What’s everyday life like at Silicon Valley’s most famous research center? To find out, I talked to YF Juan, a director of business develpment at PARC, and communications manager Linda Jacobson.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

As I write this, the DowJones is down 600 points, largely in reaction to the House defeating the federal bailout of the credit industry. What should we think and do about this?

Read the rest of this post

This month’s announcement of a backroom deal between internet service providers and the big record companies to spy on suspected copyright infringers and reduce the quality of their Internet connections is just the latest paragraph in the record industry’s long, self-pitying suicide note, and it’s left me wishing they’d just pull the trigger already and stop beating their chests and telling us all how unfair it all is.

Read the rest of this post

The Singularity is a conceit of modern science fiction: a place inside vast computers where whole universes are simulated whose reality is every bit as sharp and instantaneous as the physical world we inhabit. Books like Charlie Stross’s “Singularity Sky” and the Matrix movie trilogy have done a great job of representing such alternative, computer-calculated realities.

Read the rest of this post

Flagler Productions, a video production company in Kansas that spent years as Wal-Mart’s corporate archivist, is now selling access to thousands of hours of candid footage of Wal-Mart execs talking about the business’s dirty secrets. Wal-Mart fired Flagler, and gave them a lowball offer of $500,000 (7,33€) for the archive. Instead, Flagler is now selling access to the archive to researchers (mostly union organizers and plaintiff-side lawyers suing Wal-Mart) for $250/hour.

Read the rest of this post