>Too many companies have learned this lesson the hard way, launching invasive new services that have triggered class action lawsuits, Congressional inquiries, and media firestorms.

Shouldn't that read "Too few companies have learned ..."? Otherwise the problem would not exist.

Anyway, I think this can only be fixed by legislation. Companies have too much monetary incentive for privacy violation to do anything else than token improvements. "Industry self-regulation" is nothing but newspeak for "foxes guarding the henhouse".

> But what if we read their thoughts and Stalin really thought he was doing a good thing

No need for mind-reading here. Stalin no doubt thought he was doing a good thing: he was convinced he knew what was best for everybody, there just were all those dunces that disagreed and tried to sabotage his benevolent plans... The same is true of other classic dictators. They are all extreme cases of narcissist personality disorder, who unfortunately managed to gain great power.

Were I live (Italy) we switched to DGTV some time ago, and last time I checked, Teletext was working just fine

Same thing in Finland. It is actually still quite popular, many years after the digital switch-over. If you have your TV already on, it is the fastest way to peek at the latest headlines or weather report. Another popular application seems to be horse racing scores. Kiosks selling bets almost always have a TV constantly showing Teletext at the relevant page. Works without any net connection.

A nice result of the Teletext limitations is that the pages show just the data without fancy formatting, and whoever creates the content must make the best of the limited space, choosing words carefully. This means the system is really very efficient for the reader, you don't have to wade over fluff... (unfortunately because of the way the pages are rotated in the transmission, you may have to wait a bit until your page comes up, unless your receiver implements good caching. Old implementations did not, and that made reading slow.).

The you mention are plausible extrapolations from the state of technology in the 1990's, not "unobtainium", although we now know the time table was way too optimisitic, as usual. As noted by another poster, the thousands of small windmills were aknowledged to be a bad idea even within the books (their inventor Sax Russell attends a conference on terraforming, where one paper accounts for the warming effects of various methods, and dismisses the windmills). As for solar warming, remember the terraforming also tapped geothermic (areothermic?) energy (the "moholes"), and collected more solar energy than the surface area of Mars allows by the use of space mirrors (the "soletta" of the books).

The "Red Mars", "Green Mars", "Blue Mars" trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson is a great future history that lays out a credible way the Mars colonisation could play out, including the inevitable revolt against the megacorporations. Enjoyed it last summer. The books were written in the early 1990's, evidenly with the best knowledge about Mars available then. At times it feels like the author had visited the place in person... There is no technobable, no miracle technology, this is hard sci-fi at its hardest. But much of the story is really about social effects, the tensions between early Mars settlers, newcomers, people who want to terraform Mars and those that desire to preserve it, and the corporations that just want to extract maximum profits from Mars. Earth future history is also explored with the unexpected discovery of a life-prolonging treatment (who gets it?), and an environmental crisis caused by volcanism in the Antarctic (a huge flood, but not fashionably by global warming).

And you get hit by a ton of patent lawsuits, if it looks like you will be succesful :-(

In Finland, every publisher is required by law to submit a copy of every printed work published in the country (not just books, but newspapers and magazines as well) to the National Library and a few other university libraries (so the system has redundancy). This has been going on since 1829. I suppose many other countries have similar laws.

I guess the biggest one is a much cheaper track: Just a concrete through, which probably does not have to be built to as exacting tolerances as a maglev track. Heavy rain might be an interesting problem to handle. The track cannot have too large drainage holes in it, otherwise the lift disappears.

Thanks, the second picture nicely answers my question about how to supply electricity to the train.

This might be a good idea, if they can figure out how to supply electricity to power the flying train. Tricky, because there is no ground contact, unlike a regular train, and the track itself does not propel it forward, like a maglev track does. Otherwise it has to carry its fuel, which might negate the advantages of the idea.

Exactly what I was about to post! He is a character that is foremost an engineer. Professor Calculus is from the Tintin series by Herge (in the French language originals he is named Tournesol), and the character is supposedly based on the great real-life inventor and explorer Auguste Piccard (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auguste_Piccard ) On the other hand, most of the characters in the article were unknown to me (a Finn), so continentalocentrism cuts both ways.

well, I will trust a German "Stiftung" more. Mainly irrational reasons based on images of German work ethic., etc. Just donated 25€

As an owner of a plot of land in one of the cities mentioned as beneficiaries, the article made my day... That ought to take care of my retirement fund :-).

During my latest 64-bit Mandriva Linux upgrade, I accidentally nuked the previous 64-bit plugin beta version, and I was dismayed to find Adobe no longer provided it on their site. After this /. article I rushed to the site to grab it just in case some corporate strategist makes it unavailable again... Works fine with Mandriva 2010.1 on Pentium D @3.2Ghz (don't laugh, I got the board cheap and the performance is more than adequate for my needs). Much better than the 32-bit plugin version with nspluginwrapper. Not sure if I should thank them or not, though. Giving something, then capriciously taking it away, then giving it again would be bad behaviour in a real human.