The internet has (kind of) run out of space

On Thursday, the internet as we know it ran out of space.

The nonprofit group that assigns addresses to service providers announced that, on Thursday morning, it allocated the last free internet addresses available from the current pool used for most of the internet's history.

"This is an historic day in the history of the internet, and one we have been anticipating for quite some time," said Raul Echeberria, chairman of the Number Resource Organization.

CNN

Sputnik Moment?

"This is our generation's Sputnik Moment," President Obama said during Tuesday's State of the Union.

...

So I couldn't help wondering: Could we ever have a Sputnik moment?

Frontiers? We live on them. In 1969, things were still analog. You didn't have to discard your devices after a few months because Steve Jobs had decided that light purple was the new purple. Now, if something is lasting, we look down on it. "The only thing that lasts these days are dead armadillos and those seasonal breads in the glass case at Starbucks," we point out. Ephemeral is the new permanent. We have the collective memory -- and persistent desire to mate with anything in sight -- of Viagra-addled mayflies.

This comes with many boons. Thanks to our insistence on living on the bubble of the present moment, our world is rife with unnatural wonders - iPhones, iPads, Clouds, memes, videos of cats in Japan stuffing themselves into boxes. When I have a sore throat, I can go online and describe my symptoms, and strangers from across the globe (or the part of the globe that follows me on Twitter, at any rate) can suggest that I drink blueberry syrup and hot toddies! This is the stuff!

Everyone admits that the world has shrunk. But this shrinkage has also closed the window for Sputnik moments.

Washington Post

Technology Loop

Excessive Video Gaming Not Just A Symptom

Spending hours with a PlayStation or an Xbox every day can lead to serious psychiatric problems in children -- but "pathological" video game playing may not be just a result of preexisting mental disorders, researchers reported.

A two-year prospective study of more than 3,000 children identified several baseline psychological factors such as impulsivity that predicted excessive video game playing, according to Douglas Gentile, PhD, of Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa, and colleagues.

Nevertheless, such conditions as depression, social difficulties, and poor school performance "seemed to act as outcomes of pathological gaming," Gentile and co-authors wrote online in Pediatrics.

"Pathological gaming seems not to be simply secondary to other disorders but to predict poorer functioning longitudinally, and it can last for several years," they added.

For their study, the researchers gave questionnaires to 3,034 elementary and middle-school children in Singapore from 2007 to 2009. The survey, conducted in the students' classrooms, asked age-appropriate questions to elicit information on video gaming habits, social interactions, decision-making skills, affect, and other aspects of their psychiatric status as well as school performance.

Gentile and colleagues noted that response patterns indicated that causation could go in both directions for some factors.

"For example, although impulsivity is a risk factor for becoming a pathological gamer, impulsivity worsens after a youth becomes a pathological gamer," they wrote.

MedPage Today

NASA - The Frontier Is Everywhere

Your BlackBerry or Your Wife

When you're out to dinner, does your BlackBerry occupy a seat at the table? Does your spouse ever check email before saying "good morning" to the kids? Does your son sleep with his laptop?

It may be time for a technology cleanse.

Like an extreme diet that cuts out all processed foods for a short period of time with the promise of lasting good health, a technology cleanse means you unplug for a short time with longer-term benefits for your relationships.

But be warned: As with any other diet, it isn't easy.

The Wall Street Journal

The Shallows

Try reading a book while doing a crossword puzzle, and that, says author Nicholas Carr, is what you're doing every time you use the Internet.

Carr is the author of the Atlantic article Is Google Making Us Stupid? which he has expanded into a book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.

Carr believes that the Internet is a medium based on interruption — and it's changing the way people read and process information. We've come to associate the acquisition of wisdom with deep reading and solitary concentration, and he says there's not much of that to be found online.

NPR

Tweeting in court: why reporters must be given guidelines

The decision by a district judge to allow tweeting from the court in the Julian Assange extradition hearing raises interesting legal questions.

First, has the district judge, Howard Riddle, set a precedent which other courts will follow? Not exactly: it is a magistrates court, lowest in the pecking order of courts, so decisions do not bind other courts. However, his decision may be persuasive of other courts, especially other magistrates. The sky did not fall in as a result of yesterday's tweeting, so why not allow it again? For the decision to gain wider acceptance we really need a crown court judge or high court judge to follow suit.

guardian.co.uk

Assange's 'poison pill' file impossible to stop, expert says

The Poison Pill. The Doomsday Files. Or simply, The Insurance.

Whatever you call the file Julian Assange has threatened to release if he's imprisoned or dies or WikiLeaks is destroyed, it's impossible to stop.

"It's all tech talk to say, 'I have in my hand a button and if I press it or I order my friends to press it, it will go off,'" said Hemu Nigam, who has worked in computer security for more than two decades, in the government and private sector.

"Julian is saying, 'I've calibrated this so that no matter how many ways you try, you're never going to be able to deactivate it,'" Nigam said. "He's sending a call to action to hackers to try it. To the government, he's also saying, 'Try me.'"

CNN

For the first time a commercial spacecraft was launched into orbit and returned safely to Earth.
The launch, a test of a commercially developed spacecraft designed to take cargo and eventually astronauts to the International Space Station, was successful from beginning to end on Wednesday.

The flight was the first demonstration flight in a program by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to use private companies to ferry cargo and supplies to the space station.

“It reinforces what the president laid out and what Congress endorsed as the future of space transportation,” said Lori Garver, NASA’s deputy administrator. “This does indeed validate the path we are on.”

Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, or SpaceX, launched its Falcon 9 rocket, carrying a Dragon capsule, at 10:43 a.m. Eastern time from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The rocket appeared to operate flawlessly as it headed skyward.

Nine minutes later, the Dragon capsule reached orbit. It circled the Earth twice at an altitude of 186 miles before re-entering the atmosphere. Slowed by three parachutes, it softly splashed in the Pacific Ocean about 500 miles west of northern Mexico. Ms. Garver said she had been told it landed within a mile of the recovery ship.

The entire flight lasted less than three and a half hours.

A second demonstration flight, going close to the space station but not docking, is scheduled for next spring. A third and final demonstration flight under SpaceX’s $278 million development contract would dock at the station.

With the success of the first flight, SpaceX is likely to pursue its desire to combine the second and third demonstration flights. With the completion of the demonstrations, SpaceX would then begin delivering cargo under a separate contract, worth $1.6 billion.

New York Times