I’m not sure whether to be amused or baffled by the news that – just as almost every other big organisation has given up on Second Life being anything more than a virtual playground – the United States Army is going to set up a recruitment station there. Is there a suitable military acronym for the sensation of having missed the boat… or (perhaps more aptly) having missed the point?
Sub-orbital tourism prices fall
Space tourism business RocketShip Tours offers 38 miles straight up into space for less than half the cost of Virgin Galactic‘s 62 miles. Hopefully this is the first of many tumbles down the supply demand curve towards mass market space tourism, from PhysOrg:
Per Wimmer, a Danish investment banker holds the first reservation for the Lynx sub-orbital flight expected to launch sometime in 2011.
Mr. Wimmer hedged his bet by plunking down the necessary reservation fee to Richard Branson´s Virgin Galactic and another rival for commercial space travel, Space Adventure. According to Wimmer, “It will be a real race to see which one goes up first”. The main difference between the XCOR Lynx is its ability to launch on any 10,000 foot runway with clear air space.
Just to remind us the future is nearly here, there is a computer generated (natch) video of what it’ll look like:
Time to end prohibition?
Did you know that alcohol prohibition ended in the United States seventy-five years ago this month? Me neither; following on neatly from the Swiss legal heroin program story comes news of a US organisation called Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, whose name should tell you exactly what they’re advocating: legalised regulation of all drugs. Here’s their pitch:
After nearly four decades of fueling the U.S. policy of a war on drugs with over a trillion tax dollars and 37 million arrests for nonviolent drug offenses, our confined population has quadrupled making building prisons the fastest growing industry in the United States. More than 2.2 million of our citizens are currently incarcerated and every year we arrest an additional 1.9 million more guaranteeing those prisons will be bursting at their seams. Every year we choose to continue this war will cost U.S. taxpayers another 69 billion dollars. Despite all the lives we have destroyed and all the money so ill spent, today illicit drugs are cheaper, more potent, and far easier to get than they were 35 years ago at the beginning of the war on drugs.
They’ve got a lot of facts and figures there, that’s for sure… and they’ve also just released a report that claims ending the war on drugs will boost the US economy by at least $76 billion a year, in addition to putting criminal cartels out of business.
LEAP are far from the first to make similar claims, of course, but their point about the economic effects is well timed and calculated to appeal to the status quo. Whether it will have any effect of the entrenched ideas of policy makers remains to be seen… over here in the UK, our government is trying to reclassify cannabis on the same level as methamphetamine, so I’m not exactly hopeful for a spontaneous outbreak of common sense in the halls of power. [image by aforero]
Book publishing implosion – how can you help?
If you follow almost any industry or author blogs at all, you’ll be aware that things are looking pretty bleak in the world of book publishing right now, with resignations and lay-offs and all the rest.
Although it’s probably fair to say he has a certain degree of bias, Scalzi has some sensible advice for those of you who’d like to help mitigate the situation – buy more books. Even if you don’t care about the state of the publishing industry, they’re an affordable gift for a hard-times holiday season.
Contextual advertising comes to… school test papers?
We may not be queuing up for bread handouts yet, but times are obviously getting pretty tough in the US education system. When high school calculus teacher Tom Farber was told that his photocopying budget was being cut to a point where he wouldn’t be able to repro a year’s worth of tests, he decided to start selling advertising space on the test sheets.
In the face of shrinking budgets all over, how likely is this to become commonplace? And how much of an impetus will it be toward home schooling untainted by commerce (if such a thing is even possible)? [via SlashDot]