Season Three has begun. I'm showing this to Mark and Kelly from the beginning, so I'm not watching the new stuff yet, but I'm psyched. Check the torrentfeed, yo.

It's not really much of a debate because there's only really one side to this thing. Everyone except the big telcos (who want to maintain their monopolistic model) wants the internet to remain a level playing field.

But check this to see the lack of a rational argument from the Telco side in full flower.

Neat Video of DrupalCamp NYC from back in May:

You can see me for a sec waving my hands at high speed. Lots of other familiar faces too.

The Las Vegas Airport (like PDX) gives you free wifi. This is the right thing to do. Why? Because very few people will pay for it, and if you let it be known that you've got it there for free, you'll get biz travellers who plan to get to the place early because they know the hour they may spend waiting for their flight can be productive. Then you score on the $7 tuna sandwitch.

Neat link that came up from a comment on a post below:

http://www.oilgae.com/

It's an attempt to be a one-stop-shop for oil-from-algae and especially biodeisel. Definitely worth checking out. They are recommending pressing/centrifuging (which I thought might work) as a practical extraction method. Quick idealistic burst: what if I could build a bike-powered centrifuge! Oh man, that would be so hippy-awesome!

The main drawback of Biodiesel from vegitable (algae or other) oil is viscosity. When it gets cold, it'll gum up and quit working. There are a few ways around this, including the creative use of an electric blanket. I'm psyched to try some of this over the summer.

Eventually it would be pretty effin' sweet to be able to disconnect as many physical dependencies with the outside world (e.g. food and energy) and keep up the non-physical connections (e.g. internet) at the same time. This presents an opportunity to solve the main problem with Pirate Utopias (being that they're secret and unsustainable) and do so in a highly public, mainstream-able fashion.

Zack and Adam and Fred and me are doing a CivicSpace workshop in Las Vegas on thursday. Give us ideas for a site to build as part of it. Recommend the diary too if you can.

Finally got around to watching the two-part finale. It was pretty decent, although I think the path of "explaining" things is fraught with peril. I've always felt the show works because it exists in parable-space, making up meaning without really having to engage a chain of logic (e.g. "Who are you?" "We're the good guys" -- that's f'ing brilliant!).

So, I'm basically comfortable with a lot of things not getting explained -- that piece of statue, polar bears, etc -- because I think the fun of the show is in projecting your own explanations and theories onto it, and because I fear that attempting to tie up these loose ends will be a dissapointment. But so far so good.

Also, always a pleasure to see Clancy Brown at work. I dig his acting. He was on back earlier this year as US Military dude who interacted with Saed in Iraq. The two times he's appeared the characters have had different first names, but the same last name, but could be the same person. Or not.

MyDD has the details, but basically there's a new bill to restore Net Neutrality provisions which will serve the same function as the amendment which was previously defeated. It just passed committee with good bipartisan support.

The lobby efforts of individuals is having a definite impact here, as it's harder and harder for Reps to ignore the fact that the only people who want Net Neutrality gone are big telcos. Everyone else (literally, from MoveOn to the Christian Coalition to Lawrence Lessig to Gleynn Reynolds) is in favor of keeping physical network owners from discriminating about which TCP/IP bits they pass around.

Looks like the good guys may win this one, but it's far from a done deal at this point.

Bioengineering is hot. Scientists are looking at how to get bacteria to make electricity, which could open up some very interesting solutions to the 21st Centiry energy crunch.

Bacteria that convert hydrocarbons into power will still vent CO₂ of course, but it would be a hell of a lot more efficient than burning the hydrocarbons and trying to capture that heat to boil water to spin a big magnet around to make electricity.

The real mojo would be if someone started engineering a way to get juice from photosynthesis. Biologically-captured solar power is where we get most of our energy (food, oil/coal/natural gas) from anyway. Theoretically it should be possible, but it's a whole different thing to work with plantlife as opposed to bacteria.

Mmmmm... shiny.

I hate that they're charging $200 more just to make it black. I hate that I want it anyway. Fucking marketing!