To follow on neatly from Jamais’ latest column on mutual surveillance, a judge has just ruled that the FBI can use your mobile phone as a ‘roving bug’ – provided they get a warrant first, of course. How long before the hacking communities get parity with this latest development? And how long before it gets misused, by either side?

Here’s one small upside to global warming, it will mean satellites experience less drag and thus stay in orbit longer. And here you might have thought global warming was a negative thing! Silly hippie…

To the best of my knowledge, I have responded to all Futurismic story submissions as of this morning. If you submitted something to us before the November 18th deadline and haven’t heard back yet, please feel free to query, as sometimes submissions or responses go astray. Thanks to everyone who submitted! Look for us to reopen sometime in February.

Just a quick note: Futurismic’s server will be down for a couple of hours tomorrow evening beginning about 8pm Pacific Time.

The media and the blogosphere (myself included) have been so busy looking at the cultural impact of Second Life that we’ve neglected to ask some rather more important questions. For example: given the vast amount of server space that it takes to run the synthetic world, and that servers chew through a fair amount of electricity, is SL ecologically sustainable if you compare the power consumption of an avatar to a meatspace human?