RTFA: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9K4zosGUMBw&eurl=ht…

The Google Lunar X PRIZE seeks to create a global private race to the Moon that excites and involves people around the world and, accelerates space exploration for the benefit of all humanity. The use of space has dramatically enhanced the quality of life and may ultimately lead to solutions to some of the most pressing environmental problems that we face on earth — energy independence and climate change. For more information, please visit www.googlelunarxprize.org

WATCH THIS VIDEO. It is destined to become an artifact of speculative futurism. This video is overflowing with optimism stolen directly from the 1950s flying car. Add a generous helping of cheesy geek-actors, crowds of shining happy people, and a laptop on every kid’s desk, and the experience of watching leaves you simultaneously inspired and helplessly cynical.

At the same time, this video presents a compelling vision of the future, broken down into dead-simple goals that are so easy to understand, they are bound to be ingested by pop media. For example, the first team to locate ice on the moon gets a bonus. It’s goofy-fun. It’s great science fiction. If you drink the kool-aid and become a dreamer, it’s also stunningly beautiful.

RTFA: http://www.stopthespying.org/

The president is unconstitutionally wiretapping the telephone and Internet communications of millions of ordinary Americans.
Companies like AT&T want immunity for their illegal collaboration with the President’s program.

And Congress might let them get away with it.

Stop the Spying Now!

This one is pretty basic. Your conversations have been recorded. Yes - that’s what this fuss is about. You thought you had a constitution to protect you, but now you feel like an idiot.

RTFA: http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/B/back-door.html

Ken Thompson’s 1983 Turing Award lecture to the ACM admitted the existence of a back door in early Unix versions that may have qualified as the most fiendishly clever security hack of all time. In this scheme, the C compiler contained code that would recognize when the login command was being recompiled and insert some code recognizing a password chosen by Thompson, giving him entry to the system whether or not an account had been created for him.

Normally such a back door could be removed by removing it from the source code for the compiler and recompiling the compiler. But to recompile the compiler, you have to use the compiler so Thompson also arranged that the compiler would recognize when it was compiling a version of itself, and insert into the recompiled compiler the code to insert into the recompiled login the code to allow Thompson entry and, of course, the code to recognize itself and do the whole thing again the next time around! And having done this once, he was then able to recompile the compiler from the original sources; the hack perpetuated itself invisibly, leaving the back door in place and active but with no trace in the sources.The Turing lecture that reported this truly moby hack was later published as “Reflections on Trusting Trust”, Communications of the ACM 27, 8 (August 1984), pp. 761–763

“We’re not worthy! We’re not worthy! We’re scum! We suck!” –Wayne and Garth