I like how it ends with - "Definitely a cool step forward." Have we reached a state where summaries, in their attempt to be succinct, end up (rather ironically) stringing together meaningless superfluities which give us no real information?

...... is still not understood by most. And I think we are stuck in an odd place here.

Insects evolution is faster than animals like dodos. We can't walk around beating them with a club till they go extinct. Mosquito nets used to be the most effective form of protection, until now. The mosquitoes are getting smaller. And adapting to chemicals is an inevitability. Too many of them reproducing at very high rates. Making them infertile seems to be best way around this all.

But more importantly, we still have absolutely no clue what role the mosquitoes play in ecological niches. Will their extinction lead to irreversible changes that affect the very fabric of nature? Humans vs. mosquitoes - who is more important to nature. Does anyone want to answer that question? Does the increase in human population directly correlate with the increase in mosquito population? We are their food after-all ....

I think that this is the way to go. Every organization has different motives and the captchas can be tailor-made to utilize user-time in that direction. It works well in atleast one direction, if not in both. Depends on who the user is.

If it is a profit-maximizing organization, it makes sense to monetize these few seconds of user attention. If it is an organization working for human-rights, replace the captcha with the image of some charity or some news item that they wish to inform the user.

Get the captchas to help you read books, solve world-hunger problems, solve NP-hard problems, whatever you wish. But seriously we need to move on from random letters that do waste A LOT of time, with little productivity for anyone.

Oh Yes.

Come down to India and China, where we have no goddamn lives any more. We work more than 12 hours a day on menial tasks at odd times. Forget work-life balance, because we really have no lives. And we work because that's how poor we are, with little choice in life and no government looking out for us. Train us. Use us. Abuse us. Talk to us in racial undertones. Marvel at our ability to take crap for little money.
Get away with your profits.

Welcome to the bright world of outsourcing.

"A study done by me has found that of the billions of websites and over a trillion objects on the web, any given two are separated by no more than 2 clicks. Distributed across the entire web, though, are links to search engines such as Google —that are very highly connected and can be used to move from area of the web to another. Google serves as the "Kevin Bacon" of the web, allowing users to navigate from most areas to most others in less than 3 clicks."

I need my PhD. Now.

No seriously.

http://www.hl7.org.au/docs/Australian%20Patent%202001100012.pdf

Internet poker going brink-and-mortar is just plain old poker. Something that never did go out of fashion.
Unless out here people are sitting in a casino on terminals, playing with each other. That might work. Internet poker in a closed sealed room. I await movies made about this.

... a shadowy flight into the dangerous world of a man who does not exist...

How about a 4D space-time interweb? Where we can travel through space and time, fight gladiators, ride dinosaurs, wrong our rights, and vanish in a poof of temporal paradox

I second this. Hygienic unbearded ladies have always driven the motivations of men. (No offense to the bearded women...) We do need more of them.

shall be to return to the ways of the past. Stop the brushing. Lets get out our raw meat and vegetables, and slowly revive those bacteria populations ...
I shall call it the Bacteriophilic Trials of the 22nd Century.

Ok. Seriously. There is a problem, but there are solutions too. Water conflicts have been around for a long time now in the Middle East since the beginning of civilization tiself.
4500 years ago, the control of irrigation canals vital to survival was the source of conflict between the states of Umma and Lagash in the ancient Middle East. 2700 years ago, Assurbanipal, King of Assyria from 669 to 626 B.C., seized control of wells as part of his strategic warfare against Arabia. In the modern era, the Jordan River Basin has been the scene of a wide variety of water disputes. In the 1960s, Syria tried to divert the headwaters of the Jordan away from Israel, leading to air strikes against the diversion facilities. The 1967 war in the Middle East resulted in Israel winning control of all of the headwaters of the Jordan as well as the groundwater of the West Bank. In these cases, water was certainly an important factor in both pre- and post-1967 border disputes.
But contrast this to cases in Africa, like the Okavango delta (the world's largest inland delta) which through a negotiation by Angola, Botswana and Namibia has received a fresh lease of life. I think the key is how likely countries are to negotiate rather than go to war. The current Middle East does not seem like a place where cooperation can or will replace conflict.

Someone needs to convert all that oil into water. Now THAT would be a miracle!

Aah. Sepia-tinged nostalgia ...

Do the Scandinavians hate to be away from the mobile phone markets?