In the past couple of weeks it's become something of a fad to post about the genre of cyberpunk becoming somewhat passe'. We now live in the twenty-first century, where much of the fiction that my generation grew up reading was ostensibly set. We don't have flying cars or jetpacks. We don't really have food pills, either, but the nutrient and protein shakes that you can buy in the cold case of just about every convenience store these days (or the frankly awful tasting energy drinks that are popular with the younger set) aren't that far off. We do have …

There are some forward-thinking countries in the world who have decided that net.access is a basic human right and are taking steps to provide it to everyone who needs it. When you think about it a little, for many people life without the Net is a difficult one, indeed: it's difficult to apply for jobs if you can't get online. It's indeed difficult to be gainfully employed if you can't get online in some fashion these days. The Net is also, in a very real sense, the repository of a fantastic amount of knowledge and wisdom accumulated by the …

It is a long standing tradition among the amateur radio community to construct whatever you need to get the job done if you can’t acquire it somehow. In fact, the basic training you need to get a ham license includes some electrical engineering and electronics theory, assuming that you don’t already possess this knowledge. Some hams have even gone so far as to design and construct satellites to facilitate shortwave communication around the planet, helpfully launched by space agencies where they serve as ballast for other orbital insertions. It would seem that negotiating for help from NASA is …

I think that it's safe to say that everyone's been annoyed at one time or another by someone in a restaurant, on a bus, or in a store by someone who was carrying out a loud conversation on their cellular telephone and refused to make any effort to leave the area. Now, there are some of us who sometimes don't have a choice in the matter (like those of us who are on call for work, though many of us at least make the attempt to get away from everyone else in an attempt to not be rude), but there …

Here's an interesting website that I found during a random search: Have you ever wondered how far the information you've generated has travelled in the universe? Now you can find out - this website will calculate all of the known starts within your light cone, which ones have been reached, and which ones that information has yet to reach, and displays it in the form of an RSS feed that you can import into a reader or aggregator. Nifty.

Here's an interesting website that I found during a random search: Have you ever wondered how far the information you've generated has travelled in the universe? Now you can find out - this website will calculate all of the known starts within your light cone, which ones have been reached, and which ones that information has yet to reach, and displays it in the form of an RSS feed that you can import into a reader or aggregator. Nifty.