“The year is 2032. You have just celebrated your 80th birthday and you have some tough decisions ahead. You can keep repairing your current body or move into a new one. The growing of ‘blank’ bodies has become all the rage, and by using your own genetic material, body farmers can even recreate your own face at age 20.” This scenario is from a blog by Google’s top-rated futurist, Thomas Frey.

The singularity: merging human/machine to achieve immortality
http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/pelletier20130521

The original “Star Trek” television series featured technology that had first appeared decades earlier in science fiction stories. Pulp heroes had been wielding ray guns, flying faster than light and teleporting from place to place since the 1930s. But perhaps the true inspiration of Star Trek’s superscience is the revolutionary physics discoveries of the early 20th century. Relativity, discovered by Albert Einstein and quantum physics, pioneered by Max Planck  revealed a universe far different than ordinary human experience might suggest.

Warp Drive & Transporters: How ‘Star Trek’ Technology Works (Infographic)
http://www.space.com/21201-star-trek-technology-explained-infographic.html?cmpid=514648

It’s easy to become jaded about announcements in the tech world.  Slick, media savvy CEO’s announce “revolutionary” new products with metronomic regularity.  Version 1.0 becomes 1.1 and eventually 2.0 and on and on.  It all seems like a blur.

Meanwhile, the truly groundbreaking stuff often goes unnoticed (neither the transistor nor the microchip were instant hits).  Paradigm shifts come in strange guises, with little or no tangible effect on immediate life and often take decades to make an impact.

Nevertheless, we should take notice at the recent news of the Google-NASA quantum computing partnership which marks the beginning of a new digital paradigm.  Although we must account for that which is beyond our present understanding, even the projects currently underway promise a future that seems almost more like science fiction than science fact.

Why The New Google-NASA Partnership Marks A New Era In The History Of Computing
http://www.forbes.com/sites/gregsatell/2013/05/20/why-the-new-google-nasa-partnership-marks-a-new-era-in-the-history-of-computing/

In a commencement address to business students at Columbia University, New York Times CEO Mark Thompson hailed the company’s digital subscription strategy and dismissed skeptics who say media outlets can’t reinvent themselves.

“[T]he launch of the pay model is the most important and  most successful business decision made by The New York Times in many years. We have around 700,000 paid digital subscribers across the company’s products so far and a new nine-figure revenue-stream which is still growing.”

New York Times CEO calls digital pay model “most successful” decision in years
http://paidcontent.org/2013/05/20/new-york-times-ceo-calls-digital-pay-model-most-successful-decision-in-years/

If you think the private messages you send over Skype are protected by end-to-end encryption, think again. The Microsoft-owned service regularly scans message contents for signs of fraud, and company managers may log the results indefinitely, Ars has confirmed. And this can only happen if Microsoft can convert the messages into human-readable form at will.

With the help of independent privacy and security researcher Ashkan Soltani, Ars used Skype to send a four Web links that were created solely for purposes of this article. Two of them were never clicked on, but the other two—one beginning in HTTP link and the other HTTPS—were accessed, by a machine at 65.52.100.214, an IP address belonging to Microsoft. For those interested in the technical details, the log line looked like this:

Think your Skype messages get end-to-end encryption? Think again
http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/05/think-your-skype-messages-get-end-to-end-encryption-think-again/

Intel has been taking steps in recent months to promote the democratization of consumer data — the idea that consumers should be able to check out the information that companies are collecting on them — even though it might not be immediately obvious how the chip maker could generate revenue through the initiatives, according to an article from the MIT Technology Review.

With push for data democratization, Intel tries to play both sides of the big data debate
http://gigaom.com/2013/05/20/with-push-for-data-democratization-intel-tries-to-play-both-sides-of-the-big-data-debate/

A book Untangling the Web: A Guide to Internet Research (PDF) produced by the The National Security Agency to uncover intelligence hiding on the web has just been released by the NSA, following a FOIA request, Wired reports.

It offers advice for using search engines, the Internet Archive, and other online tools. But the most interesting is the chapter titled “Google Hacking.” For example: to find spreadsheets full of passwords in Russia? Type “filetype:xls site:ru login.” Even on websites written in non-English languages the terms “login,” “userid,” and “password” are generally written in English, the authors helpfully point out.

NSA Google search tips
http://www.kurzweilai.net/nsa-google-search-tips

Dokkat appears to think that databases are overused. “Instead of a database, I just serialize my data to JSON, saving and loading it to disk when necessary,” he writes. “All the data management is made on the program itself, which is faster AND easier than using SQL queries.” What is missing here? Why should a developer use a database when saving data to a disk might work just as well?

Why use a database instead of just saving your data to disk?
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/05/why-use-a-database-instead-of-just-saving-your-data-to-disk/

Our imagination is stretched to the utmost,” wrote Richard Feynman, the greatest physicist of his day, “not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things that are there.” Which is another way of saying that physics is weird. And particle physics – or quantum mechanics, to give it its posh title – is weird to the power of n, where n is a very large integer.

Is computing speed set to make a quantum leap?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/may/18/quantum-mechanics-computing-speed