The NSA taps fibre optic cable A story that made me say, “well, duh!” at first, I must admit, but it is interesting to read speculation of how this would have been done. And even more interesting to read, “The NSA’s budget is classified, but individuals familiar with it say it is about two-thirds what it was a decade ago, even before accounting for inflation.” I don’t know if this is misinformation (could there be an even more secret agency getting their money? Heh.) but I would have expected their budget to have gone way up not down given the new fields of the Internet and the mobile phone for them to play in…

New Yorker: Pimps and Dragons Yet another piece about the history of Ultima Online, one of the first and most successful massively multi-player online games. Well worth a read so get in quick before the New Yorker site removes it!

China beats India in Buddha wars er… surely this is missing Buddha’s point here?

The Empire That Was Russia In the early 1900s, one Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii took photographs around the Russian empire. They would be interesting enough anyway but what makes them especially fascinating is that they were taken using a unique process which (after some digital re-assembly) yields colour photographs with an almost super-real quality. Well worth a look…

Am I Going Down? As the site itself put it, this was “a guide to your likelihood of personally experiencing full loss equivalency” – in other words, given your origin airport, destination and your airline this site will calculate how likely you are to die in a plane crash. Fun for the paranoid…

Update: That site is no longer live and can’t be accessed via the Internet Archive. Sorry to everyone who has been looking for it!

Thank you memepool.com for the link

Wow – the beginnings of a discussion in my message board at last! This one is about minidisc vs other digital storage media for music listening.

According to research from US thinktank Resources for the Future, (discussed in The Economist) even factoring in pollution and congestion benefits our fuel tax is roughly twice as high as it should be to take into account the costs of using fuel (though America’s petrol tax is much too low). Why? Political cowardice. It is (or has until now been) politically easier to hike up “sin taxes” on petrol than to raise income tax.adding razr ringtones forstanley c accrington faccrington cinemaadam vancouver harringtoniphone ringtones accbeaumont of amanda harringtonamc barington 30lg ringtone vx 6000 Map

An interesting survey of How much information is produced annually. The short answer is 250Mb for every person on earth – 93% of which is in digital format. The authors (from Berkeley) offer a lot of supplemental data as well. For example, until 1992 most TV stations broadcast no more than 9.5 minutes of advertising per hour in prime time – now the average is 15 minutes. Ouch! I thought things were worse there – here in the UK the terrestrial channels can only show 7.5 minutes an hour and cable only 9 minutes an hour (plus, of course, the BBC is completely ad-free).

An entertaining parody (in PDF form…) “If you’re buying Perrier or Poland Spring or any of those other bottled waters, what you’re drinking has actually been in the ground for thousands (if not millions!) of years. That is hardly what we would call fresh water!… We gather only the finest individual hydrogen and oxygen atoms and combine them (two parts hydrogen to one part oxygen, of course!) in our state-of-the-art hydrogen-oxygen bonding facility..”

Also see Dihydrogen Monoxide – a warning about the effects of DHMO.

whodoivotefor A good idea badly done – answer questions about your policy views and it will tell you how you “should” vote in the upcoming UK general election, but I don’t feel the questions were well-chosen. Does anyone know a better questionnaire?