I have of late tended to come down on the side of net neutrality, though.  I’m wary of government telling people how to conduct business, but we must also face the fact that certain providers are nigh on monopolies in many of the markets they serve, namely Comcast.  This would indeed prohibit them from showing favoritism in what internet content consumers access, and will help avoid a multiple fee level internet akin to cable television.  I can certainly see a need for this, too.  A good analogy would be a phone company creating situations so that calls between subscribers and non-subscribers of their service (i.e., someone from Verizon calling AT&T or Sprint) would have lower quality calls than in-network calls (i.e., Verizon to Verizon or AT&T to AT&T).  This would obviously not go over too terribly well.  But the difference in this is that there truly is competition amongst telephone providers in the age of the mobile device, whereas much less competition exists currently in broadband internet markets.  At my apartment I have three options: dialup or ISDN, Comcast cable, or satellite.  Of the three of those, the only viable option is Comcast.

On the flip side, it just serves to extend the hand of the FCC into another aspect of daily life.  Their rules regarding censorship and broadcasting in the United States are already controversial, and it could easily evolve into that in regards to what is transmitted across the internet.

So, as with so many things, the free marketeer conservative in me is at odds with the technology nerd.  I am hesitant to throw out a current evil for one that will quite likely become worse in the future, but something has to be done to reign in certain companies that provide services such as internet access.

The details of the communications are the only thing new in these, and it’s nothing even that surprising.  It’s more of a curiosity than anything, albeit one that can place sources of intelligence at very serious risk. I have to wonder if WikiLeaks  has no real concept of what they’re doing, or the danger that releasing this can pose to individuals’ lives for no real value. They claim to want to protect individuals, but their redaction efforts are amateur at best, and do very little to protect the sources of this intelligence.

In my opinion, it’s quite obvious that this is nothing more than a political smear campaign against the US for doing the exact same thing that everyone does, and that the US must do to stay on the same level diplomatically as other nations. If they were really interested in changing the world and making diplomatic interaction more overt, then they would have done something other than point this big digital finger at one country and cry foul.  As if making diplomatic interaction more over was necessarily even a good thing.

It does show that we need to be much more careful in how we handle high level sensitive intelligence, though.  It appears as though many people handling this intelligence are junior enlisted members of the military that have little or no education in such matters, experience in handling it, or the knowledge or respect of its importance.  Is this a deeper problem in our military, giving individuals too much access to too much information at too low of a pay grade?  Or is it cultural? I’m not sure.  Whatever the cause though, it must be remedied and it must be remedied quickly, otherwise people may die because of this information being leaked to irresponsible muckrakers like Julian Assange.

Traveling at 415km/h, Shanghai’s latest bullet train has smashed the previous record held by the country last year, by 21km/h. It services the Shanghai to Hangzhou route, which are about 202km apart.

It may be super speedy, but according to locals it’s going to be super pricey too, with the fares costing double what normal trains cost. But what price is getting to the destination in half the time it normally would take? Seemingly, 100 Yuan (about $15) for a first-class ticket. Sounds like chips to us, but apparently a fare on the slower train is around $7 in price—a much more palatable price.

Commuters must wait until late October, which is when the new line will open, and when women standing on train platforms with wet hair will suddenly feel the whoosh of a train whizzing past, drying them out. [IB Times via PopSci]

UPDATE: This is the world record for high-speed train travel, which differs from conventional rails. The record holder there is the French TGV, which traveled 574.8km/h on a test run.

So, they’re able to go around 125 miles in less than half an hour.  That’s about the distance between Philadelphia and Washington.  If one were to take the Acela Express train (the United States’ only high speed rail service, and it barely qualifies as that) from Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station to Washington DC’s Union Station, you’d be spending a little over an hour and a half on board the train, assuming you didn’t get caught in one of Amtrak’s many delays.  That’s seriously the best we can do?

I for one would love to see some of this data ported into the next iteration of Flight Simulator.  Yeah, I’m a dork…