Just read John Grisham's http://www.amazon.com/Broker-John-Grisham/dp/0385510454 The Broker which is based on this idea, only the hackers are Pakistani. They all got killed in the book.

Have you ever tried walking up all the stairs in a very tall sky scraper? This gives you a very human feeling of the extent of the gravity well in which we sit, due to the mass of the Earth. It takes a ridiculous amount of energy just to get away from Earth. Then add to this the problem of cosmic rays and having enough of everything to get there and back, and I really have to wonder why so much thought and money and time goes into the idea that we will go to Mars. Until we have better sources of energy or a breakthrough in physics so that we can teleport places, don't you think it's a bit of a waste of time and resources to think we can take a trip to Mars? If not, why not? Basically, I'm saying, let's just explore and take care of this planet a lot better first, before we go anyplace else.

The level for a mammogram is shockingly high compared to other ordinary x-ray diagnostics. Could this be wrong? Hundreds of millions of women regularly have mammograms. How can their exposure be thousands of times higher than other x-ray therapies? This must be an error.

Video calling on cellphones has been available for years all over the world. Does anyone use it? No. Video phones have actually been available in various incarnations for almost 40 years. Many large corporations even had them implemented throughout the company. Were they ever used? No. Skype style video calling is available. How often is it used compared to voice only? Very little. So at what point do we finally agree that the experiment has been done, and repeated sufficiently so that we can conclude the simple fact: people do not want video calling. The better question is: why do companies insist on keeping this nonsense of video calling as the "next big thing" when it has been shown quite clearly to be something nobody wants? I'd love to get Slashdot's explanation of this. Please move this to Ask Slashdot perhaps.

So I went to the Jaron Lanier essay referenced in the story and started reading. After a few paragraphs, I thought to check his Wikipedia entry in another browser window and see if indeed he was called a "Film Director" on Wikipedia. No. That had been corrected. Excellent. Wikpedia seems to be working as advertised. But then further down in Lanier's Wikipedia entry there is a reference to the very Edge essay by Lanier that I was reading, and it is broken down into point form, making for much easier reading and comprehension. Neat. Finally, I went back to the Lanier's original essay to read it all the way to the very end, where it says, "Jaron Lanier is a film director". Bizarre.