The incident occurred at one of Hollywood’s most distinctive landmarks. Originally a luxury hotel, the eight-story building was built in the style of a 17th century French castle with a striking white facade and turrets that loom over the nearby Hollywood Freeway.

The church remade the building into a facility aimed at celebrities 39 years ago. According to a church website, the Celebrity Centre caters to “artists, politicians, leaders of industry, sports figures and anyone with the power and vision to create a better world.”

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One way to look at the space program in these economic times is that it is a jobs program,” AIAA’s Bell says. “It would be bad to encourage people to go into science and technology and then get rid of one of the agencies that is the primary employer for those types of people.

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But copyright’s problem is that most of the copyists cheerfully admit that they copy. The majority of American Internet users engage in infringing file-sharing. If file-sharing were stamped out tomorrow, they’d swap the same files — and more — by trading hard drives, or thumb drives, or memory cards (and more data would change hands, albeit more slowly).

Copyists either know that they infringe but don’t care, or they believe that the law can’t possible criminalize what they’re doing and assume that it punishes more egregious forms of copying, such as selling pirate DVDs in the street. In fact, copyright law penalizes selling DVDs at a much lower level than sharing the same movies over the Internet for free, and the risk of buying one of these DVDs is much lower (thanks to the high costs of enforcement against people making transactions in the real world) than the risk of downloading them online.

Indeed, copyists are busily building an elaborate ethos of what can and can’t be shared, and with whom, and under what circumstances. They join private sharing circles, argue norms among themselves, and in word and deed create a plethora of “para-copyrights” that reflect a cultural understanding of what they’re meant to be doing.

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It shows people are increasingly writing in a register somewhere in between spoken and written English.

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Electronic Frontiers Australia board member Colin Jacobs said his civil liberties group was concerned at what would be deemed “unwanted content”.

“It is unclear how ACMA will scale up their blacklist to 10,000 websites and what will go on the list,” he said.

“Conroy said the list would contain illegal and unwanted content but we still have to see what would end up on that list.

"Under the current mandate that includes adult material, which would mean most material that could be rated R and, in some circumstances, material rated MA15+.”

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Once inside the isolation chamber, the team will live their lives as if they are on a space mission, with just frozen meals to eat, no natural sunlight and a 20-minute delay to their communication with “ground control”. They will be expected to perform tasks such as cleaning, cooking and conducting scientific experiments, while being studied by outside researchers.

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If this analysis is right, what causes these cycles of reform and backlash in American politics? I believe they are linked indirectly to stages of technological and economic development. Lincoln’s Second American Republic marked a transition from an agrarian economy to one based on the technologies of the first industrial revolution – coal-fired steam engines and railroads. Roosevelt’s Third American Republic was built with the tools of the second industrial revolution – electricity and internal combustion engines. It remains to be seen what energy sources – nuclear? Solar? Clean coal? – and what technologies – nanotechnology? Photonics? Biotech– will be the basis of the next American economy. (Note: I’m talking about the material, real-world manufacturing and utility economy, not the illusory “information economy” beloved of globalization enthusiasts in the 1990s, who pretended that deindustrialization by outsourcing was a higher state of industrialism.)

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“The Internet of Things begins with small things,” advances Violet’s Haladjian, “things that are fun, simple, accessible, and that people want to have at home because they are just as fun as they are practical.

"Little by little, they get used to this kind of object, learn how to use it, discover their limits as well as new opportunities. I really don’t think the Internet of Things could have started with the smart refrigerator.”

…

“We are still living in a world where information is trapped in a few of our objects,” says Haladjian. “We stare into our screens, which are like goldfish bowls full of information swimming around, but unable to escape.

"At Violet, we dream of a world where information would be a butterfly, flitting freely all over the place, and occasionally landing on any of the objects we touch to give them life and enrich them.”

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Focusing on the adventures of Matt Hazard, this weird third-person shooter tells the tale of a classic 80s video game hero who gets his chance to come back to the mainstream via Marathon Megasoft, a huge publishing company which wants to create a next-gen game starring Matt. Combining meta humor with some serious satire and tom-foolery revolving around the game industry, Eat Lead sounds like it might wind up being a cult classic for industry followers. Neil Patrick Harris, of How I Met Your Mother and Dr. Horrible fame, and Will Arnett, from 30 Rock and Arrested Development, will be lending their voices to the game.

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As we discover ourselves to be a much poorer nation, one of my correspondents put it: “the bogus risk-swapping economy must be replaced by a net value-added economy.” That means actually making things, growing things, and rebuilding things, and that can only begin to happen if we do not stupidly sucker ourselves into a war with other nations who are liable to be extremely ticked off at us for destroying the global economy, but also competing with us for a dwindling supply of resources that are not equitably distributed around the world.

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