requires a complex set of audits. It also cements and further empowers a concentration of power over elections under the White House, gives explicit federal sanction to trade secrets in vote counting, mandates an expensive 'text conversion' device that does not yet exist which is not fully funded, and removes 'safe harbor' for states in a way that opens them up to unlimited, expensive, and destabilizing litigation. "

Here's some interesting thoughts on Adobe and Microsoft's attempts "at remaking the web in their own image": Silly Season... And on a completely unrelated note, the Gnu folks are at work on an up-to-date Free flash plug-in: Gnash, but of course, we're too busy giggling at youtube to care.

Here's a nice test case... Microsoft bans Xbox "hacking" to prevent cheating in networked gaming: Microsoft bans hackers from Xbox Live. My bet: more than half of the slash crowd will come out in favor of this particular example of DRM lockdown.

Annalee Newitz questions whether it's a good idea to store your life on someone else's servers: Data crash of 2027: "... this situation is worse than potentially being data-raped by some feds trolling for terrorists. When we store all our personal, financial, and social information on other people's computers, we risk losing everything for reasons even stupider than the war on terror."

After 13 years, Randal Schwartz has had his conviction "expunged". In effect, legally it never happened. If you haven't heard about this one before, my take is that as a contractor at Intel, Randal did some over-zelaous white-hat cracking free-of-charge; this embarrassed some people in management (he pointed out that their passwords were terrible) and management then chose to embarass themselves further by having him convicted of a felony under an "anti-hacking" law. More info can be had from the Friends of Randal Schwartz.

Video blogger and independant journalist Josh Wolf has been in a federal jail for refusing to turn over a video of a San Francisco demonstration to the federal government. He's been jailed for 170 days now, a new record for US journalism. "Democracy Now!" has a new interview with Josh Wolf from jail. If this issue is not resolved, it this does not bode well for the concept of "citizen journalism"...