Obviously, scheduling a long flight as a form of writing retreat is stupid in all sorts of ways. Unless someone else is paying you to travel, it’s crazy expensive. And even if someone’s paying you to fly to Adelaide for a few days, it’s got massive environmental impacts. So I’m thinking about a business that lets you stay on the ground, but rent a writing space that mimics the key features of a long plane flight.

No connectivity – I’ve been productive on long flights where I’ve had internet access, but it’s a very different form of productivity. Craig Newmark and I were invited to the same conference in South Korea some years back and sat side by side for 15 hours, answering email on the way from NYC to Seoul. I reached inbox zero, but I didn’t write anything I was proud of, as I kept getting distracted by incoming mail. And that was before Twitter.

“Long Flight” facilities will be located inside Faraday cages. Once you enter the facility, your phone will be cut off from GSM and CDMA networks, and Wifi won’t work. You’ll be encouraged to download and cache anything you’ll need to read ahead of time.

Fixed duration – I work well in libraries, but I tend to leave them after I’ve accomplished the main task I’d had on my to do list. One of the reason long flights are so productive is that you’re committed to staying in a space well beyond the time you need to accomplish a task. For me, that means I get a blogpost or chapter written, but I also catch up on papers I’ve needed to read.

“Long Flight” facilities will be bookable for durations of 6, 8, 10, 12 and 14 hours. We’ll refer to the duration by the names of cities – book an 8 hour session at our Boston facility and we’ll reference your stint as an “Istanbul”. You’ll be free to walk around the facility, pass other people’s compartments, access the rest rooms and snack counter, but your access key won’t let you leave the building until your session is up. (You’ll sign a waiver that prevents us from being charged with holding you against your will. And we’ll have

Today, you can still buy new 1.44MB floppy drives and floppy disks, but for the other formats you need to look to eBay or yard sales. If you really want a new 3.5” drive or disks, I'd get them sooner than later. Their day is almost done.

But, as they disappear even from memory, we should strive to remember just how vitally important floppy disks were in their day. Without them, our current computer world simply could not exist. Before the Internet was open to the public, it was floppy disks that let us create and trade programs and files. They really were what put the personal in “personal computing.”

Our governments don’t help. Our Governments are filled with politicians that are so unimaginative they studied politics at Uni. Instead of our governments being filled with engineers, scientists and doctors, our parliaments are filled with lawyers and professional politicians. (In my opinion) People who lacked the ability to dream as children are now in charge. They are the people who tell us we can’t afford space programmes, better schools, better health care, etc. Collectively we accept it because we have become used to hearing the word no. We stop questioning why we can’t say yes. I heard a stat last year, which I looked up again last night. The official cost of the Apollo program was nearly $25 billion. Adjusted, this would be almost £100 billion. Last year the cost of the UK’s banking sector bailout was put at £955 billion.

You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics looks so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, "Look at that, you son of a bitch."
—Edgar D. Mitchell, Apollo 14 Astronaut

IT skills don’t just cycle economically the way other broad categories do–one year, public-school teaching is competitive, the next, it’s nursing and transportation, and eventually it comes back to teaching. Several of the skills or specialties Korzeniowski rightly characterizes as “not hot” aren’t just out of favor temporarily. They’ll never return.

On the busiest day, the BBC delivered 2.8 petabytes, with the peak traffic moment occurring when Bradley Wiggins won Gold and we shifted 700 Gb/s.

Here's the audio from the chat Charlie Stross and I did with Mitch Wagner from Internet Evolution about our forthcoming book, Rapture of the Nerds.

The only sensible thing to do would be to set up an independent, technical board that ran the Internet for the benefit not of companies looking to exploit its possibilities, or of countries looking to use it as an instrument of control, but of the Internet itself. That is, its decisions would be based on technical criteria designed to make the whole thing run and evolve as smoothly as possible, for the benefit of all constituencies, undistracted by other agendas that damage the underlying infrastructure, as ICANN's current moves threaten to do.

That might seem hopelessly idealistic, and may be it is. But it's worth pushing as a third way in the current situation, which is fast coming down to an impossible choice between seeing the Net destroyed by ICANN's ham-fisted commercialisation or by ITU's all-too efficient politicisation.

I find myself wanting to redesign secondary education so that history and literature get merged into a single class, and you read novels in conjunction with learning about the time of their writing or setting.

Choire Sicha offers the essential viewing guide to watch from beginning to end without the crap bits. Yes, most of season 3 is gone.

Our city of 2032 is emitting as much information in a second as Google processes in an hour today: remarkable, but not outrageous in context.

The truth is that a large number of the animals featured on O’Reilly books are threatened or critically endangered. We’ve always used colophons in the books as a way to tell readers about the animals. Now we want to use social media and the web to tell those same readers how they can contribute to helping the animals in real life.

When we launched AOL 4.0 in 1998, AOL used ALL of the world-wide CD production for several weeks.  Think of that.  Not a single music CD or Microsoft CD was produced during those weeks.

Der Internethändler Amazon verkauft mittlerweile auch in Großbritannien mehr E-Books als gedruckte Bücher, ein Meilenstein, der in den USA bereits 2011 erreicht wurde.

Amazon nennt in der Mitteilung keine absoluten Verkaufszahlen, listet aber ein paar Vergleiche auf. So habe das Unternehmen in Großbritannien im laufenden Jahr für je 100 verkaufte Bücher 114 E-Books absetzen können. Nach dem Kauf eines Kindle würde ein Kunde darüber hinaus viermal so viele Bücher kaufen wie zuvor. Auf gedruckte Bücher würde dabei auch nicht verzichtet, fügt Amazon hinzu.

I'm safely on the surface of Mars. GALE CRATER I AM IN YOU!!! #MSL

The people formerly known as the audience have a voice and boy are they using it to complain about NBC’s tape delays of races and the opening ceremonies, about its tasteless decision to block the UK tribute to its 7/7 victims, and about its commentators’ idiocies (led by Meredith Vieira’s ignorance of the inventor of the web; they could have used their extra three hours to enlighten her).

• Twitter is a gigantic spoiler machine. It would be nearly impossible to isolate oneself from news of results because even if you don’t read Twitter or Facebook or go to the net, someone you know, someone you run into will. Information can’t be controlled. Amen.

The lead author and editor of the OAuth 2.0 network authorization standard has stepped down from his role, withdrawn his name from the specification, and quit the working group, describing the current version of the spec as "the biggest professional disappointment of my career."

I.B.M. is doing its own thing in the enterprise market, much as Apple is in consumer technology. Both are separated from the industry pack. In I.B.M.’s case, to be sure, that separation has been a more subtle and evolutionary process than it has been at Apple, the blockbuster product machine.

Satellite operator Avanti has launched a new Pay-As-You-Go service across Europe which it says will offering a high-speed internet connection with no monthly subscription.

Launched by feisty Olympic legend Daley Thompson, of button-bashing 8-bit fame, the show will start at 9 p.m. every night the games are on. Positive tweets will color the wheel gold, the Metro reports; negative will make it purple. Eye sponsor EDF Energy reckons it's the first disaster-waiting-to-happen social media-driven light show.